The Art of Going Direct
Everything you knew about PR no longer applies.
Recently, Instagram has been feeding me videos of founders “building in public.” Poorboy Coffee shares, through carousels and reels, how they’re bootstrapping their way to their first SF-based coffee shop. Beny Yogurt takes its followers to dairy farms upstate and offers interactive polls. “Do you like your yogurt in plastic or glass?” Your answer may influence their very first mass product order. Hot Girl Pickles mislabeled 1500 of their jars. They almost got sued, and they want everyone to know.
Starting a company is hard, and so is becoming a content creator. The expectation for founders these days is to do both. Social media is seen as a free tool for staying close to your customers, building your own direct communication platforms, and owning your narrative. Founders seem to get there with a lot of talking-to-the-camera reels that open with catchy, repeated hooks and interactive polls. They’re likely aiming for high engagement which will help them stay at the top of followers’ feeds and also be discovered by new, future customers. If they succeed, they can organically build brand recognition in often-crowded markets and a pipeline for quick customer feedback.
Frothing in this changing tide is the birth of the modern-day PR firm. As founders change their approach, so do innovative founders of new PR firms. The modern-day PR firm helps founders “go direct”, turning founders into the primary megaphone for their business and its mission. One of these new PR firms, Rostra, puts it well in their manifesto to founders:
“You may not be interested in The Discourse, but it is interested in you. And if you bow out, you are forfeiting your license to build a movement and thus build a company.”
Another PR firm, Sisu tells founders:
“A defensible business starts with a story only you can tell.”
These PR firms help founders craft a voice and a megaphone rather than another press release. In structure, they reflect the startups they aim to support. They are lean, often made up of ex-VC people staff. One of their biggest selling points is that they have no PR backgrounds.
As a media enthusiast, it’s amazing to observe the extent to which social media has altered the entirety of the media industry. We’ve talked a lot about the birth of content creators and production studios that create content native to these platforms. Now, we’re seeing social media alter the roadmap for founders themselves and the PR firms that support them.