We see many questions from early-stage founders about building brand recognition, so we sat down with Kristin Sauchak, Partner and Head of Brand at COMMAND and 53 Stations Wayfinder, to share a systematic approach that’s helped dozens of startups she’s counseled to break through the noise.

This is a classic Series A founder moment: You’ve spent months crafting the perfect brand identity. Your mission statement is inspiring, your positioning is sharp, and your value prop is crystal clear. But when the Wall Street Journal publishes an article about your space, you’re not even mentioned. 

When clients come to me with this quandary, I assure them this isn’t because your messaging is bad (most of the time, at least.) It’s because there’s a chasm between having good messaging and having that messaging penetrate the market consciousness.

Think of your brand identity as a signal you’re broadcasting. Between your intended message and how your audience actually perceives you lies a complex web of signal distortion. Economic headwinds might make reporters focus on survival stories over growth stories. A competitor’s announcement might suddenly make your differentiated approach the new conventional wisdom. A journalist might have bandwidth for only two funding stories this week, and you’re number three.

Some of these factors you can’t control. But the ones you can control? That’s where the magic happens. After working with hundreds of early-stage companies, I know that those who break through don’t just get lucky. They build systematic approaches around three core areas: how they generate stories, how they train voices to tell those stories, and how they ensure consistent messaging across every channel.

Let’s take a quick look at these three approaches:

The Three-System Framework: Stories, Voices, Channels

Stories: Your Content Engine

Most founders wait for funding announcements or product launches to generate coverage. The math is brutal: you get maybe two or three news moments per year. If that’s your entire strategy, you’re invisible 90% of the time.

One solution I recommend is “story mining”: a process to actively discover narrative opportunities within your organization. Take a past fintech client struggling to differentiate in a crowded market. During story mining with their customer success team, we discovered users were achieving ROI 40% faster than industry average in a specific use case. We turned this into thought leadership positioning them as efficiency experts. Result: 2x increase in inbound leads and speaking opportunities at two major conferences within six months.

Potential story mining targets? Sales team: What competitive objections are you uniquely positioned to address? Engineering: What technical problems have you solved that others haven’t? Customer success: Which users are seeing unexpected results?

Assign someone to own a lightweight “story engine” that transforms these insights into narratives. The most valuable things to look for? Contrarian perspectives to conventional wisdom and connecting to broad macro-narratives. “Everyone says remote work is dead, but our data shows the opposite” beats “We built a great remote work tool.”

And don’t forget: traditional media isn’t always the best channel. Consider emerging media, your owned channels, and paid marketing channels for telling these stories.

Voices: Building a Spokesperson Bench

CEO-led storytelling is an incredible lever for start-up comms, but it’s not exclusively your CEO’s job. As you’ve learned from story mining, your best stories often come from people closest to the problems you’re solving. Your CEO should never be your single-point-of-failure for company storytelling.

Develop spokespeople in tiers and train them accordingly: 

• C-Suite Executives are preferred by top tier media, so they need comprehensive media training
• Subject Matter Experts are great for creating content and speaking at vertical specific events, so they likely need specific guidance like speaker training
• All staff should understand basic messaging principles and be given resources on how to speak about your company publicly (and what to do if a journalist reaches out)

Consider a cybersecurity startup whose Head of Engineering became the go-to voice on security trends. Within six months, she was quoted in three major publications and spoke at the RSA Conference. This positioned the entire company as technical thought leaders – not to mention freed up the CEO to lead more business growth storytelling.

Channels: Consistency is King

When you’re an early-stage startup, your company strategy can change on a dime. Your messaging should change with your strategy. I audited one Series A company and found their website positioned them as “enterprise”, but their sales pitch conveyed a “mid-market focus.” It turns out the website hadn’t been updated in a year.

Your sales materials should use the same value propositions as press interviews. Job descriptions should reflect your company narrative. In-product copy should reinforce broader positioning. This ensures every interaction reinforces the same understanding of what you do and why it matters. And when you consistently nail your messages, your audiences start to “get it” faster: journalists think of you for industry stories, investors recognize your name in market contexts, and customers associate you with the problem space itself.

The great Ira Glass said, “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” At the end of the day, products don’t speak for themselves: great storytelling makes them heard. Companies that master mindshare early create compounding advantages that make competitor positioning increasingly difficult.

The question isn’t whether you have a story worth telling: it’s whether you’re building systems to tell it effectively at scale.