What Tech Founders Get Wrong About PR
Most founders treat PR as press-release distribution. The real job is turning progress into a credible story that people outside your company care about.
Most founders do not misunderstand PR because they do not care about visibility. They misunderstand it because they treat it as a distribution service.
They have raised a round, launched a feature, hired someone senior, or reached a milestone. They assume the job is to write it up, email enough journalists and wait for coverage to appear.
That is not really how it works.
PR is the work of finding the part of your company that matters to someone outside it, then making that story credible, timely and easy for the right people to tell. Sometimes that results in a launch announcement. Often it means taking a step back and asking a more useful question: why should anyone who does not work here care right now?
That distinction sounds small, but it is the difference between a press release that gets ignored and a story that earns attention.
1. “We have news” is not the same as “we have a story”
Inside a startup, almost everything feels important. A new product capability took months to build. A partnership required dozens of calls. A funding round may have kept the company alive.
All of that can matter commercially. It does not automatically make it a media story.
Journalists are not there to document a company’s progress. They are looking for something their readers need to understand: a market shift, a new behaviour, a problem becoming more urgent, a real signal of demand, or a founder with an informed perspective on something already in the conversation.
That means the most useful question is not, “Can we announce this?” It is, “What does this reveal?”
For example, “we launched an AI assistant” is rarely enough on its own. “Why mid-market support teams are moving away from generic AI copilots and toward workflow-specific tools” may be a real story, if the company has evidence, customers or an opinion that makes it credible.
The announcement can still be part of the pitch. It just should not be the entire pitch.
[MEDIA SUGGESTION: A simple two-column visual: ‘Company update’ versus ‘Story journalists may care about’.]
2. Funding is a moment, not a communications strategy
Founders often see a funding announcement as the moment PR begins. In reality, it is one of the few occasions where a company has a clearly defined news hook. It should be used well, but it cannot carry the full communications plan for the next year.
A good funding announcement establishes a narrative the company can build on: why the market matters, what makes the approach different, what the capital enables and what the team expects to prove next. It gives journalists, prospects and future hires a clear way to understand the company.
Then the company has to keep earning attention. That may come through customer wins, market commentary, data, product milestones, founder bylines, event conversations or a sharp response to a breaking issue in its sector.
The mistake is treating coverage as a one-off trophy. The better approach is to treat the announcement as the opening chapter of a story that will develop over time.
3. “Top-tier coverage” is not always the right goal
It is completely reasonable to want coverage in the biggest publication in your sector. It is not always reasonable to make that the only measure of whether PR worked.
A well-placed article in a specialist publication can reach the buyers, partners, investors or future employees you actually need. A thoughtful piece in a respected trade outlet can also give your sales team something useful to share, build authority in a niche and create a credible starting point for bigger conversations later.
The right media target depends on the business objective. Are you trying to explain a complex category? Reach technical buyers? Support enterprise sales? Build trust before a market launch? Recruit senior talent? Attract an investor audience?
Those answers should shape the communications plan before anyone starts building a media list.
This is particularly important for early-stage B2B and deep-tech companies. If a journalist’s readers cannot understand why your technology matters without specialist context, the relevant vertical press may be much more valuable than chasing a general startup headline.
4. Journalists do not owe anyone coverage
This is an uncomfortable one, but it makes PR easier to do well.
No matter how hard a team worked, how much money the company raised or how impressive the founder thinks the product is, a journalist has no obligation to cover it. They have limited time, a specific audience and usually a larger story queue than they can realistically complete.
The numbers back up the practical reality. Muck Rack’s 2025 journalist survey found that 84% of journalists said stories often start with a PR pitch, but 86% said they ignore pitches that are off-topic. Cision’s 2025 survey of more than 3,000 journalists similarly found that relevance to their beat and audience was the most important consideration. Muck Rack (https://muckrack.com/resources/webinars/takeaways-state-of-journalism-2025) and Cision (https://www.cision.com/about/press-releases/2025-press-releases/cisions-2025-state-of-the-media-report-reveals-a-tipping-point-for-trust-technology-and-pr-journalist-partnerships-302448410/) are not saying something surprising. They are quantifying what most reporters have been saying for years.
Good PR respects that reality. It does not send the same release to 300 people and call it outreach. It identifies the journalists who genuinely cover the subject, understands the kind of stories they write and gives them a clear reason to look at this one.
Personalisation is not adding a sentence about someone’s latest article. It is understanding whether the company belongs in their inbox in the first place.
5. A press release is a tool, not the campaign
The press release is not dead. Journalists still use them as a practical source of facts, quotes and links. But a press release cannot replace a communications strategy, a good media pitch or a spokesperson who can say something worth quoting.
Think of it as the reference document. It should be clear, factual and easy to use. It should explain the news without inflated language, provide the numbers that matter and include someone who can speak in normal human terms.
The campaign is wider. It includes the story angle, the target audiences, the right journalists, founder preparation, interview availability, supporting assets, follow-up and what happens after coverage lands.
Companies get into trouble when they spend all their energy polishing a release and none deciding what the story actually is. A beautifully written announcement with no outside relevance is still an announcement with no outside relevance.
6. PR is not only about what you say about yourself
The strongest PR programmes make room for a company to talk about the market, not only its own product.
That might mean a cybersecurity founder explaining the security implication of a major breach, a fintech CEO commenting on regulatory changes or an AI company sharing a practical view on how customers are actually adopting the technology. The company must have real expertise and something useful to add. It should not force itself into every news cycle.
But this kind of work matters because it builds a public point of view. Over time, people begin to associate the company with a problem it understands, rather than only with its latest launch.
It also makes media relationships more useful. A journalist who knows a founder can give a timely, honest and well-informed comment is far more likely to remember them when a relevant story breaks than one who only receives announcements.
7. You cannot measure PR only by the number of articles
Article count is easy to report. It is also incomplete.
Three pieces of coverage in publications that reach the right people can be more valuable than 30 low-quality mentions. A founder interview that becomes part of enterprise sales conversations may matter more than a short funding brief. One well-timed piece of commentary could change how the market understands a category.
PR should still be measured. The measures just need to match the objective. Depending on the programme, that could include the quality and relevance of publications, key-message pull-through, referral traffic, branded search, inbound enquiries, sales enablement, share of voice, investor interest or the number of useful journalist relationships built.
The point is not to claim that PR caused every outcome. It is to understand whether the work is helping the business become better known and better understood by people who matter.
What founders should expect from good PR
Good PR is not a guarantee of headlines, and anyone who presents it that way is selling the wrong thing. It is a disciplined process for identifying the stories a company has earned the right to tell, packaging them credibly and bringing them to the people who can make them matter.
Sometimes the answer will be a major announcement. Sometimes it will be a focused trade story, an opinion piece, a briefing or a decision to wait until the company has stronger proof.
That is not PR being less ambitious. It is PR doing its actual job: helping a company build visibility and credibility, not simply make noise.
Have an announcement, launch or market story that needs a sharper angle?
Goldszmidt Media helps technology companies turn real progress into stories journalists and customers can understand.