This is something that irritates me about business writing. Parable != evidence, since I construct a parable after the fact, to make a specific point.
Also, like witty aphorisms, it's just as easy to support either side of an argument. E.g. "the early bird gets the worm" v.s "the second mouse gets the cheese".
It's the classic mistake of confusing sales (selling an existing product) and marketing (finding out what people really want).
Be wary of someone great at advertising/PR but not at market fit. Those are two distinct questions. Often the founder needs to "own" market fit, probably with the help of others, and advertising/PR can be somewhat delegated. However since market fit drives every decision, it can be hard for that person to be anyone else but the founder.
the plural of anecdote is not data
The problem is that a parable isn't even an anecdote. One of the other posters on here, saying "this happened to me" is an anecdote, and I found that useful.
parable <- propaganda
anecdote <- something that happened, but generalize at your own risk.
data <- often useful, but subject to horrible flaws in interpretation
"The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.[3]"
On the other hand, while the story sounds like a parable, I didn't notice anything in the text that actually implies that it is fictional. In any case, it was highly effective for Steve to get his point across to me. Whether the point is true is another question which I can't answer from experience.
Now we're at a stage where we do have a repeatable (hopefully highly scalable) sales model, with a seasoned sales guy making sales happen.
But some folks in the company are still on the "customer validation/development" mode :) So not out of the woods yet!