Originally published May 2019. Part of the EPR Startup PR cluster — foundational coverage of the crash course in PR for new companies.
Startup PR is not one discipline — it is a set of parallel disciplines that have to run at the same time from day one: press, narrative, founder visibility, crisis preparedness, and the owned-media record that carries the company between campaigns. New companies that build these layers early compound. New companies that build none of them lose share to the ones that did.
The crash course.
Public relations is not just for customers
Startup PR has to reach multiple audiences at once — investors, current and prospective employees, partners, customers, regulators, and the broader category community. The framing that works for one audience can actively damage another. Angela Watts, former head of communications for Spotify, captured the structural tension: "Advertisers want you to tell the world that the company is huge, that there are lots of users. Content providers, the artists and labels, however, don't want to be seen as giving music away for free. So you have this conflict."
The takeaway: strategic message consistency across audiences is a structural requirement, not a style preference. Inconsistency between investor-facing positioning, hiring-page copy, and customer-facing voice compounds over time and shows up in the reputational record long after the founder has moved on to a new pitch.
Get your narrative straight early
The foundational positioning a startup establishes in its first eighteen months becomes the durable record everyone else refers back to. Dex Torricke-Barton, director at Brunswick Group, has called this the "mission hangover" — startups that move past their early framing without explicit redefinition find that earlier framing follows them forever.
Every piece of press, every LinkedIn post, every conference talk, every customer-facing description — all of it accretes into the public version of the company. Building the right narrative from the beginning is not a long-term preference. It is an operational requirement.
You don't need a big budget
Several high-leverage moves are available to early-stage startups without significant PR spend.
Build the press page. A clean, comprehensive press kit — company facts, executive bios, high-quality photography, logo files, fundraising history, product details — eliminates friction for every reporter who arrives at the site. Most startups still don't have this.
Use the available channels. Help a B2B Writer, Qwoted, Featured, and the broader source-request infrastructure all produce daily opportunities for founders willing to provide substantive commentary. Sustained presence compounds.
Build the structured record. Founder LinkedIn presence, Crunchbase profile completeness, Wikipedia presence where the company merits it, named-comment placements across category trade publications — all contribute to the entity-level reputation that outlasts any single campaign.
Be prepared for bad press
Every startup faces a negative news story eventually. Spotify's first major PR cycle came when Thom Yorke of Radiohead called the streaming platform the "last desperate fart of a dying corpse" over artist compensation. The cycle reignited the broader debate about streaming economics — a debate that has continued through every Spotify financial cycle since.
The lesson: crisis preparedness for startups is not optional. Have the rehearsed founder statement, the pre-briefed friendly press contacts, and the owned-media surface ready before the cycle starts. Companies that build the discipline after the crisis hits don't build it in time.
Forget the press release as the primary product
Press releases still matter for specific use cases — funding announcements, executive hires, product launches, major partnerships — but the durable wins come from storytelling delivered as substantive content, not formal release copy. Founders who can articulate the company's story in plain language, with concrete examples and named customers, compound their press position over months and years.
Every public statement is durable record. Podcasts, LinkedIn posts, conference talks, customer-facing content — all of it accretes. Founders who treat every public statement as permanent compound. Founders who treat them as ephemeral don't.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
