PR and media outreach

What this actually solves

An advertisement is a claim you paid to make about yourself. A journalist writing about you is somebody else deciding you are worth their readers' time, and buyers know the difference instinctively. That is the whole asset here, and it is why a funded company will spend on this while spending nothing on other channels.

For a startup specifically, the effect compounds in three directions at once. Coverage in a publication investors read shapes the next conversation about the next round. It makes hiring easier, because engineers check whether a company appears to exist beyond its own website. And it moves enterprise deals, where somebody in procurement searches the name and needs to find third-party evidence. There is a search benefit as well — an editorial link from a large publication lifts the whole domain in a way that no amount of directory listings does.

The uncomfortable part, and the reason this service has a bad reputation, is that the hardest work is not the outreach. It is finding a story. What sits in the news folder instead is a new website, a new feature, a rebrand, a milestone that matters internally and nowhere else. Pitching those is why journalists have learned to ignore agency email, and it is why our first month is spent looking for something that is genuinely new before writing a single pitch.

What we do, and in what order

1. Find the story, or establish that there is not one yet. Everything the company knows that nobody outside it does — proprietary data, an operational change, a result that contradicts what the sector assumes, a founder with a genuinely unusual route in. This is the step that decides whether the rest works, and if the answer is that there is nothing yet, we say so and propose building something worth reporting. One to two weeks.
2. Build the media list by hand. Forty to eighty names, each one arrived at by reading their recent pieces rather than by exporting a category from a database. Outlet, beat, what they have covered in the last few months, and the specific angle that fits them. No journalist name and no article title ever comes from a language model, because that is precisely the material models invent most confidently. One to two weeks, then maintained.
3. Write and send individual pitches, in small batches. Under ninety words, subject line under fifty characters. The structure is fixed — first line references their own recent work, second line states the new thing in one sentence, third line offers the proof or data we can hand over, last line asks one question they can answer yes or no to. Sent from a properly authenticated domain, never as a bulk send. Ongoing, weekly.
4. Follow up once, then stop. A single short follow-up after several working days. Silence after that is an answer, and continuing to chase converts a neutral contact into a person who filters your domain. Ongoing.
5. Handle what lands and report monthly. Interview scheduling, briefing the spokesperson, fact-checking requests, and then a report listing every pitch sent, every reply, every placement, and the ones that went nowhere. Half a day at month end.

Tools — Qwoted and Featured, where journalists post the question and you supply the answer, which is the fastest route to first coverage where no relationship with a writer exists yet; LinkedIn and X for understanding what a writer is currently interested in; the professional databases such as Muck Rack or Prowly where your budget justifies your own licence; and a maintained sheet for the list itself.

What moves the price

The range is $800–$5,000/mo and the arrangement is ongoing, because relationships with writers are not built inside a single campaign and a story rarely lands the month it is pitched. Three things decide where in that range a programme sits.

Which press you are aiming at. Trade and niche publications in your sector are reachable with a good story. Tier-one national and US technology press is a different level of competition for the same slot, takes longer, and fails more often.

Whether we are building the story or only distributing it. If you have data, a research piece and a spokesperson ready, this is outreach. If the story has to be found, structured and evidenced first — pulling numbers, shaping a finding, preparing a spokesperson — that is significantly more work and it sits higher in the range.

Volume and cadence of announcements. One announcement a quarter with sustained relationship work between is a lighter retainer than a continuous programme of monthly stories, commentary placement and reactive comment on breaking sector news.

What usually goes wrong

One pitch goes to the whole list. It is the defining amateur move and it fails twice. The journalist can tell within a line that they were not thought about, and a hundred near-identical emails from one domain in one morning looks exactly like bulk mail to the receiving servers, so the sending reputation degrades and future pitches land in spam. Personalised first lines are not a courtesy, they are the mechanism.

Coverage gets promised to win the account. Somebody says "guaranteed placements" in a pitch meeting, you sign on that basis, and three months later there is nothing to show and a relationship that cannot be repaired by explaining how editorial works. The honest version is harder to sell and it is the only version that survives month three.

A model is asked to produce the media list. It will happily return names, outlets and article titles that read perfectly and do not exist, or that belonged to a writer who left that publication two years ago. Pitching a person who does not cover the beat, or does not work there, is worse than not pitching at all. Every name on the list is verified against a live byline before it is used.