Founders’ Guide to Comms

If you’re a founder, neglecting public communications is a drag on your business. It’s not something you should focus on primarily (that’s what rage baiters do), but you should use this channel just like any other, because it will help you find customers, win candidates, secure partnerships and raise funding.

Now, what are comms? We used to call this public relations when it was mostly about print and TV media, even when they’ve moved online. New categories have emerged with the rise of social media and influencers, and now individual authors are building full-scale media outlets on platforms like Substack and YouTube. To me, comms is all of this. WSJ reported that the industry is trying to rebrand this combined approach as “storytelling” but I don’t agree much; it’s still just comms.

I get many requests from founders who make the same mistake: “we launched our product a while ago, how can we get it on TechCrunch or Bloomberg? Unfortunately, “here’s my great company” isn’t a story. You need to share something new, either a fact or a piece of knowledge, something that wasn’t known yesterday. This mostly applies to the news media but they’re just the most gated and demanding. You’d be wise to apply the same criteria to what you post on X or LinkedIn.

If you have already launched your startup publicly, you can’t just come to the media and ask them to tell the same story. And while you can technically post it on X or LinkedIn, it’s unlikely to go viral.

Let’s go over this exact scenario: you launched a while ago, didn’t have much publicity, and want to switch it up now. What do you do? First, we will figure out how to give it another shot. Then, what you should do afterward.

Restart

First, you must come up with a newsworthy event. It could be a major feature launch, a unique partnership with a larger brand, a unique report on the industry you prepared, or something else. That’s why launch and funding announcements work so well; there’s a clear before and after. Look at your roadmap, think about what kind of data you have access to or can gather.

But this is a hook. Now you need the arc. What is actually your story? What are you building and why is it important? Why is it objectively good for humanity? With some products, this comes naturally. The best case is when you have the “enemy”, the Goliath that you, the David, want to kill, because it’s archaic, expensive, or harmful. Arc/Dia wants to replace Chrome. Perplexity wants to replace Google. Linear wants to replace Jira. Sometimes, it can be the faceless industry you’re fightning, slow and inefficient.

Ultimately, you need people to root for you. Lulu Cheng Meservey said that people root for you when they think you deserve more than you’ve got. For this to happen, they must find what you’re building to be objectively good and important. However, while people like rooting for the underdog, nobody wants to root for the loser. You can’t be the loser. You must have something to show for. Not just a radically better product, because this is often subjective — all founders say their product is the best one.

There are exactly two ways to “prove” this. First is hard data, like “our AI coding agent makes 30% fewer mistakes than Claude Code”. Second is anecdotes, like “this guy on Twitter used our product to create a viral app with 2M users”. The best is if you can combine all of this.

We are building a SaaS that makes customer data instantly queryable for non-technical teams. Our product is 10x faster than traditional BI tools and is already used by teams at Notion, Figma, and Linear.

What if you have none of this? Look deeper into the product, talk to you team, figure out what you can actually gather if you start tracking: improvements, time spent, PMF scores, etc. Still nothing? Then you don’t have a story and probably don’t have a good product yet. Focus on the fundamentals before you proceed with comms.

Tactics for Pitching

You’ve identified an upcoming interesting feature in your roadmap that you want to announce. How?

First, draft a one-page document about the announcement. Combine your overall story with this feature and show how they’re connected. Add all the validation you currently have, including traction figures, growth rates, and customer names. If you want an example, I believe Stripe has the best corporate communications: no buzzwords, straight to the point, validated by numbers where necessary. Find a similar announcement from them and write one for your company. We can call this document a “press release”. If you have any stakeholders for this announcement, such as co-founders, partners, or investors, this is the ideal moment to get their approval.

It’s time for pitching! In 2026 and beyond, you have a rich array of options, including news media, newsletters and podcasts. The first option is the classic one, with publications like TechCrunch, Axios, Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Sifted, and many others. Use search, find articles similar to the story you have, and study their authors. For instance, TechCrunch has around four people covering AI now. If you’re building in this space, these are the people to target.

When you see someone relevant, pitch them and offer your story as an exclusive. You pitch authors similarly to how you pitch investors. Here’s an example of a pitch that landed our client on TechCrunch.

But don’t disregard the alternatives. TBPN, Alex Konrad’s Upstarts or Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer are probably more influential than most of the classic outlets for select audiences. In fact, more people would likely read about you there. Few outlets disclose the readers of individual stories, but Forbes still does, and it can be as low as a few thousand (see here). Meanwhile, most other founders and executives I talk to listen religiously to Lenny’s Podcast. New media are extremely powerful, even if brands haven’t reached mainstream awareness yet.

Chances are, you might be a bit too small for them as well. New media authors are picky: they have to be, as they tend to produce fewer stories than a TechCrunch authors would do per week. I recommend you trying them anyway, because the profiles they produce are often longer and have more details, like Konrad’s story on Granola. Even big orgs that could have gotten a top-tier media now go to newsletters instead, like this $190M fund announcement from Root Ventures.

But there are many more options out there. Look beyond top-3, find the authors who are also rising and grow with them. I’ve gathered almost 100 relevant and often underrated new media platforms that I will share in the next email blast, so subscribe if you want to get access.

Whether to go with a traditinal media outlet or a new one depends on your goals. With the former you get a logo you can put on your website and a link you can share with a wide array of customers and less sophisticated investors. Meanwhile, new media can often provide you with a much larger and detailed profile and people in this business often value them just as much or even more.

When an author takes an interest in your pitch, share the full release and offer to jump on a call or have a meeting. Continue selling until the very end and ask them to confirm if they’re planning to cover you.

Now, it’s time to take that press release and create a blog post and social media posts. A blog post is a more reader-facing version of the same document. Again, Stripe has both press releases and blog posts for each announcement; use them as a reference.

As for social media, for most projects, it’s just LinkedIn and X (many live just fine without the latter). Repurpose the ideas from the press release to write native posts for them. Even more human, conversational, a longer post for LinkedIn, and a thread for X. Don’t use the native article formats; few people bother to read them. Here’s a great example of such a thread.

Social media is valuable because you will be able to capture and onboard any incoming interested people while also sharing your ideas in your own voice.

Continuing Activities

You probably don’t have an announcement every two weeks. Maybe not even every month. So what’s important is to spend the rest building up your presence.

Write down 15-20 reporters, newsletter authors and podcasters covering the same area you’re in and follow them everywhere. Respond if you have interesting context to add to their thoughts and stories. The best option is not to pitch yourself into a podcast, but be invited instead because you look like someone who has interesting things to day.

If you’re in the same city, you can ask them for a coffee and offer to share anything about the tech industry without pushing your own startup too much. This is how you build relationships that can be converted into coverage later.

Your best long-term option is to “go direct” and “build in public”. It doesn’t mean you should ignore the media, on the contrary, your goal is to build up a profile that makes you unavoidable for them. Because when lightning strucks, they can be extremely valuable.

Lovable built their entire social media strategy on posting photos from the office and bragging about the speed at which they delivered features. But doing this from a corporate account is much harder. People want to follow people, and the current X’s algorithm discourages underperformance by a lot.

Your best bet is running comms for the company from your personal account. I often recommend early-stage founders to avoid using a corporate account at all initially, just create it to take the name.

At the end of each day, look at what you and your team built and find something to post. You can post this every day on X and 2-3 times a week on LinkedIn (I wouldn’t recommend more there). Here are some examples of founders who do this best (by no means an exhaustive list):

• Tobi Lutke, Shopify
• Blake Scholl, Boom
• Tyler Denk, Beehiiv
• Ryan Petersen, Flexport
• Matteo Franceschetti, EightSleep
• Marie Martens, Tally
• Nick Abouzeid, Rivet
• Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity

What unites them is they are always running founder-led comms. They speak as operators, not as brand accounts, and teach and share knowledge while selling their product in the meantime. They feel like fighers in the ring and not random white-collar workers, so bystanders root and cheer as if it was their own company. These founders pre-announce features, educate about their product and the industry, share screenshots or vides and charts with metrics, post exciting user stories, hype up employees, and are always running customer support (here’s a great guide for this).

Great founders aren’t posting solely about their company. They also show their personal interests and their human side, because this is what helps other content resonate. That’s why people want to follow them. Tobi Lutke posted about vibe-coding a viewer app for his MRI and got 7 million views. Now we know a bit more about him and he only looks cooler. But when Shopify has an actually big announcement, he posts relentlessly about it.

Founders have a lot on their plate. Many are working days, nights and weekends. Comms are rarely a priority — you have lots of stuff to do, so you can always postpone and post it tomorrow, right? Or maybe you feel it’s pure vanity irrelevant to the business. But the founders above didn’t suddenly get more free time than you. They just realized that 15 minutes dedicated to posting daily is marketing, so they look for ideas and get all the benefits in the end.