An alternative to an employee advocacy platform
Same goal, opposite mechanism. An advocacy platform distributes posts for your people to share. thestory.run coaches each person to write their own, and never writes a word of it.Except cheat-mode, which you spend deliberately: a small monthly allowance to have the coach write one post, marked permanently as coach-written.
What an employee advocacy platform does
An employee advocacy platform is a distribution tool. Marketing writes a post, puts it in a shared feed, and employees pick it up and publish it to their own profiles, often in one click and sometimes with a line of their own on top. The better ones add scheduling, a leaderboard, UTM tracking and a report showing reach earned per employee.
It is a real category with real products, and for a company that wants one message carried further by more accounts, they work exactly as advertised.
Products commonly compared in this category, each of which works differently in its own way: EveryoneSocial, Sociabble, Haiilo, Hootsuite Amplify, DSMN8
Why participation falls off
The mechanism that makes it easy is the mechanism that makes it wear out. Everybody is sharing the same paragraph, so a reader scrolling their feed sees the marketing department speaking through six accounts, and the accounts know it. The first month is a launch. Six months in, the question is whether the same paragraph is still worth sharing, and the programme is only as alive as the reminders behind it.
It also leaves nothing behind. When the subscription ends, the queue stops and the people are exactly where they started, because at no point were they writing.
What thestory.run does instead
thestory.run is a writing coach for LinkedIn. It asks one question at a time about a rough thought you brought, marks the strong lines you already wrote, and offers a structure to write into. It does not generate post text, and it does not rewrite your sentences. A finished post publishes to the author's own profile from the app, on their instruction, or gets copied out and posted by hand.
Teams coordinate through shared topics and a calendar rather than a content queue, so a company can show up on one theme in a week without anybody publishing the same paragraph. Ideas, drafts and coach conversations stay private from colleagues and admins, enforced in the data layer rather than hidden in the interface.
There is no approval step, and that is a real trade rather than pure upside. Nothing is ever published on anybody's behalf, so what goes out is a person posting under the same responsibility they already carry on their own account. If your industry needs a post read before it ships, that read has to happen the way it does today, between people.
Side by side
Six questions that decide which of the two you are actually buying.
| The question | Employee advocacy platform | thestory.run |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the words? | Marketing, or an agency. Employees pick the post up, sometimes adding a line of their own on top, and share it. | The person publishing them, every time. The coach asks, it never writes. |
| What does the admin do each week? | Briefs, drafts, chases and approves. The programme is as big as one person's week allows. | Sets a topic and a date. There is no draft queue and no approval inbox, because there is nothing to approve. |
| What does a reader see? | The same paragraph from several colleagues, which reads as one department with many accounts. | Different posts about one theme, each in the voice of whoever wrote it. |
| What are you billed for? | A seat per person per month, whether or not they posted. | A coaching session, 1 euro plus tax, and nothing else. Free forever up to five people. A quiet week costs nothing. |
| What do you get back? | Reach and clicks earned per employee, which is the number the programme is judged on. | Posts shipped, rhythm held, and the wins somebody chose to share. Where there is not enough data to say something true, the app says that instead of drawing a chart. |
| What is left if you stop paying? | The queue stops. Whatever was learned was learned about sharing, not about writing. | People who got better at writing over a quarter. That does not leave with the subscription. |
If you already run an advocacy programme
You do not have to end it to try this. The two do different jobs: a distribution tool moves the company's own message, and this moves a person's ability to write their own. Plenty of companies want both, and the honest split is that anything speaking for the brand belongs in the first and anything speaking for a person belongs here.
We expect what happens to be smaller than a migration: the first people here being the ones who never shared anything, because nothing here asks them to put somebody else's words under their name. That is a prediction, not a finding. We have no customers to count yet, and there will be no adoption numbers on this site until they are real.
Try it with your own rough thought
Free forever for teams of five people or fewer. No credit card, and no trial clock counting down while you decide.
What it costs for a team your sizeThe checkable facts, including what this is not