In startup PR, Christmas Starts in July

Advice

Here is an email we have received in one form or another more times than we can count. “We want to go out on the 18th, can you get us into [top-tier tech publication]?”

It is the 2nd. No contract has been signed. There is no press release, but worse – nobody thought about narrative, messaging, positioning, or what the story actually is.

Communicating a round sounds like a simple ask. The problem is that it’s about what’s behind the number that matters more, and if you don’t take some time to think about it properly, you will waste a great opportunity.

And the same applies to many other instances of PR work. You can always fast-track. But startup PR is not the same as shipping product at a startup. Ship fast and iterate is not possible in the same way. Reid Hoffman says you should be embarrassed of your first product, otherwise you launched too late. It’s definitely not like that in PR. Of course, imperfections will happen and learning will so too, but in PR you always want to try to seize the right windows of opportunity that will otherwise not be readily available.

What you are actually asking for

Start with onboarding. We know, ‘onboarding’ can be a dirty word. But before anyone can pitch anything, we have to understand your company well enough to explain it to a journalist who covers forty companies a week and will give you roughly twenty seconds of attention. While being strategic enough to hit your priority stakeholders with the right messaging and telling positioning your company in the right way. Imagine going through the entire campaign and landing in the media creating a totally backwards image of yourself? It just doesn’t make sense.

Then, simply getting the materials. A press release, quotes that say something, the right amount of background information for an FAQ, spokesperson preparation. As much as many believe it, none of that is an AI prompt. Turning information into a story takes human decision-making and a fair amount of graft. If you don’t believe us, ask the PR team at Google DeepMind. Even they don’t rely on AI for this. After that come the feedback rounds, and if external partners are involved they might need to provide their quotes or give an OK that they are happy with the press release, if you are using one. Sometimes it’s easy-peasy, but some may have strong views, some may be from large companies with lots of legal considerations… and your two-day turnaround becomes nine working days of version control (we’ve actually experienced this in the flesh).

Next up: the logistics. Which route are we taking? For a funding announcement, the typical question is: embargo, exclusive, or wide outreach? These are not interchangeable. Each has its own, different timeline, a different risk profile, and a different ceiling on what you can achieve. Choose wrong and you have spent your only news moment badly, and there is no second attempt at the same announcement.

Something that is not always obvious, because not every single campaign is a repeat of the previous one. Which journalists actually cover your category? Do they tend to cover this type of news? Why would they cover you? Would it make sense to reach out to them? Who are they and how do you get in touch with them? Because it’s not about blasting your only media list every time.

And finally, the part that can really hurt. Journalists that may be interested in the story, may end up not covering. For various reasons. Whether a stealth exit, a big raise, or a partnership with a globally-known name. Your company, your date is enormous to you. To the reporter it is one item among many, and other stories on their desk may well be bigger. So for them, skipping is a valid option if: they are busy with even bigger stories with bigger numbers, they are travelling for work, they are sick, they forgot to respond and you never followed up… In many cases, the most sensible approach is to hold your date loosely and start much earlier than feels necessary.

So why that date? We ask this more often than we ever expected to. Because sometimes there is a real answer, but more often than not “our investors want to be able to brag about our round”….

Sometimes, investors are applying real pressure. Or there is an event you are attending and the news belongs there. Those are legitimate constraints and we can build around them, as long as certain conditions are met. Often, though, there isn’t a real reason for a date.

Why rushing usually leads to ‘unrealised gains’

The common assumption is that a PR campaign underperformed because the agency didn’t execute well, or because they didn’t have the right connections. In our experience, the culprit is usually something else. What kills an announcement is having no time to prepare it properly, no time to be strategic about the route, and no time to make the right people care before the date arrives. Where we usually do find an agency or in-house team at fault is at the lack of pushback. Although it has to be said that sometimes the pressure can be overwhelming.

Funny enough, even weak news well handled can find a home, an audience. If you know what its ceiling can be. Strong news thrown at a wall on four days’ notice will usually not reach its ceiling or maximum potential. Why not allocate a good amount of time to make the most? Especially for a significant moment in your company’s history. That is not PR pros or agencies enjoying long timelines for their own sake. It is what the work takes when you are coordinating internal stakeholders, external partners and a press corps that, as we always say, owes you nothing.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

Who knew Benjamin Franklin would be so applicable to PR? This is framing we would like founders to adopt when it comes to announcements and PR in general. Preparation is not the tidying-up that happens before the real event. It is actually just as important as the event. By the time the release goes out, the outcome has largely been decided by choices made weeks earlier, such as what the story is, who it is for, which route you took, and whether the people who need to care were given any reason to.

We are not magicians. What looks like a well-placed story is almost always the visible end of a long, unglamorous run-up. The tip of the iceberg. OK, you want another quote? Here we go: “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six hours sharpening my axe.” The one is Abraham Lincoln.

So if there is one thing to take from this: stop treating comms as an afterthought. Bring it into the room when the decision is being made, not after the date has been set. Christmas ‘starting in July’ sounds absurd until you have watched a good story fail for want of three more weeks.