How to make people care about your startup

Kristen (Lenny's Podcast article): More importantly, if you're not excited about the story of why you started this company, you should probably look for a different line of work. As more people stray from traditional career ladders and as entrepreneurship becomes more popular, there will be a wave of founders who start companies simply because they can, or because it looks like a fast track to a lot of money. People can tell when you're in it for the wrong reasons—which includes no reason at all. There's no comms strategy for that. But for everyone else: if your reason was convincing enough for you, it's convincing enough to make other people care too.

Kristen (Lenny's Podcast article): It's never been easier to start a company. It's also never been harder to get someone to care that you did. Anyone can now go from idea to business in less time than it takes to hire a single engineer. But the same tools that make building simple make standing out a challenge. As channels like X and LinkedIn flood with soulless AI slop, startups are having to work harder to grab people's already fractured attention amid all the noise. But this moment presents an opportunity for founders who can say something honest and connective by "going direct"—or what I call founder-led communication. Today, a solid founder-led communications strategy is one of the lowest-cost, highest-leverage tools at your disposal to get people's attention.

Kristen (Lenny's Podcast article): The Insight founder is someone who started their business because they saw or understood something before others did and decided to change it. ... What makes Insight founders compelling is that they were right—early. Where Problem founders build customer loyalty by making people feel understood, Insight founders do almost the reverse. They make people feel smarter by helping them consider new perspectives, understand complex subjects, and form opinions that they otherwise wouldn't have come up with. That relationship with customers is a slow build, but it's a durable one. An audience that believes you understand things others don't and trusts your read on an industry will borrow your language, repeat your conclusions, and eventually accept your opinions as a reason to believe in your company. Most founders you think of as "thought leaders" are Insight founders, and they're uniquely positioned to share and debate their points of view. ... The core communication pillar for an Insight founder is regular, incisive thought leadership about their industry. It's easy to believe an Insight founder builds credibility by being right all the time, but the more important thing is being helpful.

Kristen (Lenny's Podcast article): The Problem founder is someone who started their business to solve a problem that was personally tormenting them. Think Sara Blakely, who hated how pantyhose looked under her pants, so she cut the feet off them and founded Spanx, or Tobi Lütke, who tried to sell snowboards and got so frustrated with the existing e-commerce programs that he decided it would be easier to build Shopify instead. What makes these founders compelling is that they understand the customer better than anyone else could, because they are the customer. When you're solving a problem because it caused you so much pain that you restructured your life around fixing it, you have a unique power to make your customer feel seen and understood. You get to say that you're working for "us," not for "them," and your success becomes "our success." That narrative is a powerful tool for building affiliation and brand loyalty. The Problem founder has a singular ability to identify as a customer first and business owner second, which should anchor their entire comms strategy. ... The centerpiece of a Problem founder's comms strategy is high-repetition, vignette-style storytelling about their experience with the problem. I think of this as the Taylor Swift method: communicate specific, scene-based details about an experience to evoke universal and strong emotional responses. You should have a well-rehearsed "origin story" that describes your experience with the problem and can be repeated across channels. For that story to connect, it can't sound like "existing options weren't working for me." It needs to be more like "I was crying in my car during lunch."