Tiberiu Iacomi is a startup operator and mentor working at the intersection of growth, communications, and early-stage execution. With experience across building and advising startups in multiple markets, he focuses on how companies move from zero traction to their first real signals of product-market fit, often through channels founders tend to underestimate, like PR and direct customer engagement.
I think the most important thing startup founders need to understand about PR is that it has a lot of potential, even though it is not immediately quantifiable in the same way as paid ads, for instance.
Because of that, many founders tend to underestimate it. But PR works differently, its value builds over time, it contributes to brand awareness, customer trust, and eventually customer loyalty.
There is also another aspect that founders often overlook: PR is not primarily about budget. It’s about effort - the blood, sweat, and tears you put into it, rather than the money you spend. And sometimes, that also means avoiding money you would otherwise waste on ads if you haven’t yet learned how to use or optimize them properly.
What I keep seeing, consistently, is that founders skip the organic phase. They don’t try to build traction through PR or direct engagement first. Instead, they go straight into advertising, expecting it to be the fastest path to growth.
They see advertising as an immediate gateway to scaling sales exponentially. They expect something close to an overnight effect. You can see where that expectation comes from. For example, in Shark Tank, many founders say that after their episode aired, their website crashed because everyone rushed to buy.
A few years ago, I was mentoring in Dubai in an accelerator created by Emirates Airlines focused specifically on transportation technology startups.
One of the startups I worked with was called DUBZ. It later got acquired for millions of dollars. At that time, the founders were bootstrapping and came to me with a problem: they had around $3,000 left in their company’s bank account. Their mobile app was already live in the Play Store. They had tens of thousands of downloads, but almost no one was actually using the app.
And the product itself was very good, based on a model already proven in Europe. The app allowed travelers to send their luggage directly to the airport on the last day of their trip, so they could enjoy the city without carrying bags.
Imagine you are attending a business conference that lasts three days. On the last day, the conference ends at noon, but your flight is at 11 PM. You have half a day available, but you are stuck walking around with luggage. It’s frustrating, especially for business travelers.
They were solving a very real and very simple problem. They asked me where to invest the $3,000?
And I told them: nowhere. Instead, I suggested a very simple exercise - to go on Google and search for the biggest business conference happening in Dubai at that moment.
It turned out there was a major health conference at the Dubai World Trade Center, with pharmaceutical and medical representatives from all over the world. I told them to go there and talk directly to people who are on their last day of the conference.
Out of around 200 to 300 people they approached, they got more than 200 rejections. But they came back the next day and said: we sold our first 100 subscriptions.
That was the turning point.
From there, things started to move. They got early traction, real users, real feedback, and testimonials. Only after that did they start using advertising again. And when they did, it worked much better, because now advertising was amplifying something that already had proof.
It’s becoming easier to manage expectations now, because we have better tools to track at least part of the impact.
PR is still not as directly measurable as paid advertising, but it’s not a black box anymore.
For example, when a startup is featured in an article, you can include UTM links that allow you to track traffic coming from that specific source. You can see how many people visited your website because of that article. So even if you start with 1,000 visitors coming from a PR article, you can see how that translates into actual outcomes.
It’s not perfect, but it gives founders a much more concrete way to understand the impact of PR.
This is a very common misconception. I always try to explain this with a simple example.
Let’s say I’m mentoring a biotech startup that just raised a round, a publication like Sifted wants to write about it. That sounds great. But then I ask the founders: who reads Sifted?
The answer is usually other founders, investors, or people working in the startup ecosystem. But the question is how many doctors are actually reading Sifted?
Even though being featured in a large startup publication gives visibility, it might not contribute directly to your business goals.
In contrast, a niche industry publication with a much smaller audience might be far more valuable, because it reaches exactly the people you want to talk to.
The second aspect is understanding how journalists work. Founders often approach PR as if they are sending a pitch and expecting a result. But journalists have their own process, their own constraints, and their own priorities. The more you help a journalist do their job, the higher your chances of getting published.
The most common one is sending cold emails and assuming that the story will speak for itself.
Founders often believe that their product or technology is so unique that it will automatically stand out. But journalists receive many similar messages every day. Without understanding what makes something newsworthy, or what kind of effort is required to actually publish a story, those emails don’t go anywhere.
It’s similar to sales. You can’t expect something to “sell itself” just because you believe it’s good. You need to understand the other side. In PR, that means understanding how journalists think, what they need, and what motivates them to invest time into a story.
Everything starts with empathy. Founders sometimes behave as if entering a new market is just a matter of showing up and announcing their presence.
But you need to start by understanding the people in that market. You talk to potential users, connect with small communities, reach out to people through your network and ask for introductions.
Step by step, you build awareness. And then you can start small collaborations. Over time, the market starts to notice you. Only at that point do you have something that is actually worth communicating through PR.
If you skip these steps, you end up sending cold messages to journalists in a market where nobody knows you, expecting immediate coverage.
The issue is that success is often presented in a compressed way. You see the moment when a company raises funding or reaches a milestone, but you don’t see the years of work behind it.
And this is not just a founder problem. It’s also how the media and PR present stories. There is a responsibility to show the full picture, including the failures, the iterations, and the time it takes to get there.
Absolutely. There are already initiatives like Fail Nights that focus on exactly this. Founders share their failures and what they learned from them.
From an investor perspective, failure is not necessarily negative. In many cases, it’s a positive signal. Some investors actually ask founders how many failed startups they’ve had. Because that tells them something about experience, resilience, and how the founder will handle challenges in the future.
That there is a lot they can do before spending money.
I want them to understand the difference between paid, earned, and shared media, and how much they can achieve through organic effort. Most founders are already part of communities. They know other founders. They have access to networks they don’t fully use.
For example, they can ask other founders which journalists they worked with, how they approached them, what worked and what didn’t. These are simple things, but they are often overlooked. The goal is to help them activate what they already have, before defaulting to paid channels.
