What Startup Founders Get Wrong About PR & Comms

Many startup founders and teams in Singapore and Southeast Asia today still misunderstand the role of comms, to the detriment of business growth. This piece breaks down the most common misconceptions about PR in early-stage companies and what it really takes to build perception that compounds.

When should a startup hire a PR agency? This question reveals the first costly misconception—what we call "the announcement fallacy."

Most founders believe startup communications is primarily about generating media coverage around funding rounds and product launches. This thinking treats PR for startups as a tactical response to events rather than a strategic capability that shapes those events.

According to data from CFO Advisors, companies with consistent, high-quality investor communications are 40% more likely to secure follow-on funding at favourable terms. Yet most founders treat communications as something you "turn on" when you have news to share.

This tactical approach creates "communications debt"—the accumulated cost of missed relationship-building opportunities, undefined messaging frameworks, and reactive stakeholder engagement. Like technical debt, communications debt compounds over time and becomes increasingly expensive to address.

The founder Delusion: Why Founders can’t Wing It

Why doesn't PR work for my startup?

This frustrated question usually comes from founders who've discovered the most dangerous misconception—the belief that communications expertise can be improvised. Many founders view strategic communications for startups as an extension of marketing rather than a distinct discipline requiring specialised knowledge and relationship capital.

According to Forbes' 2023 crisis preparedness study, only 49% of surveyed companies have formal crisis communication plans. Organisations with established crisis management frameworks—including designated teams, updated plans, and pre-drafted messages—are much more ready to respond within the first hour of a crisis, whilst those without frameworks will struggle to coordinate effective responses and often miss critical windows for protecting stakeholder safety and organisational reputation.

“The biggest mistake we see founders make is assuming that being passionate about their product translates to being effective at communicating about it," observes ACID’s founder & CEO, Chester Tan. “Product expertise and strategic communications expertise are fundamentally different skill sets.”

PR Mistakes Startup Founders Make by Waiting Too long

How do I get media coverage as a startup? This question usually comes too late. One of the most costly patterns we've observed involves founders who recognise the need for strategic communications only after they've encountered problems that proper communications infrastructure could have prevented.

Consider a Singapore-based logistics startup that delayed investing in professional press office capabilities and media relationship building until after they faced regulatory scrutiny from the Personal Data Protection Commission over data handling practices. By that point, they needed to rebuild stakeholder confidence while simultaneously establishing communication frameworks they should have had from the beginning.

The cost of building communications capabilities during a crisis is exponentially higher than building them proactively. When you're managing a crisis, you're not just building communications infrastructure—you're rebuilding trust while establishing credibility.

How to Build Reputation Without breaking the bank

When founders recognise the need for communications support, they often make expensive mistakes in how they structure that investment. The most common error we've encountered involves defaulting to traditional PR agency retainers that aren't optimised for startup needs, stage of growth, or business objectives.

Most agencies are designed to serve established companies with consistent communication needs and substantial budgets, whereras startups need strategic guidance, rapid execution capability, and flexibility to scale based on business developments. Traditional agency retainers often provide the opposite—high overhead costs and one-size-fits-all scopes of work.

This mismatch has led to new agency models like ACID’s fractional communications model that provide executive-level strategic expertise without traditional agency overhead. Companies using fractional leadership models typically achieve better cost efficiency compared to traditional agency relationships while maintaining better strategic outcomes.

Strategic Communications for Startups: reputation, Not Just Coverage

Addressing these misconceptions requires a fundamental shift in how startup founders think about communications—from a tactical response capability to a strategic function that shapes business development from the beginning.

The most successful startups we work with treat communications as an extension of business strategy rather than a marketing function. They invest in narrative development and stakeholder mapping that aligns messaging with business objectives early, build stakeholder relationships proactively, and measure communications effectiveness through business outcome metrics rather than activity indicators.

For resource-constrained startups, cultivating your brand’s reputation doesn't necessarily require large budgets or full-time comms hires. It does, however, require strategic thinking about stakeholder priorities, systematic relationship building, and measurement frameworks aligned with business objectives, which senior comms practitioners can help establish.

The Competitive Advantage of Getting Comms Right

As Southeast Asia's startup ecosystem matures and competition intensifies, founders who develop a sophisticated understanding of strategic communications will have enormous advantages over those who continue operating under these misconceptions.

In a regional regulatory environment that increasingly requires stakeholder engagement (Singapore), investor markets that prioritise narrative clarity (Indonesia), and enterprise sales cycles that depend on credibility and positioning (Thailand), communications effectiveness often determines which companies succeed regardless of product quality.

For this generation of founders and business leaders, this represents an opportunity to build companies that are not only innovative and efficient but also sophisticated about how they engage with the complex stakeholder environments in which modern businesses operate.