Why Most Startup PR Is Wasted — and What to Do Instead
When I raised my Series A for VideoGenie, the first thing my investors told me to do was invest in PR. “It’s just something you do.” So I shopped around the San Francisco firms. Somehow every option landed at $10,000 a month. I signed up, and over the next year I lit roughly $120,000 on fire.
Here is what I got: a feature in Inc Magazine. The framed article still hangs in my office. It made me feel good. It impressed my mom. I am not sure it did much beyond that.
What traditional PR didn’t give me
- No data. I had no way to measure whether the coverage moved a single customer, hire, or dollar.
- No ongoing channel. It was a one-time hit, not a relationship with an audience I could return to.
- No control over the message. The story they told got key details wrong, and I had no way to correct it.
That is the structural problem with traditional PR for most startups. You pay gatekeepers for a one-way, unmeasurable, time-bound mention — and then it is gone.
The better investment
I am not saying coverage never matters. I am saying that for most founders, the money is better spent on channels you own and can measure. The clearest example is the leader’s own voice, published consistently on owned and earned surfaces:
- Measurable — you can see exactly what reaches people and what converts.
- Continuous — a daily, compounding presence instead of a single placement.
- A dialogue — two-way conversation with the people you want to reach, not a press release shouted into the void.
- No gatekeepers — you decide what to say and when.
Getting started does not require a firm or a retainer. Share an insight from your work. Spotlight someone on your team. Make your company’s values legible. Do it consistently, and within a year you have built something a press hit can never give you: an owned audience that shows up when you need to hire, raise, or partner.
If you have $120,000 to burn on a framed article, go for it. But it is worth asking what that same investment would build if you put it into a presence you actually own.