We pitch named reporters on your beat, land the funding and launch stories, and turn that coverage into rankings and citations inside AI answers. Outlet tiers, placement targets, and dates are signed before we start, behind a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.
The stakes
Most founders shopping for a startup PR agency are working against a clock nobody else in the room feels. Runway is counted in months. There is one launch worth the name, one round to raise, and a hiring plan that quietly assumes people have heard of you.
The retainer is rarely the real loss. It is the quarter you spent waiting for it to work. A competitor with a thinner product gets the TechCrunch story, the trade coverage, and the podcast run, so their name reaches the shortlist before your rep does. The engineers you wanted to hire read that instead of your careers page. Your next round's investors run the same search and find one company that looks like the category and one that looks like a website. Then a buyer asks ChatGPT who solves the problem you solve, and the answer names three companies that have been written about, not the one that built the better thing.
The deck
Every scope starts from your runway, your funding calendar, and the publications your buyers and investors name out loud.
The full menu sits on public relations services.
Two tracks
Almost every agency ranking for this search picks one side. The tech firms have never sold a product on a shelf, and the consumer shops have never sat through a security disclosure. We run both, because the problems founders bring us from those two worlds look nothing alike.
As a PR agency for tech startups we work across SaaS, artificial intelligence, fintech, cybersecurity, and B2B software sold through procurement. That work lives or dies on beat fluency. An editor covering AI has read four hundred pitches this month claiming a model changes everything, and can tell inside one paragraph whether the sender understands the product.
CPG startup PR runs on a different calendar entirely. Coverage has to land before the retail meeting, not after, and a category buyer at a national chain reads the same trade press your customers do. We build launch stories around ingredient, founder, and sell through angles, time them to trade shows and retail resets, and pitch consumer, food, and retail desks. Direct to consumer brands get the same treatment with reviews, gifting, and creator seeding layered in.
The roadmap slide
Discovery with your founders, a messaging framework, a share of voice read against the competitors who keep getting quoted, and a target media list. Outlet tiers, placement targets, timelines, and deliverables are signed before you wire anything.
Outreach to named reporters on their beat, plus reactive commentary pitched into stories already in progress that week.
Trade and category press usually land first. That is where your buyers live, and it is what national desks check before they take a new name seriously.
Business and consumer desks, founder bylines placed, and a review of what landed against what we promised.
On our Forbes program the first opportunity usually opens inside 4 to 8 weeks.
The number
Almost nobody competing for this search publishes a number, so here is the market to judge any proposal against. Startup retainers usually run $5,000 to $25,000 a month, with seed and Series A programs clustering at $5,000 to $15,000 and growth stage work sitting above that. A single launch or funding campaign priced as a project runs roughly $15,000 to $50,000. For comparison, one in house communications hire costs $120,000 to $180,000 a year before anyone has sent a pitch, and a media database subscription alone runs into four figures.
Ours is published rather than quoted after three meetings, on the pricing page. Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff. Earned media and search bought as one program run mid five figures to six figures annually against a 12 month roadmap. Project, retainer, and performance oriented models are all on the table, and we will tell you on the call which one fits your stage instead of selling you the biggest one.
AI answers
Your buyers stopped starting at Google. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini who solves their problem, and one answer names two or three companies. There is no page two to climb onto.
Those models repeat what they can verify from sources they already trust, supported by consistent entity signals across your site and structured data that says plainly what you sell and who you serve. A feature in a publication they already crawl is the strongest input available, and no link vendor manufactures one. That is why one team here owns both, so nothing falls between two vendors. If organic acquisition is the other half of your problem, pair this with startup SEO.
Why AceIt
Every founder brings the same fear to this decision. You wire a retainer you can barely afford, wait two quarters, and end up holding a hit report full of newsletters your buyers have never opened. Nothing moved, nothing ranked, no investor noticed, and the runway is three months shorter.
So we put our own fee behind the outcome. Placement targets, outlet tiers, timelines, and deliverables are agreed before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back. We guarantee the work and the agreed deliverables rather than promising that one named reporter says yes, because nobody honest sells you another person's decision. That is the boundary of the promise. The refund behind it does not have one.
Three more things to check on every firm you call. Senior people run your account, so no junior account manager learns your category on your budget. Replies land in 1 to 2 hours, which matters on the day a reporter's window is open and closing. PR, SEO, and web sit in one team out of Austin.
Receipts
Vezbi, a community super app, earned over 1 million brand impressions through targeted organic PR during its U.S. expansion, the Vezbi case study. The Forbes program has secured 50+ placements across 12+ industries, and a single feature for one anonymized client returned 4,200+ visits, a 38% rise in branded search, a DA 94 backlink, and 12 secondary pickups. Clients have been featured in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wired, Fast Company, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes, Bloomberg, WWD, Sourcing Journal, and Inside Retail. The rest of the record sits at case studies.
Diligence
Four questions worth asking every firm on your list, including us.
Get names. If the people in the pitch meeting are not the people emailing reporters, you are buying a sales team.
Beat fluency is checkable, and vague answers here reliably predict vague coverage.
A seed company on a $25,000 retainer is funding an agency's overhead. A Series C company on $4,000 is buying a press release factory.
Almost every answer on this results page is a version of nothing. Ours is a refund.
The honest filter
It fits venture backed startups from seed through Series C, bootstrapped companies with real revenue and one story worth telling properly, CPG and food and beverage brands heading into retail, and technical founders whose product deserves a better explanation than their homepage currently gives it.
It does not fit anyone who wants a named publication promised by Friday, anyone buying on the lowest monthly rate alone, or anyone still in stealth with nothing shippable to talk about. Coverage needs news. If you do not have any yet, we will say so on the call instead of billing you for two quarters to reach the same conclusion.
Questions
Anything else, email [email protected] and it comes back in 1 to 2 hours.
Most startup PR retainers run $5,000 to $25,000 a month. Seed and Series A programs typically sit at $5,000 to $15,000, and growth stage programs go higher. A single launch or funding announcement priced as a project costs roughly $15,000 to $50,000. Our prices are published rather than quoted after three meetings, and Forbes campaigns are scoped and priced in writing before kickoff. Ask any agency what month one buys, and what happens to your money if the agreed placements never appear.
Hire when you have news worth a reporter's time and a reason for it to land on a date: a round closing, a product shipping, a retail launch, or a hiring push that depends on people knowing your name. Before that, coverage has nothing to attach to. The other trigger is founder time. Once the announcement calendar fills up and pitching starts eating product and fundraising hours, an agency costs less than the hours do.
Do it yourself while you have one story, a founder with spare hours, and a handful of reporters you can build relationships with directly. Hire out when the calendar fills, when your category needs beat reporters you do not already know, or when coverage has to land on a fixed date. One in house communications hire costs $120,000 to $180,000 a year, which buys a lot of agency months and no media list on day one.
Yes, in the only form that means anything. Placement targets, outlet tiers, deliverables, and timelines are agreed in writing before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back. What no ethical agency can promise is that one specific journalist says yes on a given day. So we commit to the agreed targets instead, and we back them with a refund.
Trade and category coverage usually lands 30 to 45 days after kickoff, with tier one business and consumer press following through months two and three. Most clients on our Forbes program see a first opportunity within 4 to 8 weeks. Anything promised faster is usually a paid placement dressed up as news. Your own timeline is agreed before kickoff, and hitting it is part of what the guarantee covers.
Yes, if you buy a project instead of a retainer. One funding announcement, one launch, or one Forbes campaign gives you a fixed scope, a fixed price, and a defined outcome, rather than a rolling monthly commitment you have to justify every quarter. Bootstrapped teams also get more out of founder positioning and original data stories than out of broad awareness work, because both are cheaper to produce and easy to repeat.
Next step
Send us your domain, your stage, and the two competitors who keep getting quoted instead of you. Back comes the story angles we would build, the reporters and publications we would pitch first, the date we expect your first placement, and the numbers we would sign. Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.
Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back
