My primary role at Accel isn’t PR.
In fact, it isn’t even one of the things that was discussed as a deliverable during my long interview process. But when you are working in branding, which is what I do, PR cannot be ignored.
Sure, in a world where some founders (think Musk) and some creators (think Tanmay Bhat) don’t need the media at all for distribution, it may be cool to diss the function. Except PR is essential precisely because we are not all Musk or Tanmay, and don’t have that kind of reach by ourselves. In that case, distribution can only be solved if you have a PR arm, or at least someone in marketing who’s looking at it.
It is in this context that I’m assessing my year and a half of handling PR for Accel and some of our early portfolio companies.
And what I’ve come up with is this: PR is a full time job.
Let me put this differently: If you are a Series B startup who has a vocal founder, ambition, a point-of-view, and a necessity to be in the news or put out news once in a while, you better have a dedicated PR person on your team. If you don’t, you are missing out on an easy advantage.
How did I come to this conclusion?
Last year and early this year, I ran two big PR campaigns for Accel . One was the launch of Accel Atoms, our pre-seed program, and the other was the launch of the firm’s Fund 7, this time with an added focus on Southeast Asia. I managed both these efforts and coordinated national and international coverage, meetings with senior journalists, back and forth for quotes and fact-checking, written questions and answers over mails, webinars, and even video interviews.
In the midst of all this, I was also supporting some of our early stage startups which were doing PR for the first time and needed help with advise and contacts.
It was exhausting, but also enervating, because the results of the work you do on PR are immediate, you can see them come up on tickers and newsfeeds. There is a finite end to the work, in that there is an embargo, then the news comes out, and you are done, whether you’ve done a good job or bad. Very few activities in modern marketing have this advantage.
But because of this finiteness, startups tend to take the function lightly, assigning it to some junior, and once done, move her to other responsibilities. Except that doesn’t take into account the depth of the work that needs to be done.
So I’ll try to make a short list of the things I did, and the time and effort it took to do them:
1. All through the year, I spoke to journalists, senior and junior, and tried to develop a relationship with them. This means giving them quotes and interviews and helping them with their stories and so on, so that they will help us when we need them. If you only go to them when you need them, you will not only not get any coverage, but you and your startup will gain a reputation of being 'takers' that will never go away.
If this sounds like hard work, it is. That’s why this is a full time job. I did this, but not as well as I could have, because I also have content and social on my plate, and I need to do those well too.
2. I worked on pitches, writing and perfecting them, both for Accel and for portfolio startups throughout the year. This is painstaking work, because it pushes you to think why a journalist or a publication would find this story worth telling. If it’s not exciting, new, unique, or genuinely interesting to their audience, why would they run with it?
Learning how to pitch, especially to senior journalists only comes with experience, you need to do it over and over again to get good at it, so you know how to pitch when you really need it to be picked up. That’s why this is a full time job.
3. There are differing ideas on the role of PR inside a startup. A large part of PR’s role is also stakeholder management. What story does the founding team want told? Is that story in agreement among all the founders? Has that been communicated to the marketing team? And from there, do we have a strategy of how we are speaking to the press?
Most often, there is not. Having someone pay attention to this will force the organisation to clarity. That’s also why PR is a full time job.
Done well, PR can be an incredibly powerful marketing and storytelling channel for your startup. But if founders and marketing heads treat it as a part time function, the ones who take it seriously will run away with the game. Make sure you are one of them.
Related Reading
One of my best tactical essays, a startup founder’s guide to early stage PR has a step-by-step to getting better at PR. I wrote it from direct learnings of working with several Accel startups. If you are an early stage founder, it has all you need to know about PR and how to go about getting the first few right.