I’ve loved reading newsletters from fellow founders, so I thought I’d share a bit more about what I’m learning as I build out First Principles Communications. I hope this will be informative for those of you who are also building or are thinking about making the leap.
Plus, I see a lot of content for software founders but less for those building services businesses, and that’s what we call a market opportunity, baby!
🛑 Wait, what are you doing again?
I’m building a communications consultancy called First Principles Communications that partners with entrepreneurs, executives, and political leaders to tell their stories to investors, employees, and the world. I particularly love working with people who have spiky opinions about the future and are at major inflection points in their journey, like building from zero to one, navigating a crisis or regulatory issue, or scaling into their next phase of growth.
🎞️ Highlight Reel
I have clients! Two to be exact, with two more in the pipeline and a few more warm leads that I would characterize as “unqualified” for now. If one or two more clients come through, I’ll be pretty full-up, or at least as full-up as I can be without sacrificing quality of life or quality of client work. Part of me thinks, woohoo! And part of me thinks, holy shit what have I done now I have to deliver. (And a third part of me thinks, I should’ve charged more.)
I’m finding traction with startups and organizations at the tech/public affairs intersection. I didn’t anticipate this being my niche; my initial hypothesis was that I’d work mostly with companies who needed someone to flex across internal and external comms. But I’ve really enjoyed the return to my political roots (for those who know me only as a techie, I actually got my start in the Obama White House—okay, fine, it was an internship, but it was cool—and on the Clinton campaign). And it’s reminded me of the similarities between tech and politics: both require strong leadership from people who see a future the rest of us can’t yet.
😎 Learnings
Making connections pays off. One of my clients came to me via a connection of my old boss with whom I shared an Uber home from a party on a snowy January night. Other referrals have come from people I met in Slack communities, on LinkedIn, and at IRL happy hours. The best part is that meeting folks has felt more like building community than capital-N Networking.
Smaller organizations can make much quicker purchasing decisions. My two clients are a startup and a small political org, so there were few steps between our first introductions and getting me onboarded as a consultant. If I bring on any larger clients, I expect the pitching and onboarding to take a bit longer.
I thrive on variety. One of my clients has hired me as a content writer; the other involves high-level messaging development and rapid response. I’m especially loving the rapid response (a few weeks ago I found myself crafting a tweet at 10 pm and thinking, without a jot of irony, We’re so back, baby!!!), but most of all I’m loving the ✨ diversity ✨ of different kinds of work. Now, to find an internal comms client for maximum variety….
Hone your pitch…but be flexible, especially if your business comes mostly via referrals. Early on I was really focused on honing my pitch, convinced I needed a crystal-clear vision of my Ideal Customer Profile and a narrowly scoped set of products to offer. And don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have a clear thesis as a starting point.
But early on, you should also be mindful that you’re a pre-product market fit startup, and that you need to test your messaging in the market before you understand what your value prop truly is. What you think is your biggest differentiator may not be the thing that actually gets the most traction. (See: me getting more traction from working at the gov/tech intersection than internal/external comms.) Be specific but open-minded. This is particularly true if you’re getting all or most of your work via referrals, where your soft skills will open more doors than your hard ones.
🥜 Nuts I Still Haven’t Cracked
Breaking into VC. I hypothesized that VCs would be a good target, because they both need to brand their own investors/fund in addition to supporting their portfolio companies. I also hypothesized that small and mid-sized VCs would be the right size target, because larger firms tend to have in-house comms talent. I still think all of this is true, but despite a few preliminary convos with VCs, I’ve yet to find one motivated to move forward. Do I need more warm intros? Do I need to find a VC at a really pivotal moment, like announcing a new fund? Should I expand my pursuit to other kinds of financial institutions?
Internal comms. I figured selling internal comms services would be harder than external for the simple reason that companies are already used to outsourcing help with PR and marketing. So far that seems to have held up; I’m seeing many fewer internal comms opportunities come my way relative to external. My hypothesis is that to get meaty internal comms work, I need to find scaling companies feeling the pain of rapid headcount growth or undergoing other major internal transformations, like layoffs or a public listing. I’m hopefully meeting with a potential internal comms client soon, so fingers crossed….
Very early stage companies. Initially I figured that early-stage startups would be a good target for my generalist skillset, because they need people who can get the message out by whatever means necessary, without over-indexing on the disciplinary differences between marketing/comms/brand/etc. What I’m finding instead is that very early stage startups (pre-seed to Series A) often don’t need scaled comms support. Most pre-product market fit companies are rightfully spending their resources getting to product market fit and doing things that don’t scale to reach their first n customers. My new plan is to look for (a) later-stage startups (Series B+) and (b) startups in controversial or highly regulated industries, where success requires managing perception even early on.
Payment. Comms consultants generally charge hourly, a monthly retainer, or by project. And the market is incredibly opaque. Like, Vanta black opaque. (Shoutout to everyone who has helped pull back the curtain on their understanding of the market so I’m not going in totally blind.)
So far I’m willing to work with clients on their preferred structure but am less flexible on rates—meaning regardless of how we structure the deal, I want to get paid a comparable hourly rate. I arrived at my rate by dividing my ideal annual salary by my billable hours a year, keeping in mind that I’ll take few weeks of vacation and also need time for administrative and business development work (which means not all 40 working hours in a week are actually billable hours).
That said, I’ve been willing to reduce my fees for projects that are both personally interesting for me and that will allow me to develop skills and/or brand name cachet for the future.
🧐 Open Question
Do I want to scale? I’m not at capacity yet, so this question is for now mostly a cleverly disguised form of procrastination, but I can definitely see a world where in a few months I am turning down interesting, high-paying work. (Right now I’m only turning down work that’s not interesting to me or not high-paying enough.)
At that point, my options might look like:Stay just me and only take on the most interesting, high-paying work
Bring on contractors or junior full-time staff to scale my current services
Bring on senior full-time staff who complement my services and can bring in their own business
For now, though, I’m focused on learning a lot, meeting lots of potential future clients and other consultants, and leaving time to revise my novel when I get feedback from a few first readers next week. (Oh, yeah, I’m writing a novel 👀! Hopefully more on that soon…. For now I’ll say that it’s a romp through the mid-2010’s tech scene, a general nostalgia-fest for pre-Trump, VC-funded Millennial life, and a critical look at being a woman in tech. My goal is that it’s fun enough to read on the beach and ~literary~ enough that you want to talk about it around the bonfire afterward.)
🙋♀️ Asks
I’d love a warm intro to folks in VC or with executive/internal comms needs.