People Don't Buy From Ads – They Buy From Stories

01 /The Concept

Rostra is a PR agency founded in March of last year. Its core mission is helping founders handle their own "direct communications" to promote their startups and companies.

As the founders put it: "We only work with founders – or someone the founder has personally designated. But it has to be the founder who bought into working with us, and the company has to be under their direct leadership. When we're dealing with a hired CEO who doesn't want to handle communications personally and wants to outsource it to an outside team – we genuinely cannot help that company or that CEO."

At launch, Rostra announced plans to build a technology platform to monitor, measure, and surface PR opportunities for its clients.

That suggested Rostra might evolve into a tech company – something like the PR platform Honeyjar ([related review](/review/pravilnyj-piar-gorazdo-jeffektivnee-obychnoj-reklamy)), covered here just the day before.

Instead, something more unexpected happened. A few days ago it emerged that the founders had transformed Rostra into an investment fund – to give them the ability to back the very founders they'd helped develop direct communications skills. The fund has closed its first $40M.

02 /Why It Matters

Let's unpack what "direct communications" actually means here.

Rostra's founders articulated their principles in a manifesto, opening with a quote from the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus: "If you want something done well, do it yourself"

Here's a distillation of the key ideas.

The central problem: traditional PR is dead.

For a long time, founders outsourced their communications to intermediaries – publications and PR agencies. Before the internet, that made sense: large audiences only lived inside professional media, and professional media only worked with other professionals.

But today, virtually anyone on the planet is reachable by email or social media. So what's the point of the intermediary?

Especially when every intermediary has its own interests that may not align with yours. PR firms need to earn fees. Publications need to attract advertisers. Journalists need clickbait headlines. And corporate communications managers need bland, risk-free messaging that won't get them fired – which, by definition, produces no meaningful results.

So the communications job has to belong to the founder.

But there's a complication: founders see themselves primarily as builders – creating a product, constructing a company, designing processes, making things. PR they tend to treat as decoration – colorful lights and ornaments for the building they've constructed, something an outside professional can handle.

The problem is that the building might sit empty if it isn't vivid enough to draw people in. And actually, the issue runs deeper than that – it lives in the concept of the building itself.

To get people through the door, you have to convey what this is, why it matters, and what makes it exceptional. You have to generate momentum – getting people to move toward the entrance.

But you can't generate momentum without understanding the secret at the core of why the founder chose to build this thing in the first place. And that secret is something only the founder truly knows – or can discover in the act of explaining it to others.

That's why public communication is exclusively the founder's job. The founder's actual primary product is not the product they're building – it's the story they tell about that product. Outsourcing that story is as grave an error as outsourcing product development itself.

Which leaves founders with exactly two options: start communicating directly, or get left behind.

Of course, "communicating directly" doesn't mean going it alone – founders can absolutely bring in support. But the storytelling itself has to come from the founder.

What holds people back: technical or operational failures typically stay internal. Communication failures, by definition, are public. That scares many founders into delegating to "professionals" – and the resulting communications are usually lifeless, which only reinforces the belief that it's all decorative and not worth personal attention.

But for the modern founder, storytelling is as fundamental a skill as coding, product development, or team leadership. The upside: storytelling, like those other skills, can be developed. And good stories will help the startup with everything – marketing, hiring, fundraising, and sales.

The same insight – that tech founders don't know how to tell stories – prompted venture fund Outside the Box Ventures to launch the Founder's Box accelerator ([related review](/review/kak-privlech-vnimanie-k-svoemu-startapu)) this summer. It pairs founders with experienced journalists who act as storytelling mentors.

The model has a structural flaw, though: Founder's Box selects startups first and then tries to teach their founders to tell stories – a skill that may or may not take. And it gives each startup $250K in the process – spending money in hopes that some founders will learn to tell stories that make that money back. Two "maybes" are one too many.

Rostra's model looks cleaner by comparison. First, its PR agency earns money while teaching founders to craft stories. Second, its fund invests only in the founders who actually learned to do it. After that, there's just one "maybe" left – whether their startups eventually succeed.

03 /Opportunities

The trend: the value and importance of public communications – the actual substance of PR, as in Public Relations – is rising. The driver is simple: paid advertising is getting more expensive and less effective.

The channel landscape has also expanded dramatically. Public communications now flow through not just traditional print and broadcast media – but digital publications, blogs, online influencers, podcasts, and the founders and employees themselves, each with their own audiences.

All founders need to do is learn to tell stories compelling enough to travel – stories other people will pick up and amplify through their own channels, which traditional media then picks up in turn.

One direction is no longer optional but obligatory: start learning to tell compelling stories about your startup and your products.

The other is to build platforms and infrastructure that help founders tell better stories and distribute them effectively.

- Platform examples: Honeyjar (covered above), Passionfroot, Muck Rack.

- Infrastructure examples: Rostra and Founder's Box.

This shift in the importance of direct founder communications has only become unmistakable very recently – even though it had been building for years. The solution space is still wide open. There are enough known patterns to start building analogs now, and the addressable market is enormous.

What can you offer this market?