Andrei Grachev: You can sell stories without products, but you cannot sell products without stories
Cryptocurrency investor Andrei Grachev stated that currently, there are only a few effective strategies in the market: selling high-quality products that trigger FOMO or selling high-quality stories that trigger FOMO.
He emphasized that it is possible to sell stories without products, but it is impossible to sell products without stories; only sufficiently grand stories can truly drive sales.
Market mechanisms indicate that capital is accelerating its concentration on projects with strong narrative capabilities, with funds flowing from purely technical products to story-driven projects. Teams with grand narratives benefit from amplified FOMO emotions, while purely product-based projects without stories are under pressure due to a lack of market attention.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Andrei Grachev, an active investor in the cryptocurrency field, has previously participated in early projects. His viewpoint continues the long-standing "narrative is king" logic in the crypto market, similar to the ICO era in 2017 where fundraising was possible solely based on white paper stories, and the path of NFT projects in 2021 achieving hundredfold growth through community narratives.
In terms of capital pathways, teams prioritize investing resources to build grand narrative frameworks (vision, community, culture), motivated by the fact that stories can quickly create FOMO and attract liquidity, while product development serves as support for the story rather than the sole core, thus achieving efficient customer acquisition and valuation enhancement in a market with scarce attention.
Similar cases include Solana's early rise through a dual narrative of "high performance + meme culture," and several purely technical projects being forgotten by the market due to a lack of stories. The current cryptocurrency market is in a highly competitive environment where narrative capability has become a core moat.
Essentially, this is about capital concentration: the market is shifting from pure product competition to a story-driven attention economy, where the mechanism is that FOMO emotions can quickly gather liquidity and capital, allowing projects with grand narratives to gain excess pricing power, while products that neglect stories struggle to form positive feedback loops.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Products are the carriers, but stories are the engines.
A product without a story is just a pile of code; a story without a product can still sell at a valuation.
Excellent founders sell grand stories, while ordinary founders sell small features.