Let’s skip the part where I tell you PR still works and you just need to try harder.
You already tried. You spent money, or time, or both. You sent pitches that went nowhere. You hired someone who promised coverage and delivered excuses. Or you did it yourself, armed with a media list and a message that felt strong — and got nothing back but silence.
That silence has a name. Founders call it being ghosted. But ghosting is a symptom. The actual problem is upstream, and it started before you ever sent a single email.
The outreach you’re sending sounds like everyone else’s
Here’s what most PR pitches look like in 2026. An AI-drafted opener that vaguely references the journalist’s beat. A three-paragraph summary of the company. A line about why this is “a great fit for your audience.” A call to action that nobody asked for.
The person reading it has seen this exact structure forty times this week. They can feel the absence of a human in the writing. Not because AI is detectable by some magical editorial instinct — but because genuine human attention has a texture that template-thinking erases.
The same thing happens in influencer outreach. The brands that get ignored are the ones who treat every creator like a distribution channel — same message, different name in the subject line. The brands that break through are the ones who clearly spent time. They reference a specific video. They name a moment that landed. They arrive as someone who has actually been paying attention, not someone who just found the contact on a list.
Media works the same way. Journalists and podcast hosts are not vending machines. They are people who have built something — a beat, a perspective, an audience that trusts them. When your outreach skips over all of that and goes straight to the ask, you are signaling, loudly, that you don’t actually care about what they’ve built. You care about what they can do for you.
That signal travels. And it gets you archived.
The fix is not a better template. It is the decision to slow down and actually study the person you’re contacting before you write a single word. That decision is harder than it sounds, because it doesn’t scale the way a mail merge does. But it’s the only thing that actually works.
The agency mistake that costs founders the most
Assume you’ve accepted that. Assume you’re ready to do PR properly, which means you’re ready to stop doing it alone and find someone who knows what they’re doing.
Here is where most founders make the second, more expensive mistake.
They evaluate agencies on the wrong thing. They look at the media placements on the deck. They count the logos. They ask about turnaround times and deliverable structures. And then they sign with whoever sounds most confident in the room.
None of that tells you whether an agency understands your brand.
There is one signal that does. Listen to how they talk about your audience.
Not your reach. Not your current follower count or your domain authority or your press history. Your audience-first strategy — the specific people you are trying to move, what they believe, what they’re afraid of, what would make them trust you enough to act.
An agency that leads with reach is selling you a number. Numbers are easy to promise and hard to connect to actual business outcomes. An agency that leads with audience is selling you strategy. They are telling you, implicitly, that they understand the difference between coverage that feels impressive and coverage that actually does something.
This is something the team at 9 Figure Media gets right — they open every conversation asking who your customer is before they ever talk placements. That posture is rarer than it should be, and it’s worth paying attention to when you find it.
When you sit across from a PR firm and they spend the first twenty minutes talking about placements without once asking who your customer is — walk out. Not because they’re fraudulent. They might be very good at what they do. But what they do is not what you need.
The right agency asks uncomfortable questions early. They want to understand your brand before they make a single promise. They push back on your assumptions. They are more interested in whether the fit is real than in closing the contract. That posture — curious, slightly skeptical, audience-obsessed — is the same posture they will bring to every pitch they write on your behalf.
How an agency pitches you is how they’ll pitch for you. Use that as your filter.
What doing it right actually looks like
It looks slower than you want it to.
It looks like taking three meetings with an agency before you decide, instead of one. It looks like asking them to walk you through a campaign that didn’t land the way they hoped, and listening carefully to how they talk about failure. It looks like getting them on a call with no deck, no credentials, just a conversation — and noticing whether they spend that time asking or telling.
It looks like not outsourcing your judgment. The founders who get burned by PR agencies are usually the ones who handed over the strategy along with the retainer. They stopped paying attention because paying attention felt like micromanaging. But attention and micromanagement are not the same thing. Attention is how you know whether the person you hired understands your brand well enough to speak for it.
It also looks like accepting that some of the failure was yours. Not to be harsh — but because this is the only productive direction to face. If you wrote generic outreach, that was a decision. If you hired an agency because their deck looked impressive without asking hard questions, that was a decision. If you expected PR to do what advertising does — immediate, trackable, scalable returns — and got frustrated when it didn’t work that way, that was a misunderstanding you carried into the engagement.
Founder media strategy is a conversational skill operating inside a relationship game. It rewards patience, specificity, and genuine curiosity about other people. Most founders treat it like a broadcast task — push the message out, measure what comes back, optimize and repeat. That approach fails not because the message is wrong but because the medium doesn’t work that way.
When you’re ready to approach it differently, the model that actually works looks like this: study before you pitch, choose partners who ask before they promise, and keep your judgment in the room even after you’ve hired someone. That’s the framework teams like 9 Figure Media are built around — and it’s the standard worth holding every agency you consider to.
The question you should be sitting with
Not “how do I get more press coverage.”
Not “which agency should I hire.”
The real question is: who have I trusted with my brand’s reputation, and do they actually understand what they’re carrying?
If you can’t answer that clearly, that’s where the work starts. Not in your pitch template. Not in your media list. In the decision you made — or failed to make — about who gets to speak for you, and whether that person has ever been curious enough to find out who they’re speaking to.
That’s the audit. Run it.
Sesus Blog — Smart Moves for Founders and Modern Marketers 
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