Unlocking Your Company's Hidden Treasure: How Storytell Turns Unstructured Data Into Strategic Insights

When I was running a founder community with DROdio, my co-founder, I had a realization that changed everything. We were recording every Zoom call with Otter AI—all these rich, high-fidelity conversations happening every single day. Meeting notes piling up. Documentation scattered across platforms. And I remember thinking: What are we going to do with all this? How do we get the value out of this, or is there even a point to it?

That question haunted me because I could see the pattern everywhere. Every company I talked to was drowning in the same problem.

The $90 Trillion Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Here's something that stopped me in my tracks: unstructured data—your meeting transcripts, documentation, presentations, Jira tickets, all of it—makes up about 90% of enterprise data. But we've been treating it like it doesn't exist. It just sits there in various platforms, essentially invisible, while we build data warehouses around the other 10%.

It's almost everything. And we've not been able to get the value from almost everything, which is totally nuts.

So much innovation can happen when you extract the strategic insights from that treasure trove. But most people don't even know it's there, or their access is somehow blocked when it usually shouldn't be.

The Constant Ping Problem

One of our product managers at a DevOps company told me something that perfectly captures the frustration: "I don't want to get pinged all day."

You know the experience. You're trying to focus, and the Slack pings keep coming. "Hey, when's that thing rolling out?" "What about this feature?" "Who's doing research on X?"

And the answer is always already there—somewhere. In some meeting notes. In some documentation. In some PowerPoint someone created. It's out there. Just scattered to the winds.

That information shouldn't require a human middleman. Storytell creates a master database of all your unstructured data—all the transcripts of meetings, documentation, everything (with proper user-based controls, of course)—and brings it to life at your fingertips.

How It Actually Works: Complexity Hidden, Power Revealed

The technical reality of AI is overwhelming. Different models excel at different tasks. Prompting is its own specialized skill. The learning curve is steep.

We built Storytell to hide all that complexity.

At the heart of our platform is what we call the LLM router. Based on your task and the performance characteristics of each model, it automatically chooses the right model for the job. You don't have to know which AI is best for what. You don't have to become a prompt engineer.

In fact, we have an "improved prompt" toggle. Whatever you write—however simple or complex—we automatically rewrite your prompt for you, pointing it at whatever dataset you're looking at. So if you type something like "thing go boom," it comes back with a PhD-level optimized query. You just get the answer you need.

The whole phase where everyone had to be a prompt engineer? That's not feasible. It's such a different way of interacting. We just take that step out. You don't have to be that smart anymore—or rather, you get to focus your intelligence on what actually matters: the insights, not the interface.

Real Stories, Real Impact

Let me share some examples that show you what this unlocks:

The Discovery That Launched a Product Line

One of our users at a DevOps company has an amazing memory, but memory is fallible—and you're not on every call. He started querying all the meetings he wasn't in. Just asking Storytell: "Get me up to speed on the last two weeks of stuff for this project."

It scans all the notes, all the Jira tickets, everything. When you have great engineers who really document what they're doing, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips.

He discovered a whole other product line based on a meeting he wasn't in.

You just don't know all the opportunities you're missing by not benefiting from that wealth of insights.

Three Months of Work in Minutes

Here's one that still gets me. This product manager told us: "We took three months—all we did, all the product folks for three months at our company—was look at our meeting notes to understand what everyone deployed to. And we only had 50% confidence in the answer."

Three months. Half the confidence they needed.

With Storytell? Instant. Complete. Accurate.

That's a total game-changer for decision-making velocity.

From Research Silos to Strategic Insights

At Paramount, our biggest customer, research teams are constantly trying to understand why a show performs the way it does. They're supporting ad sales, understanding viewership trends, developing strategy.

But the work is shockingly manual. One person goes into one research platform. Then another platform. Then another. Five different vendor tools. And here's the kicker: often they don't know that another team is doing the exact same research.

The information is siloed within one person, and duplicated across teams.

Storytell breaks down those silos. "Tell me what my users are thinking now" becomes a question you can actually answer. "Tell me how that's trending over the last six months"—done.

The job that used to be called "product ops"—reading through all the qualitative feedback and summarizing it for the product team—that used to be someone's entire role. Now it's a query.

The CEO Who Moved the Needle

One user insight completely surprised me recently: A CEO at an entertainment company asked his senior leadership team how they were using AI. Answer: not using it.

But he was so impressed with the insights that came from Storytell on their own data that he immediately said, "Okay, then I need you to work together to bring this into our enterprise."

Just a certain level of insight was enough to move the needle.

It's Not Just for Tech Teams

Anyone dealing with a lot of unstructured data can benefit—which is honestly a lot of different people and companies. We've got coaches using it to search through all their client calls and notes. One person said they could write a book from it. (They absolutely could.)

We have research teams, DevOps companies, ad tech startups, entertainment enterprises. The pattern is universal: if you have meetings, documentation, conversations, and decisions happening—and that knowledge is locked away instead of accessible—Storytell is for you.

Building Humanity Into Our Operating System

My background as a writer taught me something crucial: data without narrative context is just noise. CEOs are always asking why. "Tell me the why behind the number." You can't just deliver numbers.

Every communication is essentially a translation to your audience from a different role. It's vital, and people tend to do it poorly, missing so much context.

That insight shaped not just our product but how we operate as a company.

We created something called Clean Communication—a framework we use in our all-hands meetings and when giving each other feedback. It guides us through levels of communication, from the head to the heart:

• Level 1 is where we get work done—status updates, timing, deliverables
• Level 2 is where emotions are
• Level 3 maps feelings to universal human needs

When there's conflict or misunderstanding, people get stuck in logic loops at level one. It can go on for hours, weeks, months. We've learned to head straight to the source: What are you feeling? What need is met or unmet?

At our monthly 90-minute all-hands, we start with a 10 to 20-minute clean communication check-in. We use a flowbot that brings up a check-in question—nothing that takes more than 10% of the meeting. Sometimes we go into breakout rooms with people we work with regularly, taking turns giving and receiving feedback. Sometimes we all stay together and write in Notion, just a quick litmus test: where are we all in this moment?

It's what you get when you go into the office—that human connection—but if you're remote-first, you have to bake it into the process. Otherwise, you just grind out Zoom calls.

We're a globally distributed team. We don't always have time and space to solve everything that comes up, but we can recognize what's going on for folks. And if there's something related to the business, we can see what changes to make.

Storytell is Clean Communication as a product value, too. It's not just our internal culture—it shows up in how we design the product. How do you do things that are humane, that connect as humans, and can still be part of the flow of business?

The Vision: Self-Service Knowledge, Zero Friction

We're building toward something agentic—where you don't even have to be in the platform to get value from it. Storytell will decide what internal knowledge it needs to search and what web searches to run. Information comes to you.

We're focused on helping people evolve in their relationship to information—from asset to concept. From "I need to find that document" to "I need to understand this idea."

Because that's what matters. Not the file. The insight.

Your Turn

If you're reading this and thinking, "We have this exact problem"—meeting notes nobody reads, documentation nobody can find, decisions getting re-litigated because nobody remembers what was decided—you're not alone.

Every company has a treasure trove of knowledge locked away in unstructured data. The question is: are you going to keep letting it gather dust, or are you going to unlock it?

Storytell exists to give you your time back, eliminate the noise, and surface the insights that actually move your business forward to help you feel like a superhero at work while also achieving work-life balance.

Because you shouldn't have to choose between doing great work and being constantly overwhelmed.

You just need the right tools to make all that hidden knowledge finally work for you.

If you’d like to dive deeper into this conversation, you can watch the full discussion here.

‍