Comms 101
WTF is comms and does your startup actually need it?
In recent conversations with startup founders, I realized that many of them don’t grok what comms is—or why a startup focused on not going out of business tomorrow should care about it.
This post is a primer on these topics. My intended audience is startup founders who are starting to wonder if they need a “brand” and aren’t sure where to start. If you’re a comms professional, this post isn’t written with you in mind, but may be a helpful way to rethink your own services for your non-comms stakeholders.
What is comms?
The high-level version is that comms helps you tell your story, both inside and outside of your company.
That’s super vague, so here are a few examples of projects a comms person might work on:
Writing your website copy
Developing a presentation for your CEO to give at Cannes
Landing a story in TechCrunch about your latest fundraise
Putting together a company All Hands
Responding to an inquiry from a Wall Street Journal reporter
Isn’t that just marketing? Or maybe PR?
Here’s the deal: Today, “comms” is often used as a blanket term for a bunch of related functions, including PR/media relations, marketing, brand, content, digital/social, community management, employee communications, and even policy.1
The general idea is comms impacts how audiences like investors, users, buyers, candidates, regulatory bodies, employees, and other entities critical to your startup’s success think about you.2 Big, later-stage companies can divide all these functions into their own teams and get really pedantic about the lines between them all.3 But I don’t think there’s much value in distinguishing between them at the early stages.
In fact, focusing too much on what name to use (marketing/comms/whatever) can blind you to the best way to reach your actual goals. Whether you’re sharing your message on Substack or a podcast or your company website or LinkedIn is a tactic; the strategy is your story—and your story is comms’ central concern.
Put another way, comms professionals can help you think through:
What you want to say (Strategy)
Who you want to say it to—and who you don’t (Audience)
How to reach those audiences (Tactics)
How do I know if I need to invest in comms?
Truthfully, lot of early-stage startups don’t! If you’re growing at a healthy clip, acquiring customers, and able to recruit your key talent through 1:1 engagements, then you might not need to invest in comms. Often that’s a “right now” decision for a younger company that will invest in comms down the line, but sometimes it’s a forever decision.
Many successful companies don’t have “brands” in the Airbnb or Disney sense, and you shouldn’t create one just to satisfy your own ego or because you feel like that’s what all “real” companies do. (Palantir’s social accounts languished for years before we revived them in 2018/2019. We were a 30B company without a Twitter! Be sure there’s a business reason to turn these kinds of things on.)
The real question is, “Do I have a business problem that needs a comms solution?” You might have a comms problem if one of your core audiences either:
Doesn’t know about you (awareness); or
Has wrongly held beliefs about you (misunderstanding)
A few examples:
Potential customers or candidates haven’t heard of you (and so aren’t buying)
Employees don’t understand why you’re pivoting the company to a new product (and so productivity and morale are down)
Investors don’t believe your company is worth X (and so you can’t raise)
Importantly, the goal of comms is never to make everyone like you. That’s like boiling the ocean. What matters is what your core audiences think about you. In fact, often the very message that will resonate most with your core audience will be off-putting to the peanut gallery.4
I think I have a comms problem. How do I fix it?
Treat a comms problem as you would any other problem: Test out potential solutions, and don’t over-invest in hiring until you have a strong thesis for the value a hire would bring.
In order, I recommend:
Adding comms to an existing staffer’s portfolio. The first few comms-flavored needs you encounter are likely to be ad hoc and infrequent, like answering a one-off reporter inquiry or zhuzhing your investor deck. You should treat them like the other one-off needs that pass through your company: by having an ops generalist like a chief of staff or biz ops associate handle them, then (if justified) stand up a function from zero to one before hiring specialists. What you’re looking for at this stage is ROI. Is the time spent on comms efforts justified by the (a) money (if you’re engaging in paid efforts) and (b) opportunity cost of not focusing on other efforts, like one-to-one biz dev?
Bring on fractional help. Consider bringing on part-time help once you’ve validated the need for comms to accelerate your startup. Fractional help can take the form of a contractor or an agency. (In my opinion, the economics make more sense to engage an individual rather than a larger agency; agencies typically charge more to cover their overhead.) You might hire a third party for a specific project, for a specific length of time, or on an ongoing basis. Make sure you agree on what success will look like (more on this below). If you have a clearly scoped need, like landing a product launch story or revamping your website, you can hire a specialist; otherwise, you want a strategic partner who is tactic-agnostic and can help you think from first principles about what tactics will actually help you reach you core audiences—and then execute on them.
Hire a full-time employee. Only once you’re scaling would I recommend investing in a full-time comms person. You should have conviction that there will be a steady stream of comms-related needs for this person to work on; otherwise you may be better off with continued fractional help that can flex up and down with your needs. At the earliest stages, you want a Swiss Army knife-style generalist who can flex across tactics and move between strategy and actually doing the work. That said, you should consider your core needs—if you’re going to be doing a lot of brand building, hire a marketing superstar; if you’re handling a lot of controversy, a crisis background might make more sense.
How do I measure the success of my comms person?
Candidly, comms as a field has really struggled with the measurement question. Performance marketers can say, “I generated $X in revenue or Y number of leads from this campaign.” That’s harder to do for a billboard or a TV story, or even for digital marketing when the goal is brand-building rather than converting customers.
In general, you want to benchmark your KPI before and after a key comms initiative. For example, if you want to attract employees with your latest fundraise, measure applicant numbers before and after your news breaks. Other goals might include: passing or blocking a piece of regulation; favorably shaping a piece of incoming news coverage; or generating customers through community engagement.
Be super clear with your comms person, whether they’re in-house or not, about how to benchmark success. The key is to keep your goals business-related. It doesn’t matter if your comms consultant lands five stories if they’re in low-value outlets or don’t actually move the needle for your business.
To put it more starkly: Imagine a startup founder spends a half an hour with a reporter on a story that 5,000 people read. If none of those 5,000 people are your core audience, you would’ve been better off spending that half hour on the phone closing a candidate or on a sales call or even just chatting up a current employee in the break room. Comms should help scale your business efforts.
Do you think comms could accelerate your startup? I’m happy to chat—you can reach me here.
Consumer agency Daly calls this “comms+.”
One of my prior employers restricted their core audiences just to current and potential employees and current and potential customers. This might seem overly simplistic but in fact is the heart of almost every business.
If you’re still curious about the differences between these fields, one common distinction between “comms” and “marketing” is that comms handles all the stuff you don’t have to pay for (like newspaper articles and tweets), while marketing handles the stuff you do pay for (like digital ads and billboards). PR typically refers exclusively to media relations, aka working directly with journalists. But again, I wouldn’t focus too much on these lines, which are getting blurrier by the day.