From breakdown to breakthrough: How entrepreneurs craft vulnerability narratives on social media

Abstract

Entrepreneurial narratives are widely understood as strategic tools for building legitimacy and mobilizing resources. Yet we observed that some entrepreneurs openly share stories of fear, doubt, and struggle on social media - foregrounding emotional exposure rather than demonstrating strategic purpose. We conceptualize these as entrepreneurial vulnerability narratives: a distinct narrative form through which the lived consequences of entrepreneurial uncertainty are publicly shared and opened to social negotiation. These disclosures expose entrepreneurs to interpersonal risks, heightened for women entrepreneurs who contend with gendered biases and less supportive social contexts. To examine this phenomenon, we conducted interviews with 33 women entrepreneurs and a 21-month observation of their Instagram activity. Our analysis reveals that women entrepreneurs hold multiple and coexisting motivations for disclosure - self-oriented, relational, and normative - oscillating between them as needed, while developing narrative-crafting tactics that sustain the benefits of sharing while managing interpersonal risks. Our study contributes by theorizing entrepreneurial vulnerability narratives as a distinct narrative form; by challenging the view that entrepreneurial narratives serve primarily persuasive functions; and by showing how entrepreneurs actively construct precarious holding environments in fragmented digital contexts.