Behind the Work
Every person I work with has built something valuable and can't find the words for it. I've spent the last several weeks realizing I'm one of them
I’ve been writing online for several years, but if you’ve been reading Signal & Story, you’d probably struggle to describe exactly what I do.
Part of that is by design, and part of it is habit. Each time I’m asked:
“What do you do?”
I pause for a second and end up saying something along the lines of:
“I’m a writer/creative director/marketer/copywriter”.
I’ve never trained to be a writer, an artist, or a creator. I just love learning about things that excite me and sharing the process on the internet. That’s much easier to write here, and a lot harder to explain to someone else in person.
So, to try and make sense of it all, I’ve been reflecting on the work I’ve done, how I got to each milestone, and what I see myself building over the next few years.
This piece is the synthesis of those ideas.
Doctors & Writers
April 2024.
Two years after graduating med school, everything I did centred around copywriting.
Copywriting is one of the best skills you can learn, even in today’s world where writing sales pages, email sequences, or content can be done while waiting for your morning coffee. Once you learn copy, you also learn how to communicate ideas, clearly and effectively. But above everything, I found the entire process from the human psychology of persuasion, to structuring the perfect string of words that triggered someone to take action, genuinely fascinating.
Around that same time, I was in the early stages of launching Doctors & Writers along with Adi Kumar, a neurosurgeon and writer from the UK. We connected via Twitter, talked at length about all that we worked on at the time, and how writing was at the heart of everything we’d built.
One question we kept circling on was what if more doctors started writing online? We knew what publishing had done for both of us — the clarity, the opportunities, and especially the people it connected us with. So what if we packaged what we’d learned with doctors who want to put themselves out there, but haven’t figured their way through the common objections of:
How did you get started? How do you have the time? What do you even write about?
After running a free pilot cohort and announcing the project on LinkedIn, we got the signal we needed to go all in. We launched a website, started a podcast, and published a weekly newsletter. We wanted to create a movement and a place where doctors had access to tools, tips, and resources to finally share their words with the world. With that vision, I put all my focus on becoming a better writer and teaching everything I’d learnt on the platform we’d built.
But often in life, the right things arrive at the wrong time. With moving countries, and starting new roles, life pulled us in different directions and we chose to take a step back from the project.
What stuck with me most from that period was how much I loved working on a raw idea and doing everything possible to make it exist. And to have a co-founder who was just as passionate as I was gave me a sense of confidence I’d never felt before.
Startups
May 2024.
Earlier that same year in my first week of Write of Passage, I came across a new writing tool I fell in love with called Vnote.
I reached out to the founder saying:
“I’m amazed at what you’ve built. I’ve been using it for the last few days and it’s saved me countless hours of drafting and editing!”
The product was excellent, but the branding, website, and messaging were completely off. There was a disconnect between what the product did and what it communicated to the market, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how to fix it.
So I opened up Notability on my iPad and started drawing diagrams of their content gaps, notes on their messaging, breakdowns of where the sales pages lost people — the same way I would organise or learn a topic in medicine.
When I got on a call with the co-founder, Nick, I had no pitch or agenda in mind. He mentioned his startup was based in Silicon Valley, and one of their major struggles was establishing brand awareness and attracting new users. So, I started walking through my list of suggestions, and at one point, pulled up the Notability drawings.
As soon as Nick saw it, he said:
“Hold on, could you show me that again?”
I walked him through everything, and by the end of the call, he asked if I could send him screenshots of what I’d put together.
I didn’t think too much of it. I figured he was curious and might explore the ideas on his own. But within a couple of days, I was invited to work in a part-time/internship role, and it wasn’t long after that I joined the team full time.
Our goal was securing a seed investment round by the end of the year, and to get there, we had a wide range of projects to get off the ground like creating harmony between the product and its user base, restructuring our brand’s positioning, systemising our content, and growing our monthly recurring revenue.
As the new website, emails, and positioning rolled out, users who had gone quiet were now suddenly engaged. Our open rates grew by over 23%, our LinkedIn audience grew steadily with each month, and our trial campaigns did exceptionally well.
By December, within five months of joining, Vnote got fully acquired.
From there, I joined a new role as Creative Director for Vojomo, the acquiring company. Greater ambitions, an incredibly stacked team, and an environment that demanded nothing but the very best.
With my calendar packed and notebooks running out of pages, I absorbed everything I could working alongside the founders.
But towards the end of the year, I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a restlessness I still can’t quite explain. I’d walk into meetings unsure of what to say, and my natural creative energy now felt completely blocked. I didn’t know what to do with all the building tension. And for almost all of 2025, I hadn’t written a single thing. Nothing on Twitter, nothing on LinkedIn, and no active newsletter either.
All the momentum I’d built over years was sitting untouched.
By the end of the year, we decided to go our separate ways, and heading into 2026, I knew it was time to channel all that I’d learned into something of my own.
Act Two
September 2025.
A few months before the end of my startup tenure, I joined a new program from the founders of Write of Passage called Act Two.
I knew just how transformative WOP had been for me, and when I got the first few emails about the new program with the call: “finally build that creative project you’ve been putting off”, I thought to myself, maybe this could be exactly what I need.
At the same time, there was another voice in my head that said:
“Going from zero to a hundred in five weeks with live classes and weekly projects while managing work, health, and everything else? You must be crazy.”
But I couldn’t give in.
I knew I had to take this opportunity, and after a few days of deliberation, I decided to sign up.
One of my three projects was structuring a writing business. I didn’t know what exactly people wanted or how I could best deliver value.
Should I focus solely on copywriting? Maybe a mixture of branding and storytelling?
To answer those questions, I launched a survey in week two where I offered Loom breakdowns of students’ sales pages in exchange for feedback on what I was building. I got some fantastic data points, and by the end of the program, I launched Signal & Story and a YouTube channel 15 years in the making.
Some nights during Act Two, I’d stay up for the live lessons at 1am with ideas flowing faster than I could write them down. I was wide awake, scribbling into notebooks, on calls with other creators and builders. The creative energy I thought I’d lost now came surging back.
Towards the end of the program, I got a message from Will Mannon:
“We’d love for you to do a profile write-up of Cris Valerio. This will be our first ever ‘Citizens of the Internet’ profile — trying to emulate the ‘Humans of New York’ style. This is a great way for both sides to test out a potentially bigger partnership. Let me know what you think!”
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think my skillset was strong enough to be trusted with something like this. But the fact that I was gave me all the confidence I needed.
Over the next three months, I wrote ten creator profiles. Each time, I prepped for every interview the way I would have prepped for an exam — building a story arc, mapping out what I already knew, identifying the gaps, and then structuring the questions to fill it all in.
I wanted to sit across from creators and capture something timeless that best represents who they are, what they’ve accomplished, and put together a story they couldn’t tell about themselves.
This was my doctor brain connecting the dots. It just looked a lot different now.
I kept hearing versions of “that’s a really good question, I never thought about it that way” and “I love the way you captured my story” in my conversations. Talking to these creators, seeing them light up when asked a specific question, and reading their feedback once they saw their own story on paper gave me back something I’d been missing in my work for a long time: humanity and connection.
In that same period, I connected with a client on the basis of a landing page breakdown I put together. And what started as an honest conversation turned into a partnership that’s been building ever since.
That gave me all the proof I needed to see that I can bring value to the people I’m excited to work with and if I wanted, I could run this on my own terms.
By the end of 2025, it was time to shoulder that same responsibility and see how far I could take this.
Flying Solo
January 2026.
One of the first cold emails I sent that month was to a brand strategy pioneer. He was someone I admired from a distance, but never had the opportunity to speak to. All I asked for was a conversation, but at the time, that alone seemed enormous.
It took me an hour to come up with those few hundred words. I rewrote the opening four times, deleted several paragraphs because it felt too forward, and even after all that, I shut my laptop as soon as I hit send, convinced I’d made a mistake.
He responded graciously, and we got on a call a few days later. And from that conversation alone, my understanding of the work I was building transformed once again.
Over the following weeks, I started sending out more emails to founders, strategists, and people whose work inspired me. Each time I received a response, I had the same reaction:
Wow, they actually responded!
I didn’t have to over-posture or pretend to be someone else.
I just reached out as honestly as I could. And it worked.
When I started working solo at the start of the year, I expected most of my work to centre around writing. But that became just a small part of the bigger picture. Everything I’ve been working on since has expanded to a blend of my startup and creative experience: brand strategy, positioning, offer architecture, copywriting, growth marketing, and storytelling.
A lot of times, the person who runs a business is too close to their own work. There’s a gap between what they’re building and how they communicate it, or in other words, the curse of knowledge.
That makes it impossible to see clearly when you’re on the inside. And that’s exactly where I come in: asking questions they haven’t asked themselves, connecting dots they’re standing too close to see, so that they say:
“That’s exactly it, I just couldn’t find those words on my own.”
Every person I work with has built something valuable and can’t find the words for it. And I’ve spent the last several weeks realizing I’m one of them.
What’s Next
If someone asked me tomorrow what I do, I’d probably still pause.
But after writing this, it feels like less of a stumble, and more of choosing which part of the answer I want to give — because for the first time, there are too many honest answers, and they all connect with one another.
My whole career so far has been about trying different things, learning on the go, and following my curiosities. There’s no bulletproof guideline I’m following. I try to see what works, what doesn’t, and share both as honestly as I can — first with myself, then through writing, and eventually by sharing it here.
This newsletter is what’s helped me channel so much of that energy I once had no outlet to express. And as we head into the second half of 2026, I finally feel like I have the right foundation to build from.
Before I sign off, if Signal & Story has resonated with you in some way, whether there’s a piece that stuck, an idea that changed how you think about something, or even just a line you keep coming back to, I’d love to hear about it.
Your words matter and are the heart of everything I will continue to build on in the future.
Talk soon,
Pranav