创始人如何通过“为什么创业”建立传播策略

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Kristen does such an incredible job of introducing this piece that I’ll just skip my regular intro and jump right into it.

Kristen Lowe is an executive ghostwriter and narrative strategist, and the incoming Director of Founder & Editorial Communications at Scribe. Previously the Director of Operations at Hinge, she has built founder communication platforms across LinkedIn, Substack, X, and keynote stages, and written for leaders in every format from essays to TED Talks. You can find more of her work on AI, careers, and storytelling on Substack and TikTok.

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.

Most founders seem to know this. When I started writing for founders as an executive ghostwriter and comms strategist, the biggest surprise was the constant stream of inbound clients at all stages who thought they “should” be building a public platform but didn’t know how to start. I’d assumed people would want ghostwriting help because they just hated writing, but the number one reason founders reached out for help was “I have no idea what to say.”

There’s a discouraging misconception that for comms to be impactful, you have to be vulnerable, contrarian, or profoundly entertaining in every message you put out there. I hear from founders all the time who are daunted by that expectation. But in my experience, the only thing most people need to build a credible comms strategy is an answer to the question “Why did I start this company?”

This answer is usually the most narratively powerful idea to share about your business. Starting a company is a life-altering pursuit with a famously high failure rate. Whatever reason sent you down that path, it was once compelling enough to rearrange your whole life around and recruit others to do the same. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.

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.

Once you know your “why,” this guide will help you figure out the right strategic communications choices for your business, so all you have to do is start writing and hit post.

The three founder archetypes

While every founder’s “why” is unique, they almost always fall into one of three categories, each mapping to a founder archetype that can help you define your comms strategy:

• The “Problem” founder: The person who started a company to solve their own problem
• The “Insight” founder: The person who started a company to solve a problem only they saw
• The “Vision” founder: The person who started a company because they imagined a better world

Lumping yourself into an archetype might seem like a counterintuitive way to build distinctive founder content, but the ways people connect with founders map to these three relationships: I identify with you, I trust you, I’d follow you. A unique story makes your content interesting, but your archetype determines which feeling it evokes in your audience, and cultivating the right one for your business requires different strategic choices.

Your founder archetype will guide you to the decisions that matter for a comms strategy:

• Goal: What specifically your content strategy is meant to achieve
• Voice: How you should sound
• Messaging pillars: What you should talk about
• Success conditions: How you’ll know if it’s working

What your founder archetype will not tell you are answers to questions like “How often should I post?” Founder comms are like workout routines: the best one is the one you can commit to. Regardless of your archetype, committing to any channel and cadence that works for you beats agonizing over the perfect one. And everything else you might be worried about—audience segmentation, attribution, earned vs. organic media balance—is secondary. You can tackle that once you have a substantial body of content to optimize around.

Archetype 1: The “Problem” founder

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.

You’re a Problem founder if: you started your business to fix a problem you were personally experiencing, when you realized the only way to get it solved was to do it yourself.

The Problem founder playbook

• Goal: Build a loyal following of customers who feel deeply understood and recognized by your product.
• Ideal voice: Personal, honest, detailed, (appropriately) urgent/frustrated
• Primary messaging pillar: 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.”
• Additional pillars: