Most founders don't misunderstand PR because they don't care about visibility. They misunderstand it because they don't know what PR actually is and how it can help their company grow. I've worked with many startup founders, and they are all incredibly smart. They've grown a company from just an idea. But PR is a different beast than even marketing, and they make assumptions before we even get started.
PR starts with understanding your technology, then finding the right way to tell your story to the media. It's about shaping a story that is engaging and easy to understand for the right people, meaning reporters, hosts, and other people in the space. Often the right questions to ask are "Why should anyone use this product instead of a competitor?", "Why does it matter now?", and "What is unique about this solution?"
These are the biggest pitfalls I've seen founders fall into, over and over again.
1. “We have news” is not the same as “we have a story”
Inside your startup, everything feels important, and it is, for you and your team. A new product capability took months to build, a partnership required dozens of calls, a new client broke sales records.
All of that can matter commercially. It does not automatically make it a media story.
Journalists are not here to document a company's progress. They are looking for a story their readers will enjoy, one that keeps those readers coming back. Don't forget the reporter has their own audience to answer to as well.
So the right question to ask here is not "Can we announce this?" It is "Does this announcement have any meaning in the space outside our company?"
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 the evidence, customers, or point of view to make it credible. The announcement can still be part of the pitch. It just should not be the entire pitch.
2. Funding is a moment, not a communications strategy
Founders often see a funding announcement as the moment PR begins, and that's not necessarily wrong, but there is more to it. The funding round is one of the few occasions where a company has a clear, defined news hook, which is a great way to get your foot in the door. However, a number alone doesn't get you through the door. You still need a story and a cohesive communication strategy that can build on the funding news.
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 a short, medium, and long term view of what's next and why it matters.
After the funding, 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
Yes, getting coverage in the biggest mainstream publications is a good thing. But that's not the only way to measure if PR worked, and it's not something you can just make happen. For most companies, you need to grow into it, block by block, story by story.
Top tier coverage is also often misunderstood. Yes, you have CNBC, Fox Business, CNET, etc, but top tier is also defined by sector. You have publications like Dark Reading, Construction Dive, ENR, and Insurance Journal that are the leading media in their own spaces, and can carry just as much weight, since their audience is exactly what you're looking for.
A well-placed article in a niche publication can reach the right 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, and what you should care about, 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. TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and The Guardian are not a strategy.
4. Journalists do not owe anyone coverage
This is an uncomfortable one, but it helps founders understand some of the behind the scenes work that happens.
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, and they receive about 3 million pitches a day. Yes, having contacts is good, but talking to a reporter doesn't automatically mean coverage without a strong story. It just means they'll say "I'll pass" in a nicer way.
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.
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 the story.
Personalization 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, and it's also taking on a second life in the AI era, as part of AISEO, as there is a trend of using releases to get recommended by LLMs. But a press release cannot replace a communications strategy, a good media pitch, or a spokesperson who can say something worth quoting.
The press release is NOT a marketing pamphlet. It should be clear, factual and easy to read. It should explain the news without inflated language, provide the numbers that matter, and include someone who can speak in normal human terms. A press release is not a sales deck.
The campaign is wider. It includes the story angles, 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. Also, too many chefs in the kitchen make bad food.
6. You cannot measure PR only by the number of articles
Article count is easy to report, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Three pieces of coverage in publications that reach the right people can be more valuable than 30 low quality wire copy-paste articles. A founder interview that becomes part of enterprise sales conversations, or 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 strategy, 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 the 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, because they know you're buying based on the wrong assumptions.
What you need from your PR person is for them to build a narrative around your company, position the startup the right way, and get you talking in the right conversations at the right time. You should see that you're being mentioned by others in the space, that you're seen by the right potential clients. If you're only measuring by number of articles, you'll be hugely disappointed in the end.
Have an announcement, launch, or market story that needs a sharper angle?
I help tech companies turn their product into stories for their audience.
