How I Turned an Unknown Startup into the #2 Most Valuable Private Space Company

A case study in brand positioning, category creation, and the decisions that compound

The most important marketing decision a startup will make isn’t about channels or budget. It’s about the story. I learned this at every company I’ve worked with, but nowhere more dramatically than at Relativity Space, where the right positioning took an unknown company to a $2.3 billion valuation.

In November 2018, I drove to a factory in Los Angeles to meet the team. I’d barely heard of them. They were called Relativity Space, and they were building 3D-printed rockets. When I walked through the factory door, I saw Stargate, the world’s largest 3D printer, depositing metal in slow arcs, building a rocket component the way a potter shapes clay except the clay was aerospace-grade alloy and the pot was going to orbit. I stood there for a long time. I’d spent years marketing software you couldn’t touch. This was a building full of things you could put your hand on, and every one of them was being invented.

Their technology was extraordinary: an autonomous platform integrating AI, machine learning, robotics, and patented 3D printing that could build a rocket in sixty days instead of years. They had backing from Mark Cuban, Y Combinator, and Social Capital. They had a factory full of engineers who were inventing the future of space manufacturing.

What they didn’t have yet was a clear story.

Nobody outside the aerospace industry knew who Relativity was. The brand had no coherent positioning. The messaging was scattered across different narratives depending on who you asked: were they a 3D printing company? A rocket company? An AI company? A manufacturing company? Everyone inside the building could explain the technology. At the time, nobody could explain why it mattered in a sentence that a journalist, an investor, or a potential customer would remember.

I came on as a consultant and acted as an interim CMO with a simple mandate: make people care. Relativity became the #2 most valuable private space company after SpaceX, valued at $2.3 billion at the time. This is the story of how that happened, and the decisions that made it work.

How Do You Diagnose a Startup’s Brand Problem?

Every engagement starts with a diagnosis. At Relativity, it took about a week. I’d already felt the power of the technology walking through the factory. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that nobody outside the building could feel it.

But the story was fragmented. Internally, the company talked about itself in technical language that was precise and accurate, but inaccessible. The press coverage that existed was sporadic and focused on the novelty of 3D printing rather than on the strategic significance of what Relativity was actually building. The company was being covered as a curiosity, not as a category leader.

This is a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly across different industries. A company with genuinely exceptional technology and a team that can explain every technical detail but can’t answer the simplest question: why should anyone who isn’t an engineer care about this? It’s not a marketing problem. It’s a narrative problem. And you can’t solve it by buying ads or hiring a PR firm. You have to solve it by rewriting the story from scratch.

How Do You Choose the Right Positioning for a Startup?

Relativity could have been positioned in at least four ways. A 3D printing company that happens to make rockets. A rocket company that happens to use 3D printing. An AI and robotics company building an autonomous manufacturing platform. Or a space infrastructure company that was fundamentally rethinking how rockets get made.

Each of these framings was technically accurate. Only one of them was strategically correct.

I worked with the CEO and CTO to settle on the fourth: Relativity was building the first autonomous rocket factory. Not a 3D printer. Not a rocket. A factory. An entirely new way to manufacture space vehicles, one that could reduce build time from years to days and fundamentally change the economics of access to space.

This positioning choice mattered for three reasons. First, it was bigger than any single product. A 3D-printed rocket is a novelty. An autonomous factory that can build any rocket is a platform, and platforms attract different kinds of attention, investment, and valuation multiples than products do. Second, it put Relativity in a category of one. There were other rocket companies. There were other 3D printing companies. There was nobody else building an autonomous rocket factory. Third, it created a narrative that could grow with the company. When Relativity eventually expanded beyond rockets, the “autonomous factory” positioning wouldn’t break. The “3D-printed rocket company” positioning would have.

What Relativity confirmed for me is that the most important marketing decision a startup makes isn’t about channels or campaigns or content. It’s about the story. Get the story wrong, and everything you build on top of it underperforms. Get the story right, and everything you do afterward is amplified. At Relativity, the story was right, and everything that followed benefited from it.

How Do You Turn a Product Demo into a Brand Experience?

One of the first things I did was redesign the factory tour.

This sounds trivial. It wasn’t. Relativity’s factory in Los Angeles was one of the most visually stunning environments I’d ever walked through. Stargate, their massive 3D printer, was building rocket parts in real time. The scale was staggering. The process was mesmerizing. And almost nobody was seeing it, because the tour had been designed as a technical walkthrough rather than a brand experience.

We redesigned it as a story. Every stop on the tour corresponded to a chapter in Relativity’s narrative: here’s the problem with traditional rocket manufacturing, here’s how we’re solving it, here’s what it means for the future of space access. The technology spoke for itself, but the tour gave people a framework for understanding why the technology mattered. By the time a journalist, investor, or potential customer finished the tour, they didn’t just understand the product. They understood the category.

This is something I learned early in my career launching products at Lucasfilm and Nintendo: the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like an experience. When you walk someone through a story rather than pitch them a product, they remember it differently. They internalize the narrative. They retell it. And when a journalist retells your story in their own words, that’s worth more than any press release you could write.

After the factory tour redesign, journalists who visited the factory wrote feature stories. Not because we asked them to, but because they’d experienced something they wanted to share. That’s the difference between a tour and a brand experience.

How Do You Build a Press Strategy for a Company Nobody’s Heard Of?

The key insight was sequencing. Press coverage isn’t a single event. It’s a narrative arc. I designed Relativity’s coverage to move through three phases: “here’s an interesting company” to “here’s the company that’s changing space manufacturing” to “here’s why this company is building the future of humanity in space.” Each story built on the one before it. By the time we were in phase three, journalists were pitching their editors on Relativity stories without us asking.

With our PR firm, we identified the journalists who covered the intersection of technology, manufacturing, and space. We built relationships individually. We gave them exclusive angles that improved their reporting and their coverage. That last part matters: the best press relationships aren’t transactional. They’re built on making the journalist’s work better.

Results came fast. In seven months, we went from sporadic coverage to 100+ feature stories in top-tier outlets. CNBC, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, NPR, Wired, TechCrunch, CNN, PBS, CBS, Politico, Ars Technica, Business Insider, Space News. Not press releases that got picked up. Feature stories. Long-form pieces where journalists spent time in the factory, talked to the team, and wrote about Relativity as a category-defining company.

We increased feature story placements by 10x. But the number that matters more is this: the stories consistently positioned Relativity the way we’d positioned ourselves. The narrative stuck. Journalists weren’t writing “interesting 3D printing startup.” They were writing “autonomous rocket factory that could change the economics of space.” When your positioning shows up in other people’s words without you putting them there, you know the story is working.

Why Should Investor Relations and Marketing Be the Same Function?

Most startups treat investor relations and marketing as separate functions. At Relativity, I treated them as the same thing.

My logic was simple: the same story that makes a journalist write a feature makes an investor write a check. If the positioning is strong enough to convince a reporter at Fortune that Relativity is the most important space company nobody’s heard of, it’s strong enough to convince an investor that this is a category-defining opportunity.

I developed investor relations programs alongside the press strategy. The factory tour served double duty: investors who visited left with the same narrative that journalists carried out. The fundraising materials, the pitch deck, the one-pagers, the website, all used the same positioning, the same language, the same story arc. There was no gap between the public narrative and the investor narrative, because they were the same narrative.

This mattered enormously when the Series C came together. The $140 million round closed with investors who’d read the press coverage, visited the factory, and encountered a company that told a consistent story across every touchpoint. They weren’t buying a 3D-printed rocket. They were buying the autonomous factory platform, which is a much larger bet with much larger upside. That framing came from the positioning work.

How Do Third-Party Partnerships Build Category Credibility?

If Relativity’s story was truly about the future of manufacturing and access to space, then the audience was much bigger than the aerospace trade press. So we built editorial partnerships with PBS, Discovery’s Seeker, CBS, and LinkedIn. Not advertising buys. Content partnerships that put Relativity’s story in front of audiences who cared about science and the future but would never visit a rocket company’s website. Relativity’s story wasn’t a startup story. It was a space story. That reframing opened doors we hadn’t anticipated.

We also secured World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers and MIT Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 for the founders. These weren’t vanity metrics. They were credibility markers that showed up in investor conversations, customer negotiations, and recruiting. When you’re a company most people haven’t heard of, third-party validation from institutions like WEF and MIT compresses the trust-building process by months.

How Do You Convert Brand Awareness into Actual Revenue?

Press coverage and brand awareness are not business outcomes. They’re inputs to business outcomes. The test of whether the marketing worked isn’t how many stories we placed. It’s what those stories produced.

At Relativity, the press and brand strategy directly contributed to three measurable outcomes. First, the $140 million Series C, which closed with investors who’d been warmed by the coverage and the factory experience. Second, multimillion-dollar satellite launch contracts with first customers, secured through partnerships, acquisition programs and events we designed specifically to convert awareness into commercial relationships. Third, a talent pipeline that brought world-class engineers to a company they’d read about in Wired or seen on PBS, which is a competitive advantage that’s hard to quantify but impossible to ignore in aerospace, where engineering talent is the scarcest resource.

The launch contracts are the outcome I’m most proud of, because they’re the hardest to attribute to marketing. Satellite companies don’t sign multimillion-dollar contracts because they read a Forbes article. They sign them because they believe in the technology, the team, and the timeline. But they show up to the conversation in the first place because they’ve encountered a brand that seems credible and important. Marketing didn’t close those deals. Marketing created the conditions in which those deals could happen. That distinction matters, and it’s the one that most founders and most marketers get wrong.

What Would I Do Differently?

I want to be honest about this because every case study that doesn’t include mistakes is a sales pitch, not a story.

If I could go back, I’d have pushed harder on digital infrastructure earlier. We built the press strategy and the brand experience before we fully built the digital engine that should have captured and nurtured more of the attention those efforts generated. The website was redesigned, the materials were created, but the demand capture and nurture systems were behind the brand work. In a perfect world, those would have been built in parallel. In the real world, I had to sequence, and I chose brand and story first. That was the right priority, but the gap cost us some efficiency in the middle months.

What Does Relativity Space Teach Us About Startup Marketing?

I left Relativity after about a year to move back to San Francisco. I transitioned the role to a full-time hire who could carry the strategy forward. By then, the brand was established, the positioning was locked, the press relationships were built, and the category was defined.

What I took from Relativity was confirmation of something I’d believed for a long time: the most important marketing decision is the story. Not the channels. Not the tactics. Not the budget. The story. When you get the story right, and I mean truly right, in a way that’s distinctive, defensible, and bigger than any single product, everything else gets easier. The press wants to cover you. The investors want to fund you. The customers want to work with you. The engineers want to join you. Because the story resonates.

Relativity went from unknown to the #2 most valuable private space company after SpaceX. The technology deserved that outcome. The team earned it. My job was to make sure the world could see what was already there.

That’s what the right story does. It doesn’t create something from nothing. It makes visible what was always true.

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If you’re building something the world hasn’t seen yet:

For founders: If you have extraordinary technology and nobody can explain why it matters, that’s the problem I solve. Through Wondr Venture Studio, I work with early-stage companies on positioning, brand, and go-to-market strategy. Let’s talk about your story.

For investors: If you’re backing a company that has the technology but not the narrative, I’ve been the person who bridges that gap. I’d welcome the conversation about your portfolio.

For everyone: Subscribe for case studies, essays on growth strategy, and the decisions that compound. Or share this with a founder whose technology is better than their story.

About the Author:
Maly Ly is the Founder & CEO of Wondr, an AI-native social and discovery platform, and the founder of a growth lab advising early-stage startups. She is a founder, growth executive, and operator who has helped scale multiple startups to breakout growth and unicorn status across AI, Web3, aerospace, SaaS, and consumer tech.

Her experience includes leadership roles at category-defining companies such as AdRoll—named the Inc. 500’s #1 Fastest Growing Marketing Company—and Relativity Space, which reached a $2.3 billion valuation and became the second most valuable private space company after SpaceX. She has also held leadership positions at Eventbrite, Sojern, YouCaring (later acquired by GoFundMe), and SecurityPal AI, and earlier in her career helped launch top-selling products for franchises including Star Wars, Tomb Raider, and Nintendo.

Beyond tech, Maly spent two decades producing art, music, and both corporate and underground events, while leading digital campaigns for global brands including Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Burberry, and Williams Sonoma. She is also a Certified High Performance Coach.

Her work has been recognized by Forbes, Fast Company, and Direct Marketing News with its Hall of Femme honor. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Forbes, The Tonight Show, and The Ellen Show.

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