Public Relations

There is a ceiling on what a company can say about itself. "Our product is the fastest" reads one way on a company's own homepage and another way in an article written by a reporter. The first version sounds like a seller picking the flattering numbers; the second sounds like someone outside the company checked first. No advertising budget clears that ceiling, because readers already know the space was paid for.

At Pagedeck the ceiling showed up right after the Series A. Ravi, the growth marketer, had pushed ad spend to roughly 20 million won a month and signups to 180 a week, and not one deal with a company over 100 people moved forward. Sofia went and asked why. A buyer told her she had searched the company name, found nothing but ads, and had no source to cite when she took the request upstairs. She couldn't paste numbers from a sales deck into an internal approval document, so there was nothing to point at.

Sorting exposure into three buckets makes the gap visible. Paid media is space you buy. You decide what appears, where, and when, and it disappears the moment the budget stops. Owned media is what the company runs itself — the website, the blog, the social accounts. You control every word, but it only reaches people who already came looking. Earned media is exposure someone else created on their own: articles, reviews, community posts. You can't buy it and you can't edit it, and it is the bucket readers trust most.

Public relations is the work of growing that third bucket. The method is not purchasing placement but producing facts a reporter has reason to write about, and that comes with a trade. You give up control over what gets published and how, and in exchange you get coverage that reads as credible. Eight out of ten pitches go nowhere, and the ones that land often lead with the detail the reporter found interesting rather than the one the company wanted highlighted. For someone used to approving ad copy word by word, that is the strangest part of the job. Preparation here means assembling facts, not polishing sentences. What you control ends at which facts you offer and who receives them when. That is also why the work starts further upstream than most people expect. Before anything gets pitched, somebody has to decide which of the quarter's developments are actually news — a funding round, a customer milestone, a product that changes how a job gets done — and which are internal announcements dressed up as news.

The scope is not limited to good news either. When payments stall for two hours or customer documents become visible to the wrong people, that is the day the company name gets searched most. If nobody has decided in advance what gets said, when, and by whom, silence becomes the answer, and silence always fills up with the worst available guess.

The work under public relations splits three ways: what you hand a reporter (materials), what you do with reporters and the public (activities), and the agreements that keep the whole thing running (operations). The split is useful when coverage dries up and you need to know where to look. Pitches nobody opens point at materials. Good materials with nowhere to send them point at activities. A launch that leaks on the wrong day points at operations.

Materials are the artifacts that stay in someone else's hands. Two of them travel together.

1. Press release — the news written up in something close to article form and sent out. What happened, when, and why it's worth writing about all go in the first few lines, because a reporter sifting through dozens of pitches a day decides there. A release opening with "we are building the future of collaboration" closes there. One opening with "automatic meeting notes shipped on March 4, with 1,200 companies on the waitlist" gets read. The shape is fairly fixed: a page or less, a quote or two from a founder or lead, contact details and an image link at the bottom.
2. Media kit — logo files, product screenshots, headshots, a paragraph of company background, and funding history collected in one place. A reporter on deadline pulls what they need from it two hours before filing. Without one, those two hours get spent emailing logo files back and forth, and a stale screenshot sent in a hurry ends up in an article that outlives the product version it shows. Most companies park it on a page called "press" or "media" so it can be taken rather than requested. Keeping it current matters more than making it thorough: a kit with last year's leadership photos and a product shot from two redesigns ago does more damage than no kit at all, because the outdated version is the one that ships.

Activities are the part that deals with people and situations. They divide into what you do routinely and what you do when something breaks.

1. Media relations — building standing relationships with reporters and outlets before there is anything to announce. Reaching out for the first time on launch day and reaching out to someone you've traded industry notes with for six months produce very different reply rates. The practical form is a list: which fifteen reporters actually cover software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, and what each of them published recently. With that list, a launch goes to five people at the angle each one cares about instead of to everyone at the same angle. A reporter covering startup growth gets the pace of expansion since funding; a reporter covering how teams work gets the hours of meeting time removed. Relationships don't make people do favors — they tell you which angle to send. The list is also the thing that keeps the work honest. Fifteen names with recent articles next to them makes it obvious when a launch has no natural home, which is a useful signal to get before spending a week writing about it.
2. Crisis communication — assembling and delivering a position when something goes wrong. Preparing doesn't mean drafting an apology in advance. It means deciding beforehand who speaks, how much gets disclosed, and how many hours can pass before the first notice goes out. Start debating "should we say anything publicly" after an outage begins and users will post about it before the debate ends. The first notice has a known shape: what happened, how far the investigation has gotten, what users should do right now, and when the next update arrives. Waiting for a complete explanation before saying anything is the most common mistake. Root cause can take days; the first notice takes an hour and buys the time to find it.

Operations are the rules that keep the first two workable. Embargo is the main one — an agreement to share material early on the condition that nothing publishes before an agreed hour. It exists because writing a real story takes reporting time, and a reporter handed a release the morning of the launch can only transcribe it. Send it three days ahead with a Thursday 10 a.m. release time and there is room for interviews and fact-checking. When the agreement breaks, both sides lose. One outlet publishing two hours early kills the story for everyone who waited, and the company that leaked drops off the list for the next announcement. Embargoes are also easy to overuse. Holding routine news behind a timed release adds coordination work without adding coverage, so most teams reserve it for launches and funding announcements where several outlets are writing at once.

The three groups depend on each other in sequence. Activities produce the list that gives materials somewhere to go, materials worth reading earn the next conversation, and operations keep that relationship alive until the following launch. When one is missing the others spin. A team with polished releases and no list ends up posting them on its own blog, and a team with relationships but nothing to announce fades out after two rounds of small talk.

"Let's take this one to press instead of paid. The number is the story."

Something concrete — 1,200 companies on a waitlist — gives a reporter a reason to write. It isn't an argument against spending money, just a claim that this particular item can land without it.

"We have no relationship with that outlet. Send the media kit and try again in a month."

Asking a stranger for a favor gets declined. Skip this launch and open the relationship for the next one.

"Embargo lifts Thursday at 10. Nothing goes on the blog before then."

The timing agreement binds the company too. Posting on your own channels early counts as breaking it.

Those three lines came up in one week at Pagedeck, around the launch of automatic meeting notes. Ravi had built a list of fifteen reporters covering SaaS and sent material to five of them three days ahead. Grace took two interviews and explained why the feature was built; Theo handled the technical questions. Four articles went up simultaneously at 10 a.m. on Thursday.

There was one near miss. On Wednesday afternoon someone on the marketing side posted a teaser image to a social account, and a reporter who saw it nearly published, assuming the embargo had already broken. Ravi sorted it out within half an hour, but after that Pagedeck added a step: during a launch week, one person reviews every outgoing post. Public relations accidents usually don't arrive from outside. They come from two internal things happening in the wrong order.

Measuring the work by article count is the most common error. It's the one number that's easy to put in a report. But one placement in an outlet your buyers never read and one placement a buyer pastes into an internal approval document are not worth the same. Make the count a target and the team drifts toward whatever is easiest to place. Six months later the report shows 40 articles and not one of them is usable in a deal conversation. Counting is fine; counting without outlet and context is not. Pagedeck records three things alongside the number: which outlet ran it, whether the sentence the company cared about survived into the piece, and whether the piece got cited in sales material or an approval document.

Treating public relations as something you call on only when things break is the other common reading. The visible moments are the apologies, so the association makes sense. In practice the relationships built during quiet months determine how fast the response moves. A company with no reporter list and no history of contact, calling for the first time on the day of an outage, watches its explanation stay out of the article while user complaints get quoted instead. Left alone, every incident restarts from zero, and the impression left by the first one is still there at the next launch. The quiet months are when the work is cheapest and most effective, which is exactly why they're the easiest to skip.