Disrupting a major industry is hard to do if no one has heard of your revolutionary new product.
Hard-working and brilliant startup teams may not be sure how to make that happen even as they finish their feverish building efforts. Sara Morgan saw that gap firsthand as a startup founder in the 500 Startups accelerator program. Understanding that need helped inspire her to found Eleven Eleven PR, a marketing firm based in D.C. and aimed specifically at consumer startups.
"Startup founders know where they want to get to in the end, but they might have no understanding of how to get there," Morgan said. "That's what they need someone from outside to help them with."
Large public relations companies aren't necessarily able to handle the style and speed of startup marketing, Morgan said. She might see some new trend mentioned on the Today Show in the morning, and design and send out pitches to new outlets that same day. It's a stark contrast to the speed of events at the more traditional corporate marketing firms she used to work at.
"Everything about it felt antiquated," Morgan said. "They'd plan out goals a year or more ahead of time only have updates once a month. Life in startups happens much faster than that."
Eleven Eleven's system is built to work at that higher speed. Morgan explained that each client takes about a week to onboard, and that means covering the company's details and sketching out its goals and how to make them happen. As for the kind of clients Morgan works with, they're an eclectic mix of companies, usually with a tech angle of some kind. Her clients include an e-commerce company for wedding presents, a sharing economy platform for boats and a high-powered search engine for finding hotels and other places to stay.
"Every single day is different," said Avery Walker, Morgan's first full-time hire at Eleven Eleven. "I scour the Internet, looking for current events to tie clients to. I'll write blogs, do some social media, write pitch emails. It's never slow."
Working with companies innovating in new spaces comes with some complications that don't arise in other industries though. Sometimes, the pitches are necessarily as much about informing people about a new kind of business as they are about as the business itself.
"The company might be a concept no one is familiar with," Morgan said. "When peer-to-peer companies first started coming out, everyone I reached out to was confused."
While that particular industry has become familiar enough that most people understand what it means to say a company is part of the sharing economy, there's still plenty of need to figure out how to link companies with a tech focus to other experiences. Marketing has had to evolve to fit the way technology is part of everyday life.
"It used to be that PR was either tech or lifestyle, there was no merging at all," Morgan said. "I wanted to show that the two could go together. D.C. is a better market for that than the Valley."
D.C.'s tech scene is less set in viewing startups as one thing or the other, she explained. That's why her angle on PR for startups can thrive here in a way it would have more trouble doing around Silicon Valley.
Morgan, Walker and their rotating cast of interns are always keeping an eye out for new clients, although their current workload isn't exactly light. The nature of startups is that the next big thing has a good chance of fizzling, but PR marketing can make a crucial difference.
"Pinpointing contacts for pitches can make a big difference," Walker said. "You want to know who you're writing the pitch for."
"Every piece of press makes a difference," Morgan said. "But not everything will be on the cover of The New York Times the day after it launches."
