One of my biggest frustrations with founders is when we are working on some kind of communication and they almost inevitably drop this line: But we’ve already said this before.
Or that other version of the same thing: We’ve written about this before.
It takes all my patience to not tell snap back, and tell them what they probably don’t want to hear: No one cares. Not yet at least. People are not hanging on to your every word yet. Tell it again.
When you are a startup founder with the audience of a few thousand, you are not important enough yet, and no one is reading everything you write.
Which is what you are doing when you are saying or writing things about your business or your product: You are building that platform. And when you are repeating these things over and over again, you are making them believe in you.
And this them includes both your own company and the world outside.
I’ve written before about how Girish’s framing and repetition of the Freshworks story seeped into and became how the company operated:
"..if you want to differentiate your startup, then the first step should be to figure out what the story is. The next step would be to frame it in a way that is relevant, repeatable, and memorable.
Girish’s framing of the Freshworks story was all of these, and that story remains the bedrock, even today, of Freshworks culture — prioritising the customer above everything. This didn’t happen overnight. The story was told over and over again, repeated in newspaper reports and magazine articles, people at Freshworks talked about it at events and roadshows, until bit by bit, the story became something else: It became something all of Freshworks believed in."
So when you have a good idea or a story that communicates your particular viewpoint well, say it again and again, and again, until it becomes more than anecdote and company legend; It becomes culture, it becomes your calling card to the world outside, it becomes what you are remembered for.
And when that happens, people will read every word you write.