Juan Carlos Milena, founder of friendlyHUB & PR Partner at Zinkup

In this interview, we talk to Juan Carlos Milena, founder of friendlyHUB & PR Partner at Zinkup, about how communication becomes an essential lever for the development of startups, corporations and innovation ecosystems. Throughout the conversation, he shares the lessons learned from years working as an agency, startup, corporate and own venture, with cases such as Microsoft, minube or Repsol.

It also reflects on the most common mistakes in early stages, the role of communication in times of crisis and the importance of building narratives that connect with people. As he points out, "communication is not communication, it is business", an idea that sums up his way of understanding strategy: aligned with the reality of each company and always at the service of the people who make it possible.

After so many years accompanying startups, what signs allow you to quickly identify when a company communicates well and when it is going to have narrative problems?

For me, the best way to approach a communication strategy is to understand that communication is not communication, it is business. As a communication or marketing team, we are never going to generate a different reality than the company or the team itself. Therefore, the moment that part begins to fail, everything else fails.

In the case of startups, we often talk about ideation phases, of building a product that can then pivot. And the main thing in these phases is to be clear: to know what you want to do, what you want to sell and to whom. Once that is clear, the communication or marketing strategy is naturally aligned.

If someone starts spinning, rambling, or talking about trends instead of talking about their original proposal, they're likely to fail. And we probably won't even start working with them. Sometimes we separate things by departments – this is marketing, this is financial, this is commercial – but when you understand that the key is the business model itself and how you get it to people, everything else falls into place. If that foundation is not there, it doesn't matter how well you communicate: you will not be able to do your job well.

You have experienced communication from agency, startup, corporate and own entrepreneurship. What practical lessons did each stage leave you to communicate in times of growth, pivot or uncertainty?

The greatest learning, not only as an agency, but as a professional within the world of startups and investment agents, is to learn about experiences, try to see them, learn from them and also from mistakes. Many times we think that we have a clear idea and that the only thing we have to do is shoot. But it is usually a process of accompaniment, where you contribute your experience and, at the same time, learn from the project and the ecosystem.

The biggest challenge that we have as agencies or marketing and communication professionals is not to present our book. It is understanding business, how a startup, a corporate or an investment ecosystem works, to speak their language. Otherwise, we'll just be offering wooden spoons or knives, because that's what we have. And, on the other hand, startups should not see agencies as mere instruments to achieve objectives.

From each stage I take something different with me. In the world of startups, the main thing is that agility to do things that impact with few resources: a brutal survival work, but also creativity and ecosystem creation. In corporates, the size itself requires you to manage a very interesting complexity: teams, high budgets, a lot of data. But you can also bring the startup to the table: agility and creativity. And in the case of accelerators or incubators, the good thing is not to think only about service providers, but also about the stories you can tell of partners and startups with whom you collaborate.

In the end, whether you've worked on any of those links, your mission is always going to be to try to connect them, because they want to connect with each other.

Early stage startups tend to repeat mistakes. Which ones do you see most often and what indicators help you detect them before they scale?

There are several errors that are repeated in the initial phases. The first is to think that when they start doing communication or marketing it is because they have money and they have to spend it. That's a mistake: just as the rest of the business is based on cash efficiency, marketing must also be part of that effective management. It cannot be an open bar.

The second mistake is the saturation of messages without a strategy. If you are clear about what the main message is, go for it. Don't try to have a lot of messages or copy things from third parties because you find them fun or exciting, if they are not part of your core. That does not mean that the message cannot evolve – in fact, in pivot processes it is necessary – but you have to have a medium and long-term vision.

Another very common mistake is that many enterprising people want to launch, but they don't want to listen. And our job as marketing and communication professionals is not only to help them send messages, but also to listen to what different audiences are transmitting to them. This is very relevant not only for the message to reach better, but also to better support the pillars of the business.

And finally, a common mistake is to create star spokesperson figures when you probably have small stars within your technical, commercial or even administrative team, which are great opportunities to tell diverse and more capillary stories. If you have a spokesperson who does it very well, great, but don't disconnect from your team, because together you get better results.

In addition, when you work on communication within a startup and use it to bring the team culture together, the impact is brutal. It's no longer just about the results in media coverage or campaigns: those actions generate a sense of pride in the team that makes the project work better. You may have made an impact in a medium like Expansión, but what you take away the most is the face of the team saying "how cool, our work is there". This vision, moreover, is common in both startups and corporates.

At minube you experienced a transformation of the sector from within. What lessons did startups that create new categories leave you and what can startups that create new categories apply today?

There are two experiences that have marked me in my professional career. The first was the agency I joined almost on the rebound and from which we carried out Microsoft communication, which was brutal. And the second, the entry in minube. It was practically an initiative of five people, in a small office, with a proposal that I thought was beautiful: to revolutionise the way we understood travel communication based on the experiences of other travellers. Today it may sound commonplace, but at the time we practically invented the category.

We had a colleague who invented a proposal to travel everywhere and we sold it to Televisión Española. They told us: "if you send us content, we will take it out". And suddenly we had a national broadcast with that idea. For me, minube represents the ability of a very excited and highly complemented team —in management, technology, marketing and sales— to believe in an idea and change throughout different phases, generating trends or aligning themselves with what the sector demanded.

It was almost nine years in two stages. First we revolutionised social travel, then the use of mobile apps to manage and enjoy travel, and later, travel with social responsibility and diversity. It was always clear to us that the opportunity was to combine our B2B commercial proposal to destinations – which were the ones that generated the income – with the confidence of travellers. We came to have a community of more than two million travellers who were not just customers: they felt part of something exciting.

We did everything: press releases, interviews, content on social networks, travel meetups at Fitur with more than a thousand people enjoying the experiences of other travellers and partners. It was no longer just a travel platform: it was a group of people passionate about travel who offered apps, interesting transactions, profitability, but also shared enjoyment of discovering new corners. That is the lesson for any startup that creates a category: build a trend, build an ecosystem and do it from the passion of the team.

You've also worked with large corporations. What corporate communication practices can startups adopt to professionalise their narrative without losing agility?

The most interesting thing is to understand that startups and corporates have a lot to learn from each other, and that the micro-stories that unite them are a mine of opportunities.

A micro-story of a corporate developed with a startup probably does not mean a significant change in its balance of results, but it sows milestones that build a very positive brand image. And for a startup, that alliance with a corporate can be a huge opportunity to generate credibility by reference, especially in the face of other possible alliances.

What startups can learn from corporate startups is active listening and the ability not to define the communication plan in a unidirectional or broad stroke. The marketing and communication team has to go down to the hallway, have conversations at the table or coffee, where the important thing is not to present yourself as an agency with a briefing, but to ask: "what can you tell me?". I always go back to my past as a journalist: the basis is to do that interview, to know the little story, to find the headline and the image that defines it.

And vice versa, corporates can learn from startups that ability to co-create, to evangelise together, to talk about stories that interest the public. We have developed several White Papers – four on minube and others with corporates – and I always say the same thing: the White Paper comes with your logo, but the stories we are going to tell are the ones that will give you credibility and generate empathy. They can be third-party stories. Let's co-create, launch and, above all, be able to transfer this content to the way users consume, whether it's a large audience or B2B.

For me, a press release that is launched today may be a headline that lasts a week, but if I base it on values that I defend in the medium and long term, and I manage to chop up that action so that it continues to have a recurring impact on different channels, I will have achieved the objective with the efficiency, creativity and few resources of a startup also applied to a corporate.

You have accompanied entrepreneurs in investment, scaling and crisis. What role does communication play in critical moments and what differentiates a company that manages these peaks of tension well?

One of the things that I have been most passionate about over the years has been crisis communication. I don't know if it's because I'm a bit of a masochist, but helping a company or a spokesperson deal with a reputational crisis is an amazing thing. And rule number one is preparation. Ninety-odd percent of the time, good preparation ensures that the crisis does not sink in: you stop it sooner or you make the internal departments prevent it from happening.

Both startups and corporates must actively work on this preparation, not only to protect their reputation, but also their relationship with suppliers and customers. From the slightest thing something can emerge that scales, and you have to have humility, messages prepared with consistency, and an alignment between the legal, business and communication parts.

The very evolution of a startup is a continuous moment of crisis. Scaling involves phases in which you have to continue demonstrating your proposal, respond to new trends or a new player, position yourself for investment rounds. That is a crisis situation, because it stresses you out, it requires you to step on the accelerator and communicate to new audiences with tools that are not the usual ones.

For me, the basic rule is not to disdain the melee. Many times a conversation solves a crisis more than setting off big fireworks. And it greatly reduces the impact of forming a network of partners or references around it that can validate your proposal to third parties. That it is not you who defends yourself, but that the ecosystem defends you. Sometimes you can't contain something from happening, but you can get others to come out to defend you. That has happened to us with clients and to ourselves.

And a very clear learning from corporates: your best friend is always going to be a lawyer. Crisis communication is not only based on beautiful messages, it is based on having arguments. That is why the best way to be prepared is to build trust and surround yourself with those who can give you these arguments, and then, from communication, transfer them to the right audiences.

Many founders want to communicate better but don't know where to start. What practical steps would you recommend to gain clarity, prioritise messages and avoid noise?

Yes, I would like to share some practical tips for founders, because it is a profile that has a thousand things in mind and often does not know where to start communicating. 

The first: create a Personal Communication Business Model Canvas, following the same scheme you use for your business, about what you contribute as a professional and spokesperson. Then, be clear about your target audiences, identify two or three key messages that you can defend, speak clearly (not just loudly) and eliminate noise: don't talk for the sake of talking. Listen, because we often forget. And work on personal branding in an ecosystem: sometimes a photo with a person who validates and supports you is a bigger endorsement than a headline in a national media.

And one last piece of advice, especially for female founders: the world of entrepreneurship is difficult, but for women it is much more so. You have to solve problems of communication, reaffirmation, diversity. I always try to keep in mind that principle of diversity, to speak inclusively and not to judge. I think that the world of entrepreneurship, investment and innovation would do much better if we also spoke in feminine terms. So I encourage all entrepreneurs not to be afraid to communicate and defend their proposal.

How can the ONE Platform help entrepreneurs and communication teams build stronger messaging, connect with audiences, and gain strategic clarity at every stage of growth?

Initiatives such as the ONE Platform are the anchor for any startup or agent in the ecosystem that needs to understand how a process works that will probably advance for several years. You are going to face situations that, within the ecosystem, have already been experienced, already have resources and have answers to questions that in the world of entrepreneurship we ask ourselves continuously.

When you work on the communication of a startup, an investment club, an acceleration program or even a corporate, an initiative like this provides you with information, connections and the opportunity to access physical spaces that are very relevant, as well as events that can be organised together. But above all, it gives you the confidence to know not only what's going on in your office, but also what's going on outside.

I recommend everyone who is going to start a business or invest that they do not have a fixed chair in one place. To go outside, to be informed, to connect, to undertake. And the ONE Platform is the right place to learn and keep climbing.