Getting Startup Press Without a Rolodex: A Practical PR Playbook

Asked whether press is worth a founder's time, Gerber points to its second-order effects. A CNBC article tells a software buyer, a prospective sponsor or a recruiter that a company is legitimate. This matters most for early-stage firms, where buyers worry the startup may not raise more money or may disappear. When a sales rep or recruiter can link to a story, that outside validation goes a long way.

For consumer products, she says, the picture is more varied. Perplexity, one of her clients, has put essentially nothing into paid marketing and has no marketing hire, yet saw a big spike in signups after its latest announcement. She attributes this to an easy-to-grasp pitch (a Google alternative) and a product that shows its value after a single query. Other consumer clients depend instead on affiliate deals, where publications take a commission on sales from product lists.

Host Lenny Rachitsky says that profiles in Fast Company, CNBC and Entrepreneur produced no visible growth for his newsletter, but the logos help when he emails potential guests. Gerber agrees and adds that articles about a founder are usually entrepreneurial-journey stories, which persuade recruits and partners more than customers. Her clients also get stories about culture and initiatives that help hiring rather than sales.

Gerber believes a funding round can nearly always get coverage if it is pitched the right way. She cites a tweet from another agency that counted nine TechCrunch funding stories in a week against roughly 50 actual rounds, so founders should not assume TechCrunch will cover them automatically. TechCrunch remains the outlet most likely to write the story, she says, and it has no paywall and handles these stories reliably.

The most common mistake is a muddled message. Her pitches say plainly that this is a launch or funding announcement, that it is offered as an exclusive, how much was raised, what space the company is in and who invested. She matches the round to the reporter who covers that beat, for example a fintech round to the fintech reporter, rather than building a grand trend narrative.

Follow-up is essential. She waits three or four days, then returns with something new, such as a recent tweet or article by the reporter, and repeats this with three or four relevant reporters. Rachitsky sums up the funding pitch as how much was raised, who the investors are, and one line on why it matters.

Gerber walks through the outlets she uses most. TechCrunch suits funding and sometimes product news, but she has struggled to find beat reporters for health tech and martech, and it also offers Disrupt speaking slots and podcasts. Axios is strong in fintech and healthcare but is deals-focused, so pitch funding, monetary partnerships or acquisitions and never product launches. Its new local editions can work for region-specific stories.

Business Insider likes pitch-deck stories, which can be redacted, and entrepreneurial-journey pieces that demand real metrics. It also runs frequent open calls for lists of top startups and professionals, which take about five minutes to enter. VentureBeat is her pick for AI news, Fast Company for future of work, design and media, and Forbes for awards and a contributor network with a lower bar for early-stage companies.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are a different story. Gerber jokes that early-stage companies get covered there mainly through a crisis. A feature at series B or C usually requires an on-the-record valuation and hard business metrics, which many founders will not share, and otherwise you may get a sentence or two in a larger piece. CNBC, she adds, targets people interested in public markets, though its Disruptor 50 list is aimed at companies approaching that stage.

On fear of a negative story, Gerber says a briefed reporter rarely writes a hit piece unless something negative is already going on. The bigger risk is an angle you did not want. Reporters are not employees, so the agency can only correct factual errors, and the best defense is a spokesperson who repeats the key messages clearly in the briefing.

Gerber's team finds podcasts and awards with plain searches, starting from who the customers are and what vertical they work in. Then comes a qualitative check. Does the show host vendor executives, or only practitioners? Is it still producing episodes? Is the quality high, and are the past guests the kind of peers you want to be associated with?

She also advises matching the spokesperson to the audience. If a show is for CFOs, pitch a CFO rather than the CEO, and hiring someone in the role you sell to helps your PR. Casual questions in customer conversations about which podcasts and newsletters they follow can reveal where to go next.

For outreach she finds the host and sends a short LinkedIn note asking whether they are open to guest ideas, without naming a client. Rachitsky agrees that lightweight messages get replies even when the answer is no. A long pitch from a stranger often gets no response at all, while a friendly opener at least produces an answer.

Gerber says relationships with reporters matter far less than founders assume. Reporters change beats and publications, and media itself is shifting toward Substack and podcasts, so a career built on specific contacts is fragile. A relationship, she says, gets you an open and an answer, maybe a coffee, but no editor decides coverage on friendship. Many reporters she works with regularly, she has never met in person.

She uses every channel. If a reporter tweets that they are working on a story, she may reply with about ten words on why her client is the person to speak to, plus a link, which can beat a 30-minute email. She also uses short DMs and email with subject lines that state the goal, such as the name of the recurring column and the proposed guest. Her best pitches run to about three sentences.

She adds a few tactics: acknowledge that the reporter's inbox is slammed, point out gaps in their coverage instead of just praising an article, and bring something contrarian when there is no hard news. If nine AI companies take one stance, the one with the opposing view is the one a reporter needs for balance. The advice has to fit the business, though, and not every company wants to comment on regulation.

Gerber gives an example of a contrarian pitch for Clockwise, a calendar-management tool. Shopify had received a lot of positive press for cancelling recurring meetings, so another piece praising it would not have been published. Instead the team wrote an op-ed asking whether that alone changes meeting culture, which Fast Company ran under the CEO's name with a title about Shopify's meeting cost calculator not addressing wasted time.

She says she hates it when companies cast themselves as category creators, because it does not land with reporters and is rarely quite true. Instead she describes a product as doing what a household name does, but better, and puts that in the subject line, for example a company taking on Salesforce with a new approach. It gives the reporter an immediate frame of reference.

Rachitsky notes that category creation is one of the most divisive topics among his guests, and Gerber says successful examples are two out of thousands. She restricts the claim to PR, saying she cannot speak for other parts of the business.

Gerber's strongest example is Ramp's bill-pay launch in its early days. Product news rarely gets major coverage, but her team framed it as Ramp taking on Bill.com, a well-performing public company that she says had captured only two percent of the market. That angle got a CNBC story, and the next day a story about Bill.com's falling stock mentioned Ramp. Pitched as a simple, seamless vendor-payment product, it would probably not have been a story.

Column Tax, an embedded tax-filing company, had many partnerships to announce, but her team focused on one: tax filing inside Propel's app for people receiving SNAP benefits. It tied into the wider story of TurboTax's fines over claims about free filing, and she says about 40 percent of people who filed through Column had not filed the year before. That earned a Fast Company piece instead of a generic growth-metrics announcement.

Her favorite funding story was Gamma, which she calls a modern take on PowerPoint. Instead of a blog post, they built a Gamma presentation with direct language, customer quotes, bulleted investors and a video of the lead investor explaining why she invested. TechCrunch's headline said Gamma brings PowerPoint into the 21st century. She notes that everything said to a reporter in email is on the record, so she shares such assets only after interest is confirmed.

Rachitsky then shows the pitch that convinced him to host a guest, a Nubank executive. It had two bullets: growth was 80 to 90 percent organic, and the company is larger than several well-known fintechs combined. Gerber says the first bullet was the one that mattered because it matched his show's interest in tactical lessons, and that scanning episode titles is usually enough to see what a host wants. She admits she once pitched a CEO to him, which he almost never hosts.

Gerber says hard-news pitches go to fewer reporters, from one to six, and are staggered because exclusives are offered, while podcast and relationship outreach is more of a numbers game. She does not blast one list. Some clients get one opportunity per 20 or 30 messages, so she mixes lightweight notes with custom pitches for the best targets.

To show a weak pitch she reads a press-release line about workflow automation combining AI assistance, human-in-the-loop collaboration and a robust multiplayer experience, and Rachitsky cannot tell what it does. TechCrunch described the same company as setting out to eat Zapier's lunch. She tells clients to explain what each phrase means and to read the copy out loud. She says at least half of releases read this way because of how marketers are trained.

The fix is to answer plainly what the product does, who it is for and who the customers are, and what is new and why now. She also doubts the value of paid press releases, which cost roughly $300 to $2,000, because reporters no longer scan the wires. A first-person blog post carries the same news, is more shareable and sits on your own site. She makes an exception for public companies and required disclosures.

She also discourages vague launch-growth claims such as a 700 percent increase since leaving stealth, which could mean going from one customer to seven. Reporters do not use them. She prefers concrete color, such as reaching six figures in revenue and growing about 30 percent a quarter. Early-stage numbers do not need to look huge, she adds.

Rachitsky asks how to find a nugget when a company is not a Ramp or a Perplexity. Gerber says about 80 percent of her clients are at a stage without mass awareness. For Entropy, a technical transaction-data API, her team leaned into the founder's story of struggling to get her first US apartment because of how credit scoring works, which ties into the product's use case.

That personal angle also helped with conference talks. The Entropy founder spoke at Money20/20 on a panel with Column Tax. Gerber recommends teaming up with peers at non-competing companies to propose a panel, because it is more successful than pitching yourself alone.

Gerber treats newsletters and podcasts as part of any core PR program, calling them simply part of media now. Social media is a separate game, and she says it is hard to outsource. Box CEO Aaron's presence is entirely his own, and a tweet about a Microsoft partnership she helped with even led a publication to write a story.

She argues that companies should invest in executive accounts rather than only corporate channels, since people follow personalities and not brand feeds. Executives who are willing to be bold and opinionated can be quoted by reporters. She notes that even brand personality on social is becoming a meme, so strategies need to keep evolving.

For founders who find social hard, she says it can still work. She pushes herself to post on LinkedIn at least once a month, and each post brings at least one client inbound. Because it is easy to test, she suggests trying it for a month or two and adjusting.

She closes with a tactical tip: Morning Brew's coworking series, where execs can apply with a roughly ten-question form. She says about half of her submissions have succeeded when answers are fun and not too promotional, and that it is often better not to submit the CEO.

Gerber warns against assuming bigger agencies do better work for startups. Large firms often work with household brands in a reactive, message-controlling way, while startup PR needs experimentation and speed. She advises asking what month one looks like, since a three-month intake ramp may not suit a cash-conscious startup, and asking for recent blogs or releases to see whether the agency writes the jargon she criticized.

She also recommends meeting the actual day-to-day team and avoiding extensive RFPs, which demand free work and may drive away the best agencies. Her own firm does not do them.

On timing, she suggests starting about six weeks before an announcement, so there is time for media training, investor quotes, images and pitching. She also urges founders not to fix a date, since landing the first-choice reporter matters more than announcing a few days earlier. She has seen companies issue big news with no coverage because they stuck rigidly to a day.

On cost, she says small boutique agencies start around $10,000 a month, good consultants about $8,000, and her own retainers start at $15,000, typically for series A companies. She would not go above about $30,000 for a series C startup, and one-off projects run roughly $10,000 to $20,000, or perhaps $8,000 with a consultant.