Why Being Known Is Not the Same as Being Understood

A Thought Leader Guest Post from Kyle Cabodi of Peristyle Communications:

Brand Awareness Isn't Always the Same as Being Understood

And why that gap gets harder to fix as you grow.

There's a moment most startups and high-growth companies hit once things start working. You're seeing it a lot right now across the Orange County ecosystem. Companies are raising real rounds, products are finding traction, and partnerships are starting to change how they're perceived in the market. That momentum brings attention with it. You get more inbound, more intros, more conversations that start with some version of "I've heard of you guys, but I'm not totally sure what you do." Which is usually not where you want to be.

At some point, someone says it out loud. We probably need to invest in comms. PR, brand awareness, getting in front of the right reporters, something along those lines. And they're not wrong. It's usually a sign that something is working. More visibility does help. You see it in hiring pipelines, inbound interest, even how seriously people take the company on a first pass. But it also changes something that's easy to miss if you haven't been through it before. Up until that point, your story mostly lives inside the company. It's in decks, in how the founder explains things, in how the team talks about the product when they're not trying to be precise. Not perfect, but yours, and still flexible.

Once more people start paying attention, it stops being just yours. People form opinions quickly. Customers, investors, candidates, partners. Everyone is trying to figure out what you are, and they're not waiting for you to get the wording exactly right. They grab whatever is easiest to understand, and that version starts to travel.

Sometimes that shorthand comes from a competitor. A comparison that's close enough, even if it misses what actually makes the company different. "So you're like X?" becomes the default framing. It's not always malicious. It's usually just the fastest way for someone to make sense of what you do. But once that framing takes hold, it tends to stick, and you end up being described in terms that weren't really yours to begin with.

You don't always notice it right away. It usually shows up a few weeks later, in off conversations. You explain what you do, and people keep coming back to the same narrow interpretation. You find yourself re-explaining the same thing over and over, adjusting the wording each time, hoping one version finally lands.

I've seen this play out with a company that started as a pretty clear point solution in the accounting close process. Early on, that framing worked. It was simple, easy to explain, and it got picked up quickly. Over time, the product expanded into something much broader. It was closer to a platform, touching more parts of the workflow and solving a wider set of problems. Internally, that shift was obvious. Externally, the original description kept showing up. Prospects, partners, even investors would still anchor on the earlier version, even when the product demo told a different story. It took a sustained effort to move that perception, not because the company hadn't evolved, but because the first version of the story had already traveled.

That kind of gap isn't dramatic, but you feel it. It shows up as drag right when the stakes are getting higher. Fundraising, new markets, bigger customers, partnerships that are supposed to signal something more. All good things. Also the exact moments when more people are forming a view at the same time, which means whatever version of the story is already circulating has a much better chance of sticking.

Around this point, a lot of teams start asking a different set of questions. What should our communications function look like? Which reporters should we be talking to? Do we need to be briefing analysts? What channels actually matter for us right now?

Those are the right questions to be asking. But the answers usually depend on whether the underlying story is clear enough to travel the way you intend it to.

You see a version of this in how early-stage companies talk about themselves. A lot of the focus is on outputs. Dollars saved, time saved, efficiency gained. Those are real and they matter. But they don't always carry meaning outside the product context. The work is translating that into outcomes: what changes for the customer, how it shows up for the people doing the work, what it means for the category they operate in. That's usually what sticks, and it's often the part that gets skipped.

It also shows up when companies try to connect to what's happening in the market. The economy, shifts in hiring, pressure on certain functions. Product-level messaging rarely travels into those moments on its own. But when the story is grounded in outcomes, it's easier to connect what the company does to what people are already paying attention to, without having to stretch for relevance.

When the narrative is working, it starts to shape the tactical decisions naturally. Which conversations are worth having, which outlets make sense, which angles will land without much translation. Without that, it's easy to stay active across a lot of channels without much compounding effect.

What matters is how the company actually describes itself in everyday conversations. How the founder explains the problem a few calls into the day. What people default to saying without thinking about it. That's the version that gets picked up, whether you intend it to be or not.

You can usually feel when it's off. It shows up in moments where the response is close, but not quite right. Where you explained it well, but something still didn't land. That's usually the signal worth paying attention to. The story usually isn't broken. It just hasn't caught up to what the company has become. The earlier you close that gap, the less work it takes.

Thanks for this Guest Post and its graphics to Kyle Cabodi, CEO and Principal of Peristyle Communications.

Kyle Cabodi is the CEO and Principal of Peristyle Communications, a fractional communications consultancy that helps venture-backed companies build brand visibility and external story to match their momentum.

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