The Press Release Nobody Reads
Consider a SaaS founder in Pune — sharp, solid product, genuinely solving a real problem for mid-sized manufacturers. He had just closed a Series A round and wanted help getting media coverage. When asked to share whatever materials he had, what arrived was a two-page press release that opened with the funding amount, listed the investors, described the platform's technical architecture in painful detail, and ended with the founder saying he was "thrilled to scale operations and deliver value." That exact press release gets written about four hundred times a year. Different company name each time, same skeleton.
Here is what most founders in the Indian startup world do not fully appreciate: journalists delete these emails. Not because they are rude or lazy, but because there is genuinely nothing for them to grab onto. A reporter at Economic Times or Mint gets hundreds of pitches a week. They are scanning subject lines looking for a reason to care. Product specs and funding announcements, unless the numbers are truly staggering, do not give them that reason.
What Journalists Actually Want
Years of building relationships with journalists across Indian business media reveal a consistent pattern: the thing that opens doors has nothing to do with how impressive the product is on paper. Journalists want stories they can tell their readers. They want a founder who quit a VP role at a multinational because she kept seeing the same supply chain failure and could not look away anymore. They want the story of a company that almost shut down in 2020 and then pivoted into something nobody expected. They want texture, tension, something human.
When a pitch leads with a product's feature set, it essentially asks the journalist to do the storytelling work. Most of them will not. They will move to the next email from someone who made their job easier by leading with a narrative that already has a beginning, a middle, and enough intrigue to hold a reader's attention past the first paragraph.
Founders who are naturally good storytellers, often without even realising it, tend to get disproportionate media attention. Their companies are not always the biggest or the best-funded. They just know how to make people care.
The Ingredients That Actually Matter
So what goes into a brand story that works? It usually comes down to a few things, though they look different for every company.
The Real Origin, Not the Polished One
Every founder has a version of their origin story that they tell at conferences. It is clean, rehearsed, and usually a bit boring. The interesting version, the one that makes journalists lean in and readers remember you, is messier. It involves doubt, or an argument, or a moment of genuine frustration that would not look great on a pitch deck slide.
Consider a cleantech founder who kept describing his company as born out of a desire to "contribute to sustainable development." Passable, but unremarkable. The real story was far more compelling: he had grown up near an industrial area in UP where the river water changed colour depending on what the factories were dumping that week. He had watched his grandfather's farmland deteriorate over decades. That is a story. The sustainability mission statement is just a label you put on it afterward. People connect with the specificity, with the river water changing colour, not with the abstract commitment to environmental progress.
Your Customer's Life, Before and After
The most powerful thing any startup can do in its communications is show the transformation its customers experience — with enough detail that the reader can picture it. There is a world of difference between "our platform reduces operational inefficiency" and "our first client, a textile exporter in Surat, used to have three people spending their entire week reconciling invoices manually. Now the whole thing takes one person half a day." The second version makes someone in a similar situation immediately think about their own three people wasting their own week.
A Mission That Sounds Like You Mean It
Every startup's website has a mission statement. Most of them sound like they were generated by committee, which they probably were. The mission that actually resonates with journalists and customers is the one that feels specific to your company and your experience. It is not about saving the world in vague terms. It is about a particular problem that keeps you up at night and a particular reason why you think you are the one to fix it.
That cleantech founder is a case in point. Once his mission was reframed around the specific environmental damage he witnessed growing up, everything clicked. Journalists understood immediately why this person was doing this work. Investors got it. Even potential hires started reaching out because they connected with the story on a personal level.
Proving Your Values, Not Declaring Them
Companies that simply list their values on their website rarely build genuine trust. Integrity. Innovation. Customer-centricity. These words mean absolutely nothing without evidence. What makes a brand story stick is when a company can point to a specific moment where it lived its values at some cost. Maybe it turned down a lucrative client because the work did not align with its principles. Maybe it publicly acknowledged a product issue before customers even noticed. Those are the details that build trust, because they show what actually happens when it would be easier to do the opposite.
Finding the Story You Already Have
The most common thing founders say is "we don't really have a story." They are always wrong. The story is there, buried under layers of corporate language and a natural reluctance to be personal in a business context. Indian founders are especially prone to this. There is a cultural tendency to lead with credentials and achievements rather than vulnerability and motivation. It takes a bit of digging to get past that.
A useful starting point is a long, unstructured conversation with the founder — not an interview with prepared questions, just a chat. The early days, the failures, the customers remembered most vividly. Somewhere in that conversation, usually when the founder stops trying to sound impressive and starts just talking, the story reveals itself. Sometimes it is in an anecdote told almost as an aside, without realising it is the most compelling thing said all hour.
Talking to early customers helps enormously too. The people who bought in when there was no brand recognition, no case studies, no social proof — those people took a leap of faith. Understanding why they made that bet, in their own words, often gives you the emotional core of a brand narrative. Customer quotes are frequently better than anything a professional copywriter could produce, because they are real and unpolished and specific.
Does Any of This Actually Work?
The skepticism is understandable. Founders are busy. They want to know that spending time on storytelling will move the needle on something concrete. In practice, startups that invest in crafting a genuine brand narrative consistently punch above their weight in media coverage. They get calls from journalists instead of the other way around. Their founders get invited to speak at industry events. Their LinkedIn posts, when they share real insights and personal experiences rather than company announcements, generate engagement that their corporate page could never match.
There is also a compounding effect that is hard to quantify but impossible to ignore. Once journalists know a company's story and find its founder interesting, they start reaching out proactively when they need expert quotes or industry perspectives. The brand becomes part of their mental rolodex. That kind of earned credibility is worth more than any number of paid placements or press releases.
Where Startups Get This Wrong
A few pitfalls come up often enough to be worth flagging.
Embellishing the story. Audiences in India are more media-savvy than most founders give them credit for. If an origin story sounds too cinematic, people will sense it. The most effective brand stories are the ones that feel ordinary enough to be true but specific enough to be memorable. The real version is almost always more interesting than the polished one.
Copying someone else's playbook. Many startups want to "do what Zerodha did" or "build a brand like Boat." But every story has to be its own. The Indian startup ecosystem is mature enough now that audiences, journalists, and investors can spot borrowed narratives from a mile away. What worked for Nikhil Kamath is rooted in his specific personality and experience. Every founder needs to find the equivalent in their own journey.
Making every story about the company. The best brand narratives are generous. They give the reader something useful or make them feel something real. If every piece of content is ultimately about how great the product is, people will tune out. The startups that build the strongest brand loyalty are the ones whose communications genuinely help their audience think about their own challenges differently, with the company's offering woven in naturally rather than hammered home.
Getting Started
If you have been relying on press releases and product announcements to build your brand, you are making one of the most common startup PR mistakes — and leaving a tremendous amount of trust and credibility on the table. The good news is that the raw material for a compelling brand story already exists somewhere inside your company. You just need to find it, refine it, and put it to work across your communications consistently, from how your founder shows up on LinkedIn — and founder personal branding is one of the highest-leverage places to start — to how you pitch journalists to how you talk about yourself on your website.
At StrategyVerse, this is a big part of what we do. Our branding and content services are built around helping startups and growing companies uncover the narratives that make people pay attention and, more importantly, trust you. If you have been wondering why your great product is not getting the recognition it deserves, the answer is probably not a better product. It is a better story.
Reach out to us if you would like to have that conversation. No pitch deck required.