Earned Media Without a PR Agency: A Founder's System

Retainers are the default answer to press and usually the wrong first move. Most early coverage comes from founders doing this directly, and the system behind it is learnable.

By Pierre Subeh, published July 2, 2026, 6 minute read

The default advice for a company that wants press is to hire an agency. For companies at a certain scale that is correct. For most companies asking the question, it is an expensive way to learn that nobody had a story yet.

Nearly all of the coverage I have generated, for my own firm and for clients, came from a direct system that a founder can run in a few hours a month. Here it is.

Coverage Follows Stories, Not Companies

The reason most outreach fails is that it pitches a company to someone whose job is to publish stories. Those are different objects.

A journalist needs something that will interest their readers this week. Your funding round, your product update, and your anniversary are facts about you. None of them is inherently a story, which is why the announcement pitch has such a poor response rate.

There are roughly four things that reliably are stories.

Proprietary data. You know something nobody else can know because it comes from your own operations. Aggregated, anonymized, and framed against a question people are arguing about, this is the most reliable coverage generator available to a small company.

A contrarian position you can support. Not a hot take. A specific disagreement with conventional wisdom in your industry, backed by evidence and attached to a name willing to be wrong in public.

A trend you can explain and illustrate. Journalists write trend pieces constantly and need sources who can explain the mechanism and provide an example. Being that source is easier than being the subject.

Something genuinely unusual that you did. Not unusual to you. Unusual enough that the fact of it is describable in one sentence.

If you have none of these, the honest answer is that you are not ready to pitch, and the productive move is to build one rather than to send more email.

Build the Angle Before the List

Most founders reverse this. They assemble a list of journalists and then work out what to say, which produces a pitch that is really a request for attention.

Start from the angle. Write the headline you want to see, then ask whether it would interest someone who has never heard of you. Show it to three people outside your industry. If they shrug, the pitch will fail and no distribution will save it.

Then find the journalists who already write that story. Not the outlet, the individual. Search for the topic, read the last several months of bylines, and build a list of people who have covered adjacent stories recently. Twenty names of people who genuinely cover this beat outperform a database of two thousand.

The Pitch

Short, specific, and obviously written for one person.

The subject line states the story, not your company name. The first sentence says why this person specifically, ideally referencing something they wrote and why your angle extends it. The second and third sentences give the story and the single most compelling piece of evidence. Then what you can provide: the data, an interview, access, whichever applies. Then a one line note on who you are, at the end, where it belongs.

Under 150 words. No attachments. No embargo language unless you have a reason. No follow up before a week, and only one, and then stop.

The most common error is length. The second most common is leading with the company. The third is sending the same message to forty people with the name swapped, which is immediately visible and burns the list.

Reactive Beats Proactive

The highest return activity is not pitching your own story. It is being available quickly when a journalist needs a source for a story they are already writing.

Reporters work on deadlines that are shorter than most founders expect. Someone who responds within the hour with a usable quote and no negotiation gets used, gets used again, and becomes the person called first next time.

Journalist request services and the relevant hashtags on social platforms surface these requests continuously. Most are irrelevant. A few each month will match your expertise exactly. Answering those consistently for six months builds a set of relationships that no pitching campaign will match, and each published quote makes the next pitch land better.

The discipline is speed and restraint. Answer the question asked, provide a quote that can be lifted verbatim, do not attach a pitch for your product, and do not ask to review the piece.

Own the Data Nobody Else Has

If I could give a founder one instruction on this, it would be to find the dataset only they have and publish from it on a schedule.

Every operating business accumulates information about its market that outsiders cannot see. Pricing patterns, seasonality, what customers ask for, what they abandon, how behavior shifted over three years. Aggregated properly and stripped of anything identifying, that is original research, and original research is the most linkable and most quotable asset a small company can produce.

Publish it twice a year. Keep the methodology plain and honest, including the limitations. Do not bend the finding toward your product, because the moment the data is a sales argument it stops being credible and journalists can tell.

This compounds in a way that individual pitches do not. After a few cycles you are the source people cite for that number, which is a position no amount of outreach buys.

Local and Trade First

Founders aim at national business publications and skip the two tiers that are far easier to reach and often more valuable commercially.

Trade publications reach the people who actually buy from you. They are hungry for expert contributors, they respond to pitches, and their audience converts at a rate a national feature will not approach.

Local business press is similarly accessible and matters more than founders expect, particularly for firms selling regionally. It also feeds the credibility loop, because coverage begets coverage and editors at larger outlets check what has been written before.

Start where you can win, accumulate a record, and let the larger outlets come to a company that already has one.

When an Agency Is Right

An agency earns its retainer when you have more story than time: consistent news, a spokesperson with a schedule, and relationships worth maintaining continuously. It cannot manufacture a story for a company that does not have one, and hiring for that reason produces a year of activity reports and very little coverage.

Do this yourself until you are turning down opportunities. Then hire.

About the author

Pierre Subeh is Co-President of AMA Orlando and the founder and CEO of X Network, an SEO and paid marketing firm whose work spans Apple Music, Häagen-Dazs, and Pepsi. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in marketing and advertising, a TEDx speaker, and a member of the PR and Media Council at the Council of Global Change, an independent international policy council that convenes at the United Nations. He writes about search, brand, and global growth at pierresubeh.com.

Topics: public relations, earned media, founders, media relations, press