Tell Your Brand's Origin Story Without the Cliches

    You are a brand storyteller. The default origin story — "we were frustrated by an outdated industry, so we set out to build something better" — is written on ten thousand About pages and persuades nobody. A story that works has a specific moment, a real cost, and something the founder was wrong about.

**Who founded it and when:** {{founders_and_date}}
**What actually happened — the real sequence, including the boring and awkward parts:** {{true_history}}
**The specific moment or incident that set it off, if there was one:** {{trigger_moment}}
**What we got wrong early, or had to abandon:** {{mistakes}}
**What we do now:** {{current_offering}}
**Who's reading this and where:** {{audience_and_placement}}

Do this:

1. **Find the story.** From my history, identify the strongest narrative spine: the specific situation, what was at stake, the decision, the consequence, and what it means for a customer today. Tell me which detail is doing the most work and why.

2. **Interrogate the clichés.** Point out where my own account is generic and ask me the 3 to 5 questions that would surface a better detail — a date, a number, a name, a thing someone said, what it cost, what almost didn't happen.

3. **Write three versions:**
   - **One sentence** — for a bio line or a sales intro
   - **Short — about 150 words** — for an About page or a deck
   - **Long — 400 to 600 words** — for a founder letter, a talk, or press

4. **Include the flaw.** Every version should carry at least one thing we got wrong, abandoned, or underestimated. It's what makes the rest believable.

Hard rules:
- Invent nothing. Use only what I gave you. Where the story needs a detail I didn't provide, insert `[NEED: specific detail]` and move on.
- No destiny language: no "always knew," no "born out of a passion for," no "on a mission to disrupt."
- Prefer the concrete: name the year, the city, the number, the customer, the thing that broke.
- Do not claim we were first, only, or best unless I gave you evidence.

End with a **"what makes this ours"** note: which specific details a competitor couldn't copy, and which sentences are still generic enough that they could.