Untangling the future of PR: Q&A with Press Friendly founder Joel Andren

Press Friendly is the startup du jour that is being heralded by both PR Flacks and Journos as the future of PR. Dodging the “does PR have a future/what is the future of PR” debate for a second, this back to basics approach of “who, what, when, where and why” approach might just do more than ruffle a few feathers. It might just find and launch the next big thing.

I sat down with Co-Founder and CEO, Joel Andren, and grilled him for a bit about the service that aims to “…empower entrepreneurs to build and manage their own relationships with the press without being reliant upon a PR agency”.

Paul Armstrong: That’s a pretty bold statement. Why is Press Friendly needed?

Joel Andren: There’s no middle ground between doing it yourself or hiring an agency. We wanted to create great software to help making creating/managing PR campaigns easier.

PA: What is the ultimate goal of Press Friendly?

JA: The ultimate goal is to create authentic connections between entrepreneurs and the reporters who want to write about their companies.

PA : I imagine you’ve had an interesting reaction from the PR world. Should PR firms be worried?

JA: I think good PR firms have nothing to worry about. They work hard for their clients and provide tremendous value. I do think there’s a lot of PR firms who take advantage of the glut of early stage startups and do crappy work. We’re going to be compared favorably to them.

PA: What can’t Press Friendly do that big PR firms can?

JA: Create amazing connections between entrepreneurs and reporters. To often PR firms suck all the personality out of an entrepreneur and their authentic voice does not come out. Reporters don’t want a sanitized version of reality and appreciate the direct connection with people building great things.

PA: That’s a pretty bold statement. How did you decide on the product features and how have journalists reacted?

JA: We do matching of the pitches to their archives, so they’ve reacted very positively to the fact that they won’t receive irrelevant pitches from us. They also love working with the entrepreneurs directly.

PA: Press Friendly does help the users with “Consultants”. Who are the consultants? What are their qualifications and how do you vet them?

JA: They’re hired directly by me and I find people with agency and in-house experience. The consultants we work with very talented professionals who want to work 15-30 hours a week with great clients, but don’t want to do the business development or account management aspect of consulting, they want to focus on strategy.

PA: Whilst I can see this working for startups, how does it work for other sectors/businesses?

JA: There certainly would need to be some adaptations to the current service, but no one envisioned the vast multitude of marketing realms that have been automated already. I feel confident there are ways to expand the business beyond startups. In fact, we’re already seeing demand for that.

PA: Interesting — so on that thought…what’s the future for the business? How do you plan to scale?

JA: Every day we’ll be creating better processes and automation and smarter algorithms for better connections. We learn very quickly from what works and make it better. We’ve come so far in five months that I can only imagine where we’ll be two years from now. We’ll scale by institutionalising our processes and training and be enabling the software to do more.