You can do your own PR if you have the time to build reporter relationships, a genuine story, and the discipline to pitch and follow up consistently. A PR agency makes sense when you lack the time or the media relationships, when the stakes are high, or when you need results faster than a learning curve allows. When just starting out, many founders can and should do their own PR. As the company grows and PR becomes a real lever, hiring an agency or publicist usually pays for itself.

A press pitch gets a response when it reaches the right reporter, signals a real story in the subject line, and makes saying yes easy. The body should be a few tight paragraphs: the angle, why it matters to that reporter’s readers now, the few facts they need, and a simple way to follow up. Most pitches fail not because the story is weak, but because they bury the angle, target the wrong person, or read like a company announcement rather than a story.

Short answer: Most journalists ignore most pitches because they receive far more than they can answer, not because the pitch was bad. A non-response is usually silence from an overloaded inbox, not a no. The founders who get covered are not the ones with the single best pitch; they are the ones who target the right reporter, make the story easy to say yes to, and follow up once or twice without becoming a nuisance.

You sent a good pitch to a journalist who covers exactly what you do. It was relevant, it was timely, it was addressed to the right person. And then nothing. No reply, no rejection, just silence.

Design and PR are usually treated as separate functions, but they are two halves of one problem: how a business is perceived. Design shapes perception when someone meets you directly; PR shapes it before they arrive. Handled separately, each quietly undercuts the other. Handled as one system, they compound.

The seven-second test is the principle that a visitor decides if they want to stay on your website within about seven seconds, before they scroll. In that window, your homepage has to communicate what you do, who it is for, and why it matters. If it doesn't, the visitor leaves, no matter how strong the rest of the site is.

The perception gap is the distance between how good your work is and how good it looks. Learn why it costs clients and pricing power, and how to close it.