If you’re trying to build a startup in 2025, the product isn’t the product. The story is.
And the best stories don’t sound like stories. They sound like conspiracies.
Somewhere between Twitter threads about Epstein, influencer wars over seed oils, and Reddit debates about fluoride in water, something shifted in the collective attention economy. The default mode of engagement became adversarial. Suspicion sells. Belief spreads faster when it feels like a secret you weren’t supposed to know.
The information ecosystem rewards friction. Algorithms don’t amplify consensus. They amplify conflict. The ideal narrative is a paranoid one that positions the believer as enlightened, the skeptic as sheep, and the originator as the persecuted prophet.
Which makes the perfect PR campaign today look a lot like a cult recruitment flyer. Or a leaked manifesto. Or a whistleblower’s dying breath.
We’re not in the business of storytelling anymore. We’re in the business of plausible paranoia.
Every successful religion has a devil. Every movement has a heretic. Every founding myth has a betrayer.
You don’t build loyalty by offering convenience. You build it by identifying an adversary. Amazon was the anti-retail. Tesla framed itself as the anti-oil. Coinbase, at its most compelling, pitched itself as anti-Fed.
Even OpenAI - despite its sanitized, post-corporate press releases - runs on an implicit conspiracy. The AI arms race isn’t concerned with innovation. It’s who gets to be God. Altman’s calm exterior belies the manic energy of a man who believes the future hinges on avoiding the wrong kind of intelligence. Or perhaps the wrong kind of intelligence agency.
This is structural drama. A startup without enemies is a startup without a cause. There’s no tension. No plot. No reason for anyone to care.
Narrative requires antagonists. And attention is the currency of growth.
You can’t buy mainstream attention anymore. You have to earn subcultural allegiance. The fastest-growing startups don’t market to customers, they recruit believers, they sell salvation from the matrix. From the overlords. From the middlemen, the gatekeepers, the Cathedral, the WEF, the boomers. Pick your boogeyman.
The logic is circular but effective:
Frame your startup as dangerous.
Let institutions overreact.
Use that overreaction as proof you’re onto something.
Convert the curious into missionaries.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same playbook used by early Bitcoiners, paleo diet bloggers, UFO whistleblowers, and Jordan Peterson fans. Every one of them built a movement around the idea that someone wanted them silenced.
The suppression doesn’t have to be real. It’s the perception of suppression that matters. And that’s enough.
In cult land, if you can’t beat the truth, co-opt it. Insert controlled opposition. Give people just enough of the narrative to pacify them, but not enough to act on.
In startup land, you flip that.
You become your own controlled opposition.
You seed critiques of yourself. You raise the possibility that your product is too powerful. You hint at dangerous implications. You encourage your community to debate you. Loudly. Publicly. Algorithmically.
This works because it blurs the line between marketing and resistance.
People won’t forward your landing page. But they will forward the takedown thread. They will screenshot the controversy. They will share the quote out of context. And they absolutely will tag their friends with: "Isn’t this the thing you were talking about?"
Then, five links deep, they hit your call to action.
Controversy becomes conversion. Resistance becomes reach.
This isn’t a media trick. There’s a psychological function at work.
Humans form stronger bonds through shared enemies than shared interests. The Stanford Prison Experiment, though ethically dubious and often misrepresented, demonstrated how quickly we adopt in-group/out-group behavior when told someone is working against us.
In startups, the analog is tribal onboarding. You’re inviting people into a war. Against legacy banks. Against surveillance capitalism. Against opaque institutions or slow-moving regulators.
Even if those enemies are paper tigers, they serve the function of catalyzing belief.
And belief spreads faster than utility.
Theranos didn’t fail because its conspiracy wasn’t believable - it failed because it got caught. But up until that point, it had all the ingredients of a perfect viral myth: a young female founder disrupting male-dominated science, a secretive boardroom stacked with statesmen, a revolutionary device kept under wraps, and whispers of government contracts.
What would have been a liability became its growth engine. Secrecy built mystique. Lack of transparency was recast as protection from competitors. Critics were dismissed as part of the establishment.
The architecture of the conspiracy: take a complex problem, simplify it into a single enemy, imply that they are orchestrating your stagnation, and then sell the antidote.
The success of the message isn’t a matter of truth, it’s narrative coherence. It explains why things feel off. It explains who is to blame.
In tech, the enemy is often misnamed. People say it’s the incumbents. Or the VCs. Or the regulators. But the real enemy, from a narrative perspective, is indifference.
And nothing kills indifference faster than the scent of conspiracy.
Startups now operate like decentralized psyops. The goal is to be memetically potent while remaining technically blameless.
You don’t say your competitor is in bed with the CIA. You ask why they’re hiring so many former national security advisors.
You don’t claim to be censored. You just publish your most provocative content on a separate blog and then casually note it was removed from LinkedIn.
You don’t say “we’re the resistance.” You say, “it’s strange how often we get flagged.”
You imply. You gesture. You suggest the edges of something larger. You use ellipses instead of exclamation marks.
This is theater. But it works. Because in the war for attention, ambiguity is a weapon.
There is a risk. When every company becomes a conspiracy, the novelty wears off. The insurgent aesthetic becomes cliché. The paranoia becomes white noise.
And yet, the alternative is worse: irrelevance.
No one goes viral for being reasonable. No one builds a movement around competent execution. People build movements around moral urgency, apocalyptic stakes, and existential threats.
So founders perform belief. They borrow from theology. They write in manifestos. They speak in code.
Eventually, it’s unclear whether they believe it themselves. But by then, it doesn’t matter. The market believes for them.
To build in public today is to create in a panopticon. You are always being watched, interpreted, remixed. And the audience doesn’t want clarity, so much as drama.
The startup is the new sect. The press release is the new parable. The user base is the congregation. And every product update is a signal in the information war.
If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. But discomfort is a small price to pay for belief.
And belief, in a saturated market, is the only feature that can’t be copied.
