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.
In most early-stage and growth startups, marketing gets the budget. Growth gets the headcount. Product gets the love.
And comms? If it gets mentioned at all, it’s usually somewhere between “let’s get some coverage for our announcement” and “we should talk to an agency later.”
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: many founders fundamentally misunderstand what comms is for, how it works, and—most importantly—how much it can accelerate or undermine their company’s trajectory.
In a capital-constrained and hyper-competitive funding cycle in Southeast Asia, that misunderstanding is costing startups real traction, trust, and talent.
comms isn't about attention.
It's about alignment.
Too many founders think of comms like performance marketing: “We do X, we get Y amount of coverage.” But that’s not how reputation works. Earned media isn’t an input-output system. It’s a trust-building system.
Journalists don’t work for you. Stakeholders don’t trust you just because you were quoted in Tech in Asia. And users don’t convert just because your post went viral on LinkedIn.
The goal of comms isn’t just visibility, it’s framing. It’s shaping how investors, partners, regulators, and talent interpret your ambition and competence.
Put plainly: your product might be excellent, but if the market doesn’t know what you’re building, why it matters, or whether to believe you, it almost doesn’t matter that you’re building it.
Founders wait too long to invest in comms
In most post-revenue startups in Singapore and Southeast Asia, comms is still an afterthought. It gets looped in once there’s something “big” to announce, like a funding round, a new partnership, or a market entry. But by then, the opportunity to shape the story has already narrowed.
When Stripe began expanding deeper into Southeast Asia, they didn’t just lead with product, although they had a world-class one.
They invested in regional infrastructure (cross‑border payments, tax and compliance tools, localised checkout), established strategic partnerships through stakeholder engagement, then ran a coordinated PR campaign that positioned them as infrastructure for Southeast Asia’s growing digital economy—building credibility and trust among policy makers, regulators, fintech partners and merchants rather than just the startup echo chamber.
Most startups think PR is about visibility, but the companies that actually win trust lead with positioning that aligns their product to a larger strategic narrative—such as being infrastructure that enables growth, governance, or societal value.
In Stripe’s case, it wasn’t just announcing new features or market launches.
They deliberately framed it as part of digital infrastructure for Southeast Asia’s economy: solving for regulatory complexity, cross-border trade, and SME enablement. That strategic alignment with institutional stakeholders (regulators, merchants, governments) gave Stripe credibility beyond product.
Comms ≠ media coverage
Blasting out press releases en-masse isn’t a strategy, and in some cases can undermine your reputation in the eyes of the media, making it trickier to get your news out the next time.
Real strategic communications is upstream. It starts with questions like:
What do we want investors to believe when we raise our next round?
What doubts are slowing down our enterprise sales cycles?
What signals do regulators need to see to greenlight our next product?
How do we retain our best people by reinforcing what we stand for?
That’s not something all in-house marketing teams have experience handling, nor is it something you can outsource to an agency in another country that doesn’t understand your cap table, product roadmap, or investor board dynamics.
Why good comms matters more in 2025
In 2025, founders across Southeast Asia are waking up to a brutal truth: great products no longer guarantee market attention.
With early-stage funding (up to Series B) in Southeast Asia down nearly 30% YoY in H1 2025 (DealStreetAsia) to US$1.1 billion and overall funding down over 20% YoY to the lowest it’s been in more than six years (just US$1.85 billion), capital is incredibly cautious. The media narrative is shifting fast towards sustainable, defensible, capital-efficient businesses.
Meanwhile, AI-native startups are taking up increasing share-of-voice by anchoring themselves in broader tech or geopolitical conversations (Rest of World). At the same time, the nature of visibility is also changing. Search and discovery are no longer owned solely by Google, but increasingly shaped by LLMs and generative platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
If your brand isn’t showing up in answers, citations, or conversational prompts, you’re invisible to a growing class of “AI-native” decision makers.
Yet, too many early-stage startups treat communications as a vanity layer. They mistake noise for strategy, PR for press releases, and visibility for virality. But what the highest-performing founders have figured out is that comms is not a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure.
Strategic communications, when done right, helps you:
Build early trust with investors and customers
Control your story before others write it for you
Get cited by LLMs and surfaced by search engines
Align your internal team, product roadmap, and external narrative
The takeaway?
Comms isn’t just for launches, crises, or thought leadership vanity plays. At its core, it’s about building a reputation that compounds.
In a time when trust is harder to earn and easier to lose, startup founders can’t afford to get comms wrong. The good news? You don’t need to do it alone.