At a recent board meeting, someone suggested that we needed to go hard on PR and marketing to “build hype.” When the phrase “build hype” came up, the rest of the room soured immediately. To many, hype was synonymous with snake oil.
The company in question is doing legitimately impressive technical work, work that will define the category it is in, and almost no one outside its immediate customer base knows about it.
Later that meeting, I asked the founder: Had anyone, anywhere, ever pulled off a similar technical feat before?
No, he said. This would be a world first.
That concern around self-promotion is something I see frequently among the technical founders I work with building deep tech and physical AI businesses, who want to be measured by the substance of their technical work, not their effectiveness at marketing them.
In software, it’s common practice for sales and marketing materials to outpace what the product is capable of. In fact, it’s often encouraged as a way to probe for product-market fit. Taking this strategy to the extreme, however, can result in serious blunders and even outright fraud. Companies like Cluely, which misrepresented its annual recurring revenue numbers; Delve, which experienced allegations of fake compliance audits; and most infamously, Theranos, serve as cautionary tales of hype without substance to back it up.
And so many of these founders remain silent, hoping the tech will speak for itself. But silence is not a strategy, and it creates its own risk. People will form an opinion of the company whether it does promotion or not. They simply do it with less information. This risk is especially high for tech companies, where the product may take years to mature and the market may not yet understand the category.