On March 15, 2026, CoinGecko co-founder and CEO Bobby Ong made an unusually revealing observation about the company’s biggest competitor, CoinMarketCap. When asked where CoinMarketCap remained stronger than CoinGecko, he did not point to better data or a superior product. He pointed to search visibility, and then explained how early media coverage helped create it. 

The timing supports his point. CoinMarketCap went live in May 2013, while CoinGecko officially launched on April 8, 2014. That gave CoinMarketCap roughly an 11-month head start in a crypto industry that was still very young.

According to Ong, that early start came with significant media attention. Publications linked to CoinMarketCap when reporting on cryptocurrency, those links strengthened its search presence, and journalists researching crypto later found CoinMarketCap more easily. They cited it again, creating what Ong described as a “virtuous cycle.” He acknowledged that CoinGecko has spent years trying to close that SEO advantage and that doing so has not been easy. 

That admission is particularly striking because it came from the leader of a formidable competitor. CoinGecko is not a small platform looking up at CoinMarketCap from the sidelines. It now records more than 200 million monthly page views and tracks over 18,000 crypto assets, according to its own figures. Yet its CEO still identifies the media advantage CoinMarketCap created more than a decade earlier as difficult to overcome. 

For startup founders, there is a much bigger lesson here than SEO.

Media publication can create an advantage long before a company becomes the biggest name in its market. The stories published about a startup today can become part of how that company is discovered years later, especially when those stories appear on credible platforms that search engines and journalists already recognise.

CoinMarketCap demonstrates how that advantage can compound. A publication mentioning the company creates another credible page associated with its name. That page can be discovered through search, referenced by another writer and become part of the wider information surrounding the business. One story does not build a market leader, but a strong media footprint can make the company much harder to overlook.

CoinMarketCap’s own history shows how substantial that position eventually became. By the end of 2018, the platform had recorded 3.6 billion page views during the year. Today, the company says its data is regularly cited by major global news organisations and used in government research. 

The important point is not that media publication alone created CoinMarketCap’s success. The platform still needed a useful product that people returned to. Ong’s observation is more valuable than that. It shows that a strong product and strong media visibility can reinforce each other, creating an advantage competitors may find expensive and time-consuming to reproduce later.

Startup founders often reverse this order. They wait until the company becomes large enough, raises significant capital or achieves a major milestone before treating media publication seriously. By then, another business may already own much of the public conversation around the market.

A younger company has more reason to start early.

The story does not need to announce a multimillion-dollar funding round. It needs to give the media something credible to document about what the business is building. A startup solving a difficult industry problem can communicate the significance of that solution before it becomes widely known. The company begins creating a public record around its expertise instead of waiting for recognition to arrive after success.

The quality of that story matters. CoinMarketCap benefited because media organisations had a reason to reference it when discussing cryptocurrency information. Startup founders should think about the same relationship. The strongest publication is one that connects the company naturally to the subject it wants to become known for.

A fintech startup, for instance, gains little from an article filled with generic claims about innovation. A stronger story gives readers something concrete to associate with the company and gives future journalists useful context when researching that part of the industry.

Once that story exists, access to media publication no longer has to depend entirely on having established newsroom relationships. Digital PR marketplaces have changed that part of the process.

Pressdia operates within this space by giving startups direct access to publication opportunities across more than 250 African media outlets, alongside international options. Its press release writing service also allows founders to take a business development and shape it into a clearer, media-ready story before distribution. 

That combination matters because distribution without a strong story can produce a publication that says very little, while a good story that remains unpublished creates no external media footprint. The value comes from connecting both sides: something worth saying and a credible place to say it.

For African startup founders, this can remove one of the traditional barriers to building an early media presence. A company does not have to wait until journalists already know its founder personally before beginning to create credible coverage around its work. Pressdia allows businesses to select suitable publication opportunities and move their stories beyond their own websites without contacting each newsroom separately. 

The publication itself should still make sense for the story. Crest Africa can give an African entrepreneurship or innovation story a relevant continental context. A founder who needs deeper strategic direction around reputation can approach Laerryblue Media differently, while Talented Women Network provides a focused environment when women’s leadership is central to the story.

The objective is not to collect publication logos. It is to begin creating associations that become valuable over time. When people repeatedly encounter a startup in credible conversations about a particular problem, the company starts becoming part of how that market is understood.

That is what makes the CoinMarketCap story so useful for founders today.

In May 2013, CoinMarketCap could not have known exactly how large cryptocurrency would become. It entered early, became widely referenced and accumulated an information footprint that strengthened its discoverability. More than a decade later, the CEO of one of its strongest competitors is still publicly acknowledging the advantage created by that early media exposure. 

Startup founders should not wait to become market leaders before building a media presence. By that stage, the companies that started earlier may already have years of searchable stories and third-party references working in their favour.

The lesson from CoinMarketCap is simple: a publication today can become more than a moment of publicity. When the story is relevant and placed where the market pays attention, it can become part of a visibility advantage that compounds long after the article itself is published.