Every year, founders launch products they believe are objectively better than what’s already on the market. Yet many still struggle to gain traction, while seemingly average competitors dominate conversations and win customers.
According to Simran Pant, the problem often isn’t the product. It’s how the business frames the problem it solves.
As Head of Marketing at Transcelestial, the Singapore deep-tech company building laser communication networks, and someone who has helped shape more than 50 brands, Simran has built a career translating complex ideas into messages that customers, investors, and partners actually understand. Her experience has convinced her that branding is no longer just a marketing function — it’s a strategic business capability that determines whether a company earns attention, trust, and ultimately, growth.
In a world where AI can generate polished websites, logos, and copy within minutes, she believes the companies that stand out won’t necessarily have the flashiest brands. They’ll be the ones who communicate with the greatest clarity.
Highlights
Nobody Wakes Up Wanting to Buy Your Product
One of the biggest misconceptions founders have is that customers care about their product first.
According to Simran, they don’t.
“Nobody wakes up wanting to buy anything,” she says.
People wake up with problems they’re already paying for — whether through lost time, wasted money, or missed opportunities. That, she argues, is the real competition.
“The price of doing nothing.”
Yet many founders begin their pitch by explaining what they’ve built. They lead with features, specifications, and product capabilities before giving buyers a reason to care.
The companies she’s seen succeed reverse that order.
First, they explain what it’s costing customers not to solve the problem — what Simran calls the Cost of Inaction (COI). Then they paint a picture of what changes once the problem is solved. Only after establishing that context do they explain how the product works.
For Simran, storytelling isn’t about emotional narratives or founder origin stories.
It’s about becoming the company that defines the customer’s problem most clearly.
“Whoever describes the buyer’s problem most precisely gets to own the solution — even when someone else’s product is better.”
As products become increasingly commoditised, she believes the ability to articulate a customer’s pain has become one of the strongest competitive advantages a business can possess.
Complexity Doesn’t Create Credibility
Working at Transcelestial means marketing one of the world’s more technically sophisticated technologies: laser communications.
Ironically, Simran says, explaining that the technology has never been the first challenge.
“Most people don’t wake up looking for laser communications.”
Instead, the team’s first objective is to help customers recognise the limitations of what they’re already using. Once buyers understand the gap in their current systems, they naturally become interested in alternatives. Only then do product specifications begin to matter.
Before that, technical detail is simply noise.
This is where many deep-tech founders make a costly mistake.
They assume complexity creates credibility.
In reality, it depends on the audience.
Technical depth is essential when speaking to engineers responsible for evaluating a solution. But executives, investors, and founders aren’t primarily judging whether every specification is correct. They’re deciding whether the technology changes the future of their business.
Too often, founders communicate only to technical evaluators because that’s the audience they’ve spent their careers speaking to.
“The depth is all there,” Simran explains, “but the reason to care is missing.”
The most effective companies know how to speak to both audiences without confusing one for the other.
AI Can Generate a Brand. It Can’t Build One.
Artificial intelligence has dramatically lowered the cost of producing polished marketing assets.
Logos. Websites. Brand guidelines. Copy. Visual identities.
According to Simran, that’s precisely why appearance is no longer a competitive advantage.
Previously, polish signalled something meaningful.
If a company had a professionally designed website and a cohesive visual identity, customers assumed it had invested time, money, and judgment into building the business.
Today, AI has broken that relationship.
“Looking good proves nothing now, because it costs almost nothing.”
She uses AI tools herself, but believes many founders misunderstand what those tools actually provide.
They generate outputs.
They don’t make decisions.
Ask AI to design a brand today, and it will produce an impressive first version.
Ask again next month, and you’ll likely receive an entirely different one.
Without consistency, recognition never forms.
“Recognition is repetition.”
People don’t remember the first version of a brand.
They remember the version they’ve encountered hundreds of times — consistently.
AI has made version one almost free.
It hasn’t solved version two hundred.
Equally important, AI naturally produces the average of everything it has already seen.
Average can look attractive.
It rarely creates differentiation.
For Simran, memorable brands aren’t built through endless redesigns.
They’re built through consistency, specificity, and the discipline to remain recognisable over time.
Building in Public Is Changing Careers
Although many people associate Simran with building a successful creative business alongside a full-time career, she insists none of it was part of a carefully constructed strategy.
She simply started writing publicly about branding because she wanted a place to think out loud.
The opportunities came later.
What has changed, she argues, isn’t necessarily what younger professionals want from work.
It’s that the internet has made people’s thinking visible.
Today, professionals can publish ideas, document experiments, share failures, and demonstrate how they solve problems without waiting for permission or introductions.
“What used to require permission doesn’t anymore.”
That shift has implications far beyond personal branding.
Companies often worry that employees building visibility online are creating opportunities to leave.
Simran sees it differently.
If someone’s reputation increasingly exists outside company walls, titles alone become less meaningful.
“What holds them is work they’d want their name on.”
Rather than treating employee visibility as a risk, organisations should see it as an advantage.
Working at a deep-tech company has reinforced that lesson.
When a technology is difficult to explain, having employees who can communicate it clearly in public becomes one of the company’s greatest strategic assets.
“You can’t stop people from having options,” she says.
“You can give them a reason to stay.”
The Question Every Founder Should Answer Before Launch
When founders prepare to launch a new product, Simran believes they often obsess over the wrong things.
Another feature.
A slightly better website.
One more revision to the investor deck.
The final 10% of polish that customers are unlikely to notice.
More often than not, she believes, perfectionism is simply fear disguised as preparation.
Instead, she encourages founders to run one deceptively simple test.
“Can someone else explain what you do correctly without you in the room?”
Her advice is straightforward.
Explain your business to a potential customer.
Wait a week.
Then ask them to describe it back to you.
If they explain it accurately, your positioning is working.
If they don’t, no amount of design, branding, or polish will rescue the launch.
Because products don’t spread when founders explain them well.
They spread when customers can.
Final Thoughts: The Brands That Win Make People Care
As AI continues to lower the barriers to creating polished brands, websites, and marketing campaigns, differentiation will increasingly depend on something technology cannot automate: judgment.
For Simran, successful branding has never been about producing more content or making companies look more impressive. It’s about helping people understand why a problem matters before asking them to consider a solution.
The founders who succeed won’t necessarily be those with the best products or the biggest marketing budgets.
They’ll be the ones who communicate with enough clarity that customers remember the problem — and instinctively associate their company with solving it.
Because in the end, people rarely buy products.
They buy the confidence that their problems will finally disappear.
Highlights
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