Top PR Tricks and Free Tools for Startups in the Era of Decreasing Valuations

‘This has happened before’: early stage startups and now well-established companies are looking for low-budget tools for getting media coverage amidst the economic downturn and the era of new valuations.

Trying to decrease burn rate, startups are jumping from one paid channel to another aiming to report growing numbers to their VCs. However, PR with media coverage and organic traffic it provides is still the most effective, however one of the most difficult approaches to master.

Cutting the marketing budget entirely and hiring a PR manager (which could also be a costly and fun adventure if you don’t understand how PR works and what to expect) is not an option, but knowing some PR tricks will help in getting media coverage prior to your next fundraising.

In my previous op-ed we talked about basic PR mechanics and such tech solutions as Linguix, HARO and PRGuy which are still useful low-budget but very decent alternatives to create and land a pitch.

In this article, let’s find out what new and cool AI-powered tools are available to help out a busy-with-fundraising founder and their PRs.

AI-powered Pitch Creation Assistants

Except ChatGPT there are plenty of NLP tools available, such as Copi.ai, Jasper, and their alternatives. While they can provide some inspiration and really help with SEO-optimized blogging and social media posts by saving your time, they are completely unreliable in terms of preparing a media pitch or press release (yes, this is not the same).

“ChatGPT may not always be accurate”, Mira Murati, OpenAI's CTO said in an interview with Time magazine. In other words, the service is notorious for making up facts and quotes. Even though this could be used as an example where you can put some stats and your thoughts on the matter, there is a chance you can miss such parts and send faked numbers or references.

Today not any of those platforms is capable of producing complex, nuanced content with comprehensive market and competitor analysis, which is a must when you pitch a tech or business journalist. Mostly all of them generate content using pre-existing templates, which may result in content that is not entirely original.

Pricing-wise, usually these platforms are subscription-based that can be expensive for small businesses. However, if you need just one pitch or press-release, some of them do provide freemium models with 5-10 posts per day creation including the templates. Copy.ai even has a free plan. PRGuy charges you per template or ready-to-go pitch and it keeps providing a human-editor review.

AI-powered Outreach Platforms

Finding journalists’ contacts has always been and still quite a time consuming activity. Nowadays, buying email databases for “spray-and-pray” and the subsequent distribution is considered to be bad manners and an experienced PR specialist would never do so. Neither will they ask a colleague to share their media base Google spreadsheets.

There are a lot of platforms available for businesses to automate marketing cold outreach efforts like SalesLoft. There are even platforms like SellScale that pull data from public internet sources to craft “hyper-specific” outreach. But this looks creepy and none of those will help with the media outreach. And again, nothing is low-budget about them.

There are two options available for founders and PRs who want to automate the outreach and at the same time don’t spend a fortune: OnePitch and House of Pitch. Both are free of charge. OnePitch is a free version of Mack Ruck and other costly platforms. It suggests journalists based on your pitch and allows distribution within the platform.

The House of Pitch in turn asks you to pick the most relevant journalists (or VC scouts!) according to their beats (industries of interests) prior to the distribution of the pitch. But there is one feature it has that is dope–you get a clear Yes or No response each time you reach out to a journalist. The pitches you send on HoP are Tinder-like cards that journalists sort Connect or Reject and you either meet with a reporter in an email or will get a “sorry, not a good fit” notification.

Conclusion

More tools aiming to help with marketing appear every month. However, only a few of them fit the PR needs.

The most successful outreach efforts are still those that are personalized, targeted, and backed by genuine human interaction, not GPT. I won’t rely on AI-powered writing assistants, if you have a success story when you pitched to a journalist completely generated text, please share it with me.