Don’t trust young organizations that hire PR agencies. PR agencies are the obvious mechanism by which you can translate money into reputation. As such, spending on PR agencies is a pretty huge flag! Not everyone who works with PR agencies is doing illegitimate things, but especially if an organization has not yet done anything else legible that isn’t traceable to their PR agency or other splashy PR efforts, it should be an obvious red flag.
In The Submarine, Paul Graham talks about his startup ViaWeb hiring a PR firm back during the dotcom bubble:
PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren’t dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won’t bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they’ve worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don’t want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it’s the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it’s so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won’t lie to them.
A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.
Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this “fact” was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.
Agree! I found that section quite interesting to read and ran into it when researching for this post.
I think I disagree with Paul Graham’s lax-seeming relationship to telling selective truths and leveraging that for your company’s success. Separately, I do also think Viaweb running a non-trivial fraction of the store fronts on the internet made it ambiguously a young company. I would be curious to learn how close this was to Yahoo’s acquisition of Viaweb, which could sway me either way on this being a counterexample or not.
Separately, I am pretty sure Paul Graham has said things other places where he warns startups not to hire PR companies, or something to that affect, but I can’t find it. This HN comment refers to it.
In The Submarine, Paul Graham talks about his startup ViaWeb hiring a PR firm back during the dotcom bubble:
Agree! I found that section quite interesting to read and ran into it when researching for this post.
I think I disagree with Paul Graham’s lax-seeming relationship to telling selective truths and leveraging that for your company’s success. Separately, I do also think Viaweb running a non-trivial fraction of the store fronts on the internet made it ambiguously a young company. I would be curious to learn how close this was to Yahoo’s acquisition of Viaweb, which could sway me either way on this being a counterexample or not.
Separately, I am pretty sure Paul Graham has said things other places where he warns startups not to hire PR companies, or something to that affect, but I can’t find it. This HN comment refers to it.