From Pitch to Publish: How PR Monkey is Redefining the PR Game

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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that features interviews with b to b and SaaS entrepreneurs and marketing leaders. In many respects, Nima Olumi is living the entrepreneurial dream. He's leveraged the success of a services business, public relations, to launch a SaaS based business, PR Monkey. It's a path that many entrepreneurs would love to pursue, but it's often a huge challenge to make happen. On today's podcast, I'm talking to Nima about his take on PR amid a volatile media landscape and his experience and lessons from launching PR Monkey. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Nima.

Guest: Hey. What's going on? Thanks for the very kind intro.

Mark Evans: It's great to have you. Maybe we can start by sharing your background and the journey that led you to found Light Your Strategies, your PR agency, and PRMonkey. What inspired you to start these ventures? Were you always an entrepreneur, or is it something you stumbled into?

Guest: I I would say I was always an entrepreneur. I had a gum dealing business when I was in sixth grade, and I was plowing a lot of driveways in Boston when I would snow. Just knocking on doors and stuff. I always have a lot of entrepreneurial tendencies. Lightyear started out as a public real not as a public relations business, but as a marketing business. So I kinda had the ADHD's mindset of entrepreneurs, and I was essentially just acting as marketing head for various companies in New York City post grad. And that was a really interesting gig. We were doing a lot of web design. We were doing a lot of lead generation tactics. We were doing a lot of copywriting, advertising design, advertising management, and we were kinda like a Swiss army knife, but a lot of people don't use a Swiss army knife to eat steak and stuff. I I think we learned a lot, and then we found our niche in public relations at the very start of COVID because we were very fortunate to have a client, that is a very large property management company in New York. And I convinced the CEO that they had a very interesting story to tell at the start of COVID, and we were able to get them published in New The New York Times, Bloomberg, realtor.com, the real deal, tons of press, and they were able to raise a $35,000,000 round off a lot of those publications. I saw the firsthand value that we brought. And and what was lucky about that client is we had a really interesting story. So I I just mined the data of reporters from the outlets, and I just shotgun blast stuff to them. It it was my first time doing it. We were very fortunate to have a client that trusted us to kinda experiment and and always let me guinea pig different ideas and things like that from a marketing perspective. But ever since then, when we saw the bang from that, we decided just to specialize in PR so that we could specialize in industry and really grow. Since early twenty twenty, we've just been doing PR. Three and a half years now, we've specialized in the public relations industry. Then I met our head of product just over a year ago at a dinner party. I was starting to dabble in the public relations software industry. We were just perplexed that that a lot of the softwares that exist in our space are very archaic and old and very expensive. We started making investments in in terms of designing a software that is more modern, has better updated technology, better data flows. That's how PR Monkey essentially came about, and the product's in a private beta right now, which is really exciting. We're 10 people full time. Very heavy on the development front, not so heavy on the sales and marketing fronts. Eight of the 10 people on our team just build product, and we only have me and one other person who can sell and manage clients and stuff like that. We really appreciate guest appearances, what you're giving us here because it's one of the ways to

Mark Evans: get the word out. I wanna talk about PR Monkey, but first, let's focus on the PR landscape. I was a journalist many years ago, and that game was different because there was a lot of media, a lot more media. PR seemed to be an easier game to play because there was supply and demand, but the landscape has changed. PR is still this magical thing many entrepreneurs. They believe that if they hire a PR agency, they can get media coverage. Media coverage can attract the spotlight in customers. It can allow their business to grow quickly, and then they'll be able to raise money. A lot of them think that PR is the silver bullet to a lot of their problems, but you and I know that that's not the case. Can you talk about some of the misconceptions and the challenges that you've encountered in helping companies understand the realities of PR, how it works, and establishing expectations. Because I think that overnight success is really hard to if you can convince somebody that's investment over time as opposed to something that's gonna produce instant results, that's a good approach. So talk to me a little bit about the PR landscape and how you establish that trust with clients about the job you're gonna do for them.

Guest: A lot of people have different, perspectives and perceptions of what public relations mean. As a business, you you have to cater your deliverables to what that client wants, whether that's views, domain authority, helping close more deals. One of the things that we try to do at Lightyear is is to really focus on working with clients who have an interesting product. The vast majority of our our clients are deep technology companies. We know how to program. I've I've taken a lot of programming courses. Our whole team knows a lot about high-tech and things like that. We're really good at taking copy and making it amicable for the media. And and, sure, the media landscape has changed a lot. We really focus on companies that mostly sell b to b products. And a lot of the people who are decision makers and buyers in those space for those clients, they are pretty well read people. They do read the press. They do read the news. And a lot of having a TechCrunch article or being in Bloomberg and having that third party validation can be the difference of when users come to your platform and sign up for your product or not. It depends on the kind of PR. There's influencer marketing with TikTok and Instagram. That's a form of PR. There's journalists and reporter PR, which is more traditional PR. We're more on the traditional front on the journalists and and reporter side. But there's there's tremendous value that's brought that subtle. I would always say a company has had the means to invest in a serious public relations campaign. If you're a two or three person show, you're just getting off the ground and you're debating whether to hire an SDR or a full time PR company, I'd probably go with the SDR. When that SDR starts booking meetings and having stuff and any potential clients coming through, if they have a good funnel and you don't have good media backing, you're losing a significant amount of customers on that.

Mark Evans: The question is, as we talked about, PR can be very tempting. It's kinda this creature that's sexy and compelling. But how does a company know that it's ready for PR? You mentioned the fact that if they get some sales momentum, that could be a signal. What are some of the other signs that a company is ready to take the next step? Because it is a big leap, and it does involve an investment. It's not something that they can invest a month and then back away. What are the signs that a company should be seriously exploring the idea of leveraging PR to move forward?

Guest: You should probably have some sort of investor. You should have some minimal viable product that's ready for sale, I would recommend. Well, it's very unfortunate in the public relations industry is sometimes you get companies who don't have a product that's ready, and they're trying to hire a public relations agency to market it as ready. We have to be very wary of those sort of situations and do a significant amount of due diligence when we're taking on new clientele. And it's also why we deny a lot of business. It's not worth our time to get invested in someone who isn't serious. We do a tremendous amount of research and and things like that before we take on clients to make sure that we're promoting accurate, thorough information. As a business owner myself, it's always really helpful to see something from an outside or a third party perspective. A lot of CEOs are thinking, we just wanna hammer the nail, make it all about me, me, me, and our company. That's not gonna get as many genuine headlines as something that's well thought out. That's not just direct propaganda. That's actually an interesting story. So we focus a lot on pulling relevant statistics, interesting storylines that are interesting to a general audience, but also in support of the company's best interest.

Mark Evans: Let's set the stage a little bit when you're onboarding a new client. Obviously, they would love to have instant success. They want media coverage in the short term. Every entrepreneur dreams about that. But how do you establish expectations in terms of this is the journey that we're gonna go on? Ideally, you create a strategic partnership that is win win. How do you set the stage in terms of listen. We're looking at a three to six month campaign. It's going to begin with in-depth research into you and the competition and the story angles. We're gonna do some research on pulling statistics and maybe leveraging trends. Then we're gonna do these things. Map that out for me in terms of providing entrepreneurs with a road map of how this thing is gonna go.

Guest: We do a tremendous amount of research before sending any pitches. A lot of PR companies spend ninety days doing research. We spend a week and a half, two weeks max. So we do a lot of research, and we come up with different copywriting. What's the subject line that's gonna resonate well with their target audience, whether they're trying to target tech influencers or fashion influencers. One of the most important things is what is the subject line that's just gonna excite people in this industry? How can we quickly educate someone and pique their curiosity? That's how reporters, that's how writers, that's how influencers are. They're all creatives at at heart. So how can you gain their interest and their respect? And then we we test different various copy, and we try to come up with different formulas for different audiences and niches of influencers. Something that a fashion journalist would find interesting wouldn't be something that a tech journalist would find interesting. Or more specifically, an AI journalist versus someone who programs, writes specifically on more back end information or something. So you really should value your first impression to people. I think a a good public relations person or company will do that. It depends on the client. Do they have a lot of inbound PR coming in? Are they looking to get get more PR? We're more focused on helping people get coverage who want more news coverage. There's a lot of people who also get tons of news coverage and want PR companies to watch it and make sure it's not bad or or help them answer the questions and stuff.

Mark Evans: I'm gonna call you on your research process. A week and a half seems very agile, very, very agile research compared to a longer research cycle where you're trying to get a sense of the product and the competitive landscape and the news landscape.

Guest: How do you do that? I was consulting for companies since I was 20 years old. So trying this, trying that, jumping to the sky, trying this project. I've had a lot of experience taking products and trying to write copy for them or advertising for them. To me, I think it's not too hard. It just comes naturally, but I can understand if that process takes a little bit more time for people. We've made a process out of it, which is pull statistics, check the competition, test various headlines, see what fits. It's common sense at this point.

Mark Evans: Every entrepreneur believes that their company is newsworthy. Every entrepreneur believes that if they hire a peer agency and they craft a good story, the journalists are gonna come running. The reality is, obviously, there's a lot of competition for the attention of bloggers and journalists and influencers. The question is how much do personal relationships matter with reporters, bloggers, and influencers? So for example, if you know reporters at Inc. Or Entrepreneur or The New York Times or The Washington Post, Is that important? Does that make a difference? Does that separate one PR agency from another? Because I think relations just matter. When I was a journalist, I gave the PR people who I knew the time of day. I wouldn't look at their email and dismiss it or look at it later. I would actually actually say, say, okay. Maybe there's something here. I trust you that we've got a relationship. But when a company is looking at a PR agency, what's the value of the relationships that the PR agency has? And how do you demonstrate that when you're trying to pitch a client that you really want?

Guest: I would say PR people at their core are very well connected, very likable people. So we're very gregarious social. We know how to bring value to parties, and we know how to deal with difficult people. I would say relationships are very important. They're not the only thing that matters. I've seen some stats in the PR industry where relationships don't matter. 95% of the value is the story. That's a little wishful thinking. The story is super important. Relationships absolutely matter, and they can be the the difference of whether you have an in with certain editorials or not. But there's a lot of places where people can genuinely feel inbound new queries every day. We review 500 fresh queries every day from writers, reporters, journalists through different channels and mediums and softwares that enable us to place the clients that we have in in our media.

Mark Evans: Given the value of personal relationships, what's your advice to entrepreneurs before they embrace the idea of PR? How do they build relationships with reporters and bloggers? Because, obviously, if relationships matter, what are some of the steps that they can take to build their network, to establish themselves as thought leaders or valuable resources as opposed to simply cold pitching a reporter? What are some of the techniques that they can use to to make that happen?

Guest: I would say create debt in someone's head. Bring so much immeasurable value to someone's life that they can't ignore you. And that is a good way to get on a reporter or an influencer's good side.

Mark Evans: That's the theory. So how do you make it happen?

Guest: How do you make it happen? You have to take this from a perspective of every industry, every group of people. Someone's good at something. Right? There's so many entrepreneurs who are terrible salesman, but they hire someone who can sell for them and do that aspect of their business. A lot of CEOs, that's not their field to figure out how to hunt in the wilderness and find the fairy reporters and things like that and figure out how to kinda win that coverage. It's an art. Absolutely. It's an art. What you say on interviews really matters. How you interview, whether you just blab at someone for thirty five minutes versus having a two way conversation matters. What about pre PR? Let's say, for example, you wanna target a specific reporter at The New

Mark Evans: York Times or The Washington Post. Things like following them on Twitter, engaging with them in comments, following them on LinkedIn, commenting on their posts. The ways that you can send them signals that, hey. I'm interested. I'm engaged with you. Maybe sending them an email. I'm making this up. Sending them an email saying, hey. I noticed that this big story is happening. Here's some interesting ideas or things that you should think about.

Guest: One thing which will frustrate a lot of people hearing this if is you should never pitch yourself. So, you know, you can engage. You can do those things. One of the best things is to read their previous stories, comment on their articles, be a listener to what they're putting out there. Reporters really appreciate when people check out their stuff from a genuine fashion and not in a BS way. And you can argue with them a little. Right? You could send some feedback or some thoughts on on a piece that they put out that was a little more controversial and have an engaging conversation around that. I think a lot of people, their first thing that they do is they try to sell, which is their business or their diet. Write about me. That's your job. Right? But that's what they're that's what they're thinking. But that person doesn't work for you, writing dog or anything like that. Build a relationship and and try to get people on the phone. If you can just get a writer and a reporter on the ringer, then you can chat for a bit and then they'll ask you about your stuff and as long as you do it in a way that's smooth.

Mark Evans: One final question before we talk about PR Monkey. What happens if a client doesn't get media coverage? So they've invested in you and and you have a reputation or you have a promise that you can get them high profile media coverage. So that's your value proposition. But in that extreme case, when you have a client and the story doesn't resonate, reporters are focused on other things or there's too much competition for similar companies, What do you do

Guest: in those situations? One, try to avoid them by taking on clients that would get picked up and have an interesting story and stuff like that. That's one precaution that I would say we take. You can put out a press release that typically garners a a lot of news coverage and indexes relatively. So that that helps. That's get out of jail free card. Luckily, we know a lot of writers and editors through our our relationships in the public relations world and and just the general building of PRMonkey that a lot of people are interested. As long as someone didn't have something that was really wrong with their story or or or wrong with their company, we would have no problem being able to deliver that. But if we ever did, we would just process a refund or something if if it really came to that. So haven't had to do that yet.

Mark Evans: That's a very diplomatic answer to my question. Why don't we turn why we talk about a little bit about PR Monkey? Give me the PR Monkey one zero What is PR Monkey? What's the value proposition? Why did you build it? How does it work? Give me the the the lowdown on PR Monkey. PR Monkey was built to say, hey. Can we automate this process of what,

Guest: you know, Nima does every day? From reaching out to influencers, you know, personalizing things, bringing value to reporters. The amount of back and forth that I've had with reporters over the years, sending client headshots, previous quotes, previous media coverage, the amount of pitches. You know, having a Google Doc of pitches rather than having six different templates of different pitches per client. Because there's certain patterns that you start to recognize and and things like that. So, you know, really taking a look at what is the public relations tools market and how can you build on top of it. The PR tools market as it currently exists is essentially just the contact information of writers and reporters and influence. So you were said you had a background as a journalist. A lot of the big the biggest three public relations software companies out there, they make 90% of their money just selling your email. That's it. So they say, hey. Here's your email. And that's why you would get blasted with inquiries all the time, and it would be maddening. Because a lot of public relations people don't have any other tool than that. So PR Monkey, you type in the name of of someone that you represent or that you want to represent, and we automatically download a lot of information that makes it really quick for you to build a media kit on a on a client or a prospective client in under thirty seconds. So you just type in their information, click click click. We download all of their previous news coverage. We monitor their future news coverage, and then we have a system that allows you to send trackable links and cards to journalists and and track all of the engagement, kind of like a CRM, but designed specifically for PR. That's the the system.

Mark Evans: Where are you at in terms of building out the product? And as important, how are you building the brand in terms of positioning and branding? What are some of the steps that you're taking to establish PRMonkey? And the other question would be is that you're selling to PR agencies as your primary customers. Is is there any conflict given that you're a peer agency?

Guest: No. If anything, it's much more of a exciting you know, we understand their industry and their business as we've done it, we continue to do it. Better to quote the agencies we talked to than than me, but that that it it allows us to build more trust and and excitement around the industry because we we get it.

Mark Evans: What are some of the lessons you've learned from building PR Monkey? Obviously, the journey from services to SaaS is something, I said, a lot of entrepreneurs dream about. The idea that you could build a business that generates recurring income is very appealing. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to embrace SaaS, but they're not sure where to start?

Guest: I would say probably the biggest piece of advice is you should be very careful. Try to go to a few enterprise level businesses. It depends on your time, b to b, b to c. Who who would be your dream customer? For us, it's Larry Weber, you know, CEO of Racepoint Global. Go to those people. You know, hit them up and see if you can get their attention, and then build towards what they want and and try to see if you can secure some contracts early. But before I, you know, go and launch and build this, will you give me x dollar amounts for y? You know, that's important. That that that is something that that I think would be really good. And then you'll have a very clear understanding of what people would pay for and what people would want and what you would bring value.

Mark Evans: So what did you guys do in terms of validating the idea? Admittedly, you had a bit of a head start because you're an established PR agency. You've a track record of high profile clients. There's credibility in terms of we do this. We understand your industry. You're not coming in from out of the blue. What was the research process that you undertook to make sure that PR Monkey was an idea worth pursuing?

Guest: You just feel it waking up every day, and talking to PR people. And I have a background in computer science, which I also would say do not start a SaaS product if you have not taken a coding class. To me, it's ridiculously moronic of anyone to try to do. I I just think having some I I'm not saying be a coder and code every day, but understanding what's possible and what's not possible is really key. And also being able to talk to developers in their language and understand what they're saying and what they're working on is super key to being able to earn the respect of the software development team and also to just be able to attract talented developers.

Mark Evans: The other thing I wanted to explore in terms of PR Monkey is you're offering a tool that changes the way that a lot of PR people operate. They're using traditional tools. They've got the list that they lean into. They do their outreach a very traditional way. A lot of it is blast away and see what sticks. They do what they do, and they've been doing it for a long time. And I'm I'm curious about how you convince people to change horses in midstream. Change is hard. Getting someone to embrace a tool, even if the tool is better, easier, more convenient, cheaper, can be a challenge because changing habits is really difficult. What are the things that you've had to do to showcase the value of PR Monkey and as important convince people that you change is good. Change is necessary, and it may be a little bit painful, but this is something you should do.

Guest: You have to build around. That's one of the reasons I say be careful with the software industry. It's for that very point right there. We're coming in, and I'm trying to take your phone away and give you a new phone. Hey. This is a new phone. But I'm sorry you have to, like, upload some of your contacts again. Yeah. But this is a new shiny phone, and people resist change. We're lucky in the sense that there is very minimal competition in our market. It's not like we're building a real estate application, and there's, you know, 10,000 real estate applications. There's a dozen PR applications. So it's very, very few and far between. Everyone can relate on the fact that 11 out of, you know, 12 people will agree that the public relations softwares are not very good. That's something that we get a lot of attention, you know, just from the industry because they're ready to try something new. And I think working with people, being patient when we first started doing demos and onboarding users and stuff. So we built this thing. We're super invested in it. We're looking at someone to click a button or mess something up or and we're taking a step back and breathing and having someone who maybe doesn't have so much skin in the game talk about it or present it is probably good too. It's no easy feat to get parties interested, and that's one of the reasons you wanna sell the product to larger agencies where you sell the one person gets deployed to a 100 people or 400 people. Great. Yep. Fantastic. Then you get more users and you get sizable rep.

Mark Evans: You got a beta program, but you're onboarding friendlies right now, people who are willing to be guinea pigs. What are some of the things that you've learned so far? And what are some of the biggest changes that you've had to make to ensure that PRMonkey is embraced and as important people are using it on a regular basis? You want it to be sticky. You want people to see the value, get so much value that they that they wanna refer and evangelize and share. So what are the things that you've done to make PR Monkey even better since the beta launched?

Guest: One of the things is we significantly improved our ability to pick up future and previous news coverage. For example, in our first design, we were only picking up tier one media placements, and then a lot of tier threes and stuff were were getting lost. And that doesn't make you feel good if you're a PR person and, you know, the aren't considering your news coverage. We created a dual system by connecting to various outputs that allowed us to pull all of those sort of news coverages so we didn't lose anything, whether it's, you know, Joe and Susie's blog or The New York Times. We can kinda pick that up and and pull that information. So that was one thing that was pretty cool. We just launched our Chrome extension, which is very exciting and and really puts us to a significant point of value for more enterprise level clients and to really have, you know, a basis to, you know, charge us, you know, substantial amount of of capital for the services. And and that is a really awesome tool because to your point of, you know, trying to move people away from a process, something like a Chrome extension allows them to operate in their Gmail. If you're pitching in your email and you're used to that, you can do that in the comfort of your own home now and save you a lot of the copy and pasting back from the platform. Because who wants to go from one thing to email to one thing to email and stuff like that. And the future goal is to bring it all to PRMonkey, you know, long term. So that's our plan.

Mark Evans: Thanks for the info about the exciting world of public relations and PRMonkey. Where can people learn more about you, Lightyear, and PR Monkey?

Guest: To learn more about PR Monkey, you can just go to prmonkey.com, or you can email me at neema@prmonkey.com. For Lightyear, you can go to lightyearstrategies.com or Google us. And same thing, nema@lightyearstrategies.com, and we can chat.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. You can reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.