Somewhere in a WeWork - or the ruins of one - a founder is sitting in a glass box, pitching their startup to a PR agency account lead who nods too eagerly and writes too little. The founder thinks they’re buying influence. What they’re actually buying is a very expensive PDF.
The ritual plays out the same way each time. The PR person says, “We just need to get your story out there.” The founder says, “We just need a hit piece in TechCrunch.” Everyone agrees this will be big. They write a pitch. The pitch goes nowhere. Or maybe it lands, in the shallow graveyard of Sponsored Content.
A win, on a technicality.
That’s the secret most PR firms won’t say out loud: they’re not selling outcomes.
They’re selling feelings.
Specifically, the feeling of being taken seriously. Of being, however briefly, seen. But the people doing the seeing - editors, reporters, readers - don’t care. They’re busy. They’re skeptical. They’ve seen this pitch before. Ten times. This morning.
A PR agency is a strange organism. It cannot live without a host. It feeds on billable hours and thrives in vague deliverables. It will not tell the founder their story is unconvincing because the agency wants the retainer. It needs the retainer. And in some cases, the account lead is already imagining how to pivot their way out of the engagement in six months. “We did our best. The market was crowded.”
That isn’t malice. It’s survival. But it’s still lying.
To lie well in this industry, you need plausible deniability. You need a founding story with a bootstrap origin myth. You need a paragraph that sounds like disruption but means nothing. You need an investor quote saying the company is "poised to revolutionize" something.
None of it has to be true. It has to be trite enough to be unchallenged.
The press release is a genre. Like the sonnet or the sitcom. Its internal logic is fixed: hero founder, urgent problem, inevitable growth, moonshot vision. Try deviating from that structure and you’ll be told you’re off-brand.
The irony is that the real story - the messy, unresolved, high-stakes story - is almost always more compelling. But it’s risky. And PR hates risk.
Joseph Campbell defined mythic narrative with the Hero’s Journey: a protagonist leaves comfort, faces trials, gains insight, returns transformed. Most founders’ stories barely make it past the parking lot. They haven’t risked anything. They haven’t lost anything. They haven’t seen the underworld, let alone fought their way out.
And that’s fine. But then what are you publicizing?
A good story - one worth telling - is usually one of the following:
A contradiction resolved
A conflict walked into
A secret exposed
A rule broken
A tension still unresolved
It’s never a product launch. Or a minor funding round. Or a partnership with a company no one’s heard of.
A story has stakes. Not just success metrics. If it wouldn’t be painful to fail, it won’t be moving to succeed.
Founders often think PR is a shortcut. They believe in “earned media” the way medieval peasants believed in alchemy. But journalists are not marketing teams with better copy. They are overworked, underpaid cynics who can smell desperation across an inbox.
Pitching bad stories to good journalists doesn’t get you coverage. It gets you ignored. Or worse: laughed at.
And yet PR people keep trying. They keep sending overbaked press releases to reporters who don’t cover that beat, who haven’t worked at that outlet in years, or who never existed in the first place. Every journalist has a folder full of these pitches, and they all read like Mad Libs for bland ambition.
"Exciting founder in the [tech/fintech/healthtech] space solving [insert vague problem] with an innovative [platform/app/service]."
It’s barely even language.
The problem: sometimes the hustle does work.
Sometimes, a journalist is on deadline. Sometimes, a friend calls in a favor. Sometimes, your agency’s partner knows a guy at a place.
You get the write-up.
And for a few hours, it feels like momentum. A cousin messages you on LinkedIn. A friend texts. You post it. You say thank you. You say proud to share. You say grateful for the coverage.
But the story didn’t travel. The traffic spiked and died. The leads didn’t convert. The world shrugged. That’s because the story wasn’t real. It was cosmetic.
Worse: you spent energy convincing yourself it mattered.
The dollar cost is one thing. Five figures a month, usually. But the narrative cost is worse. Because once a story has been told, it becomes harder to tell it again. You used your shot. And if you didn’t have a story worth telling, then you wasted your surface area.
There is a kind of narrative entropy in the media. The more frictionless your story, the faster it fades. Real narratives have hooks. They have gravity. They attach to larger movements, debates, fears.
Camus once said that fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. PR, when done well, works the same way. But most agencies are telling lies that point to other lies.
Some agencies take another route. They turn down clients. Not to posture, but because bad stories break trust. When they take someone on, it’s because there’s a real conflict, or a strange product, or something uncomfortable being said.
The questions shift:
What are you risking?
What’s unresolved?
What would hurt to lose?
If there’s nothing there yet, they say so. Not to dismiss, but to pause. To wait until the signal is clearer. The point isn’t a Forbes mention. It’s narrative surface area. So when the story hits, it hits something.
Real stories come from contradiction. From founders torn between values. From inconvenient truths. From building in the shadow of something broken.
Those stories land. Because they’re harder to fake. And because they matter.
Richard Feynman once said, “If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, you don’t really understand it.” The reverse is also true: if you can’t explain why what you’re building matters to a curious outsider, maybe it doesn’t.
Narrative surface area means that your story grips. It creates traction. It allows others to pick it up and run with it. It has enough edges to cut through.
That doesn't come from polish. It comes from stakes.
The obsession with hype - revolutionize, disrupt, reimagine - doesn’t build trust. It builds fatigue.
You don’t need artificial urgency. You need real consequences. Real opposition. Real doubt.
And if those things don’t exist yet? Wait.
Build. Risk something. Say something that makes even you a little nervous.
Then the story might stick.
