Founder Reports Case Study
My work: Original surveys, data-driven content, commentary, and promotion.
Building Authority and Visibility for a Business Publication in a Crowded Market
About Founder Reports
Founder Reports is a business-focused publication covering entrepreneurship, startup life, and the realities of building a company. It publishes original editorial content, founder interviews, and data-driven research on topics that matter to business owners and operators.
The Challenge
A handful of major publications dominate the online business and entrepreneurship space. Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Fast Company, and Business Insider have massive audiences, strong domain authority, and long-established reputations. For a newer, independent publication like Founder Reports, breaking through that noise is a major challenge.
Founder Reports had solid editorial content, but lacked the authority signals and backlink profile needed to compete in search or be taken seriously alongside those bigger names. The site needed a way to earn credible, high-authority links at scale, and to do it in a way that would keep producing results long after the initial effort.
The Solution
I focused on creating original, data-driven content assets designed to serve as go-to reference material for journalists, bloggers, and content creators covering business-related topics.
The goal was to produce research and data that people in this space actually needed to cite, so the links and coverage would naturally follow.
Entrepreneur Mental Health Survey
I led a survey of over 200 entrepreneurs about their mental health experiences. The findings were compiled into a comprehensive statistics page on Founder Reports. I then promoted the research to relevant journalists and publications.
That article became a frequently cited resource. It’s now been linked to by more than 250 different websites, including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Fast Company, and Fortune. The majority of those links came in passively over time as journalists found the page and cited it as a source in their reporting.
Remote Work Survey
I surveyed 1,000 remote and hybrid workers to gather data on the current state of remote work, which is a particularly relevant topic given the wave of return-to-office mandates. The results were published in December 2025 on Founder Reports, and that page has already attracted links from more than 50 different websites.
As part of the promotion effort, I created a PDF summary of the findings and distributed it to journalists. I also wrote a commentary article on the survey’s key takeaways about communication gaps in remote work. That commentary was republished across more than 270 news websites, including Yahoo, MSN, AOL, The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, and The Sacramento Bee. These were editorial articles, not press releases or paid placements.
Return-to-Office Report
I researched and compiled data on RTO mandates, tracking which major companies were requiring employees back and how those policies were affecting both businesses and workers. The resulting report covered industry trends, employee sentiment, and the broader implications of these mandates.
That report has been referenced and linked to by more than 100 websites, many of them high-authority domains.
The Outcome
Across these three data-driven content assets, Founder Reports has earned links from hundreds of different websites. Many of those are from the same major publications that dominate the business media space, the same ones that made visibility so difficult in the first place.
More importantly, these assets keep working. New links continue to come in passively as writers and journalists discover the data and cite it in their own coverage. Founder Reports is building a reputation as a reliable source for original business-related research and statistics, which reinforces its authority with every new citation.
The results speak to a broader principle. Creating genuinely useful, data-backed content (and putting in the work to promote it initially) can generate compounding returns in visibility and credibility.
If you’re looking to build your authority and online visibility, I’d love to talk about what that could look like for you. Get in touch to start the conversation.