Building a comms strategy for tech startups

Yury Molodtsov is the COO and a partner at MA Family, a communications partner for tech startups, where he helps tell their stories and scale their impact. He’s led PR for breakout names like JetBrains, Flipper Zero, Miro and Gett. Before diving into agency life, Molodtsov was an investor at Day One Ventures in San Francisco, backing startups like Superhuman, Truebill, and Remote, while guiding their comms strategies from the inside out. 

What was your first job in comms and how has it shaped your career?

My first job was in marketing at a tech company called Coub. It was a video sharing app — a mix of Vine and the early stages of what became TikTok — very popular among internet users in Eastern Europe. Our main goal at the time was to enter the US market. We did everything from partnerships to seeding content and encouraging mainstream media to use our content for their own stories, like pasting a looped clip from the upcoming movie.

This experience heavily shaped my career as I now help founders and tech startups enter international markets. Many of them are immigrants who moved to Europe, the UK or the United States to launch and scale their company. We want to put them on the same footing as Stanford graduates going through Y Combinator in ecosystems like Silicon Valley.

Shortly after, my boss launched her full-scale agency, and I jumped ships to become its first employee. 

You’ve worked with startups at all stages. How do you build a comms strategy when the company is still figuring out who it is?

Focus on today’s core message. Startups are constantly evolving and updating their thinking. You should have a positive vision for your company’s role in the future, but the focus should be on what you’re offering right now.

Take Airbnb as an example. It started as a way to rent out a spare bedroom during big events. Then it became a network of professional hosts. Now, it’s expanding into experiences like personal chef services and photographers. Whether or not that was always part of the vision, they focused their messaging on what they offered at each stage. Anything else would be dilutive to the brand that had to educate people about this brand-new concept. 

Strategy can shift over time, but it starts with clarity in the present. You can always change your positioning when the time comes, but it’d be great to get there with a big business already. 

What’s your approach to helping founders become stronger storytellers, especially if they’re not natural communicators?

It’s not just talent; it’s a lot of work. When you read an interview with someone like Satya Nadella, you can see a lot of media training and memorized talking points that went into this, alongside his own immense experience. 

We work with founders to prepare in advance, develop key messaging frameworks (who we are, what we do, what makes us different), and create talking points for specific announcements or interviews. We conduct media prep to make these talking points feel natural. For example, when launching a product, we focus on why it’s important and why people should care, not iterating on the technical specs. 

Anybody who prepares as much can become a good communicator. In some cases, we invite third-party coaches and executive trainers who have supported CEOs of public companies to prepare for their next keynote or board meeting. 

When a company is growing fast or getting acquired, what are some tips on how comms teams should adapt their messaging and priorities?

With acquisitions, the acquirer’s comms team usually takes over. Your role is to provide context and materials.

With rapid growth, the priority shifts from the quantity of coverage to the quality. Early on, startups need to break through the ice. You need more content, news pieces, articles, podcasts — anything that gets you on the people’s radar. 

As companies grow, your focus should be on the impact and messaging of the coverage. Apple doesn’t care how many stories are written about its new iPhone, but it very much wants to ensure what exactly is said about it. 

This transition involves focusing on top-tier media and building long-standing relationships with reporters, not just between you and them but also between them and the company. They need to know who your executives are, what they do and what they believe in. 

Finally, you must identify key industry experts whose opinions can significantly influence the perception of your company among the stakeholders. Let’s say you’re a company in the AI coding space — being featured by someone like Ben Thompson can introduce you to multiple decision makers and reporters covering this space. 

What’s one underrated skill someone new to comms should have in their toolkit?

Understanding how to create news. Many people outside this space believe that having a good company is enough to guarantee coverage, but news needs a hook. The art lies in the ability to create news almost out of thin air. 

When a company doesn’t have obvious news, you can find competitors who can act as benchmarks and see what gets them coverage. Beyond that, you should identify gaps in the media landscape. For example, we had a Web3 cybersecurity client that operated in the space known for multi-million-dollar hacks. I noticed a lack of comprehensive statistics on stolen funds, with the only figures from two anonymous blogs differing by 100%. So we worked together to collect and analyze the publicly available data and produced the first proper regular report on crypto losses that has become a standard in the industry and the foundation of this company’s PR. In a couple of years, all of their competitors started doing this, but we already had the best relationships with the likes of CNBC and Bloomberg, who often came to us for comments.

 What’s one tool you can’t live without?

Superhuman is a powerful email client marketed for founders and sales but underrated for PR. I communicate extensively via email with internal team members, clients, and reporters and Superhuman is invaluable for this. It excels over any PR industry software, from scheduling emails to be sent in different time zones to templates and reminders. And there are small things. For instance, everyone writes the foundations of their pitches in a separate doc, but when you paste it, Superhuman ensures consistent formatting across devices, so that it will look perfect — try this with Gmail. 

Isis Simpson-Mersha is a conference producer/ reporter for Ragan. Follow her on LinkedIn.