Starting Up Press Relations

Press relations, well, by definition, is a relationship game. And in the startup world, no one has time for that.

Nor money — unless there’s a player in an adjacent category who has the funds to pay for placements and the willingness to give affiliate writers whatever they need to put top brass on the review. In that case, setting up a PR function doesn’t take as much time as you think.

I’ve had the privilege of earning Ergatta over 250 placements across the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, and Time magazine.

At first, I targeted editors who covered our primary competitor, scoring easy hits and building relationships with writers who only had to update their reviews with additional options for consideration. Then I had to take an outbound approach: hosting press events, running CES activations, and sending messaging to an ever-growing journalist CRM.