Share your founder story
Every founder has a story. Not every story is publishable — and the difference is almost never how dramatic it was. It is how specific you are willing to be.
What a founder story is, in a newspaper
The Gazette runs founder stories daily under Inspiring stories: journeys with the numbers left in. That last part is the whole test. A founder story here is a piece of reporting about a person who decided something, not a profile that admires them.
Which means the paper is not looking for the version you would put on an About page. It is looking for the version you would tell another founder in a pub, when you have stopped performing.
Why the specific version works better
“We persevered through a tough period” tells a reader nothing they can use. “We had eleven weeks of runway, cut our own salaries to zero, and kept two people by moving to invoices paid weekly” tells them what it actually costs and what somebody actually did. The second one is also easier to write, because it is just what happened.
Readers remember the mechanism, not the sentiment. So does an editor deciding whether to run it.
What to include
- The turn. The moment something changed direction — the pivot, the near-failure, the first customer who was not a friend.
- The decision. What you chose, what you gave up, and why you chose it then rather than earlier.
- One number that can be checked. Revenue, customers, months of runway, staff, units. One is enough.
- What it cost. Money, time, people, health. Stories that skip this read as advertising.
- What you would tell a founder two years behind you.
What gets left out
Origin myths with no detail. Awards. Round announcements dressed as journeys. Anything that could be said about any company — if the sentence still works with a different founder’s name in it, it is not reporting.
How to send it
Use the news desk form. Write the story in your own words — the desk turns it into the paper’s house style, checks the numbers against what you sent, and flags anything it cannot verify so an editor can decide. Nothing is invented and nothing is published unread; the standards page explains how.
Publication is free and decided on merit. On the morning it runs you get the article link, a share image, a Featured badge, and a permanent story number in the archive.
Questions
Where can I share my founder story?
Founder stories run in startup papers, regional business press, sector trade titles and founder newsletters. The Founder Gazette runs them daily in its Inspiring stories section and takes them through one open form, read by a person.
What makes a founder story publishable?
A specific decision, what it cost, and what changed — with at least one number that can be checked. A story about resilience in general is a poster. A story about the month you nearly ran out of money, and the exact thing you did, is a story.
Does my company need to be successful yet?
No. Stories about the difficult middle are often better than stories about the win, because other founders are living in the middle. What the desk needs is honesty and a checkable fact, not a happy ending.
Do I have to write it myself?
No. Send the facts in your own words through the form and the desk writes it in the paper's house style. You do not need to be a writer; you need to be specific.
Tell it
Also: what the desk takes and declines, getting featured when nobody has heard of you, and UK publications for founders.