How can PR be a game-changer for early-stage startups?

In this interview, Emilie Gerber explains why founders confuse PR with marketing, when a startup should actually start caring about press coverage, and how to make a founder's story land with a reporter. She also breaks down why silence can beat a public rebuttal during a crisis, and why she believes the average reporter now gets pitched by seven PR people for every one journalist.

My name is Emilie Gerber, and I'm the founder and CEO of Six Eastern, PR for startups at every stage. We work with both B2B companies and consumer companies. We work with Nubank, which is one of the largest fintechs in the world, a public company based out of Brazil. We work with Webflow, one of the fastest-growing web development platforms.

I was extremely introverted as a child, which is surprising being in PR, but I was not someone that naturally wanted to talk to strangers. At 14 years old, I worked at Macy's and did gift wrapping for them, so I was in charge of, especially during the holiday season, wrapping presents for people. I think it has absolutely nothing to do with what I do today, but I think the common thread is just a desire to work and be busy.

I was never very good in school, actually. Communications was kind of a major that people often pick when they're not sure what they want to do with their lives. I always had very mediocre grades. A big reason for that is that I just wasn't good at memorization, and so much of school comes down to memorizing things. So I thought I wasn't smart, but really I just wasn't the kind of smart that school tests for.

Once I graduated, I really believed that the best possible way to learn about PR is by working at an agency first. You're able to see not just one company, but how ten companies do things, so that's really shaped my experience today. When you think of public relations, a lot of people think of glamorous things, like fashion and entertainment and working with celebrities, and there's certainly a place for all of that. But I think I get to work with really smart people and solve really interesting problems.

So my next job was at Box. Box is an enterprise software company, so it's not necessarily something that reporters are always looking to cover, and it really forces you to be creative and come up with interesting stories and angles.

After some time, I had a really unique opportunity to join Uber as their first B2B communications hire, so essentially the first person promoting their business products, their main one being Uber for Business, which is like transportation for employees. I joined Uber at a really interesting time. I think it was like a couple weeks before there was one of the major crises that ended up leading to the CEO leaving.

Reporters only want to hear about the bigger thing that's happening at the company, so for me it was about navigating that and figuring out how to really be creative to tell those stories. I never had ambitions to start an agency. Part of my role at Uber included business development communications, which often meant doing partnerships with other companies and announcing them, so I could see what kind of communications support these other companies had. I could sense that there was a need for more support for early-stage startups, and I could sense that it was something that I would be good at. My biggest fear was that we would just become a standard PR agency, but I saw that I was able to scale it in a way that really worked.

I also think there's a more general misconception that confuses PR and marketing. PR really has nothing to do with anything that you pay for, and there's a whole other world of marketing out there. PR is not usually a direct acquisition channel, it's much more top of funnel brand awareness, and so expecting that it's going to drive tons of conversion immediately, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure in most instances.

The ways to figure out when to start caring about PR: figuring out whether a more public reputation would contribute to key hires that you're trying to make, or if your company has a bunch of BD efforts going on and you want to build partnerships. Keep in mind that the publication is not your company's vendor; they're not being paid by you, and they're not beholden to you in any way, really. Their job is to write informative, interesting articles for their readers. Your job is to best shape that story and help them as much as you can.

There are a lot of reporters who get hundreds of pitches every day, so if you're going to stand out, come up with something really bold, controversial, and unique to say. Think of your story as a big picture. Don't just zero in on what your company is and what it does, and instead think about what reporters are covering, what people are interested in, topical things happening in the news, and figure out how to make your story resonate as part of that.

I think a lot of founders, when they do PR for the first time, expect that within the first couple of weeks they're going to already see coverage on their company, which simply isn't how it works. Don't expect that you can go straight to getting CNBC and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. 

It's so important to build your credibility through those smaller opportunities first, whether it's a niche podcast that reaches your target audience or working with a trade publication on a story, in order to get those bigger pieces. They're going to want to see that you've done other kinds of media. Don't discount those smaller opportunities and assume that you can go straight to the big guys, because then, in reality, you're just stalling your entire communications program.

When you're a founder thinking about what makes your story interesting, I think there are a couple of things to consider. One is the founding story, the individual themselves: what made them intrigued by the problem that they're solving today? What was the past experience that could have led them on the journey to get there? If they worked at an interesting company or they have really interesting career accomplishments from the past, we always tend to include that in the story.

Also, a lot of founders don't necessarily want to talk about how their company compares to giants in the space. Founders want to position themselves as creating a category, which is occasionally true. You can create a brand new category where there's nothing that competes, but I think that's very rare. It's also actually harder to tell those stories, because if we're pitching the story and there's no frame of reference, oh, this company is trying to disrupt Salesforce or Google or something more specific, then our job is a lot harder, because we're having to talk through the nuance and explain things from scratch.

This sounds very basic, but if the startup has raised funding or has some growth metrics, that should always be a part of the story, because reporters get pitches about companies each and every day, and some of them might be really interesting, but there needs to be something tangible behind it. It can't just be an interesting story; they need to see that it's real. When we talk to startups, we'll often advise that they hold off on even engaging with PR or telling their story publicly until they have something along those lines to share.

I think use of social media, like Twitter, so many companies assume that they need to have this, when in reality there should be more thought put to whether that's even where your audience is. I will say that even with the changes at Twitter, there are still a lot of journalists on the platform, so it can be a really great way to build relationships with journalists, especially if you can get a decent following going. 

I wouldn't recommend that you necessarily do that through a brand page, but instead through the actual founder's page, and they need to really have something unique to share. It shouldn't just be constant tweets about the company's news or generic things that are clearly written by the corporate communications person. If you're going to do it, you have to do it well and make it interesting, engaging content.

Obviously, we all know that it's more interesting to read a negative headline than a positive one. You can't always prevent bad news, because there are going to be things like a data breach, which are completely out of the control of anyone at the business. But I do think for a lot of the negative things that happen, they can be controlled. 

It's just very helpful to have an additional set of eyes reviewing things, especially if you're a startup and you don't have a communications person yet or a marketing person yet. Even just getting the people team lead, the legal team, or someone on the product team to get different perspectives on something.

Oftentimes, when something negative happens to a company, there's a desire to react. There's an example: recently, the CEO of Carta put out a long email or blog post about the negative press that the company was getting and took issue with it, but in reality, most people weren't aware that Carta had a bunch of negative press, and so there was tons more conversation on the topic that otherwise wouldn't have appeared. It's important not to assume that everyone's paying attention to what's going on in your business, especially if you're an early-stage startup. Only comment if it's actually going to be constructive. I think it's a misconception a little bit that we're able to squash stories or ensure that certain things stay out of the news.

When I've worked on crisis communications, it's not so much about covering up the issue, but more so figuring out what facts you can share with a reporter on background to potentially soften the blow. Building a reputation takes time, and it's not going to happen overnight. It's a combination of perseverance and then also just consistency and telling your story over and over again, and then over time I think you'll see greater returns.

Today there are seven PR people for every one journalist, so the average reporter gets hundreds of pitches every day from PR people talking about their company. I would say even for every pitch we send, a small fraction get replies. So I think how companies think about PR needs to inevitably change, and one of the ways is to think about other platforms outside of more traditional media. I think thinking about new places to reach your audience can be really a good way to do that. So, for instance, if your product is sold to HR people, targeting HR specific podcasts or HR specific newsletters, it might be a smaller audience, but it's going to be the right people.

I think what motivates me in the job is seeing client wins and being able to celebrate those client wins. Whenever candidates ask me in interviews where I see the agency in 5 to 10 years, I'm never totally sure what to say, because I never would have expected to be where it is. I think your reputation is so important in PR, and it's very easy to lose credibility if you do a bad job on one account, and that can really impact the business dramatically. So my number one priority is ensuring that we don't sacrifice anything as we grow.