Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Tips in Managing PR for your Startup

Always be empathetic to your audience. Both the audience that would be reading the feature a journalist writes about you, and the journalist too.

When managing PR, you have to be incredibly empathetic to the needs of the journalist who is interested in finding relevant stories they can use for their publications.

One easy way to do this is by becoming a writer yourself and trying out the other side of the coin. Then you can experience what it’s like to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly pitches from PR people looking for coverage.

Just writing stories yourself (see my HuffPo column) gives you a better sense of what is important in a story and what you should include in a pitch to try to sell a journalist.

I highly recommend managing media relations within your startup. It’s not hard to find the right media leads and then seem newsworthy to them. PR is an art, and it takes practice.

Without good PR skills, we would not have been able to sell thousands of co-created men’s dress shirts, without spending tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands on ad spend.

Don’t get a firm. Do it yourself, and get someone internal to manage all your PR because journalists are also very empathetic when talking to entrepreneurs, directly.

In our custom men’s shirts venture, we have greatly leveraged the media to sell thousands of co-created dress shirts. It wasn’t about pitching the fact that we sold the best design-your-own shirts, or that we offered a variety of fitted dress shirts from slim fit dress shirts to athletic fit dress shirts. It was about telling our personal stories and our vision for changing the world through co-creation.