Let’s face it: startup life is a wild ride—late nights, big dreams, and probably more coffee than you’d like to admit. But here’s a reality check: even if your product is groundbreaking, if nobody knows about it, does it even exist? This is where Public Relations can help turn those bold dreams into buzzing headlines.
In a recent episode of The Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast, Black Unicorn PR’s very own Julija Jegorova and Mauro Battellini shared some golden nuggets on why storytelling is non-negotiable for startups. Hosted by the Latvian duo Uldis Teraudkalns and Janis Zeps, veterans of the startup, tech and marketing world, the podcast is known for dishing out actionable insights for scrappy startups. The episode (conveniently for all of us) breaks down why founders must (eventually) engage in PR and how it can become a power early-stage companies as they grow and scale.
So, buckle up. Here’s a recap of the key takeaways you need to know if you want your startup to be more than just the best-kept secret in the tech world.
Why PR Matters for Startups
PR isn’t just about getting your name in a headline; it’s about building trust, credibility, and a compelling story that investors, customers, and partners can rally around.
Trust & Awareness:
Let’s be real—no one wants to be the new kid on the block without street cred. PR is your way to gain visibility and credibility. This is the funnel view. It’s really in the middle of the funnel that PR will hit hard. However, over time and with sustained efforts, PR can also be a great source of awareness.
PR positions your startup not just as “the latest app” but as a trusted player that has earned the spotlight. It builds brand equity and moulds your identity in a crowded marketplace. And no, a snazzy logo and catchy slogan won’t cut it—eventually, you need third parties talking about you to cement your reputation.
Supporting Business Objectives:
Think PR is just for vanity? Think again. A solid PR strategy supports everything from fundraising and recruiting talent to acquiring customers and securing partnerships. Simply put, PR reflects your startup’s reality to the outside world. Investors want to back winners, and PR shows them you’re the real deal.
What do startups need to scale? Revenue, funding, partners, and talent are some of the key things on the list. Well, PR can be employed to boost all of those. How? By influencing the stakeholders, that will give you all of those.
Influencing Stakeholder Journeys
At the end of the day, startups are not islands. Founders are not locked up in a room building until customers just magically arrive. The founder is the starting point, but everything else is actually attained from different stakeholders. Before they’re persuaded to decide in your favour, each stakeholder will have a journey. Good PR helps shape the journey of everyone involved—investors, customers, employees, and partners. By sharing your narrative through PR, you’re not just telling the world what you do but why it matters.
The PR game can get more sophisticated and structured as your startup grows. But to keep things scrappy, you may consider that each stakeholder will be looking to understand particular things about your startup and need the security that certain things are in place. We typically think of investors as looking out for big market opportunities, as well as domain expertise and unlimited energy, ambition, and resilience in the founders. Employees tend to look for a place to work with opportunities to grow their careers and perks, but also leaders who can galvanise them with a clear vision. Customers may be more product-oriented, but depending on the industry and the cost of the product, they will turn to third parties. For many actors, such as governmental actors, regulators, or larger financial institutions, trust and credibility are paramount.
And let’s not forget journalists themselves. Journalists read journalists; they also google and do research. If you knock on the door of a journalist, what will they see?
Keeping in mind and designing these journeys from early can be extremely helpful.
PR for Early-Stage Startups
Wondering when’s the right time to kick off your PR efforts?
First, there’s the founder
Everything starts founder-led. In addition to their charisma, gravitas, domain expertise, and energy, founders might already have a reputation. In the beginning, founders are driving everything, from sales to recruitment. Typically, there is a commercial and fundraising-oriented CEO and a technical and product-oriented CTO/CPO. They are working with all the relevant stakeholders. Eventually, they hire teams to spread the workload and get more results, faster. There will be website improvements, content marketing, ads, performance marketing, sales teams, the lot.
But at some point, even that won’t be enough. Even startups will need to think about their brand, reputation, and story and create middle-of-the-funnel validation points, a track record that will be constantly working to support smoother stakeholder journeys.
DIY PR Tips for Startups
Some founders are PR naturals—they can sell snow to an Eskimo. But for most, it’s something they need to learn or hire for. In the early days, you can start small and on your own: a polished website, active LinkedIn profiles, and engaging with journalists on Twitter/X. These basics help you establish a credible foundation before bringing in the big guns of a PR agency.
A good place to start —PR hygiene. Make sure your website doesn’t look like it was designed during a panicked 2am sprint. Your press page, LinkedIn, and overall digital footprint should say “professional” (even if your actual office is your kitchen table). And don’t sleep on social media—start engaging with journalists and influencers in your industry.
Also, keep an eye on the media covering your space so you can build relationships before you need them. Engage with them if possible, exchange ideas, and be human with them. Don’t just sell your company. In other words, develop relationships organically if you can.
When to Engage a PR Agency
Ready to level up? Most startups bring in a PR agency post-seed or Series A when scaling becomes a priority. If your sales team is hitting awareness bottlenecks or your website’s traffic is as quiet as a tumbleweed rolling through a desert, it’s time to involve PR pros. You should feel that there really is a need, this urge, to take storytelling to the next level and actually do PR.
PR agencies aren’t your only option. Besides DIY PR by yourself and your team, you can also look for freelancers or hire in-house team members. Each has its benefits (and downsides). We wrote more about it in this blog post right here.
What Makes a Story Newsworthy?
Not every update is headline-worthy—sorry, your team’s new coffee machine doesn’t make the cut. But how do you know when to pitch your story to the media?
Timeliness
Journalism is all about journaling and making sense of what’s happening… now. No wonder timing dictates so much about the PR game. Whether it’s announcing a funding round or a product launch, something that is ‘happening now’ will always benefit from a certain added newsworthiness. To put it very simply, for the scrappy founder, there are certain journalists that absolutely cover those types of news in their industries, including startups, and if you share that news in the right way, chances are quite high they will cover it.
You can also look at timeliness as something you can leverage in terms of trends of the moment. If you’ve got a new AI tool in the works, just as generative AI is making waves. Now’s your moment. If possible, align your PR strategy with trending topics to keep your startup relevant in the broader conversation. As well as AI, defence tech, and energy are hot topics in startups. It might make sense to keep an eye on emerging trends. Some from previous years: web3, open banking, digital twins, micromobility, quick commerce and the metaverse.
Impact
It makes sense:. a startup that can impact more lives (with a popular product) or completely change just one life (by saving lives, for example) has more chances of getting covered. Often, impact can be correlated with size (yes, size matters!) And we’re not just talking about potential impact. Although it can help, journalists want to see the actual impact.
Hint, make it more real with stats and case studies.
This is why new startups often struggle to be in bigger publications and why the largest companies in the world get written about all the time, often without. Bigger will usually mean more users or clients, more employees, offices, country coverage or geographical locations, more funding, more revenue, a bigger valuation… you get the idea. It’s harder for journalists to ignore stories about those that can impact our lives to a greater extent.
Also, the bigger the splash within a piece of news, the better the coverage. Are you partnering with the industry’s biggest player, raising millions, expanding into new markets, or hitting impressive revenue milestones? For each of these, there will be numbers representing impact that are significant enough to increase the newsworthiness of the news that sends a signal. These are the types of stories that capture attention.
Geography
Your most desired customer may be in Germany. But, if you are a startup based elsewhere and with no office, employees, or investors nor significant clientele from Germany, chances are you won’t be newsworthy in German media.
It also doesn’t matter if you are a remote-first company. Where you’re based as a company, are regulated, and pay taxes matters a lot, and chances are your first media opportunities will come from local, regional, and trade media (often, the region’s trade media.) And there is nothing wrong with that!
Perhaps some people don’t, but most, including journalists, think about startups in terms of verticals, stages, and geographies. Don’t let it discourage you, and keep it in mind to make the most of it.
Celebrity
These tend to be a bit less common measures of newsworthiness for startups. There’s an obvious exception: getting a prominent investor, which we could pass off as a celebrity. Think of the likes of a16z, Sequoia, or names like Peter Thiel. In addition, many startups are getting angel investments from actual celebrities if you follow deals on Tech.eu, Sifted, and TechCrunch, you might see from time to time professional athletes, musicians, and others getting involved in the world of startups.
Sometimes, in the world of startups, we might also find celebrity founders who have achieved notoriety and can lend their celebrity newsworthiness as angel investors or to their new startups as (co-)founders.
When looking at bigger companies, celebrities are usually the ones receiving the money as part of campaigns, ads, and more. Think Stormzy with Pepsi, Kobe, and Messi with Turkish Airlines.
Conflict
Conflict could be seen as playing with fire. However, challenging a well-established player in your space in the right way can help create a more interesting narrative that adds layers of intrigue to your story.
In the pod, Uldis asked us about the case of WISE. In its early days, Transferwise would send naked(!) people to protest unfair forex fees in front of banks. This got them a fair amount of attention, but their messaging also kickstarted a narrative of David battling a Goliath, fighting something unjust and taking on giants.
Unfortunately, there are items within conflict that are not good news for anyone. Conflict with or between founders, investors, employees, crises involving different scandals and corruption, and lawsuits… all of these are also newsworthy to journalists. After all, bad news sells. But also, journalists are not simply cheerleaders, part of your marketing team.
PR Misconceptions and Mistakes to Avoid
Let’s clear up a few misconceptions that could trip you up.
Immediate Results
Founders often think one press release will have their phones ringing off the hook. PR is a long game—its value is in building brand awareness over time, not instant sales spikes. In other words, patience, young grasshopper.
Backlink Obsession
Journalists aren’t your personal SEO agents, so don’t pester them for backlinks in every piece. It’s more important to focus on the story and the value it brings than trying to game search engines.
Company, Product, and overall execution readiness
They say if you launch when you’re happy with your product, you launched too late. Well, it’s a bit different from announcements in the public sphere. If your product isn’t ready for the spotlight, step back. Bad PR is worse than no PR; a rushed launch can lead to unwanted scrutiny, bad reviews, etc.
Approach PR with the same mentality. You get windows of opportunity during moments, and if you waste them, it can take a while to try again, meanwhile, you didn’t make the most of it (having spent time and resources). That doesn’t mean you can’t iterate, learn, and do PR better every time. In other words, don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Just make sure you’re setting yourself up for PR success.
PR Strategies for Startups Preparing to Raise Funds
Preparation is Key
Well, well, well. This is almost the topic of an entire blog post. But let’s share some quick tips based on the pod.
Before kicking off your fundraising marathon, ensure all your assets—websites, press kits, bios—are on point. Your PR strategy should build momentum and show investors that you’re serious. Journalists and investors alike look for validation in media coverage, so early PR wins with niche outlets can lay the groundwork for bigger stories down the line.
Now think on your target investors. What key are they looking out for? This will guide your key messaging. What outlets are they reading? If you shared a link with them from a reputable publication, that could encapsulate these messages well and demonstrate trust (and ability to play the storytelling game), which would it be? Think about these principle and what is attainable for your stage, and go for it!
PR Is Not Just Media Relations
PR isn’t just about media wins and articles. It’s about thought leadership, event participation, and different types of public appearances. As you grow, it can include entire departments for investor relations, governmental relations, and ESG. It can be about what you wear, how you speak, and where you go. Founders need to manage their personal brands as much as the company’s. While you should be focused on PR that brings you the results that you need, it’s also important to think with a ‘PR hat’ on and be able to make the right choice at the right time.
And remember, your startup’s story is not just about what you do—it’s about why, how you do it.
For more…
Need help refining your messaging or figuring out the right time to kick off your PR strategy? Reach out to us to elevate your startup’s media presence!
And TRUST us; this blog is just a taste. For the full conversation on PR for startups, check out the latest episode of The Pursuit of Scrappiness. Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube and start scrappin’ your way to PR success!
Or watch it / listen to it all right here!
