We Love Startups: Why We Want To Work With You

Since launching, we've noticed a big problem in the PR and marketing industry. PR and marketing companies don't know how to market startups.

When young companies ask to meet us, it's usually because they're fleeing from the hands of a well-known agency. These are firms that are employed by some of the biggest brands in the world. So why is it that our smaller clients hate them? We hear tales of expensive retainers, frustrating bureaucracy and little return. One client told us that at the last PR company they worked with, they had one piece of publicity in 3 months. Another said that one agency, knowing that they were a pre-revenue startup, told them they would drop their rates and only charge £1,000 a day.

Then I would talk to big brands that worked with these firms. And they LOVED them. They thought they were fantastic work with. They enjoyed good personal and business relationships with them. And they quite happily paid millions every year for their services.

At this point, I was confused. The big guys loved them and wanted to pay them millions. But the small guys hated them and begrudged paying a few hundred pounds a month..

A friend clarified the issue for me. Big firms just don't know how to work with small brands. If they ring up a newspaper and say they've got a story about one of their clients, Virgin Media (obviously a household brand), the story will be printed no problem. But a brand that no one's heard of? How do they persuade a journalist to write about that? This requires alot more imagination and thinking.

When I was running my own startup, I freelanced on the side as a PR hack to pay the bills. The companies I worked with were mainly startups. And I never had any problems generating publicity for their companies or my own. Startups are all I know. Building brands from scratch is what I do. I live them. I breathe them.

But entrepreneurs and their products are suffering because most of the big firms just don't understand them and how to take them from A to B: A being where no one knows them and B being where everybody's talking about them.

So, like the startups we love so much do by building great products, we've decided to solve the problem. From today, we're focusing on working with startups across the globe, helping them grow their businesses through PR and marketing. We'll occasionally work with corporate clients. But for the most part, we won't be chasing their work. Startups is what we do. We want to plug the hole in the PR/marketing industry by being a company that "gets" them and knows how to turn them into big brands. Then they can "graduate" to corporate firms. We'll be working with companies across the tech, mobile, media, retail, etc (the list goes on) sectors. We could just fill in tenders and compete for work from multinationals all day long. But that's not what we love doing. We want to be out in the battlefield with CEO's, CTO's and founders, making stuff happen.

If you're a startup in need of PR and marketing services, we'd love to talk to you. Our clients have appeared in media from Wired Magazine to The Guardian newspaper. Tweet us on @TechFluffCo, follow us on Facebook or email me (Lyra) at lyra at techfluff.co. I look forward to chatting with you.