PR, Communications & Reputation

Welcome to the studio. This is a hands-on course for founders building early-stage Kaern startups who need to earn attention, trust, and a reputation that compounds — without a PR agency or a budget. Over six modules you'll learn to shape a message people repeat, get a journalist to reply, run a launch that lands, build a founder voice, survive a crisis with your credibility intact, and own how you show up online.

By the end you will be able to:

• Write messaging that a stranger can repeat back accurately.
• Pitch and build relationships with journalists who cover your space.
• Plan and execute a launch or announcement with measurable pickup.
• Develop a founder profile and a sustainable thought-leadership rhythm.
• Lead communications through a crisis with a holding line and a plan.
• Audit and steer your reputation across search, social, and reviews.

Your tutor is Mara — fifteen years across newsrooms and startup comms desks, now teaching founders to do this themselves. She's blunt, she uses a lot of analogies, and she will make you rewrite things. Pull up a chair.

Module 1: Narrative & Messaging

Learning objectives

• Distill what you do into one sentence a non-expert can repeat.
• Build a message house: core idea, three pillars, and proof points.
• Separate features (what it does) from benefits (what changes for someone).
• Adapt one core narrative for different audiences without breaking it.

Lessons

Lesson 1.1 — The one-sentence test

Alright, everyone in. Here's how I want you to think about your message: it's a rumour. The best messages spread because someone hears them once, gets it, and repeats it at dinner without your slide deck in front of them. If your message can't survive being whispered down a noisy table, it's not a message — it's a paragraph you're attached to.

Why does this matter? Because you are never in the room when it counts. A journalist describes you to an editor. An investor describes you to a partner. A customer describes you to a friend. Every one of those is a game of telephone, and you only win if the sentence is short enough to travel intact.

So we strip. Take out the adjectives, the "leading," the "innovative," the "AI-powered." Those are decorations, not load-bearing walls. What's left should be: who it's for, what it does, why it's different. One breath.

Try the elevator test on yourself: if a stranger overheard you for ten seconds, what would they tell their colleague you do — and would you be happy with it?

Lesson 1.2 — The message house

Now we build structure. Picture a house. The roof is your core message — the one idea everything else holds up. The walls are three pillars — the supporting themes you keep returning to. The foundation is your proof points — facts, numbers, customers, demos that make the pillars believable.

Why a house and not a list? Because under pressure — a hostile interview, a skeptical investor, a tired audience — you don't need ten talking points. You need three rooms you can always walk back into. Whatever the question, you steer to a pillar, then drop a proof point. That's not dodging; that's discipline.

The discipline part matters. Founders love to improvise, and improvisation invents new claims you can't back up. A message house keeps you saying the same true things often enough that they stick. Repetition feels boring to you because you've said it a thousand times. To your audience it's the first time, every time.

Here's your question to sit with: if I interrupted you mid-sentence and asked "what are your three pillars?" — could you name them without looking?

Worked example

A Kaern startup, Lumen, makes scheduling software for independent physiotherapists.

• Weak message: "Lumen is an innovative, AI-powered, all-in-one practice management platform leveraging cutting-edge automation."
• Strong core message: "Lumen fills the empty slots in a solo physio's calendar so they earn more without working more."
• Pillars: (1) Fewer no-shows, (2) automatic waitlist filling, (3) set-up in under an hour.
• Proof points: "Cuts no-shows by 30% in the first month"; "Clinics recover an average of 6 billable hours a week"; "Built by a physio."

Notice the strong version names the person (solo physio), the change (earn more without working more), and is repeatable in one breath.

Hands-on exercise

Write your message house on one page:

1. One-sentence core message (max 20 words, no buzzwords).
2. Three pillars (3–5 words each).
3. Two proof points per pillar.

Then hand it to someone who doesn't know your company. Read your core message once, take the page away, and ask them to say it back. Score how close they got. Rewrite until they nail it.

Common mistakes

• Leading with the technology, not the outcome. Nobody outside your team cares that it's AI-powered; they care what changes for them.
• Too many pillars. Five "key themes" means zero. The brain holds three.
• Proof points that aren't proof. "Trusted by leading companies" proves nothing. Name them or show a number.

Check for understanding

1. What are the three layers of a message house, and what goes in each?
2. Rewrite this as an outcome, not a feature: "Our app uses machine learning to analyze receipts."
3. Why is repetition a feature of good messaging, not a flaw?