🥃 Storytelling in B2B SaaS: Lessons from the Whisky Vibes Brand Lab

Building a vibe-first experimental brand to study emotion, identity, and behavior

TL;DR

Whisky Vibes is not a finished product. It's an active experiment — a storytelling sandbox I built to explore how emotion, mood, and identity shape how people connect with digital brands. Though still pre-launch (no social media yet), it's already teaching me how aesthetics, voice, and slow rituals can influence engagement — lessons I’m applying back into SaaS, product design, and marketing.

🧠 Why Build a Brand Like This?

In most B2B SaaS or tech projects, we focus on:

• Features

• Metrics

• Efficiency

• Product-market fit

But humans don’t think in specs. They remember vibes.
And vibes are stories.

Whisky Vibes is my personal brand experiment to learn:

“How do you build a brand that people emotionally connect with — even before it has a product?”

🧪 What Exactly Is Whisky Vibes?

Think of it as a storytelling-first brand exploring:

• Shared rituals: cards, bonding games, mood kits

• Visual identity: color, typography, silence

• Micro-interactions: how people save, share, and remember

• Emotional design: calm, connection, rebellion, slowness

There’s no live product yet, no social media.
This is an ongoing lab — built to:

• Test visual direction

• Craft narrative hooks

• Experiment with formats before launch

🔍 Key Lessons I’m Learning (That Apply to SaaS Too)

1. Start with a Feeling, Not a Feature

In SaaS, we often lead with what our tool does.
In Whisky Vibes, I’m exploring how a mood can lead behavior.
This is a lesson I apply in UX and product onboarding now — because:

“People don’t onboard into tools. They onboard into emotion.”

2. Brand Identity Is an Emotional System

Whisky Vibes has no logo yet — but it has a feeling.
The colors, tone, card mockups, and phrases create a coherent mood.

In B2B:
Design systems aren’t just for consistency — they’re for emotion regulation.
That’s storytelling. Not branding.

3. Don’t Wait for Launch to Start Learning

Because I treat this as a testbed:

• I’m testing visual concepts with 1:1 feedback

• Running mini A/B tests on layouts and prompts

• Studying what makes people say, “This feels like me”

This pre-launch approach is how I now build feature-level experiments in my SaaS projects.

Test the feeling, before the feature.

4. People Buy Identity, Not Just Utility

Even in SaaS, tools like Notion, Linear, or Superhuman succeed because they give users an identity:

• “I’m a calm creator” → Notion

• “I move fast” → Linear

• “I’m premium” → Superhuman

Whisky Vibes is helping me practice that:

What would it mean to build a SaaS brand that feels like jazz instead of JavaScript?

💡 How I’m Applying These Lessons

In real client and team work, I now:

• Map the emotional state of the user before designing UI

• Rewrite onboarding screens as story arcs, not forms

• Treat emails as moodboard moments, not just messages

• Use storytelling logic (setup → conflict → resolution) in product walkthroughs

Final Thoughts

Whisky Vibes may never sell a product.
And that’s okay.

It’s already teaching me how to create digital experiences that people emotionally align with — something every B2B SaaS brand desperately needs.

Because your startup’s most valuable feature might not be in your code.

It might be in how you make someone feel when they land on your page.

📥 Want to follow the experiment as it unfolds?
→ amishsri.framer.website
→ DM me on LinkedIn if you're building brands that feel like poetry