Creative strategy
Apr 9, 2025
In the startup world, it’s great to move fast and break things. But when it comes to brand voice, most are still duct-taping a personality together and hoping it doesn’t fall apart under pressure.
At best, voice is treated like a nice-to-have—cutesy phrasing in a social post or snappy lines in a pitch deck. At worst, it’s whatever tone the founder is feeling at the time of writing. The result is jargon in sales materials, dad jokes on social, and a product UI that sounds like it was written by a different team entirely (because it probably was).
But brand voice is not a vibe. It’s a system, a strategy. It’s how your brand builds trust before you even close a deal. It’s how you scale consistently without writing 500 Slack messages explaining how “we don’t say ‘solutions,’ we say ‘tools.’”
If you’re winging it with your startup brand voice, you’re not alone, but you are leaving equity on the table. Let’s dig into the biggest mistakes startups make when defining (or dodging) their brand voice—and how to fix them.
Mistake #1: Confusing tone with voice
In the early phase, when you ask a startup founder what they want their brand to “sound like,” you’ll probably hear something like “approachable, but smart,” or “like [incumbent brand], but for [different industry].”
But that’s tone. Tone is great, but it’s only one part of the startup brand voice system.
Brand voice is your personality. Tone is how that personality shows up in different contexts. You can be funny on Twitter and direct in your onboarding emails, but it still needs to feel like you. Without a defined voice, your brand persona can feel less like an experience and more like a mood swing.
Startups that don’t make this distinction tend to end up chasing vibes, resulting in inconsistencies throughout the user experience. Your SaaS solution’s UI can sound like a joke machine, your investor pitching deck can read like a LinkedIn crossword, or your customer success team can get stuck wondering what “on-brand” even means.
The fix: Define your voice before you start writing. Build it with clear personality traits and editorial principles. Then calibrate your tone depending on the moment. One scales. The other reacts.
Mistake #2: Basing voice on the founder’s personality
(Note: There are exceptions to every rule. If the founder’s personality is the brand, the voice should reflect their personality.)
This mistake starts innocently enough: the founder writes the landing page copy and the first pitch deck. Then they write the social captions, the one-pager, and, before long, the brand voice is the founder’s voice—including their quirks, catchphrases, and 2am hot takes.
At first, it works. It feels authentic, scrappy, human. But, as the team grows, the founder is pulled in more-impactful directions (e.g., contract negotiations, board meetings, staffing interviews). They become a bottleneck. What was charisma turns into chaos as other members of the team struggle to replicate it without any supporting documentation.
What many new startups don’t realize is that your customers don’t care about your founder’s personality. Elon Musk-s and Jeff Bezos-es are few and far between. For most businesses, what your customers care about is what your product or service does for them and how consistently you can communicate that.
The fix: Your founder isn’t your voice. Your audience is. Build voice traits that reflect how you want customers to feel, not how your founder likes to talk. Create systems others can use—editorial principles, do/don’t lists, and sample copy. Think “brand actor,” not “founder ventriloquist.”
And, if your brand voice lives only in one person’s head, that’s another mistake.
Mistake #3: Skipping voice development
This mistake is the most common and can sometimes be the most damaging. Plenty of early-stage startup teams assume voice is something you figure out later on, once you have product-market fit or a full marketing team. Until then, everyone just “reads the room.”
The problem is, all that work you do early on becomes your voice. If you’re writing emails, running ads, or demoing your product, you’re using a voice. The only question is whether it’s consistent, intentional, and aligned.
Most likely, it’s not. Without clear documentation informed by extensive strategy and intentional thinking, it’s nearly impossible for multiple team members to own different customer-facing processes while presenting a uniform experience. It’s like expecting employees to wear the same uniform without ever specifying what that uniform actually is.
The fix: Start small, but start early. You don’t need a 40-page voice guide in year one. A single-page doc with two to three voice traits, example phrases, and tone flexes by channel is enough. Give your team just enough structure to write like one brand, not five people with varying opinions and no alignment.
Because without that foundation, you’re just shouting into the void and confusing your audience in the process.
Challenge #4: Over-relying on AI or templates for content
You’re moving fast. Your budget’s tight. You need to be able to create a high volume of content without delaying other initiatives. So you turn to ChatGPT to lighten the load. This was one of the hottest topics in startup circles in early 2024—until the consequences caught up with the tech.
It’s tempting to offload your content burden onto tools and templates, but AI doesn’t create. It shuffles, replicating patterns. And, if you haven’t established robust voice guideline documentation, those patterns will reflect whatever’s floating around in its training data—startup cliches, competitor phrasing, random X humor, etc.
AI and templates are both critical elements of the creative process. AI can empower creatives to write assets at the same or higher levels of quality in a fraction of the time. Templates can further accelerate that process. But these are tools and tools, no matter how autonomous, are best used by capable craftspeople.
The fix: Don’t ditch the team for the tools, train the team to use the tools. Start by defining your brand voice traits and documenting them well. Then, teach your team the basics of large language model (LLM) prompting. Make your voice the operating system, not the afterthought.
Consider building an established prompt library that includes dos and don’ts, audience framing, and preferred tone, all broken down by asset type, and assign somebody to own the process of updating that library. After all, AI is rapidly changing, and prompt-authoring best practices are changing with it.
Mistake #5: Trying to sound like other brands
“Can we sound like Duolingo?” “Let’s write like Notion.” “We want to be the Slack of the finance world.” Examples like these are a dime a dozen, and that’s a steep discount to sell your solutions at.
Startups love to borrow voice from brands they admire, especially when those brands are consistently going viral on social media or winning hearts with clever advertising.
But what works for them might be off-putting for you. Voice is context-dependent. Duolingo’s unhinged owl routine works because their product is inherently playful and that voice has been nurtured for years. If you’re a B2B security platform tweeting in memes, it just feels off.
The fix: Voice should come from your brand, your mission, your audience, your market position. Remember that your brand voice is your brand’s personality. You should never base your personality on somebody else; it should be a reflection of your authentic self.
You don’t need to be “like them” to be compelling. People enjoy dozens of different brands every single day, and rarely does anybody complain that they don’t all sound the same.
Treat startup brand voice like the asset it is
Your brand’s voice is just as much of an asset as your product or your team. It’s an asset that can drive clarity, speed, and trust across every touchpoint. It helps new hires ramp faster. It helps customers understand what you do faster. It helps teams create, scale, and sell faster.
When done right, your startup’s voice can be a strategic multiplier.
You don’t need a big team or expensive rebrand commitment to get started. You just need to recognize that your voice isn’t window dressing, but infrastructure, product design, positioning.
At early-stage companies, every word and every image counts. Every touchpoint is a challenge, one that results in you building trust with customers or eroding it. Don’t wait until Series C to find your voice. Start now. Even if it’s scraped together and messy, you can always clean it up and refine it as you go.
But make it intentional. Make it consistent. And make it yours.
And, if you need a partner who knows how to turn brand voice from a theory into a living, breathing system that actually works, you know where to find us.