Most startups in India discover
the value of PR at the wrong moment: after a funding round, when they have
something to announce and a three-week deadline to generate coverage.
That is a PR strategy. It is a
fire drill. And it produces fire drill results - a cluster of coverage around
the announcement, followed by silence, followed by the question: 'Why has no
one written about us since?'
The startups that build real,
compounding PR programmes think about it entirely differently.
PR is more than a campaign. It is a capability
The single most common mistake
early-stage founders make is treating PR as a periodic activity, something you
commission around a fundraise, a product launch, or an awards entry, and then
pause until the next announcement.
This treats PR as a megaphone.
It is far more useful as a positioning engine.
The value of PR compounds when
it is sustained. A startup with 12 months of consistent earned media has a
searchable public record. Its founders are on journalists' call lists. Its
narrative has been tested and refined across multiple stories. When the next
big announcement comes, there is a foundation to amplify rather than a blank
page to fill.
The startups that treat PR as a
capability - something that runs alongside the business get meaningfully more
from every announcement than those who treat it as a campaign.
Journalists are interested in tension, insight, and change, features
The most common reason startup
PR fails to land coverage is that founders pitch features instead of stories.
'We have launched an AI-powered
platform that automates X' is a feature description. It tells a journalist what
the product does. It does tell them why it matters now, what changes when it
exists, who it disrupts, what it cost to build, what the founder learned, or
why the timing is right.
A story has tension. It has a
before and after. It has a protagonist with a problem, a decision, and a
consequence.
The startups that generate
consistent coverage are those that have identified their story angles. These
stories he ones that a journalist would find genuinely interesting to write
about , separately from their product roadmap. The story angles often involve:
the problem the founder has seen close-up that others have not, the insight
that led to the model, the data from the platform that reveals something
surprising about the market, the category shift the startup is betting on.
These are editorial angles.
They are separate from, though connected to, the product itself.
The media landscape in India rewards sector expertise
India's startup media has
matured significantly. Publications like The Ken, Mint, Economic Times Startup,
and a growing set of vertical-specific outlets cover the ecosystem with
increasing sophistication.
Journalists in this landscape
cover specific sectors and have strong opinions about them. Reaching them
effectively requires understanding their beat, reading their recent work, and
pitching angles that are genuinely relevant to what they are already exploring.
The spray-and-pray approach ,
sending the same press release to 200 email addresses and hoping for coverage ,
produces near-zero results. The targeted approach , identifying five
journalists who cover your category, building a genuine understanding of what
they write about, and reaching them with specific angles tailored to their
interests , produces a much higher conversion.
Volume is the metric. Relevance
is.
Third-party credibility solves the cold start problem
Early-stage startups face a
fundamental PR challenge: they often have the most interesting stories to tell
, genuine founder experience, a real insight into a broken system, a contrarian
bet on a category , but the least media credibility to trade on.
Third-party validators solve
this problem. An analyst who has reviewed the market, an industry body that has
recognised the startup, a well-known investor who can speak to the category
thesis, a customer who can put a number on the outcome , each of these turns a
startup's self-reported narrative into something a journalist can quote and
verify.
Building a shortlist of people
who understand the company and are willing to speak about it is one of the
highest-value early PR activities a founder can undertake. It takes longer than
writing a press release. It pays back far more.
Timing is a meaningful lever
The same story, pitched at
different moments, will produce entirely different results.
A funding announcement dropped
on the same day as three other major fundraises in the same category competes
for the same pool of journalist attention. A commentary on a regulatory
development, pitched within 24 hours of the announcement, has a natural peg. A
data insight published ahead of an industry event rides the wave of coverage
that surrounds it.
PR teams that understand news
cycles, media calendar patterns, and how to identify moments of journalist
interest are significantly more effective than those who pitch on the startup's
internal timeline alone.
Measurement should focus on outcomes, outputs
Coverage count is a poor
measure of PR effectiveness. It tells you how many articles were published; it
tells you nothing about whether the right people read them, whether the
narrative was accurate and favourable, or whether the coverage produced any downstream
effect on hiring, fundraising, or customer acquisition.
Better measures: the quality
and tier of coverage (are you appearing in publications your investors read?),
narrative accuracy (is your positioning being reflected correctly?), inbound
enquiries correlated with coverage cycles, and brand perception among target
audiences over time.
Founders who hold their PR
function to outcome-based targets build better programmes than those who track
clip counts.
The right time to start is before you need it
The founders who have the
easiest time raising their Series A are often those who spent the preceding 18
months building a public presence , writing about the problem they are solving,
commenting on the category, speaking at relevant forums, building relationships
with journalists before they had anything to announce.
By the time they had news to
share, the infrastructure was already in place: the journalist relationships,
the public record, the positioning. The announcement was a confirmation of
something people already half-knew.
That is what a compounding PR
programme looks like. And it starts well before the press release.
Talking Point Communications
partners with startups across growth stages to build PR programmes that create
lasting credibility, just coverage. Talk to our team:
talkingpointcommunications.com/contact-us