Why Your Startup Doesn’t Need a PR Agency

I'm sure his conclusion is correct for most people reading this, but is logic is garbage. It's like saying you don't need a VP Engineering because a founder should do it. Completely fine conclusion if it works, as it often will, but still total nonsense.

If you're paying a PR agency $10k-$20k per month and they're getting your company into blogs where the author reads every comment, you're getting screwed. No doubt about that. And if you can do it yourself through networks and hard work, then paying someone else to do it might not make sense.

But to argue that PR firms are not effective is just a lie. I won't go through linking to the major news coverage that any startup would kill for that PR firms got, but there is plenty.

There are two interesting dynamics at play in this sort of post, which comes up every week or two.

1. No one ever seems to question the source, which seems odd. We have a journalist telling companies how to run their PR. Talk about the fox watching the hen house. I'm not saying this guy or any of the others that write this same blog post on other blogs are being disingenuous, but the conflict of interest is certainly there. It's worth pointing out in my opinion.

2. PR firms, ironically, suffer from being in a position to almost never get positive word of mouth (at least publicly). When they succeed, you never know they're involved; go read the front page of the NYT business section, I promise it produces lots of PR high fives every day but almost no one reading it will ever know that. When a company succeeds with a PR firm, there's not much incentive in beating their chests about it, but when the relationship is a failure it's become fashionable to...well, write something like this except from the company's perspective. To top it off, the really great PR firm successes often masquerade as the sort of companies that are just great stories told by great founders (Mint and Pandora come to mind, both of which use agencies).

I used to work at a PR agency about 2 years ago, but don't any longer and have absolutely 0 financial stake in this sort of thing. I still help/advise a lot of friends on PR and I really just think this is overly generalized advice that leads to a nasty case of groupthink. First principles, guys.

One of my oldest HN comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66284

A few years ago, Graham sounded a warning about PR firms but hedged by saying he liked Viaweb's firm (Schwartz, which FWIW was not well-liked by many of the PR/MR/AR-types I've known). From my vantage point, it looks like PR firms (and, let's be candid, PR FT roles at startups) mostly pay off in the form of pay-for-play "op-ed" pieces in trade pubs and in stories you'd have gotten anyways.

PR firms also "offer" a lot of ancillary "benefits", like positioning reports and news alerts and trend analysis, virtually none of which are going to help most startups.

Finally, like fancy offices in SFBA and sexy logos, press is part of the "startup daydream" and is thus inherently suspect. For every truly important writeup out there (and there are many), there are 1,000 press hits that do nothing for your business. You can waste a lot of time chasing this stuff.

Not only does working with a PR agency cost the company money, but it allows employees and founders to get lazy on the continuous selling that needs to occur.

Everyone in the company should be able to pitch and sell the startup and should to everyone, including the press and media.

Worked at a failed startup that invested rather heavily in a PR firm. We received top tier press but it never came close to paying off from any business POV. It felt nice, but running out of money felt like shit...I do think there is a critical mass of press that can propel a co to success or atleast longevity, take for instance Quora, or twitter a few years ago. Unfortunately most will never hit that tipping point where the press can compound on itself and translate into growth.

Posts like this make it all sound so simple.

Of course you don't need a PR Agency if you're good at PR and you're going to do it yourself. Just be prepared to allocate time and resources, and to not lose your head during the occasional shitstorm.