Picture of Dan Sullivan SEO making a face with the word SYNERGY in all caps in front of him

My review of STorybrand.AI

I love the StoryBrand framework for marketing. It’s one of the best ways I’ve ever seen to help focus your marketing message and present yourself to would-be customers.

So when I got a week trial of StoryBrand.AI, I was ready for it. I wanted it to be a super cool thing. At $468 a year, it needs to be twice as useful as Asana, about equal to the Adobe Creative Cloud, and way more useful than say, Google Cloud storage with Gemini.

As I say in the video, I’m not there yet. If I was mindlessly pumping out things for clients without much of my own creativity, it would work. Just like having AI write articles for your blog is on the same level as a 10th grader writing an essay, StoryBrand is a useful tool, but it’s not going to replace a marketing company any time soon.

Check out this short video for my take on it. I’m trained in the Story Brand marketing philosophy. I get it. It’s great. But you really need brilliant people in the room working together on this.

What I picture is a business owner getting StoryBrand.AI thinking it will solve their marketing problems. It won’t. You need more nuance and creativity to have effective marketing. Otherwise you’re wasting your money.

Self-Promotion before the Transcript

Why yes, as a matter of fact I do base my marketing consulting on the Story Brand framework. I’m glad you asked! It’s always a fun time as we discover things about your business and your marketing that you never knew before. So call me.

Auto-generated, hand-edited transcript

It’s funny. I exported the transcript from Adobe Premiere, where I also edited some of the AI generated text, then dropped it into Gemini and asked it to remove the time stamps. It left the line-breaks in, so it kind of looks like a poem. Watch the video if you’d like to hear me read this poem out loud.

Okay, here’s my flash in the pan

review of Story Brand AI.

I have not bought it.

I’ve just done the 1 week trial

and I’m trying it out

and it, you know,

like all AI things, you want to treat them

a little bit cautiously and try it out.

Not depend on too much. It’s just a tool.

I think it’s just a glorified

spell checker or it’s like cruise control

on a car where, I’m not ready

for hands off steering yet, but cruise

control is sure going to let me drive

a whole lot further without getting tired

than if I didn’t have cruise control.

So, StoryBrand AI

so I’m trained in Story Brand framework.

I’ve done all the classes.

I’m not a certified guide because reasons,

but I’m, super familiar

and I take as many clients

as I can through the Story

Brand framework,

and I can tell what it’s doing with Story

Brand

AI is doing because it’s doing what I do

when I do the Story Brand stuff.

Right. It’s measuring up those things.

Here’s where I’m not I’m not sold on it

yet, and I’m not going to sign up

for a year of it, just yet,

because what it’s doing is what I do,

and it’s doing it automatically,

but it’s a little bit off,

and some of the joy

and excitement and fun of doing Story

Brand is the interaction

with my client

who’s trying to reach their customer,

and that I’m going to say it in a video

in right context.

That

SYNERGY

is, really what gives

a lot of life

and movement to your marketing.

When you use a story brand framework

and it energizes your team to realize, oh,

we do know our customer, we do know

where to get them and how to reach them.

So you lose that with Story Brand AI

because it’s kind of doing it for you.

So is that lame to say?

Don’t get it because it’s not as much fun.

But the other thing is that at this point,

and I’m know they’re working on it

and they’ll this

is was this April of 2025.

So we got a ways to go.

The questions

that it asks,

you have to fill in so many questions

and answer so many questions

to get it to do the work that by the time

the work that by the time

you’ve answered all of those questions,

the work is kind of done.

Does that make sense?

If I ask you, you know,

what are the three

most important things to your mission

and what’s the name of your company?

and what’s the name of your company?

And who do you fulfill that mission for?

And then I automatically write

a mission statement for you.

You kind of already wrote the mission

statement when you told me

you when you filled out the blanks right.

So a lot of it is like that.

So it’s worth it

if you need somebody to walk you

through doing the work

and you want a robot to do it,

if you don’t want a robot to help

you do it, you call

somebody that knows how to do Story Brand

and you have them do it.

And the joy of doing working through it

just gives you so many more ideas

than, than the AI will at this point.