Problem-Solving Story Over Success Story
Editors reject polished wins — lead with the challenge you faced and how you got through it.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Founders instinctively present a triumphant, frictionless success story, which editors find useless because readers can't learn anything from 'someone succeeded.' What's valuable is watching someone face a challenge the reader also faces and work through it. Feifer will kill a story on the phone if the founder won't be openly vulnerable about the real problem.
Origin
Jason Feifer's editorial standard at Entrepreneur ('a magazine about thinking'), where every story is really the audience being served through the subject's struggle.
Core principles
- 01Success stories are not interesting to anyone — there's nothing to learn from them
- 02The useful content is how someone faced a challenge you face and got through it
- 03Openness about the real problem is a make-or-break test on the follow-up call
- 04The subject is a vehicle; the story is really the reader learning through them
How to run it
- 1
Frame around the problem, not the win
Structure your pitch and interview around the specific challenge you hit and the counterintuitive way you worked through it, not the impressive outcome.
Pro tip 'Here's the problem I hit and what I did' maps directly onto what editors and their audiences want to extract.
Watch out 'We made the best product and it worked' is a non-story — solving the market's problem isn't the same as having a story worth telling.
- 2
Be genuinely vulnerable on the call
When you get the interview, stay open about how hard the challenge actually was. Downplaying it to look brilliant kills the story.
Pro tip Treat the interview like a hero's journey — the struggle is the value, so don't sand it down.
Watch out Founders who reached out because of a challenge but then act as if there was no real problem lose the editor's interest immediately.
- 3
Show the transferable lesson
Make explicit what the reader can extract — the reusable strategy or 'aha' — so the editor can picture serving it to their audience.
Pro tip If listeners consistently react with 'ah, right, there's always another way,' you've found the transferable lesson editors want.
In the wild
After O'Hara's pitch landed, the make-or-break moment was the phone call. She was willing to be open about the challenges of her business collapsing when ski resorts closed. Had she instead presented it as a small problem her ingenuity instantly solved, Feifer says he would have lost interest and killed the story.
→ Her vulnerability about real challenges kept the story alive and turned it into published coverage.
Common mistakes
Pitching a polished success narrative
'We built the best thing and it worked' gives the audience nothing to learn; editors reject it because success stories are not interesting to anybody.
Minimizing the problem once on the call
Acting as if the challenge was trivial and instantly solved by your genius removes the exact tension the reader learns from, and the editor loses interest and drops the story.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders who've landed the interview and are shaping how to tell their story to a business/insight-driven outlet
Not ideal for
Pure product-roundup or news-quote placements where a narrative arc isn't what the outlet wants
From the transcript
“I hate success stories I love problem solving stories”
“success stories are not interesting they're not interesting to anybody right it's not useful for you to just hear that someone else succeeded”
“what's useful is for you to hear how someone else faced challenges that you faced and got through them”
“she was willing to be open about challenges”
From the episode
How to get press for your product
Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine)