You're the founder, or the first marketing hire, and PR is one of ten jobs on the list. You need to know what's happening in your sector, get in front of a handful of journalists and show investors what landed.
Monitoring your sector
The Morning Briefing email arrives before the day starts, with the stories that moved overnight. Each story is marked Breaking, Building, Peaked or Fading, and a Building story is the one to comment on.
A short press list
You send from your own Gmail or Outlook, and opens and clicks are recorded against each name. Press lists score each journalist's match to the story, so you can pitch ten well-matched names instead of guessing at a hundred.
The coverage log investors see
Each piece is logged with its tier and tone, plus estimated views and a quality score. The executive dashboard is a link, so it drops straight into the investor update.
Which plan to choose
Free covers one brand, one user, 500 contacts, 50 tracked sends and 30 tracked pieces of coverage a month, with no card and no time limit. Move to Core at $269/month when you need drafting or reporting, or a second seat. Software won't phone a journalist or decide what's news, and when you need someone who will, it's time for an agency.
Questions
How much does a PR agency cost instead?
A UK B2B technology PR agency costs a start-up several thousand pounds a month. One UK agency publishes its bands, with Agentcy plus a senior consultant at £2,000 to £3,000 a month and a standard retainer from £5,000. Larger programmes start at £6,000. The same agency puts the UK retained market at about £3,000 to more than £25,000 a month. Doing it yourself costs a senior person's day a week instead, with software handling the monitoring and the coverage log.
When should a start-up hire an agency?
A start-up should hire a PR agency when the news outgrows one person's day a week. The usual trigger is a funding round under embargo across several titles, although a launch in a second market or analyst briefings alongside the press can do it too. What an agency adds is judgement about what's news and the relationships to place it. If you arrive with a clean company description, a working press list and a coverage log, the agency can get results in its first month instead of its third. PR for start-ups walks through it.
Will the software write my pitches?
On Core, Agentcy's newsjack and press release studios draft your comment, your release and the pitch from the facts you've recorded and your writing style guide. Core includes 30 newsjack drafts and 10 press releases a month, plus 400 AgentcyAI messages. You rewrite the quote in your own voice before it goes anywhere. AgentcyAI won't send an email or post anything by itself, so a person approves every pitch. If you only ever write from a blank page, ChatGPT is cheaper.
Can I see what ChatGPT says about my start-up?
Any start-up can see what AI assistants say about it with Agentcy's free checker, which needs no sign-up. It asks the questions a buyer in your category would ask and shows whether you're named, which competitors are named instead and which sources the answers cite. Weekly tracking is AI Visibility Core, with 40 buyer questions run on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Each answer is graded against facts you record, such as your products and the year you were founded.
Do I need a company email address?
Agentcy needs a company email address to sign up, because it sets itself up from your domain. Personal Gmail and Outlook addresses can't create an account. Onboarding then reads your website and any documents you add, such as a positioning deck, and drafts your objectives, messaging, buyers and competitors for you to agree. If the website isn't live yet, you can start by answering the questions yourself and add it later.
Try it on one brand, free
You can set up one brand in an afternoon and see what it finds. Paid plans are monthly, and you can stop whenever you like.