Most of you don’t fail because they lack a great product, brilliant founders, or access to capital. You fail because you haven’t worked out how to tell your story. You fail because your narrative doesn’t build trust, urgency, or credibility; three things that must happen before you ever get to the sale.
This isn’t just a founder problem. It’s an ecosystem problem. Cities, startup communities, universities, and governments keep trying to “sell” innovation without actually earning belief. We subsidize accelerators, preach about entrepreneurship, throw conferences, only to watch investor capital, top-tier talent, and scalable startups leave for markets that feel more credible.
It’s not because they’re better. It’s because they’re clearer.
Following our popular perspective on Why Nobody Understands Startup Growth, I sat down with David, Daniel, and Nick with Founder’s Best Friend again to talk about ACES: Awareness, Consideration, Engagement, Sales – isn’t a sales funnel. It’s a system for constructing narrative credibility. It’s not a tool to close deals. It’s a map of why no one believes you in the first place.
Article Highlights
Fix your startup strategy—before bad advice ruins it
Entrepreneurs and Ecosystems Don’t Have a Sales Problem, They Have a Narrative Problem
If people aren’t engaged with what you’re building, it’s because they don’t understand it, don’t trust it, or don’t believe it’s for them.
What most call a sales or even marketing problem is almost always one of the following:
- No one knows you exist (Awareness gap)
- No one understands what you do or why it matters (Consideration gap)
- No one believes you can deliver (Engagement gap)
By the time you realize no one’s buying, sponsoring, or investing, you’re already late. A sale is just the outcome of everything else working. Appreciate this: when’s the last time you bought something expensive, complex, or career-risky because of one clever pitch? You didn’t. You bought because the solution, event, or move to a city felt reliable, necessary, and inevitable. That’s not a sale. That’s narrative trust.
Founders and ecosystem builders mistake visibility for resonance. They confuse buzz for belief – you know what I’m talking about, your city seems like a startup hub because of the hype. And ecosystems all repeat the same sin, thinking that building coworking spaces or hosting pitch competitions is the same as building reputation and legitimacy.
This is why early-stage traction is so elusive to startups. It’s not just product-market fit you’re missing. It’s narrative-market fit. If your story doesn’t resonate with how your audience sees their problem, you’re not just unclear, you’re irrelevant.
Why Startups Fail to Gain Traction
The ACES model (Awareness – Consideration – Engagement – Sales) is a narrative architecture designed to build belief that compounds. That arrow in the diagram isn’t a funnel. It’s a credibility escalator. Skip a step, and the whole thing collapses.
Let me explain from my perspective of the model:
Awareness
The goal here is not exposure. It’s relevance.
- Valid: You’re addressing a real issue in a real market.
- Urgent: You’re showing that the problem is timely and costly.
- Relevant: You’re positioning your venture in a way that resonates with the buyer’s worldview.
This is where founders often flame out. The message isn’t wrong, it’s just not urgent. You’re broadcasting a feature when they need a reason to care. If the world sees you as common or risky, you’re living in the bottom-left quadrant of the model: commodity purgatory, a feature not startup, or you just clearly didn’t talk to people during market validation.
Consideration
Now we move from “what is this?” to “should I care?”
- Success Metrics: Can they see a path to measurable improvement?
- Priority: Is this a top-3 problem or a “someday when we have time” idea?
- Budget: Do they have (or can they find) the resources to work with you?
Here’s where most deals die not because the product failed but because the founder didn’t create clarity. In fact, this is usually why Product or Engineer oriented founders fail; you know you have a solution that works and is better — SO WHAT?? You didn’t show why this is worth their time, effort, or internal political capital. The burden is on you to anchor the value.
Engagement
This is the phase of risk removal.
- Impact/Benefit: The outcome is visible and meaningful.
- Allocation: They’re willing to shift internal resources.
- Investment: They’re ready to act.
If you’re here and still not closing, it’s not about sales technique. It’s about trust. Too often founders disregard that they have competition and that consumers consider what’s known as a switching cost (sure, yours is a bit better, but I have to switch from what I have now). Did your story build the kind of conviction where your buyer can make a move that won’t come back to haunt them?
Sales
Finally, we arrive at the “S” in ACES: Sales. Take note that it is at the end of the acronym ACE because almost all of you (and worse, advisors and investors) push sales FIRST, or as evidence of traction, and yet if you haven’t nailed down Awareness, Consideration, and Engagement, you are cold calling leads that don’t care and sales is a b.s. indicator of validation.
Here, at the end of ACE, you’ve earned the right to pitch, close, or convert. But that outcome (be it a purchase, a partnership, or adoption) should feel like the natural result of a structured, confident journey. Not a closed sales pitch.
We refer to ACES as a sales model but what you need to understand is that it’s because sales are the culmination of a narrative that works. If you skip ahead to pitching before you’ve walked your audience through the ACES path, or without being unique or having a guaranteed outcome, you’re not just rushing the process, you’re losing the deals even though you are talking to customers and closing some.
Beyond Startups: ACES Applies to Ecosystems and Economies
ACES is a framework your ecosystem builders, economic developer, investors, universities, and government officials should understand, because narrative is economic infrastructure.
Just look at Texas.
From the outside, it looks like a success story: no income tax, booming population, major cities, supposed startup hubs, and tech moving here. But internally, Texas is in a narrative crisis. Capital is abundant but directionless, governance is often shortsighted, and prosperity is increasingly misaligned with the lived experience of most Texans. In other words, the story of Texas is no longer matching the reality.
Sound familiar? It should, this is what I see happening in almost every city and country in our work. You SAY what you want it to be, and the community ends up believing it’s so, until it’s evident that it isn’t.
Ecosystems follow the same ACES path:
- Awareness: Are we even on the map?
- Consideration: Do investors, founders, and talent see us as a viable place to build? Likely not.
- Engagement: Are they showing up, allocating capital, moving teams?
- Sales: Are they putting down roots and staying? Are businesses sponsoring programs and events?
If you’re an economic development official or policymaker trying to “attract innovation” but you can’t clearly articulate the ACES path for your region, don’t be surprised when the startups don’t come, and the ones that do, leave.
Incidentally, yes, we know why investors aren’t considering you viable. We know why they aren’t allocating capital.
Read more: Why Venture Capital Avoids your Startup Ecosystem
Want to fix that? Stop asking what incentives or programs to launch. Start by asking: Do people even believe us yet? If the answer is no, you’re not in a sales problem. You’re in a narrative gap. And the only way out is clarity.
Where You Are Breaking Down
This is not a sales tool but if you even find yourself reading this, hoping you’ll get sales or close business, you’re missing the point and that is why you’re breaking down. This is a diagnostic for narrative health and I guarantee you are not healthy . Apply it to your startup. Apply it to your city. Apply it to your industry.
Where are people falling off? Where does trust falter? And what are you doing, not to push them down a funnel, but to earn their belief at each step?
If your growth strategy skips this kind of analysis, then don’t be shocked when your “sales problem” turns out to be structural. What part of your narrative do people not believe yet and why?
If you don’t know, you’re not selling. You’re guessing.
Yes. If people don’t understand your story, they can’t trust it, and they’ll never buy in… no matter how great your product is.