PR for Founders: How to Stop Buying Strategies No One Reads
Why your PR dies when you’re busy, and how to turn media presence from a founder’s chore into a team’s reward.
A very important piece for founders. Where do you even start if you’re a founder who’s never touched PR and is just beginning to build a reputation?
The most fundamental question you need to ask yourself is this: How much of your own time are you actually willing to sink into this to get results? If you don’t have that clarity - if you don’t realize that this is going to demand your personal time, honestly, don’t even bother starting. Sometimes this realization only hits during interviews with agencies or consultants. The founder suddenly realizes, in total shock, that they actually have to do the work. They lose interest immediately. But this is the cornerstone of the entire story.
Let’s be real: in most cases, you haven’t discovered a new cure for cancer, you didn’t invent a revolutionary smartphone, and you didn’t come up with some groundbreaking cooling system for data centers. Your product doesn’t just “explain itself” to the world. Lately, I’ve seen way too many stories where an agency bills tens of thousands of dollars over six months and doesn’t land a single placement. It’s pathetic. You can’t work like that - spending months writing a “strategy” that’s destined for the trash can.
But a huge chunk of the blame for that kind of failure lies with the founders. I once had a client, a medical company, that could have generated high-quality news hooks almost every single month. But they produced none. Why? Because the founders simply weren’t ready to put in the effort.
So, here’s my advice: Don’t rush to hire. First, ask yourself how much you’re willing to participate in the process. Even the most expensive agency won’t do the work for you. Even the highest-paid consultant doesn’t know the product better than you do.
The New Role: Chief Context Officer
This is where the founder’s first new role comes in: Chief Context Officer. An agency cannot manufacture insights, hard data, or those specific “battle stories” from the field that actually sell a story to a journalist. If you don’t respond to a request on time, you’ve effectively burned a month’s budget.
The agency must be deeply integrated into the life of the startup or company. There is no such thing as “useless detail”—every single piece of information has the potential to sell. When I worked with a logistics startup, we built a “news factory” where we could pitch journalists multiple times using the same product. First, you “sell” the launch. A few months later, you tell the story of how much money customers actually saved using the new features.
That’s the ideal case. In reality, I’ve seen group chats with 10 people sitting in dead silence. These are people who walk down the hall checking their phones every minute, yet they ignore a question from a journalist who has a line of your competitors waiting at their door. This is how an agency shifts from being a “provider of strategy and meaning” to just a firefighter.
It shouldn’t be this way. This lack of engagement destroys the trust that the entire partnership is built on. As a founder, you have to accept a simple truth: you and your team must spend time on PR. It is a core business function, not an outsourced chore.
Personal Brand as an Icebreaker
Journalists write about people, not logos. If you aren’t ready to provide sharp, sometimes controversial quotes under your own name, your PR will turn into white noise that no one notices.
A founder is an Icebreaker. In the modern media landscape, “corporate news” is dead. No one cares about your new office opening or your “synergistic partnership” with another faceless entity. Media outlets are looking for voices - people who are willing to take a stand, challenge the status quo, or provide a unique, human perspective on complex industry issues.
If you hide behind a corporate brand, you’re asking your agency to do the impossible: to sell a shadow. The moment you step forward and say, “The industry is moving in the wrong direction, and here is why,” you give the agency a weapon. Suddenly, they aren’t just pitching a product; they are pitching a visionary.
Being a “human icebreaker” means:
Owning your opinion: You cannot be “neutral” and expect to be famous. If your quotes are so safe that even your legal team finds them boring, you have failed.
Accessibility: You must be the one to pick up the phone when a top-tier journalist needs a 5-minute reactive comment. If you delegate this to a mid-level manager, the story dies instantly.
Vulnerability and Truth: Real reputation is built on transparency. If you only talk when things are perfect, you aren’t a leader—you’re a PR brochure. Journalists value founders who can talk about market crashes, pivots, and the hard lessons learned in the trenches.
Stop Asking for “Forbes”: Setting the Right Objectives
Forget the phrase “I want to be in Forbes.” It’s the ultimate sign of a founder who doesn’t understand their own business goals. PR isn’t a vanity project; it’s a tool to solve specific business problems.
You must formulate your PR objectives in terms of business outcomes, not publication counts:
Building Trust for Enterprise Sales: You need deep, technical op-eds in trade publications that potential CTO clients actually read.
Visibility for Investors: A high-frequency strategy where you comment on every market trend to show momentum.
Hiring Top Talent: Opening up your “kitchen” and letting the agency talk to your lead devs.
The Bottleneck: Why Your Strategy Might Still Fail
This looks like a perfect plan, right? You’ve accepted the “tax,” you’re acting as the Chief Context Officer, and you’re playing the Icebreaker. But even in this flawless setup, there is one fatal bottleneck.
That bottleneck is you.
When the entire reputation of a company rests on one person’s shoulders, it’s not an asset—it’s a liability. If the company cannot generate meaning without your direct involvement, its value drops. You haven’t built a business; you’ve built a prison.
The Demotivation of the “One-Man Show”
There is another hidden cost to being the sole voice of the company: the slow death of internal motivation.
When a founder monopolizes the spotlight, the rest of the team starts to see PR as “the boss’s hobby.” They stop seeing the value in helping the agency. Why should a busy CTO spend two hours explaining a complex architecture to a PR manager if the final article will only feature the founder’s face and a generic quote?
When only the founder is involved:
Interest drops: Your top talent feels invisible. They stop feeding the “news factory” with insights because they don’t see themselves in the narrative.
Zero incentive: There’s no drive for experts to stay sharp or develop their own public profiles, which ultimately weakens the company’s total intellectual authority.
Multi-Dimensional Media Exposure: The Power of the Bench
Imagine instead a culture where “being in the media” is seen as a badge of honor, a professional reward for those who are genuinely interested in it.
When you empower your team to become independent speakers, everything changes:
Recognition as a Perk: For a high-level engineer or an operations lead, being featured as an expert in a Tier-1 trade publication is a massive professional validation. It’s a way of saying, “We don’t just value your code; we value your mind.”
Expanding the Journalist Pool: A single founder usually appeals to one type of journalist—business or general tech. But when your CTO talks about infrastructure and your COO talks about logistics efficiency, you suddenly unlock multiple pools of journalists. You are no longer fighting for one spot in the morning news; you are present in the tech sections, the operational journals, and the niche industry newsletters simultaneously.
The Redundancy Shield: This is about “key man risk.” Investors and acquirers look for it. To build a sustainable brand, you need a “Council of Experts.” If you go on vacation or get tied up in a deal, the company fall silent.
True PR maturity is when your CTO is the go-to person for tech trends, your COO is the authority on scaling, and you are free to be the visionary or to simply be silent when needed.
Let me know what you think below!
Disclaimer: The information provided in this publication is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute professional PR, legal, or business advice. While we strive for accuracy, results may vary. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission.