How Can Founders Get Featured in the Media Without Being Famous?
By Jordan Baker, Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
You do not need to be famous to get featured in the media.
When I was a journalist, I did not dismiss somebody simply because I had never heard of them. In many cases, the person I needed for an article was somebody my readers had never encountered before. What mattered was whether they gave me a good reason to include them.
Did they genuinely know what they were talking about? Did they have an interesting opinion? Had they experienced something unusual? Could they explain an issue in a way my audience would find useful? Was there evidence supporting what they claimed?
Being well known can help somebody attract attention, but fame and newsworthiness are not the same thing. For an unknown founder, the real challenge is showing a journalist that you are credible, interesting and useful enough to deserve space in their article.
Why do journalists feature founders nobody has heard of?
Because journalists are not only looking for famous people. They need experts who can explain things, people who have experienced something worth writing about, informed opinions, examples, evidence and new voices who can make an article more interesting or useful.
A founder can provide all of those things without having a huge social following, a household-name business or previous national coverage.
The mistake is assuming that simply being a founder is enough. It is not.
The journalist's question is rarely "Is this person a founder?" It is much closer to "Why would my audience care what this particular founder has to say?"
That is the question you need to answer.
What made an unknown founder credible to me as a journalist?
I did not need to recognise their name, but I did want to know that there was some substance behind them. If somebody presented themselves as an expert, I wanted evidence that they genuinely had that expertise.
That could come from their professional background, qualifications, work, company, client experience, previous articles, memberships, research, online profile or other credible indicators.
Previous media experience was useful too. It was not essential, but if somebody had already been interviewed or quoted elsewhere, it suggested they probably understood roughly how journalism worked. They might be more comfortable speaking openly, know how quickly deadlines move and be less likely to treat an interview like a sales presentation.
But none of that mattered as much as having something worth saying. A strong opinion backed by real experience is more interesting to me than somebody being moderately famous but having nothing useful to add.
Five reasons an unknown founder might interest the media
There are lots of routes into the media, but these are five of the strongest.
1. You genuinely know something useful
Founders often understand their industries extremely well. They see customer behaviour, experience problems repeatedly, know what people misunderstand and see where things are changing.
If you can turn that knowledge into something useful for a journalist's audience, you can become a credible source even if nobody outside your sector knows your name.
The key is specificity. Saying "customer service is important" is not expertise. Explaining why customers repeatedly abandon a particular type of purchase, what businesses misunderstand about the problem and what you have learned from dealing with it every day is much more useful.
2. You have an unusual personal or business journey
Founder stories can work very well, but the bar is higher than many people think. "I left my job to follow my dream", "I always wanted to work for myself", "We won an award" and "We reached a revenue milestone" may be genuinely important to the founder without automatically being interesting to newspaper or magazine readers.
The stronger stories tend to involve meaningful transformation or something genuinely unusual.
Perhaps you overcame an extraordinary situation, built the business after a dramatic change in your life or transformed other people's lives in a measurable and human way. Perhaps you lost everything and rebuilt, achieved something exceptional, worked with recognisable brands or people, or started the company in genuinely surprising circumstances.
The details matter.
3. You have a strong perspective on something already happening
You do not always need your own news story. Sometimes the opportunity is to comment on everybody else's.
A founder who understands their sector can contribute to conversations already happening in the news. That might mean challenging a commonly held assumption, explaining why a trend is misunderstood, expressing a reasoned opinion about a market change or sharing first-hand experience that contradicts conventional wisdom.
Strong does not mean deliberately controversial. Manufactured outrage is not a PR strategy I would recommend. It means having an actual position rather than producing a bland statement nobody could disagree with.
4. You have information or experience other people do not
Founders often sit on genuinely interesting knowledge. Perhaps you see patterns in customer behaviour, encounter a problem hundreds of times a year, have original research or data, have access to an unusual part of an industry or have seen something most readers would never normally experience.
That can become useful editorial material when handled responsibly. The important questions are whether the information is accurate, relevant, appropriately sourced and safe to share.
5. Something happening in your business connects to something bigger
Your company news is more interesting when it tells us something beyond your company.
A launch, expansion, partnership or change in direction may become relevant if it connects to a wider shift in an industry, the economy, consumer behaviour or culture.
That is very different from assuming a journalist wants to report every internal milestone because it matters to the people who work there.
Is your founder story actually interesting to anybody else?
This is one of the harder questions I ask founders.
The fact that something was emotionally important to you does not automatically make it a media story. Starting a company is difficult, leaving a job can be frightening, winning your first customer feels enormous and hiring your tenth employee can feel like a major achievement. Thousands of other founders have experienced those things.
A journalist needs to understand why this version deserves telling. That usually means digging much deeper.
If somebody tells me, "I started the company because I wanted more freedom", I am probably going to keep asking questions.
What happened before that? Why did you need freedom? What did your life actually look like? What did you risk? What went wrong? Did something change dramatically? Was there a particular moment when you decided you could not continue as before? What happened afterwards? What did you learn that somebody else might find interesting?
The strongest founder stories often appear several questions beneath the version people initially tell.
That depth matters during journalist interviews too. Vague, polished answers rarely produce brilliant features. If you want a journalist to tell an interesting story, you have to be prepared to give them interesting material.
How can a founder become useful as an expert?
You do not have to make your personal life the story. For many founders, expertise is the stronger route.
Start with what you actually know. What problems have you spent years solving? What are customers constantly asking you? What mistakes do people make in your sector? What is changing? Where do you disagree with the conventional approach? What can you explain better than most people? What evidence or experience supports your view?
This is where Founder PR and Expert Commentary PR often overlap.
A founder can be the public face of the business while also becoming useful independently as somebody who understands a subject. The company does not have to be the centre of every article. Sometimes the founder's value is simply helping the journalist explain the story.
What makes a founder credible enough for a journalist to quote?
I think your online presence matters.
If I am pitching a founder, I want a journalist who Googles them to find something that supports the story we are telling about them.
At a minimum, I would like the founder's own website to make their credibility obvious. That might include:
- a proper biography
- relevant professional experience
- clear credentials
- what they specialise in
- notable business experience
- professional memberships
- relevant awards
- previous media coverage
- links to useful social profiles
- an up-to-date LinkedIn profile
External credibility helps too. An award alone is rarely a national news story, but a respected award can be one piece of evidence supporting somebody's authority. The same applies to memberships, published work, previous interviews and credible third-party references.
No single signal automatically makes somebody media-worthy. Together, they make it easier for a journalist to understand who this person is and why they should take their contribution seriously.
Do you need a huge social media following?
No.
A large following can be useful in some circumstances, but it is not a prerequisite for earned media. Journalists routinely quote people with modest public profiles.
I would much rather pitch somebody with 2,000 followers who has genuine expertise, strong opinions and something useful to say than somebody with 200,000 followers who cannot add anything to the article.
Social profiles can still matter as credibility signals. A journalist might check LinkedIn to confirm a founder's career history, or Instagram for somebody working in a visual consumer sector. They may look for consistency between the pitch and the person's wider online identity.
But follower count itself is not the qualification.
Which publications should an unknown founder realistically aim for?
This depends entirely on what the founder has to offer.
If somebody tells me, "I want to be in the national press", I would start by asking questions rather than naming newspapers.
What are you genuinely an expert in? What makes your experience interesting? What opinions do you have on important issues? What have you achieved? What credentials do you have? What is your story? Where are you based? Have you worked with major brands or recognisable people? What is happening in your industry?
The answers tell us which publications make sense.
Sometimes the right opportunity is national. Sometimes it is a trade title, local press or a consumer magazine rather than a business publication.
I do not believe founders should dismiss smaller or more specialist opportunities simply because the publication name sounds less impressive. The goal is relevant credibility.
A highly targeted article in a publication your customers actually read can sometimes be more strategically useful than a passing mention somewhere larger.
Why do founder PR ideas fail?
One of the most common problems is excessive self-promotion.
A founder wants the article to say: "My company is brilliant", "We provide an amazing service", "We have launched something exciting" or "We are disrupting the market".
That is marketing language. It does not automatically give the journalist a story.
Other common problems include weak or unsupported claims, manufactured controversy, ordinary milestones treated as major news, refusing to discuss anything beyond preferred sales messages, vague interview answers, exaggerated expertise, commenting outside genuine experience and failing to substantiate important claims.
There has to be something in the exchange for the journalist and their audience. If the only winner from the article would be the founder's marketing department, the pitch is probably too promotional.
Can the first media feature lead to more opportunities?
It can, but there is no automatic progression where one quote leads to ten national articles.
A first piece of coverage creates a public example of the founder's contribution. A future journalist may be able to see that the person has been interviewed, how they communicate and whether their expertise is relevant.
If you are consistently useful, respond quickly and give journalists good material, some relationships may develop over time.
The real opportunity is to become somebody journalists consider worth contacting. That cannot be guaranteed, but it is a stronger objective than chasing one article and disappearing.
When should a founder consider professional PR support?
You can do founder PR yourself. If you have the time, understand the media reasonably well and have genuine expertise or stories, there is nothing wrong with approaching journalists directly.
An agency becomes useful when you need help identifying what is genuinely newsworthy, developing stronger angles, creating material, finding journalists, responding to opportunities and managing the process consistently.
The important thing is being ready. You need genuine media potential, enough time to contribute, a credible online presence and an understanding that journalists make their own editorial decisions.
Our guide to when a small business is ready to hire a PR agency goes into that decision in much more detail.
So, do you need to be famous to get media coverage?
No. You need a reason to be there.
Perhaps you know something valuable, have lived through something extraordinary, bring a unique view of an issue or can offer strong, well-supported opinions. Perhaps what is happening inside your company reveals something much bigger happening outside it.
Fame can open doors. But journalists also need credible people their audiences have never heard of.
If you can give them expertise, evidence, experience or a compelling story, being unknown is not the barrier many founders assume it is.
FAQs
Do you need to be successful to get featured in the media?
You need enough credibility for the particular story or expertise you are offering, but that does not mean running a huge company or being extremely wealthy. The journalist's main concern is whether you are relevant, credible and useful to the article.
Will journalists interview startup founders?
Yes, where the founder has a relevant story, useful expertise, credible experience or an interesting perspective. Being a startup founder alone is not enough to make somebody newsworthy.
What makes a founder story newsworthy?
Usually there needs to be something distinctive beyond starting a company. Transformation, unusual experiences, significant challenges, exceptional achievements, notable relationships or lessons with wider relevance can strengthen a founder story.
Can a founder get press coverage without a big social media following?
Yes. A large following is not required for earned media. Genuine expertise, credibility, relevance and the ability to contribute useful material are often more important.
Is founder PR the same as personal branding?
Not exactly. Founder PR can contribute to a personal brand, but earned media involves independent journalists deciding whether a founder is relevant to their audience. Our guide to PR, personal branding and thought leadership explains the differences.
What if my business story is not particularly unusual?
Expertise may be a stronger route. Many founders can contribute useful commentary because of what they know about their industry, customers or specialist subject, even when their personal founder journey is relatively ordinary.
Can an unknown founder become a media expert?
Yes. Useful media experts develop through genuine knowledge, credibility, relevant opinions, responsiveness and helping journalists with good material. Fame is not required.
Could your founder story interest the media?
Fair Public Relations' Founder PR helps founders identify expertise, experiences, stories and opinions that may have genuine editorial potential.
Our wider Standard PR service combines positioning, media-angle development, content creation, journalist outreach, reactive PR and ongoing account management.
We do not guarantee coverage or particular publications. We look for a reason a journalist might genuinely want to include you.
Written by Jordan Baker
Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations and a former UK national journalist with more than a decade of PR experience. He writes about founder PR, journalist outreach, expert positioning, media strategy and earned media.
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