Startups
Earn real coverage without an agency
Here is what changed. Your next customer may never type your category into a search box. They ask an assistant instead. They ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini who to trust, and they act on the names that come back. Those names are not random. The assistant learned them from what credible people published: reporters, editors, reviewers, analysts. The oldest lever in marketing, earned coverage, now also decides whether a machine recommends you.
Most founders assume that lever belongs to agencies. It does not. The reporters you want to reach read their own email. The tools you need are cheap or already in your pocket. And AI can lift the grunt work off your plate, so one person can run a real campaign in the hours they actually have.
This book is the whole method, start to finish, for little or no money. We will be honest about the parts that are hard. PR takes patience, it takes a real story, and it takes follow-through on the days you would rather move on to something else. None of it takes a retainer. By the end you will have a story worth telling, a list of the right reporters, a pitch that earns a reply, a plan for the yes, and a way to turn one article into lasting visibility in the answers your buyers now trust.
Chapter 1
If you have asked an agency for a quote, you know the number. A monthly retainer sized for a budget you do not have, for work you cannot see and would struggle to grade. For a lean team that math never closes, so PR quietly goes undone and you tell yourself it is for companies further along than yours.
That was a fair story once. It does not hold now. Three things changed, and together they put real coverage within reach of a founder with a laptop and a few hours a week.
The journalist who covers your market publishes under their own name. The outlet prints a masthead. Many reporters list an email, a LinkedIn, or an X handle in plain sight, and almost all of them read their own inbox, because tips are how the job works. You are closer to the person who covers fintech at The Business Times, or startups at e27, than you think. No gatekeeper stands between a clear, relevant note and their attention. Ten years ago you needed an introduction. Today you need a reason to be relevant and a working email address. Across Asia the desks you want are busy and reachable: Tech in Asia, DealStreetAsia, Vulcan Post, KrASIA, Nikkei Asia, the South China Morning Post. They need good stories to fill the week. You may be holding one.
You already own the core of the stack. Your own email sends the pitch. A spreadsheet holds the list. Free reading, a reporter's recent articles and public profiles, tells you who to approach and why. You do not need a paid newswire, and you should skip one: a blasted press release lands in no inbox that matters and reads like every other release that day. The costly media database is optional too. The same names sit in public, in the bylines of articles published this month. Drafting and grammar help, if you want it, comes from free AI tools you can open in a browser. The only money a first campaign truly needs is zero.
The slow parts of PR are now assisted. AI can read a month of coverage and surface the reporters writing on your exact topic. It can draft a first version of your positioning, propose angles, and tailor a note to each writer so you are not staring at a blank page forty times over. What it cannot do is supply judgment or invent a real story. You bring those. The machine clears the busywork so your few hours go to the decisions that actually move the needle: which angle is true, which reporter is the right fit, what to say when one replies. Think of AI as a sharp intern who is fast, tireless, and completely dependent on your direction. Point it well and it saves you days. Leave it to guess and it produces generic mush a reporter will smell in a second.
Stack sounds technical. It is just the order of operations, each step feeding the next:
Six chapters, one for each joint in that chain. Work them in order and you have a campaign.
There is a reason to start now rather than someday. Every month, more buyers ask an assistant before they ask a person, and the assistants answer with the brands that credible outlets have written about. A clip that once faded after a week of traffic now sits in the material these models draw on. So the work pays twice: once in the readers who see the article, and again in the answers an assistant gives for months afterward. The founders who build the habit early are the ones those answers will name. Starting small today beats waiting for a budget that may never arrive.
Here is the part skipped in the agency pitch meeting. PR runs on patience. You will send notes that get no reply, and that is normal, even for people who do this for a living. A realistic first campaign is weeks of calendar time, not days: roughly a week to get your story straight, a week to build a good list, then several weeks of pitching, following up, and waiting for a reporter's own schedule to clear. Plan on a few focused hours a week rather than one frantic all-nighter. The reward is durable. One solid article in an outlet your buyers read keeps working long after you hit send, and as the last chapter shows, it now feeds the answers that AI assistants give about your whole category.
You can do this. Not flawlessly on the first attempt, and not overnight. A lean team that follows the steps in order earns real coverage, and the skill compounds every single time you run it.
Takeaway: Direct reporter access, near-free tools, and AI for the grunt work put real PR within reach of any lean team willing to be patient and work the steps in order.
Chapter 2
The most common self-serve PR mistake is sending too soon. You built something, you are proud of it, you want the world to know. So you fire off a note that says, in effect, we exist, please cover us. Reporters get dozens of those a day and clear them in a second. Existing is not a story. Before you touch an inbox you owe the reporter, and yourself, three things: a one-line position, a few claims you can prove, and a real news angle. Get these right and the rest of the stack becomes easy. Skip them and no clever subject line will save you.
Write a single sentence that says what you are and who you are for, plain enough that a stranger can repeat it back correctly. A good one line is concrete and specific. It names the customer and the job you do for them. Drop the adjectives that reporters have learned to ignore: leading, innovative, revolutionary, world-class. Those words carry no information. Compare 'we are a revolutionary fintech platform' with 'we help migrant workers in Singapore send money home without a transfer fee.' The second tells a reporter instantly whether this is for their readers. Here is a useful test: if you removed your company name from the sentence, would it still point only at you? If it could describe ten other startups, it is too vague. Rewrite your line until a friend outside your industry understands it on the first read.
Reporters trust specifics, and the good ones check. Gather three or four claims you can stand behind: a real number from your own data, a named customer willing to be quoted, a concrete before and after, a credential or partnership that holds up. Note where each claim comes from, so when a reporter asks how you know that, you have the answer in one reply. If you cannot prove it, cut it before a reporter does it for you, because one inflated claim poisons every true one beside it. Vague superlatives are worse than useless here. 'Thousands of happy users' says nothing. '1,200 businesses in Johor and Penang processed a payment with us last month' is a fact a reporter can build a sentence around. A reporter who finds one solid, checkable fact in your note will often build the whole story around it, so lead with your strongest one.
An angle is the reason a reporter can justify the story to an editor today. A launch, by itself, is rarely that reason. Editors run on reasons. Give your reporter the reason, already formed, and you make their job easy. Real hooks look like this:
The same company can hold several angles at once. A payments startup can pitch a product story to a tech desk, a trend story to a business desk, and a founder story to a features writer, each with its own hook and each to a different reporter.
Here is how the pieces lock. Say you run a small tool that helps independent cafes in Bangkok manage inventory. Your one line: we help independent cafes in Bangkok cut food waste by tracking stock on a phone. Your provable claims: the cafes on your platform threw out less stock last quarter, you can name two owners who will talk, and you handle a measurable number of orders a week. Your angle: rising ingredient costs are squeezing small cafes this year, and you have real data on where the waste goes. Now you are not pitching a product. You are offering a reporter at the Bangkok Post, or a regional food desk, a timely story with numbers and real owners attached. That is a note an editor can approve.
Set a timer for thirty minutes and answer four questions in writing. What can we say now that we could not say three months ago? What in our own numbers would surprise an outsider? What is in the news this month that we have a real view on? What do we believe about our market that most people get wrong? You will end with three or four candidate angles. Test each one against a single question: would this interest a reader who has never heard of us? Keep the ones that pass. Those are what you pitch.
A muddled pitch does double damage. It wastes the reporter's attention, and it spends your one good chance with a writer who will remember being confused. Clarity is also the gift that keeps giving across the rest of the stack. A sharp one line writes your subject lines for you. A proven claim becomes the hook of your first paragraph. A real angle tells you which desk, and which reporter, to approach in the first place. The hour you spend here saves ten later.
Takeaway: Earn the right to pitch by nailing a plain one-line position, a few provable claims, and a real news angle before a single reporter hears from you.
Chapter 3
With a clear story in hand, you need the right people to tell it to. The instinct is to buy a media database, or a ready-made list of journalist emails. Resist it. Bought lists are stale within months, they are sold to everyone in your category, and they tempt you into blasting the same note to hundreds of strangers. Reporters notice a mass send instantly, and it burns the goodwill you will want later. A short list you built by hand, of reporters who genuinely cover your topic, beats a bought list of thousands every time.
Start narrow. A beat is the subject a reporter owns: fintech, climate tech, consumer retail, enterprise software, startups and venture. A market is the place and the language: Singapore in English, Indonesia in Bahasa, Hong Kong in English and Cantonese, Vietnam in Vietnamese. Write your target as a plain phrase, for example fintech and payments reporters covering Singapore and Malaysia. In-language matters. A pitch to a Vietnamese outlet written in careful Vietnamese, or at least offered with a translated summary, shows respect and lands far better than an English note the writer has to decode.
This is the core of the by-hand method, and it is simple. Go to the outlets your buyers actually read. For a Singapore fintech story that might be The Business Times, Tech in Asia, e27, and DealStreetAsia. Open their coverage of your topic from the last three to six months. Read the articles. Note who wrote each one, what angle they took, and when it ran. A practical rhythm: pick four outlets, search each one for your subject, and spend twenty minutes per outlet listing the writers who keep appearing. A reporter who published two payments stories in the last month is a live, warm target. A reporter whose last fintech piece ran two years ago has moved on. You are not hunting for a famous name. You are looking for the person whose recent work sits right next to the story you want to place. For example, if you sell a payroll tool for small firms, a reporter who just wrote about rising compliance costs for SMEs is a far better target than the outlet's star columnist who covers big-bank earnings.
If you are not sure where to start, these are real outlets worth reading for a business or tech story, grouped by market:
Match the outlet to your buyer. A story for enterprise finance teams belongs in The Business Times. A story for the startup community belongs in e27 or Tech in Asia. Reading the outlet first also tells you its house style, which helps you pitch in a register the reporter recognises.
Collect contact details that reporters have chosen to make public: the email in an outlet's masthead or staff page, the address printed at the foot of their articles, the handle on their own public profile, the contact box on their personal site. That is enough. Do not scrape inboxes, do not buy personal data, and do not hunt for a private address a reporter did not publish. The ethical line here is also the effective one. Reaching someone through the channel they opened for tips starts the relationship on the right foot, and it keeps you clear of privacy rules you do not want to test. Note the source of each contact so you can see at a glance that it was public. If a reporter lists no public contact anywhere, that is a choice, and the respectful move is to try a different reporter at the same outlet.
One row per reporter. Columns for name, outlet, beat, market, a link to a recent relevant article, the date it ran, the public contact channel, and a short line on the angle you would pitch them. That last column forces you to treat each person as an individual before you write a word. The sheet does not need to be long. Twenty well-chosen reporters is a strong first list. Ten is enough to start.
Now sort. Two things put a reporter near the top: fit, meaning how closely their beat and recent work match your angle, and recency, meaning how lately they wrote about your topic. A writer who covered your exact niche last week, at an outlet your buyers read, is your best shot. Work down from there. Recency is not a tiebreaker, it is a signal of intent: a reporter writes about what is on their desk right now, so recent work on your topic means the door is open. Keep a second tier of looser-fit reporters too. If the top tier goes quiet, they are your next move, not a fresh afternoon of research. Pitch the top of the list first and in small batches, so you can learn from the early replies before you reach the rest. A short, ranked, hand-built list is the asset that makes every later step work.
Takeaway: Skip the bought database and build a short, ranked list by reading recent bylines, capturing only public contact channels, and sorting by fit and recency.
Chapter 4
Now you write the note. A good pitch is short, personal, and easy to say yes to. It respects that the reporter is busy and skeptical, and it does the thinking for them. The structure below is a shape you fill in, never a script you paste. The moment a pitch feels like a form letter, it is gone.
Send from your own Gmail or Microsoft 365, under your real name, as one person writing to another. This matters more than it looks. A note from a founder's own address reads as human and reachable, and the reporter can reply straight to you and reach a decision-maker in one hop. A blast from a noreply marketing tool reads as spam, and often lands in a spam folder to match. You are a real person with a real company. Let the email show it. If your signature carries your title and a link to your site, all the better, because a reporter checking you out should find you in one click.
The subject decides whether the rest gets read. Make it specific and plain. State the actual story, not a tease. 'Singapore payments startup crosses 1,000 SME customers' beats 'Exciting news from our team.' Skip the exclamation marks and the words EXCLUSIVE or URGENT in capitals. A reporter scanning a full inbox on a phone should grasp the story from the subject alone, and want the detail.
Open with one line that shows you read their work, and one that states your story. The first proves you are not blasting: 'I read your piece last week on cross-border payments in ASEAN.' Keep it true and specific, because a fake compliment is obvious and fatal. The second line delivers the news plainly: 'We just crossed 1,000 small-business customers doing exactly that, and I can share the numbers.' By the end of two lines the reporter knows why you wrote to them in particular and what the story is.
Pitch one angle per reporter, the one that fits their beat, and tailor it to them. The payments writer gets the growth-and-market angle. A features writer gets the founder-journey angle. Sending every angle at once tells the reporter you have not thought about what they cover, and it hands them the sorting you should have done yourself. One clear angle, aimed at the right person, is the whole game.
Aim for under 150 words in the body. A reporter can read a short pitch on a phone between meetings and reply on the spot. Give them the story in a sentence, two or three proof points as a short list, what you can offer (an interview, data, a demo, visuals), and a clear next step. Attach nothing on the first email; offer a press kit and say you will send it on request. Close with a plain question, for example: would this be useful for your desk?
Know the patterns that kill a pitch so you can avoid them:
Here is the shape, in order: a specific subject, one line that shows you read them, one line of news, two or three proof points, one clear offer, one plain question, your name and a real signature. Write it once as a skeleton, then fill it fresh for each reporter. The skeleton saves you time. The filling is what earns the reply.
Put the shape to work. Here is how a complete pitch might read, filled in. Subject: Singapore payroll startup now serves 500 SMEs in-language. Body: Hi Mei, I read your piece last week on compliance costs hitting small employers. We just crossed 500 small businesses running payroll with us in English and Mandarin, and the reason most of them switch is the compliance headache you wrote about. Three quick points: we file CPF contributions automatically, two of our customers in Jurong will speak to you, and we are growing steadily month over month. I can share the full numbers or set up a short demo this week. Would this fit your desk? Then a sign-off and a real signature.
Notice what it does. It names the reporter, ties to her recent work, states the news in one line, gives checkable proof, offers something useful, and asks one plain question. It would read well on a phone in under a minute.
Timing helps at the margins. Mid-morning on a weekday, Tuesday through Thursday, tends to catch reporters at their desks and planning the week. Avoid late Friday, when the inbox empties into the weekend, and avoid the hours right after a huge story breaks in your sector, when every reporter on the beat is buried. None of this outweighs a good pitch. A sharp note sent on a Monday still beats a dull one sent at the perfect hour.
Takeaway: Short, specific, one tailored angle, sent from your own inbox as a real person: that is the pitch reporters answer.
Chapter 5
Most pitches meet silence the first time, and silence rarely means no. Reporters are buried. A good story often gets picked up only after a reminder. The skill is to follow up in a way that stays persistent without becoming a nuisance, and then to be ready when a reporter says yes, because the yes moves fast.
If you have heard nothing after three or four working days, send one short follow-up. Reply to your own original email so the thread stays intact, and keep it to two or three lines. Add something, do not just poke: a new data point, a recent development, a fresh reason the story matters this week. 'Quick follow-up: we have since added 200 more customers, happy to share the breakdown' gives the reporter a reason to look again. One nudge is almost always welcome. A second, a week later and carrying a genuinely new angle, is the most a cold pitch should get. Keep the tone warm and low-pressure throughout. You are offering a story, and a reporter who passes this week may bite the next time you have news.
After two follow-ups with no reply, stop. Silence after that is an answer, and pushing further costs you a reporter you may want next quarter. Leave the door open and move on: 'No worries if this is not for you, I will keep you posted as we grow.' That line is not a throwaway. Reporters remember founders who were gracious, and the story they pass on today may be the one they come back for later. Mark the contact in your sheet and keep the relationship warm.
When a reporter bites, reply within the hour if you can. Say yes to the interview, offer two or three time slots, and ask how they prefer to talk: a call, a video, or questions by email. Before you speak, prepare. Know your three key messages, your provable numbers, and the one line you most want quoted. Be honest about what you do not know, and offer to follow up with exact figures rather than guessing on the record. Everything you say to a reporter is on the record unless you have agreed otherwise in advance, so decide what is private before you start, not after. Nerves are normal on a first interview. Slow down, answer the question you were actually asked, and if you do not know something, say so. A reporter respects a founder who says I will get you that figure by this afternoon far more than one who improvises a number on the spot. Keep water nearby, and never fill a silence with a claim you cannot back.
Have a simple press kit ready so a yes never stalls waiting on you. Keep it to the essentials:
Deliver exactly what the reporter asks for, in the format they ask for, on their deadline. Hitting a reporter's deadline once is the fastest way to become a source they call again.
Two words will come up, and they are simpler than they sound. An exclusive means you give one outlet the story first, and only them, for a window of time. It can win you deeper coverage from a reporter who knows no one else has it, at the cost of pitching everyone else at the same moment. For a first campaign, an exclusive with one well-matched reporter is often the stronger play. An embargo means you share the story early on the agreement that the reporter publishes no sooner than a set date and time. Embargoes let a reporter prepare properly for a launch day. Only offer one to a reporter you have reason to trust, state the date and time clearly in writing, and understand that an embargo is a request a reporter agrees to, not a rule you can enforce. When in doubt, keep it simple: give one good reporter a head start, and treat them well. Neither tool is a trick, and neither is required. Plenty of strong first campaigns use neither, you pitch your ranked list, and whoever bites first gets the story.
Coverage is not the end of the relationship, it is the start of one. When the piece publishes, send a short thank-you. Share the article from your own channels and tag the outlet, which reporters and editors notice and appreciate. Then resist the urge to nitpick. If the headline is not the one you would have written, let it go, because the reporter owns the framing. Correct only genuine factual errors, politely, with the right figure attached, and only when they truly matter. A founder who is accurate, easy to work with, and gracious after publication becomes a name the reporter keeps in their contacts. The second story is always easier to land than the first.
Takeaway: Follow up once or twice with something new, stop graciously when it is time, and when a reporter says yes, move fast with a ready press kit and clear messages.
Chapter 6
A campaign you do not measure is a campaign you cannot repeat. The good news is that the numbers that matter for self-serve PR are few and easy to keep. You are tracking three things, then using them to make the next round sharper and to turn coverage into something newer: visibility inside the AI answers your buyers now trust.
Keep a simple record of three measures:
Write down what you pitched, to whom, with which angle, and what happened. The record itself is an asset.
You do not need software for any of this. A single spreadsheet does the job: one tab for your pitch log, one for clips, one for the AI-answer checks. Free tools cover the rest. A free search alert, such as Google Alerts, emails you when your name appears online, so clips do not slip past. Once a month, open an assistant and ask it the questions your buyers would ask, who is the best option for this in Singapore, and note whether you show up and who shows up instead. Check weekly while a campaign is live, then monthly once it settles. The habit is light, and it is the whole engine of getting better.
Here is where the discipline pays off. After each round, read your own results and adjust. If one angle drew every reply, lead with it next time. If a whole outlet type ignored you, drop it or rethink the fit. If a certain subject line got opened and answered, reuse its shape. Each campaign teaches you who responds, what story lands, and which reporters are becoming genuine contacts. This is the loop: pitch, watch the outcome, feed it back in, pitch sharper. Agencies guard this learning as their edge. Run it yourself and the edge is yours, and it compounds with every round.
A published article is no longer the finish line. AI assistants learn who to recommend from credible, public writing, so each real placement is a signal the machines can read. You can help that along. When a clip runs, make sure the facts around you are consistent everywhere a model might look: your site, your About page, your public profiles, your own plain-language description of what you do and who you serve. Coverage in an outlet an assistant trusts, pointing at a clear and consistent story, is how a brand becomes the cited answer over time. The PR you just did and the AI visibility you want are the same work, seen twice. Consistency is the quiet part that makes it pay. If three sources describe you three different ways, a model cannot form a clear picture of who you are. One clear description, repeated everywhere, compounds.
Everything in this book can be done by hand, and it works. Cites X exists to run the same stack faster, on free-first tools, so a lean team can do more of it in less time:
It is Asia-first and in-language, built for founders and lean teams doing their own PR for the first time. The method is the point. The tool removes the friction.
Do not try to do all six chapters tonight. Do one thing. Open a blank page and write your one line, the single sentence that says what you are and who you are for, and keep rewriting until a friend outside your industry repeats it back correctly. That sentence is the seed of your story, your list, and your first pitch. One sentence is a small task, and that is the point. Momentum in PR comes from finishing the first small thing, then the next. Write it today, and you have already started.
Takeaway: Track replies, clips, and share of answer, feed every result into the next round, and turn each placement into AI-answer visibility: start tonight by writing your one line.
Cites X runs the whole loop: build the brand, win the coverage, and become the answer AI gives.
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