NEW YORK, NY
Last quarter, I watched a company most people have never heard of rack up 83 press mentions. They weren't launching the next ChatGPT. They hadn't just raised a billion-dollar Series C. They weren't even trying to sell you crypto or promise to disrupt your morning coffee routine.
Yet there they were: Bloomberg, Fortune, WIRED. The usual suspects, all covering a company that—by traditional PR logic—had no business being there.
The secret? Their founder had figured out something the rest of us are still learning: the old playbook is dead, and nobody sent out a memo.
For decades, PR followed a predictable script. Companies would hire agencies to craft press releases about product launches, feature updates, and funding rounds. They'd pitch journalists like supplicants at the gates of media kingdoms, hoping some overworked editor would deem their news worthy of coverage.
This system worked when information scarcity was real and gatekeepers held all the keys. But somewhere between the rise of social media and the collapse of traditional media economics, the entire game changed. Today's PR isn't about begging for coverage—it's about building your own megaphone and making sure it's loud enough that people want to listen.
In the attention economy, boring is the kiss of death. The old model assumed that if you built something decent and wrote a competent press release, journalists would naturally want to cover it. That was always optimistic thinking, but now it's pure delusion.
Today's landscape rewards the bold, the contrarian, the genuinely interesting. While everyone else zigged toward artificial general intelligence hype, psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author Gary Marcus zagged hard in the opposite direction. His relentless skepticism about AGI timelines hasn't just earned him 61,000 Substack subscribers and 175,000 X followers—it's made him the go-to quote for any journalist writing a "maybe AI isn't magic" story.
Marcus didn't get there by hedging his bets or splitting the difference. He picked a lane, painted it neon, and drove straight down the middle at maximum speed. The result is what every founder dreams of: becoming synonymous with an idea.
Tyler Denk figured this out early at beehiiv. Instead of just announcing new features like every other SaaS company, he made the company's building philosophy the star of the show. His weekly founder notes don't just tell subscribers what beehiiv shipped—they pull back the curtain on how they think about customer feedback, team workflows, and the relentless pursuit of shipping velocity.
Denk isn't selling email newsletter software. He's selling a worldview about how software should be built, and people are buying into that vision as much as they're buying the product. It's the difference between telling someone your car has good gas mileage and convincing them you're both part of an environmental movement.
The most liberating realization in modern PR is this: you don't need anyone's permission to have a voice. The traditional model required founders to genuflect before journalists, hoping their story would survive the editorial gauntlet. Today, Substack, LinkedIn, X, and podcast platforms have democratized distribution in ways that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago.
This shift has flipped the entire dynamic. Instead of pitching stories and hoping for coverage, smart founders are publishing their own content and letting the press come to them. Ben Lang discovered this accidentally when he posted a Notion template that he and his wife use to manage their marriage. The post went viral—equal parts fascination and horror from the internet masses—but the real payoff came when a New York Times reporter turned that viral moment into a full feature story.
Lang didn't have a PR agency. He didn't craft a media strategy. He just hit publish on something authentic and interesting, and the attention economy did the rest.
The most underutilized distribution channel in most companies isn't social media or paid advertising—it's the people who work there. When employees genuinely understand and believe in their company's story, they become an exponentially more powerful marketing force than any campaign you could buy.
But this only works when internal communication is treated as seriously as external communication. It's not about giving everyone talking points or scripted responses. It's about creating such clarity around your company's narrative that everyone can tell the story authentically in their own voice.
Ramp has mastered this approach. Scroll through their X account and you'll see regular retweets from employees across engineering, design, and product. Each person's voice is distinct, but every message reinforces the same core narrative about financial efficiency and operational excellence. It's internal alignment made visible, and it's far more convincing than any corporate messaging could ever be.
The final piece of the puzzle is measurement. Traditional PR focused on vanity metrics—mentions, reach, impressions—that had little correlation with business results. The new model treats communication as a growth engine and measures it accordingly.
When a startup founder I worked with landed coverage in KFF Health News, their initial reaction was lukewarm. "It's just a newsletter," they said. But I pushed them to think beyond prestige publications and focus on their actual business goals. That "just a newsletter" generated immediate sales inquiries from highly targeted prospects who fit their ideal customer profile perfectly.
The transformation of PR from media relations to narrative control represents more than just a tactical shift—it's a fundamental reimagining of how companies build relationships with their audiences. In this new landscape, founders who can articulate a compelling vision, build their own distribution channels, and align their teams around a unified story will consistently outperform those still playing by the old rules.
The press isn't dead, but waiting for them to tell your story certainly is. The future belongs to founders who realize that in the age of infinite content, being genuinely interesting isn't just an advantage—it's the only sustainable strategy there is.
