How to sell abundance on a shoestring

Lessons on how to pre-market your pre-revenue new industrial startup

You’re an early-stage entrepreneur with a vision to make the world a better place. With limited resources, you’re spending most of your time and money on making that idea real, leaving little left to tell the world about your solution.

Your problem? Unless people actually hear about (and use) the things you’re making, your impact will be minimal.

So, how do you get the world to care without draining capital? As Chad Conway and Judy Li – the co-founders of the new venture fund 981 VC – recently shared at a SF Climate Week panel, simple but strategic public relations and marketing efforts can change the trajectory of a business, even in the earliest stages.

Conway witnessed this during his time working at Span, the electrical control panel developer that’s now worth over half-a-billion dollars. Here, a simple call to a YouTube influencer posting about Tesla’s powerwalls turned into a video, which generated so much interest that his sales team eventually begged him to stop.

“A lot of startups have a hard time accelerating in the go-to market phase,” Conway’s co-founder Judy Li said to a rapt audience at an SF Climate Week panel on marketing late last month. “That was a big learning that I brought to 981. How do we make that faster? How do we make that easier?”

To answer those questions, Li and Conway brought in a panel of experts including the former Snap and TikTok executive Meghana Dhar; the marketing maven behind the comms strategies at places like Misfits Markets, Rivian, and Trulia Ken Shuman; LaunchSquad’s own Jason Mandell; and Wall Street Journal reporter and author Katherine Blunt.

Be your own storyteller

The first step may sound self-explanatory, but for a lot of founders it’s harder than it seems. Companies must truly crystallize their story before telling it.

Once you have a good sense of the story behind your company – the thing that makes it different from everything else on the market – start telling that story to everyone and anyone who will listen.

“Brand matters for every company and for every person,” LaunchSquad co-founder Jason Mandell said. “When you’re starting something new, every interaction you have with anybody affiliated with the project you’re working on is brand development. You have to start with a foundation. That foundation you begin with – whether that’s to your friends or the investors who you’re looking for money from – what you are saying has to be consistent. The brick layering that you make in those early days can really be game changing if you do it really, really well.”

Embrace scrappy, low-cost channels

From here, leveraging free platforms becomes essential for brands on a budget. Dhar, the former Snap executive who now runs her own advisory company helping early-stage companies, emphasized the importance of telling the company’s story on the platforms it already owns – and leveraging its executives to be a company’s first brand ambassadors and champions.

“Founders are creators and they can tell their story about building and launching and fundraising through TikTok [or other platforms]…. There is some ownership that you can take,” Dhar said. “I would encourage you to embrace the cringe. Get your voice out and know that your voice matters and there’s an audience for everyone. It’s about finding the audience for you and getting tight and crisp on your brand narrative and your voice. The algorithms will help you find your people.”

Your audience wants more than just polished marketing material. Don’t be afraid to publish on LinkedIn for B2B audiences or TikTok or Instagram for consumer products. From documenting your engineering journey with simple behind-the-scenes videos, to sharing technical insights that demonstrate your expertise, the key is authenticity over perfection.

Be an industry resource

Beyond promoting your company, position yourself as a valuable resource for media and other stakeholders.

As Shuman says, “You can be a company spokesperson… or you can be an industry commentator.” Industry commentators will always trump company spokespeople when it comes to storytelling and the media.

A company can know its story, but it has to be able to add value and tell the industry’s story to be truly valuable to outlets like the WSJ. As Blunt says: “What has been most valuable, in my opinion, and just learning about and covering the startup landscape, companies that look at PR teams that are adept at establishing relationships with reporters and teams and founders that are willing to have a lot of conversations early on just on background because that’s going to pay off down the road.”

LaunchSquad’s Mandell also noted that it’s important for founders to be leveling up on the foundational credibility they establish early on.

“The way we think about it is building up the right amount of validation and credibility in those early stages,” he said. “When you’re talking about what you’re doing …. You [must] come across as being more than an idea and a vision and show that you’ve made some progress in certain areas.”

Build in public from day 1

Ultimately, your storytelling abilities begin with building in public. Start early, start often, and start cheaply.

It doesn’t take much money to post a video of the early stages of product development for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X or Bluesky. Other than time (and the potential AI-writing assistant subscription), the posts company executives publish on their social media channels matter and can have a huge impact on the audiences that many founders most want to reach – even at the earliest stages of their company’s journeys.

“Think of every single piece of content or interaction on the internet as part of your branding journey,” advises Dhar. And that social interaction online is becoming even more important as other forms of customer outreach and advertising dry up. “CAC kind of stopped with IOS14 and social media changing and the introduction of AI chatbots,” says Dhar. “There are new ways to reach their customers, but it’s important for brands to have a direct connection… across platforms.”

Speak to immediate problems, not existential threats

Another key piece of advice comes from Shuman: “The biggest thing we can do is stop talking like climate companies.”

Avoid the technical jargon and climate language wherever possible. The best thing that companies can do is tell a story, not explain a technology. These solutions are designed to make things better, so it's best to speak to those pathways to a better world or a more comfortable one… or one that has less toxic products… or whatever the “hook” may be. The who, what, when and why are perhaps more important than the technology behind the “how”.

Whatever you do, start doing it now

The old adage “practice makes perfect” is exactly the way to approach your communications strategy. The sooner you start building your story publicly, the better you’ll be at telling it over the long term. Even if it changes.

Finally… here are some of the stories we’ve been telling:

🍃 The Midwest is a potential innovation hub

Prelude Ventures Managing Director, Tim Woodward, penned an op-ed in the Kansas City Star about climate innovation in the Midwest. He argues that a rollback of incentives, like the ones that brought a $4B Panasonic battery factory to De Soto, Kansas, will eliminate revenue, thousands of jobs, and innovation that would make the Midwest a booming part of new industry. A similar take has been spreading across the climate space. In a POWER Mag piece from May, Prelude Ventures Principal Carly Anderson argued that policy should support innovation happening in nuclear power.

🔌Energy demand keeps rising

ICF published a report that finds U.S. electricity demand will grow 25% by 2030 and 78% by 2050, covered exclusively in Axios. The report found that this rise in energy consumption could raise retail rates by 15% to 40%, depending on the market. The report offers a good look at the real costs of increasing energy demand brought about by data centers powering AI.

🤖  ChatGPT for the nuclear industry

In TechCrunch, Trey Lauderdale, CEO of Atomic Canyon, shares how his company is using AI to help modernize the nuclear power industry – starting with smarter document searching. On Substack, Energy Impact Partners’ Andy Lubershane highlights how this could save thousands of hours of effort per year at every US nuclear plant currently operating.

⚡ Hydrogen hype despite economic challenges

Heatmap News covers hydrogen startup Ecolectro's partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing to accelerate the adoption of low-cost, U.S.-made renewable hydrogen, despite the industry's current challenges. In addition to using cheaper materials, their electrolyzers can be installed on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel – achieving a levelized cost below $2.50/kg, well under industry standards, to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors.