Puzzle Pieces — How a Friendship, a Frustration, and Many Years Led to StoryLenses

This is the first post in our Becoming series — a collection of moments, realisations, and detours that shaped StoryLenses into what it is today. We are not telling you a polished founding myth. We are sharing the puzzle pieces, one at a time.

Two People, One Recurring Problem

It started simply enough. A software developer and a professional storyteller — a bestselling author, to be precise — became friends. Not business partners, not co-founders with a pitch deck. Just two people who enjoyed each other's thinking.

The storyteller began mentoring the developer on something that had nothing to do with code: communication. How to present to a board without losing the room. How to run a meeting where people actually listen. How to explain a technical decision to someone who does not care about the technology — only the outcome.

It worked. Not because of clever frameworks or presentation templates, but because the storyteller understood something fundamental: every act of communication is an act of storytelling. You are always constructing a narrative, whether you realise it or not. The only question is whether you do it deliberately or leave it to chance.

From Mentoring to a Shared Mission

The conversations kept going. The friendship deepened. And somewhere along the way, a mutual frustration crystallised.

People are terrible at communicating their own value. Not because they lack value — most professionals are far more capable than their self-descriptions suggest. But because translating lived experience into a compelling narrative is genuinely hard. It requires skills that most people were never taught: structure, empathy for the audience, the courage to lead with what matters instead of hiding behind chronology.

The developer and the storyteller decided to do something about it. They collaborated on a university publication about digital storytelling. They built an online course. They wanted to help everyone — not just the people lucky enough to have a mentor — communicate effectively.

The Wall

The course was good. The publication was solid. But something was missing.

A book can teach principles, but it cannot apply them to your specific situation. You read about narrative structure over breakfast and forget it by lunch when you are staring at a blank cover letter.

An online course gets closer — you practise, you get feedback, you improve. But it demands weeks of time that most job seekers simply do not have. When you need to send an application by Friday, a six-week course on storytelling is not the answer.

A mentoring programme works beautifully for the few people who have access to one. But it does not scale. You cannot mentor a thousand people through their job applications one conversation at a time.

Every medium they tried hit the same limitation: it could teach the theory but it could not do the work. And for communication to be truly effective, someone — or something — has to help you do the work, in the moment, for your specific situation.

It Had to Be a Tool

The realisation did not arrive in a flash of insight. It accumulated, slowly, over years. Through dozens of mentoring conversations that all circled the same problems. Through watching smart, accomplished professionals freeze when asked to write about themselves. Through seeing the same patterns repeat: the underselling, the generic language, the gap between who someone is and how they describe themselves on paper.

It had to be a tool. Something that embodies the storyteller's instinct and the developer's systems thinking. Something that does not just tell you how to tell your story but helps you actually tell it — right now, for this job, in this language, drawing on your specific experience.

That is, in a nutshell, how StoryLenses came to be.

Not a Shortcut Story

We want to be honest about something: this was not a fast process. There was no weekend hackathon, no three-month sprint from idea to launch. The path from "people struggle with communication" to "here is a tool that helps" was paved with years of conversations, experiments, dead ends, and hard-won insights about what actually works.

The friendship that started it is still at the centre. The frustration that fuelled it has not gone away — if anything, in a world where AI-generated slop is flooding every inbox, the need for authentic, personal, well-structured communication has never been greater.

What Comes Next in This Series

In the Becoming series, we will share more of these puzzle pieces. The university research that shaped our thinking about narrative archetypes. The specific conversations that changed how we approach story structure. The moment we realised that language — not just the words, but which language — changes everything about how a story lands.

Each post is a piece of the puzzle. Together, they tell the story of why we believe so deeply that narrative is the most powerful vehicle for professional communication — and why we spent years building a tool to prove it.