So I am spending more and more time these days advising concept stage and seed stage startups. And I had an interesting conversation with a pair of entrepreneurs the other day about press releases and marketing. They had reached a significant milestone and put a release on the wire. They were waiting for coverage.

I hate to break the news that you don’t really get coverage from putting a press release on the wire. You have to work it like this.

Somewhere along the way it came up that they had dropped a low four figure amount on a PR agency to help them with their release and to create a list of potential writers to contact. I love using an agency at the appropriate time but for companies without funding or revenues getting attention is a core competency that someone on the team needs to develop. It will both save you some money and people that write about startups prefer to talk with founders over flacks.

While we were having this discussion one of the founders started having a bit of a text exchange with a writer for a national news website focused on information technology companies from startups to Fortune 1000 firms. Seems he had networked his way to the writer. Hot space. Got same day feature coverage.

Do your own PR.