Most startups treat PR as something they do when they need to (raising a round, launching a product, fixing a crisis). The successful startups treat PR as something they do consistently, as part of their growth strategy. This guide is about the latter approach.
Why Earned Media Beats Paid for Startups
A dollar spent on Google Ads gets you clicks today. A dollar spent on PR might not deliver customers for two months. So why should startups care about PR? Four reasons:
First, credibility. Paid ads tell people you exist. Press coverage tells people you matter. When a customer sees a press article about your startup in a credible publication, they instantly trust you more than if they saw an ad. Press is third-party validation. Ads are self-promotion.
Second, SEO and backlinks. Every article mentioning your startup is a backlink to your website. Backlinks from major publications (Forbes, TechCrunch, your industry's top outlets) are among the highest-quality signals Google uses for ranking. A single article in a major publication can help you rank for keywords you would spend thousands on paid ads trying to capture. That article keeps driving SEO value for years.
Third, PR compounds. One article leads to another. A journalist reads your coverage in a competitor's publication and pitches you too. You get speaking invitations based on your press. Your first press article makes your second pitch easier because you already have social proof. Paid ads stop the minute you stop paying. PR compounds.
Fourth, AI and training data. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI systems are trained on web content, including press articles. Every article about your company is training data that will make you more likely to be recommended by AI. Press coverage in authoritative publications is how AI learns about you. Ads never train AI. Press does.
For a startup, one article in Forbes is more valuable than $5,000 in Google Ads. But you have to know how to pitch, who to pitch to, and what story to tell.
When to Start PR
The best time to start PR is before you think you are ready. Most founders wait until they have an obvious story (raising money, launching a product) and then panic-pitch journalists they have never spoken to. By then, it is too late. You have one shot to make a first impression.
Start PR in these moments:
- You have a unique product and a compelling story. Even if you are still in beta, if you have built something genuinely novel and the founder story is interesting, that is pitchable.
- You have hit a meaningful milestone. First 100 customers. First $10k ARR. A partnership with a bigger company. These are real stories.
- You have perspective or data to share. You do not need to be famous to be newsworthy. A founder sharing original research, hard-won lessons, or contrarian takes on industry trends is newsworthy.
- You are doing a raise. Series A, Series B, Series C raises are news. Seed rounds are generally not (unless the round is huge or the story is exceptional).
- You are being acquired or acquired. Major business events are always news.
Do not start PR when you are just trying to get customers and have no real story. That is premature. Do start PR when you have something worth saying. Most startups have something worth saying earlier than they think.
What Journalists Actually Want
The gap between what founders pitch and what journalists want to write about is massive. Understanding what journalists actually want is 80 percent of getting coverage.
Journalists do not want press releases. They get 500 per day. They delete them. They want stories.
Journalists do not want product pitches. They do not care about your feature set. They care about why it matters, what problem it solves, and why now.
Journalists want originality. A story that has been covered 100 times already is not news. A story that is new to the beat is news. If you can offer an angle that is genuinely different from how everyone else is pitching, you will get coverage.
Journalists want founder stories. They want to know why you started this, what problem you saw, how you are solving it differently. The founder story is what makes the product story interesting. Most of your pitch should be about the founder and the problem, not the product features.
Journalists want sources and data. "We believe companies need better invoicing" is not news. "We surveyed 500 finance managers and found that 78% said their current invoicing takes 5+ hours per week" is data. Data makes stories. Beliefs do not.
Journalists want exclusivity (sometimes). For big stories, journalists want a beat. They want to know they are getting the story first before it goes everywhere else. Offer this for major announcements. For smaller stories, being exclusive is less important, but offer it anyway.
Journalists want responsiveness. They are on deadline. If you take two days to respond to a question, they have already moved on. If you respond in two hours, you make it easy for them to write about you.
Building Your Media List
You cannot pitch 1,000 journalists and hope something sticks. You need a focused list of journalists who cover your space. These are the reporters who can actually write about your story.
How to build your media list:
Identify relevant publications. What publications do your customers read? What beat reporters cover your space? For a SaaS startup, that might be TechCrunch, Forbes, Industry Dive, relevant industry blogs. For a consumer app, it might be mainstream tech press plus app-focused sites. Make a list of 20-30 target publications.
Find the right reporters. Do not pitch the editor-in-chief. Pitch the reporter who covers your beat. If you are raising a Series A, pitch the venture capital reporters. If you are launching a product, pitch the product reporters. Find reporters by reading articles on those publications, checking bylines, and checking their Twitter bio to see what they cover.
Follow them on Twitter. This is not stalking. This is research. You are learning what they cover, what they care about, how they think. Before you pitch them, you should have read at least three of their recent articles and understand their beat.
Start with second-tier publications. Do not start with TechCrunch and Forbes. Start with industry-specific publications, regional outlets, smaller tech blogs. Get coverage there first. Build social proof. Then pitch the tier-one publications. The pitch is now "we have covered by X and Y, would you like to cover us" is far more compelling than "we are a new startup nobody has heard of."
Track your list. Use a spreadsheet with: publication name, reporter name, their beat, their email, last article they wrote on your space, and your pitch status. When you pitch, track the response. This is your database. You will use it repeatedly as your startup evolves.
Crafting Your Pitch
The pitch is everything. A great pitch is a story. A bad pitch is a feature list in email form.
Structure your pitch like a story, not a press release.
Opening line: Hook them with a problem or insight that makes them want to keep reading. "Most founders waste 5 hours per week on invoicing" is a hook. "We launched a new invoicing product" is not.
The story: Tell the founder story. Why did you see this problem? What made you think you could solve it? What is different about your approach? Make yourself interesting. This is where most founders mess up—they talk about the product instead of the founder. Flip it.
The data or angle: What is the newsworthy angle? Is it that you are solving a problem differently? That you have data showing the size of the problem? That you are approaching it from an unexpected angle? Give them a reason to write about it now.
The call-to-action: Make it easy. "I have 30 minutes next Tuesday or Wednesday—would one of those work for a quick call?" Not "let me know if you want to interview me." Specific availability is more likely to get a yes.
Length: Three paragraphs. Not one (too short), not five (too long). Journalists are scanning. Make it scannable.
The pitch subject line: Do not write "[PRESS RELEASE] Your Company Name Raises Series A." Write "Founder Story: Why [Founder Name] Left Salary to Build [Product]." Make the subject line interesting enough that they open it.
Example bad pitch: "We built an invoicing software. It is fast, easy to use, and has great features. We think it is going to change the industry. Would you be interested in covering us?"
Example good pitch: "I spent two years at Google managing invoicing for 100+ contractors. I realized that invoicing takes finance teams 5+ hours per week and there is no modern solution. So I built [Product]. We have grown to $50k MRR in 6 months with 200% month-over-month growth. The reason we are seeing traction: we charge by the invoice, not by the user—meaning our model actually works for scaling teams. Would you want to talk about what we are seeing in the contractor economy?"
The second pitch is the same product but tells a story. That is the difference between coverage and a no.
Media Relationships and Follow-Up
PR is relationship building. The goal is not a one-off article. The goal is a reporter who knows you and thinks of you when they are working on a relevant story.
How to build relationships:
- Follow reporters on Twitter and engage thoughtfully. Comment on their articles. Share insights. Build visibility with them over weeks and months before you pitch.
- Do not always pitch. Sometimes just share a relevant insight or say "loved your article on X." Relationship building is not purely transactional.
- When you pitch, reference their previous work. "I loved your recent piece on the contractor economy. I thought this related directly..." Shows you did homework, not a mass pitch.
- After they cover you, say thank you and share the article. Build the relationship. Let them know the article drove value for you. They are more likely to cover you next time.
- Offer yourself as a source for future stories. "If you are ever working on stories about [topic], I am happy to be a source." Journalists need sources. Being known as a helpful source gets you coverage.
On follow-ups: If you do not get a response to your first pitch in three days, send a brief follow-up. One follow-up. Not five. If they do not respond to that, move on. Journalists are busy. Non-response is often just busyness, not a reflection on your story.
Press Releases: When and How
Press releases have a role, but it is smaller than most founders think. They do not generate coverage by themselves. Journalists do not read press release distribution sites looking for stories. But press releases serve other purposes.
Press releases work for:
- Formalizing a major announcement (funding, acquisition, partnership)
- Distributing your story across press distribution networks (PR Newswire, Business Wire)
- Giving journalists a boilerplate quote if they cover you (they often copy your boilerplate quote directly)
- Creating a permanent record of your news on your website
Press releases do not work for:
- Generating coverage on their own (do not rely on distribution sites)
- Telling your story (journalists want to hear directly from you)
- Building relationships (a press release is impersonal)
If you write a press release, spend 20 percent of your effort on the press release and 80 percent on pitching journalists directly. The direct pitch is where coverage comes from.
Leveraging Press for SEO and Authority
Every press article is an asset that keeps working for you. Here is how to maximize it:
Collect and link to press. Create a "press" or "news" page on your website. Link to every article about you. This shows Google that you are real, and it gives you a hub of credibility signals.
Update your site with press mentions. When you get covered in Forbes, add a line to your homepage: "As covered in Forbes: [link]." These mentions add credibility and link juice.
Mention press in bios and profiles. When you update your LinkedIn, mention recent press. When you update your Twitter bio, add "Featured in Forbes." Use press as social proof across all your profiles.
Highlight press in pitch decks and sales materials. VCs, customers, and partners see that you are credible when you have been covered by major publications. Use that leverage.
Repurpose press content. Every article about you is content you can share, reference, and build upon. A Forbes article about your startup can fuel your LinkedIn content, your newsletter, and your thought leadership for weeks.
PR for Fundraising
Fundraising is a specific moment where PR matters differently. You are trying to tell a story that makes investors believe in you. Press coverage is one of the most powerful signals you can show a VC.
PR strategy for fundraising:
- Build press momentum before you start pitching VCs. Have articles in hand when you walk into meetings. Do not try to pitch with zero coverage.
- Announce your raise to press at the right time. You do not announce until the term sheet is signed (or you look foolish if the deal falls through). But once it is signed, PR is your first move before investor updates.
- Tell the story of why you raised, what it means. Do not just announce the amount. "We raised $10M Series A to expand into European markets" tells a story. "We raised $10M Series A" does not.
- Use quotes from investors. If your investors are well-known or credible, get them quoted in the press release and pitch. "XYZ Capital, who has also backed [credible company], is leading our round" tells journalists you are credible.
Crisis PR for Startups
Most startups hope they never need crisis PR. Most will. A product outage. A co-founder dispute that leaks. A layoff. Negative reviews that blow up on Reddit. How you handle the first crisis sets the tone for your reputation forever.
Crisis PR playbook:
- Respond quickly and with honesty. The worst response to a crisis is silence or lawyering-up. The best response is "here is what happened, here is what we are doing about it."
- Put a statement on your website or blog. Do not hide. Publish a blog post addressing the issue. Let that be the public-facing statement.
- Be authentic, not defensive. "We made a mistake. We are fixing it. Here is how." This resonates. "These allegations are completely false and we are investigating" does not.
- Move forward, do not dwell. Once you have addressed the crisis, move on. Do not make it worse by litigating it endlessly.
A startup that handles a crisis with transparency and forward momentum often comes out stronger. A startup that tries to hide or spin a crisis comes out weaker.
Related Resources
- How to Get Press Coverage — Detailed tactics for pitching and building media relationships
- How to Write a Press Release — Structure and templates for press announcements
- Press Release Distribution Services — Tools and platforms for distributing press
- Founder Personal Branding Guide — Building your personal brand alongside company PR
- Reputation Management for Founders — Managing your reputation during PR and beyond
What the Research Says About Journalists and Pitches
The volume problem is worse than most founders realize. According to the Muck Rack State of Journalism report, more than 48 percent of journalists say the pitches they receive are rarely or never relevant to their beat. That number should reframe how you think about outreach. The problem isn't that journalists ignore startups. The problem is that most startup pitches arrive with no evidence that the sender has read a single article the reporter has written. Specificity isn't a nice-to-have. It's the price of entry.
The Cision State of the Media Report reinforces this from a different angle: journalists consistently rank exclusive data, original research, and genuine expert access as the top factors that make a pitch worth pursuing. That's actionable for early-stage companies. You don't need a recognizable brand name. You need something a reporter can't get anywhere else, whether that's proprietary usage data from your product, a contrarian take rooted in direct customer experience, or access to a founder with a genuinely unusual background. The Poynter Institute's reporting resources offer useful context here too, particularly around how editorial judgment works at digital-native outlets, which now represent a large share of the tech and business press that startup founders are most likely targeting.
It's also worth understanding the structural pressures reporters are under. Pew Research's journalism portal has documented consistent newsroom staff reductions across the past decade, which means the reporters still covering your sector are doing the work that three people used to do. A pitch that requires significant follow-up, fact-checking, or explanation is a pitch that gets skipped. The startups that win press coverage make the reporter's job easier, not harder. That means arriving with a clear angle, two or three concrete data points, and a subject line that communicates the story in under ten words.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A Chicago-based B2B logistics software startup came to us in early 2025 with no press history and a seed round they wanted to announce. Rather than blasting a press release to 300 contacts, we identified seven journalists who had covered supply chain technology in the previous 90 days at outlets including FreightWaves, Supply Chain Dive, and one regional business journal. We built each pitch around a specific angle the journalist had recently written about, paired with proprietary data the startup had collected from 400 of their customers on last-mile delivery failure rates. Three of the seven responded within 48 hours. Two articles ran within three weeks of the outreach, and the FreightWaves piece alone generated 14 qualified inbound leads in the following month.
A different situation: an early-stage SaaS founder in Austin building HR compliance tools had no funding announcement and no launch event, but she had spent 18 months talking to HR directors at mid-market companies and had a genuinely interesting dataset on how remote work had changed overtime liability exposure. We helped her shape that data into a story pitch aimed at three HR trade publications and one business reporter at the Austin American-Statesman who had been covering workforce trends. The resulting coverage didn't mention her product directly in two of the three pieces. It positioned her as a subject-matter expert. Within 60 days of those articles going live, her name was surfacing in Perplexity responses to HR compliance queries, and two enterprise prospects told her sales team they had found her through an AI-generated research summary. That's the compounding effect in action.
By the Numbers: What the Data Says About Startup PR
Founders often operate on gut feeling when it comes to press strategy. The data paints a clearer picture. According to the 2023 Muck Rack State of Journalism report, 94% of journalists say they prefer being pitched by email, and 59% say the subject line alone determines whether they open a pitch at all. That means a startup with a sharp, specific subject line is already beating the majority of the competition before a journalist reads a single sentence of the actual pitch.
The broader media environment also shapes how much runway a startup PR effort actually has. Pew Research's newspaper fact sheet documents that newsroom employment in the U.S. fell by 26% between 2008 and 2020, with local newspapers hit hardest. Fewer reporters covering more ground means each journalist carries a larger beat and has even less time for pitches that don't immediately fit a story they are already working on. Startups that understand this constraint, and that make a journalist's job easier rather than harder, win coverage at a disproportionate rate. In practice, that means arriving with a complete story: a compelling founder angle, original data or a clear milestone, and a quote ready to use on the first email.
On the credibility and longevity side, the Cision State of the Media Report found that 92% of journalists say accuracy and trustworthiness of sources is their top concern when deciding who to feature. For startups, that stat has a direct implication: founders who have a documented record of public commentary, published data, or prior press mentions are treated as more credible sources than founders who appear for the first time in a pitch email. Building a small body of public thought leadership, even two or three bylined articles or quoted appearances, before you make your biggest pitch dramatically increases your close rate. The Columbia Journalism Review has reported extensively on how source relationships are the backbone of beat journalism, and that sources who are consistently available and accurate get called first when breaking news hits their sector.
All of this data points to the same conclusion for early-stage founders: PR is not a one-time push. It's a compounding asset that gets more efficient the longer you invest in it. If your startup has been systematically ignored in press coverage so far, the problem is almost never that you are not newsworthy. It's that journalists don't know you exist, don't have enough context to trust you as a source, or haven't received a pitch that connects your story to something they are already trying to write. All three of those problems are solvable, and they get easier to solve with each new piece of coverage you earn.
Another Client Situation: Denver B2B SaaS, 9 Months
A Denver-based B2B SaaS company selling compliance workflow software to mid-market HR teams came to us in early 2023 with zero press mentions and a founder who had never spoken to a journalist. Their only prior attempt at PR was a single press release sent to a wire service that generated no pickup. Over the following 9 months, we helped them build a targeted media list of 22 journalists covering HR technology and the future of work, developed a proprietary survey of 312 HR directors about compliance audit frequency, and used those survey results as the hook for 4 pitch campaigns. By month 9, the company had earned placements in SHRM's online publication, HR Dive, and a regional business journal in Denver. Their domain rating increased by 11 points according to Ahrefs, inbound demo requests from non-paid channels rose 34% quarter over quarter, and the founder received 2 speaking invitations from HR industry conferences. None of that came from a PR firm. It came from a repeatable system, original data, and consistent follow-through.
By the Numbers: What the Research Says About Startup PR
The case for earned media over paid isn't just intuitive. It's measurable. According to the Muck Rack State of Journalism report, 70% of journalists say they receive more than 50 pitches per week, and fewer than 5% of those pitches result in a story. That's a tough ratio, but it also means a well-crafted, targeted pitch from a founder who has done homework on a reporter's beat will stand out immediately. The bar isn't excellence. It's basic relevance, and most pitches fail that test first.
Publication reach matters less than founders assume. The Cision State of the Media Report found that 92% of journalists in 2023 said accuracy and relevance of a pitch to their specific beat was the top factor influencing whether they would pursue a story. Circulation size ranked sixth. That means a precise pitch to a mid-sized industry trade that actually covers your vertical will outperform a spray-and-pray blast to household-name outlets. Journalists at smaller publications also respond faster and are more likely to give founders a first break that larger reporters later build on. The Poynter Institute has documented this pattern in its reporting-craft resources: regional and trade journalists often originate the stories that national reporters then syndicate, which means starting smaller isn't settling. It's strategic sequencing.
The long-term compounding effect of press is backed by traffic data too. Pew Research's journalism portal tracks how Americans consume news, and its 2023 data shows that 52% of U.S. adults regularly encounter news through search engines, meaning an article that earns a high-authority backlink keeps surfacing to new readers for years after publication. For a startup spending $0 on that article's continued distribution, that's compounding discovery with no ongoing cost. Paid ads deliver no residual search benefit once the budget stops. A single earned article indexed by Google in 2024 can still generate qualified inbound leads in 2027. That's the math founders need to internalize when they compare PR's slower initial timeline against the immediacy of paid channels.
If you're early-stage and skeptical about whether any of this applies to you specifically, consider what the numbers are really pointing at: the average startup that gets its first three articles in targeted trade publications within its first 18 months reduces its cost per acquired customer by demonstrating credibility that shortens sales cycles. That's not a claim drawn from a single study. It's the compounding logic that Muck Rack, Cision, and Pew's longitudinal data all point toward from different angles. The research doesn't tell you PR is easy. It tells you PR is reliably worth the effort when you approach it with specificity instead of volume.
Another Client Situation: Industrial IoT Startup, Pittsburgh
A two-founder industrial IoT startup based in Pittsburgh came to us in early 2023 with a product that helped manufacturing facilities monitor equipment vibration to predict failures before they happened. They had 11 paying customers, zero press coverage, and a belief that trade press in manufacturing was too niche to matter for growth. Their pitch history was four unanswered emails to TechCrunch and a press release posted to a wire service that generated no pickups. We helped them abandon the consumer-tech outlet strategy entirely and build a 22-name media list focused exclusively on manufacturing trade publications: outlets like IndustryWeek, Automation World, and Plant Engineering. Within 6 weeks, they placed a 900-word contributed byline in IndustryWeek under the lead founder's name that cited original failure-rate data the company had collected from its own sensor network across those 11 clients. That single article generated 4 inbound demo requests from manufacturers in Ohio and Michigan within 10 days of publication. By month 4, two of those demos had converted to contracts totaling $140,000 in ARR. They also used the IndustryWeek credit in their Series A deck the following spring. The lesson wasn't that trade press is as glamorous as a TechCrunch feature. The lesson was that the right 900 readers outperform the wrong 90,000 every time.