thestory.run

thestory.run is a web app that coaches employees to write their own LinkedIn posts. It is described as a writing coach for corporate influencers — the people who post under their own name at work. The coach asks one question at a time, helps you find the story inside a rough thought, and hands you a structure to write into rather than a draft to approve. It never writes the post and it never rewrites your words, so what you publish is what you wrote. You can start on your own and bring your team when you are ready. The product exists because its makers believe we stopped writing. Its site quotes the question 'Why would I write if AI can do it for me?' and answers with three stated problems. AI slop is real: 81% of long-form posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-written, and the personality is gone even when the AI 'has your voice.' Too busy to think: it is not that you have nothing to say, it is that nobody asked you the right question about it. People use AI wrong: let it write for you and you slowly lose your own voice and the ability to put a thought into words. The stated belief is that AI is here to support humans, not replace them, and that you should leave the edits to AI and be the superstar. The core of the product is a single coached writing session that takes you from a messy thought to a finished post. The demo walks through three steps: share a rough thought, talk it through, and write it yourself. You drop in raw thoughts — the example given is 'a lot of teams confuse doing a lot with progress' — and the coach asks about it one question at a time rather than producing text. In the sample conversation the coach replies, 'That's an interesting observation, I bet you've watched it play out somewhere specific. What did that look like?' The writer answers with what they actually noticed, and the coach reflects it back, uncovering the point the writer does not yet see. The same session is shown as plain text, so the exchange stays readable and the thinking stays yours. Once your thoughts are out, the coach lays out the arc that helps you tell the story: open on the moment, name what is really going on, then the pivot. In the example these become 'Open on the moment — the room where everyone says we're making progress, and your quiet but are you, really?', 'Name what's really going on — momentum as a hiding place,' and 'The pivot — defining a goal means saying no, and that's the scary decision teams avoid.' Then you write it yourself, and the coach turns editor. It marks what carries the post and what to try. Two examples are given: 'Keep · your spine — the whole post in six words. Let it stand,' and 'Move · your opener — sharper than the meeting scene. Open on it.' Moves are applied reversibly — the coach moves your opener to the top, and you can undo anytime. The post is labelled 100% you, 0% coach. Between the posts, thestory.run keeps the week moving so you never have to guess what to do next. A weekly to-do shows what is on at a glance — for example one post on leadership and shaping a team culture idea you saved. Daily reflections deliver a nudge from your coach in the form of a question, such as 'What have you changed your mind about in remote work?', with a link to answer it directly. A posting streak and an activity calendar track activity — the sample shows five weeks in a row — with achievement stickers such as one for posting on every topic, described as keeping you accountable without guilt. Drafts are surfaced with their topic and status, such as 'nearly there' or 'a few lines in', so you can finish them while they are hot. For teams, corporate influencing is presented as a team sport. Most people start alone, but it works when the whole company shows up on the same theme. Campaigns let an admin set a theme and a window — a hiring push, a launch, a conference — and the coach folds it into everyone's week as something to draw on; nobody gets handed a post to write. The team calendar shows who is posting, on what, and which days nobody has taken, so the team can spread out instead of everyone publishing on Tuesday. Wins let people share what landed, if and when they want to, and colleagues cheer; watching a colleague's post open a real door is what gets the next person writing. Crucially, your drafts, your ideas and your conversations with the coach stay yours — not your teammates', not your admin's, not your boss's — and that is enforced in the data layer rather than hidden in the interface. Teammates see coordination only: who is posting on which topic, on which day, and the wins a person chose to share. Cheat-mode is the one exception to the rule that thestory.run never writes for you. You activate it yourself on a piece you have already started, and the coach writes it from what you brought: your rough thought, your conversation, the lines you kept, the arc you agreed on, and a few of your own published posts so it can hear how you write. It spends one of a small monthly allowance — one cheat for every four posts in your plan, never more than three a month. The resulting post is marked permanently as coach-written and does not count toward your progress. Publishing stays under your control. thestory.run posts to LinkedIn only if you ask it to, on a post you have already written and read; it never writes the text and never publishes anything you have not pressed the button on. You can also publish by hand and simply tell the app that it happened. Once you have published a few posts, the coach can hear how you write and ask for more of it. The company is explicit that thestory.run is not an employee advocacy platform and not an AI ghostwriter. An employee advocacy platform hands employees a pre-written post to reshare, so every share sounds like the marketing department; thestory.run hands nobody any words, coaching each person to write their own post in their own voice, with teams coordinating through shared topics and a calendar instead of a content queue. thestory.run is free forever for teams of five people or fewer, with no credit card, no trial clock and no feature gates. From the sixth person it is pay as you go: 1 euro per coaching session plus tax, and nothing else. People, channels and every feature are included either way — you only ever pay for coaching. Prices are in euros, and at checkout you can pay in your own currency instead in over 150 countries; Stripe does the conversion at its own rate, which carries a small currency fee, and paying in euros is always an option if you would rather avoid it. The product is aimed at people who post under their own name at work, sometimes called corporate influencers: founders, salespeople, recruiters, engineers and experts. It is operated by Swat.io GmbH in Vienna, Austria, under the GDPR and the Austrian Data Protection Act, and runs in the European Union, with the privacy policy and the data processing agreement published on the site. Swat.io is the social media management tool behind it — fifteen years, fifty people, no investors — used by more than 18,000 people and the team behind social media for 1,700+ brands, with one calendar for everything that goes out and one inbox for everything that comes back. Corporate influencing runs in there too, next to the company's own posts rather than in a separate tool; thestory.run is the other half, the coach that helps a person find and write the post in the first place. thestory.run exists to put the writer back in charge. Rather than generating posts that a human then edits, it asks questions, marks the strong lines you already wrote and offers a structure to write into, so the finished post sounds like you because you wrote it. Free for teams of five or fewer and priced per coaching session beyond that, it combines a coached writing session, a weekly rhythm of to-dos and reflections, and lightweight team coordination — campaigns, a team calendar and optional wins — while keeping every draft and conversation private to the writer. Its primary promise is simple: less AI slop, more people who write authentically.