How-To: Build Comms That Compound
with Alex Daly, founder of Daly, Orchard Street + Plenty&Co.
☎️: Alex Daly. She is founder of Daly, a comms+ agency, and founder of Orchard Street, its venture studio and angel arm. She also just launched Plenty&Co., a collective of independent agencies delivering modern, multi-disciplinary comms
📝: In today’s letter, we chat about why the launch is no longer the story, why attention now moves through a ripple, and why the best comms strategy now sits much closer to culture
Alex Daly turns founders away.
Not cruelly, and not permanently but with some regularity. A founder arrives at her agency, Daly, in stealth, ready for a big reveal, and her answer is often the same: not yet. Go get users. Work out the kinks. Come back in six months with data, testimonials, and a sharper read on what’s actually resonating.
The announcement she is being asked to make is not, in her view, a story. In a fragmented attention economy, it is often barely the beginning of one.
Media no longer just cares that you exist. What editors, reporters, and the broader attention economy find interesting now is evidence of what your impact will be: the behavioural shift you are unlocking, the trend you can name, the cultural change your product sits inside. Novelty alone has stopped functioning as news. So, the work of comms has moved from announcing to engineering: less about making a claim loudly enough, more about building the conditions for people to return to a brand three or four times until the shape of it starts to stick.
To understand how Alex arrived at that thesis, you have to look at what she was doing before she had an agency.
Belief from zero, belief from legacy
Alex trained as a journalist, moved into documentary, then built a career in crowdfunding where her entire job was to make people believe in things that did not yet exist. Standards Manual, one of her signature projects, is a useful case study. When she met graphic designers Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed early on, they told her about finding the 1970 NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual at their design firm, Pentagram. They wanted to turn it into a hardcover book, but traditional publishers said it was too niche. Alex’s Kickstarter turned it into a viral editorial object, and eventually a publishing company.
The inversion of that problem is with her current client, Yahoo. The brand is thirty years old, known to everyone, and Daly’s work there is less about building belief than revealing affection that grassroots audiences already hold. Or what Alex calls the “good internet” feeling of an earlier, more open tech era, evidence below feat. Delia Cai!
The mechanic underneath both is the same: in a zero-belief market and a high-familiarity market, the job is still to construct the conditions under which someone will care, repeatedly, until the attention holds. What changes is where you start. With crowdfunding, you build belief from zero. With legacy brands, you rebuild belief from a surplus of it. Alex’s’s career has been a long, consistent argument that the medium and the starting point are secondary. The through-line is belief compounded through narrative.
Comms is a system now
Press still matters, but it no longer moves alone. Newsletters, creators, partnerships, niche outlets, legacy outlets, and the communities that teach audiences how to read a brand all sit on the same board. Each surface trains the next. Niche outlets surface the story. Legacy outlets validate it. Founder interviews or TikToks humanise the product. Partnerships make positioning feel lived rather than claimed. The best comms strategy now looks less like a broadcast and more like a system of reinforcing signals.
The system also plays differently depending on where a brand is in its life cycle. Early-stage brands usually need to start narrow (with the audiences that already understand what they are doing) and build outward. Legacy brands often need to do the counterintuitive thing: go narrower, not bigger, rebuild credibility inside the communities that still have real affection or curiosity, and let that work travel back up to the tier-one moment.
Alex calls this the ripple effect. The logic is borrowed, knowingly, from her earlier life. Magazines and documentaries taught her pacing (what to reveal, when, and in what order) before PR entered the picture.
Foundation is part of the story
The most useful extension of Daly’s worldview is Orchard Street, the venture studio and angel arm she runs alongside the agency. It pushes the same argument earlier in the life cycle: to the moment when a founder is still deciding not just what they are building, but how they are building it.
Her observation: startups tend to over-invest in product and under-invest in the communications, culture, and operating logic that make a product matter. Wait too long to clarify the story, the culture, the operations, and the founder’s POV, and the company usually ends up sacrificing one for another. Growth accelerates; culture falls to the side. Product dominates; the founder never learns to articulate why the business exists. The internal machine gets built, but the external belief does not. For founder-led consumer brands especially, that gap tends to show up later as expensive acquisition and/or worse.
That conviction is informed by how she had to rebuild Daly itself. The agency launched in 2019. The pandemic arrived. Founders were laid off, clients disappeared, and Daly held on through a forced pivot back into crowdfunding – a survival move with a cost: burnout, a team of two, a scratched-out runway. In 2021, Alex and her business partner, Ally Bruschi, started again. They asked themselves: if this were the best place to work, what would that actually look like?
The answer became Daly’s OS: slow-down time, a four-day-style week, a wellness stipend, work-from-anywhere weeks, biannual profit share, and four explicit values: intimacy, urgency, transparency, pivoting. Underneath that sits a posture Alex describes as a deliberate refusal to run the company from scarcity, even when markets, recessions, and the news cycle pull in that direction. They keep choosing abundance because scarcity produced the burnout once, and they have no interest in producing it again. Alex is not treating comms as external polish. She is treating it as structurally inseparable from how a company is built, how a team experiences the work, and whether the internal logic and external story can hold each other up.
Taste is discernment (and Instagram is a scarcity loop)
Asked to define taste, Alex’s answer is unmystical. Yes, design literacy matters. But the real definition is closer to discernment. Knowing what is worth attention, what is a real story, what is just noise, and what framing will make someone actually care. It is why Daly stays intentionally boutique: intimacy with the work is part of what she is protecting. A team of generalists with real taste can move across categories without flattening everything into the same formula.
The clearest expression of that discernment is also the most counterintuitive: Alex had quit Instagram. For the founder of a comms agency, it reads as a contradiction. She framed it as a mental health decision that ended up sharpening her work. For her, the platform was feeding obsessive loops rather than useful signal, so she replaced ambient scrolling with deliberate inputs: newsletters, news, team conversations, intentional check-ins. The move is consistent with her abundance posture. And I agree, being informed and being submerged are not the same thing.
What Alex Daly actually built
There is plenty to admire in Alex’s story but my favourite might be that she is not attached to any one form. Daly has rebuilt her practice roughly every five years, and each version is a response to a shift in how attention actually moves. Journalism into documentaries. Documentary into crowdfunding. Crowdfunding into comms+. Comms+ into Orchard Street. And now, Plenty&Co. – a collective of independent agencies spanning consumer, B2B, and experiential.
As AI absorbs more executional work and in-house teams get leaner, the market no longer rewards scale theatre on its own so this may be the more durable offer. And she’s already on it!
My favorite interview ever!!!