What’s the point of your funding round announcement?

Hint: it’s not announcing your funding.

Getting your start-up funded at pre-seed or nailing that Series B are both awesome achievements for a company and its founders. You’ve either demonstrated the potential of your hockey-stick idea or scaled up from a few customers to thousands or even millions.

Cake and booze at the office are quite appropriate, of course. After all, your team shouldn’t forget to celebrate every step on this thankless path that fails nine out of ten start-ups.

It’s easy then to think that the point of announcing your funding to the world is to announce your funding. Well, not really.

What should your funding announcement help you do?

• You started the business to solve a problem. The true meaning of the funding is what you’re able to do with it to help more people out there. Celebrating a transfer of funds is like applauding the airline pilot for successful takeoff — a major feat, but not the point of your trip.
• In PR terms, funding means having a legitimate ‘news hook’ — an event that provides badly needed newsworthiness to what you actually want to say. And most of the time, you want to get more people to join in on your company’s mission as employees, customers or fans.
• Press releases consisting mostly of investor quotes or being “thrilled” or “excited” about the funding are a waste of valuable opportunity. Also, journalists don’t exactly love it. You should use the momentary attention to to say things that align with your growth objectives. Most investors understand that but you’ll find ones that forget that showing off their new portfolio company comes after allowing the company to shine. Ask your CEO’s help to remind them.
• If you’re lucky, investors will proactively turn to you to ask if there’s anything specific that they could say that would help the company in achieving its next goals. (Bless ‘em.) Use the opportunity to have them highlight positive industry trends that support your mission or add proof points to the problem you’re trying to solve.

Most importantly, you carry the responsibility for making the funding announcement not about the money, but the customers and the mission.

You may have secondary motives, such as grooming your Series C investors or gaining relationship points with regulators or other stakeholders.

However, be very clear about what messages you want to get across with the announcement. If you’re not sure what you should emphasise, go back to your key messages.

In conclusion

• Founders: think about the business goals for the next 6–12 months and communicate it to your PR team so they can make sure to tailor the announcement accordingly.
• PR team: ask your founder about the business goals and make sure the companies key messages are front and centre of the release — the press loves a good funding announcement so make use of it.
• Investors: your success depends on your portfolio company’s success so make sure you do whatever helps them at this stage, whether it’s cutting your quote short to allow for a more concise, mission-focused press release or being strategic about what to say that would help the company.

Footnote

• All of the above applies for various corporate announcements, be it a partnership, key hire, office opening etc. Think of these events as the newsworthiness butter on your message sandwich — it makes the whole thing more delicious and easier to go down.