Find your story.
I’m JA Westenberg. Whether you’re launching a product, a fund, or a lab, I help you nail your positioning and figure out exactly how to tell your story.
Most clients bring me in to solve a specific problem: the product is strong, but outsiders don’t understand it, and insiders can’t agree on how to talk about it.
When to bring me in.
- You’re launching something and don’t yet know what the story is
- The company has outgrown its original positioning, and people on the team describe it in different ways
- The product is technically strong, but customers, candidates, partners, or investors don’t get it
- You’re raising a fund or a round and the pitch doesn’t match how you actually talk about the business
- Your team publishes a lot, but the pieces don’t describe the company consistently
- You want an outside person to decide what the company should say and explain the reasoning
Where I work.
Clients hire me for the positioning, the story, and the decisions about what to say and where to say it. Their own teams usually do the writing that follows.
Positioning
Defining what you are, who it’s for, what you’re up against, and the ground you can credibly own.
Narrative
Working out how to explain what you’ve built, why it matters now, and why your team is the one building it.
Messaging decisions
Deciding what to say, what to leave out, and what each audience needs to hear, from customers and candidates to partners and LPs.
Channels and sequencing
Deciding which channels to use, who speaks for the company, and what order things go out in, whether for a launch, a raise, or a hiring push.
Editorial direction
Setting the voice, the themes, and the brief, so the people writing know what to say and how it should sound.
My point of view.
Settle the positioning first.
Before anyone writes, you need to agree on what you are, who it’s for, and who you’re competing with. Until that’s settled, each new piece of writing describes the company a little differently.
Choose what to say.
You’ll always have more true things to say than room to say them. The work is picking the few that matter most and using them consistently.
Decide what to leave out.
A clear story means dropping some audiences, features, and claims. Those are usually the hardest decisions to make.
Get the team to agree.
Most teams I work with have capable writers. What they don’t have is agreement on what the company is saying. Once they do, the writing goes faster and is easier to hand off.
Senior attention matters.
The decisions about your story shouldn’t be delegated through layers of account management and junior delivery.
How I work.
Directly with decision-makers
I work with the people who make the final call on what the company says.
Senior-only
No account managers or junior handoffs. You work with me for the whole engagement.
Evidence-led
I start with interviews, research, and a look at your market, and build the story from what I find.
Decisions you can use
The work ends with agreed decisions on your position, your story, and what to say, which your whole team can act on.
Selective by necessity
I take on a limited number of clients so each one gets sustained senior attention.
Selected relationships.
- Discourse
- Exponentially
- Hop Labs
- Cloudset
- r.Potential
- Sentinel
Discourse
“JA is a legend.”
Within weeks they turned our team of extremely reticent writers into willing and excited contributors, something we’d been trying to do for years, with little success. Their ability to uncover an interesting angle on a story and make it enjoyable to research and write has been fundamental to helping us find our voice.
Hawk, CEO, DiscourseExponentially
“Sharp, direct, and incredibly actionable.”
They cut through the noise and zeroed in on what really matters, the heart of the product and service. Excellent work.
Leslie, CEO, Exponentially.com
Who I work with.
- Founders and executive teams building products that are hard to explain
- Venture funds, emerging managers, and portfolio leaders who need a clearer story for LPs, founders, and the market
- Research and AI labs that need people outside their field to understand their work
- AI, deep tech, developer tools, enterprise software, robotics, biotech, climate tech, and other complex categories
- People who value independent judgment, intellectual honesty, and direct senior counsel
Millions of words across hundreds of publications.
Featured in Wired, TIME, The New York Times, The Australian Financial Review, and The Next Web.
- Wired
- The Verge
- TIME
- The New York Times
- AFR
- The Next Web
- Substack
Working together.
I work through focused engagements and ongoing advisory relationships.
Every engagement starts with what you’ve built, who needs to understand it, and what’s getting in the way. It ends with a position, a story, and clear decisions about what to say. Scope is set by the problem, not by a fixed list of deliverables or hours.
If you can’t yet explain what you’ve built in a sentence or two, get in touch.