What PR can and can't do for your business

PR does one thing no other channel can: it gets a credible third party to say good things about your company. That buys proof of momentum for investors, a trust signal for recruits and buyers, and the earned coverage AI tools cite when someone asks for a recommendation. It cannot replace a customer-acquisition channel, fix a weak product, or show up cleanly in a CAC spreadsheet. On its own, PR's direct ROI is often negative. Buy it for credibility, and budget other channels for pipeline.

Most founders aim at the wrong target. You probably do not need TechCrunch. A tech-press hit drives a traffic spike that fades in about a week, so judging PR by pageviews is the fastest way to conclude it failed. The value sits in who reads the coverage and what it lets them believe about you. DocSend's years of steady coverage mattered to the people who decided its outcome, and the company was eventually acquired by Dropbox.

What PR delivers:

• Fundraising signal - investors treat sustained coverage in outlets they already read as evidence of momentum. It will not fill your pipeline; it makes the partner meeting easier.
• Recruiting - candidates search your company before they take the call, and recruiting surveys put the share who weigh a company's reputation before accepting an offer at roughly 9 in 10. Press is most of what they find.
• Customer and partner trust - a buyer weighs an independent outlet's words more heavily than anything on your own site.
• AI citation - models pull vendor recommendations from earned coverage. Pages you control carry far less weight in that answer.

What it can't do:

• Replace sales - if you need leads this quarter, spend on ads or outbound first and come back to PR when you can wait for compounding.
• Work overnight - a placement keeps surfacing in search results and AI answers long after a paid click expires. Coverage from years ago still gets found; that is the mechanism, and it takes months to build.
• Attribute cleanly - the buyer who trusted your coverage rarely tells you that is why they showed up. Plan to measure PR by what those audiences do, not by last-click attribution.

If those trade-offs fit your situation, the next questions are timing and budget. The do-you-need-PR-yet page covers when PR starts paying off for your stage, and the what-PR-costs page gives you ballpark budgets before you take a single agency meeting.