PR Is Not A Launch Activity. 

It Is A GTM Foundation.

Part of the GTM Strategies Beyond Templates Series - Watch the full episode here

By Catherine Mak, Founder of ZILU Consultancy | Fractional CMO with 20+ years leading marketing across financial services, B2B scaleups and growth businesses

When founders raise funding and start planning GTM, one of the first conversations is usually about paid media.

• How much should we spend?
• Which channels?
• How quickly can we generate leads?

I understand why. Paid media is visible, measurable and relatively quick to switch on.

But if nobody knows your brand yet, there is a bigger job to do before you start paying to put it in front of more people.

The market needs to understand what you stand for. Your category needs to make sense. Your story needs to be clear. And buyers need a reason to trust what you are saying.

That is where I think PR deserves a much earlier place in GTM planning.

Good PR can help build the category, shape the story and create third-party credibility that paid media cannot manufacture overnight.

I often think about it as filling the pond before you start fishing. Paid media can help you reach and convert demand, but PR, content, founder voice and credible external validation help create the environment for that demand to exist in the first place.

And before any of that works, the story itself has to be right.

I sat down with Rajin Kang, a PR & communications specialist with fifteen years of experience across agencies, in-house roles and now her own fractional practice, to talk through what PR actually means as part of a go-to-market strategy, and why getting the sequencing right matters.

1. When should a start-up consider PR as part of GTM — not just a launch announcement?

The short answer: before anything else.

PR done well is not about press releases. It is about understanding what your brand actually wants to be known for, what makes it genuinely different, and why anyone outside your own building should care. That clarity takes time to develop, and it does not emerge from a last-minute brief sent to a PR contact the week before launch.

What I found particularly useful in this conversation was Rajin's point that PR is also a stress test. The conversations you have with journalists, analysts and your wider community are some of the most honest signals you will ever get about whether your positioning is landing — because those people have no incentive to be polite about it.

PR doesn't just execute against a go-to-market strategy. It can actually help sharpen it. Conversations with really influential journalists and analysts are a really useful way to stress test your positioning — what's landing, what people are challenging, what feels differentiated, and what really isn't.

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

For a start-up nobody knows yet, particularly one coming out of stealth or creating a new category, that stress test is one of the highest-leverage things you can do early. It tells you what to fix before you spend money amplifying the wrong message.

Watch Part 1 of the podcast: https://youtu.be/8D2g3V_pgeA

2. How does PR help build trust when the category is new or not well understood?

When you are building something genuinely new, you are not just asking people to trust your company. You may first have to convince them that the problem exists, the category matters, and that your approach is credible. That is a lot of work for a website to do on its own.

What PR can do — and what your own marketing simply cannot — is get other people to do that talking for you. A journalist who covers your space writing about why the problem matters. An analyst citing your approach. A customer going on record about what changed for them. These signals carry weight precisely because they come from outside your own messaging.

Third-party validation can do something your own marketing just simply can't. It gives people a reason to believe you. Earned media coverage, particularly in this market, is worth its weight in gold.

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

You do not need massive commercial traction to start building this. But you do need substance. If you make a claim, you need something behind it — data, research, customer evidence, real-world results. 

The PR work is finding and shaping that substance, then getting it into the right conversations.

Watch Part 2 of the podcast: https://youtu.be/--xJte2GMyM 

3. What makes a founder or start-up story actually media-worthy?

The obvious news triggers, a funding round, a major customer, a product launch, are necessary but rarely sufficient. We are living in an extraordinarily noisy market. There is another AI company launching every five minutes. Simply being new, or having genuinely interesting technology, is not enough to land coverage.

What does cut through is the ability to answer a very simple set of questions with real specificity and real credibility. What problem are you solving? Why does it matter right now? What are you doing differently from the ten other companies claiming to solve the same thing? And who does that difference actually matter to?

The same logic applies to founders. Being a founder does not automatically make someone a thought leader. The most interesting founders tend to have a really strong point of view, niche expertise, or a very unusual insight into where the market is going.

Your company is very rarely the whole story. What's changing in the world around your company, and what you can say uniquely about that change, is usually much more interesting.

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

I see this play out constantly. The founders who get traction with media are the ones who have a genuine perspective on where their market is going — and can articulate it in a way that makes a journalist think "that is a story."

Watch Part 3 of the podcast: https://youtu.be/YNoObpp10jQ

4. What proof points do journalists, partners and buyers actually need before taking a brand seriously?

Specificity beats superlatives. Every time.

I have read so much marketing copy describing companies as revolutionary, transformative or industry-leading. Those words have been emptied of meaning. Nobody believes them because there is almost always a competitor making identical claims.

What people actually need is evidence from somewhere beyond your own marketing. A named customer prepared to go on record. Independent data that speaks to the scale of the problem. Measurable outcomes with the working shown. Real-world results that demonstrate the technology actually does what you say it does.

Rajin made a point here that I think applies well beyond PR:

One strong, specific result will always do more for your credibility than a page of marketing copy full of big claims. Who else has trusted you? What happened when they trusted you? And what can you prove?

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

The proof point that works for a journalist is not the same as the one that works for an enterprise buyer or an investor. But underneath all three is the same question: can you demonstrate, with something real, that what you are building actually works and that someone other than you believes it?

5. What mistakes do start-ups make with PR when they are under pressure to grow fast?

The most common one I see is treating PR as something you think about when you have something to announce. Then the moment arrives and you are starting from zero. No journalist relationships. No existing profile. No founder voice with any recognition. No narrative beyond the product itself. And you expect one announcement to do all of that work overnight.

It cannot. And it will not.

Rajin named three other mistakes worth taking seriously.

Overclaiming. The pressure to make a brand sound bigger or further ahead than it really is. You might get someone's attention once. If the substance does not stand up to scrutiny, you lose trust very quickly — and in PR, trust lost is very difficult to rebuild.

Chasing volume over quality. Thirty pieces of coverage sounds impressive. But did any of the people you actually need to influence see it? One genuinely high-value piece of coverage in the right publication does more commercial work than thirty pieces in the wrong ones.

And then the one I think is most costly and least talked about:

Teams race towards launch before they've properly tested whether anybody outside the company actually understands or cares about the story. Sometimes the right PR advice is: you're not ready for this big PR launch yet. Let's get the evidence right first. 

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

I have been in that room. The founder is convinced the positioning is clear. You ask one person outside the building and they look completely blank. The solution is not better PR. It is better messaging, and PR is partly what helps you find it.

6. How should PR work alongside paid media, content and thought leadership?

They should not operate as separate machines producing different versions of the same brand. That is the clearest and most common failure I see in go-to-market execution.

The reality is that each channel does a different job, and those jobs should feed each other. 

• PR creates credibility and third-party validation. 
• Thought leadership gives the founders a distinctive point of view. 
• Content builds authority over time and gives you control over the narrative. 
• Paid gives you distribution, targeting and scale.

Start with one strong narrative and let each channel do what it's best at. 

A great piece of earned coverage becomes something paid can amplify. A strong piece of proprietary research can fuel PR, content, social and thought leadership. The conversations you have through PR tell you which parts of your positioning are actually resonating externally.

— Rajin, Communications Specialist

This connects back directly to what Maria and I discussed in the first two episodes. The credibility signals PR builds, the coverage, the third-party validation, the expert voices talking about your brand, are exactly why people trust you and what AI tools look for when deciding whether to recommend you. PR validate the proposition, LLM visibility amplifies the reach and credibility. They are not separate strategies. 

They are building the same thing: a brand that is consistent, credible and trusted across every surface a buyer might use to research you.

The sequencing matters. Get the messaging right. Build the relationships. Establish the credibility. Then amplify. In that order.

The Point That Runs Through All of This.

PR deserves a place much earlier in GTM planning.

And I would not judge PR only by immediate leads.

A strong story, credible third-party validation and a clear point of view can keep working long after launch through content, sales conversations, partnerships, search and AI visibility.

So the sequence matters:

Get the story right. Build the proof. Earn the credibility. Then amplify it.

Paid media can scale attention. A story people understand and trust gives that attention somewhere useful to go. 

That's why in the next episode, we will look into the role of Performance Marketing in a GTM plan and the difference between Demand Generation and Demand Capturing.

Catherine Mak is Founder of ZILU Consultancy. She works as a Fractional CMO with growth-stage businesses, scaleups and organisations navigating go-to-market strategy. This article is part of the GTM Strategy Series: Beyond the Template.

Rajin Kang is a Communications Specialist with 15 years of experience across agency, in-house and fractional roles. Quotes are drawn from a recorded interview and used with permission.

→ Read Episode 1: LLM Visibility Is Not a Shortcut. It Is a Trust Architecture.
→ Read Episode 2: Before You Go to Market. Get the Proposition Right.