Imagine if after building your startup where you spent many sleepless nights cultivating the value proposition, identifying your target audience, understanding what you were solving for, getting customer validation, pitching investors, showing how it will impact the world…you launched. And well….
– The press stories were negative.
– The reporter compared you to your competition incorrectly.
– Your founder wasn’t even consulted for an interview.
– …nobody wrote about you at all.
Now you have to be reactive. You go into crisis mode. You have to go and fix everything. That is 10x harder to come back from, than had you gotten ahead of the news and identified your story before anyone else. This is why PR matters early on. It allows you (the startup) to control your own narrative and story out the gate, as well as who gets to tell it. It’s important to be proactive with the press instead of reactive. This is achieved by working with PR early to create your company messaging, helping identify the right publications for launch and offering appropriate interviews.
Bottom line: If you’re not creating a steady drumbeat of your own narrative and coverage, just know that your competitor is.
Originally seen on WrongProject.com
