How Can Technology Companies Get Media Coverage Without Funding Announcements?
By Jordan Baker, Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
Technology companies often assume they need a funding round before journalists will be interested in them.
I understand why.
Look at enough technology and startup coverage and you will inevitably see investment announcements, acquisitions, launches, valuations, expansion stories and businesses celebrating significant commercial milestones. Those are obvious pieces of news because something has happened that can be reported.
But they are only one part of technology PR.
A technology business can go for months, or even years, without raising another investment round. It may not acquire another company. It may not launch a completely new platform every quarter. And, quite frankly, adding another feature to a piece of software is not automatically something an independent journalist is going to care about.
That does not mean there is nothing to talk about.
Some of the strongest technology campaigns I have worked on have relied much more heavily on the expertise inside the company than on announcements about the company itself. A founder might understand artificial intelligence exceptionally well. A cybersecurity specialist may be able to explain the latest scam affecting consumers. A recruitment technology business may have genuine insight into the skills companies are struggling to find. A platform might hold useful aggregated data showing how customer behaviour is changing.
The opportunity begins when you stop asking, "What can we announce about our technology company?" and start asking, "What does this company know, observe or understand that journalists and their audiences might find useful?"
That distinction opens up a much bigger media territory.
Do technology companies need funding announcements to attract journalists?
No.
A funding announcement can certainly be useful. It creates a clear news event, gives the journalist figures to work with and may say something interesting about investor confidence, expansion, jobs or a particular sector.
But funding is not the entry fee for media coverage.
If it were, a technology company would only have a few opportunities throughout its entire lifespan.
The same applies to launches.
There is nothing wrong with pitching a genuinely significant new technology product. But businesses often see every internal product update as newsworthy because the work involved was substantial.
Journalists see it differently.
The engineering team may have spent six months rebuilding an integration. The client may see that as an enormous achievement. A journalist still needs to know what it means to somebody outside the development team.
Does it materially change how businesses work?
Does it affect consumers?
Does it reveal a wider technological shift?
Does it solve a problem journalists are already writing about?
Does it create a new risk?
Does it tell us something interesting about where an industry is going?
If not, it may be commercially important without being an editorial story.
That is perfectly normal.
Why journalists do not automatically care about a new app, platform or feature
One of the biggest mistakes I see in technology PR is that businesses pitch from their own point of view.
The company has spent months building something, so the pitch explains the development in enormous detail. It describes the architecture, features, integration capabilities and technical sophistication. Then it adds words such as "innovative", "game-changing" and "revolutionary" and assumes the journalist will share the company's excitement.
The missing question is:
Why does this matter to the journalist's reader?
When I worked as a journalist, I was not looking for opportunities to reward companies for developing products.
I needed material that made an article interesting, useful or relevant.
A feature does not become news simply because it required a lot of engineering work.
The most effective technology pitches normally move quickly from what the technology is to what the technology changes.
A highly technical trade journalist may genuinely care about the architecture and underlying technical development. In that case, we should not remove the substance simply to make everything sound consumer-friendly.
But if we are approaching a national newspaper, business writer or consumer publication, the framing may be very different.
The central questions become:
What does this mean for an ordinary business?
What does it mean for an employee?
What does it mean for a consumer?
What problem is changing?
Who is affected?
What could happen next?
That is where the story normally lives.
Technology journalists and consumer journalists need different levels of detail
I do not believe in taking every technical subject and simplifying it to the same level.
The publication matters.
If we are pitching a deeply technical journalist who covers cybersecurity infrastructure every day, explaining elementary cybersecurity concepts to them could be patronising and unhelpful. They may want technical specifics, implementation detail and evidence that can withstand specialist scrutiny.
A mainstream business journalist needs something different.
A consumer writer may need something different again.
This is where good PR becomes translation rather than dilution.
We are not stripping the expertise out.
We are choosing which part of that expertise matters to a particular audience.
If a client sends us an explanation we do not fully understand, we research it and go back to them. They are the subject-matter expert. We are there to help turn that knowledge into something journalists can actually use.
For a mainstream audience, the test I often come back to is simple:
What does this actually mean in the real world?
What technology stories do journalists cover without company news?
There are several strong routes.
The first is expert commentary.
Technology affects work, money, privacy, security, shopping, hiring, communication and increasingly almost every part of daily life. A credible specialist can therefore contribute to a much wider range of journalism than many founders initially realise.
The second is original data.
Technology businesses often have information sitting inside their systems that can reveal something genuinely interesting about customer behaviour, business activity or market change.
The third is trend analysis.
A founder or specialist working closely with a particular technology can sometimes explain what is happening before the wider public fully understands it.
Then there are founder stories, business opinion, predictions, consumer warnings, industry analysis and stories about how technology is affecting people outside the technology sector.
None of these requires an investment announcement.
How can a technology founder become a useful media expert?
Start with what they genuinely know.
A common mistake is positioning a founder as an expert on every subject containing the word "technology".
That is not especially credible.
Instead, identify the intersection between their professional experience and areas journalists cover regularly.
A cybersecurity founder might credibly discuss scams, ransomware, password security, online fraud and business security failures.
A recruitment technology founder may be able to discuss artificial intelligence in hiring, changing skill requirements, automated screening and how employers evaluate candidates.
An ecommerce technology specialist might talk about online shopping behaviour, fraud, abandoned baskets or changes in how retailers use automation.
The founder does not need to be famous.
They do need substance.
Previous media coverage helps because it shows journalists that somebody has already operated successfully in that environment, but every expert starts somewhere.
Spectrum Search is a good example
Spectrum Search demonstrates this extremely well.
The business itself was a specialist executive search company. Directly pitching an executive search service repeatedly would have given us a fairly narrow PR campaign.
The much bigger opportunity was the expertise of Peter Wood.
Peter could credibly discuss artificial intelligence, recruitment, leadership, technology, skills shortages, business growth, fintech, entrepreneurship and the future of work. He was also exceptionally responsive and genuinely wanted to take advantage of media opportunities.
That made him a very good client from a PR perspective.
Over time, we built relationships between Peter and journalists, and journalists became increasingly familiar with what he could contribute.
Fair PR's current case study records 86 published media opportunities over an 18-month campaign, spanning national, business, technology, finance and recruitment titles. The documented approach centred on Peter's expertise rather than continually trying to promote Spectrum Search's recruitment service.
That is exactly what I mean when I say a technology business does not need constant corporate news.
One credible person can give you a large media territory if their knowledge intersects with enough things journalists care about.
Responsiveness matters more than many technology founders expect
Peter was also very quick.
That is not a small detail.
The media moves quickly, particularly around artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and breaking technology stories.
A journalist may be writing something this afternoon about an announcement that happened this morning.
They do not always have three days to wait for a perfectly polished corporate response that has passed through six layers of approval.
A concise, accurate answer delivered in time is more useful than a magnificent response delivered after publication.
This does not mean technology founders should respond carelessly.
It means businesses serious about reactive PR need a realistic approval process.
How can technology companies use their own data for PR?
This is an area where technology companies can have a significant advantage.
They often have data.
That might be customer usage information, recruitment patterns, transaction data, anonymised platform behaviour, survey responses or evidence about how users interact with a particular feature.
We regularly work with data from technology clients.
Sometimes the client sends us relatively raw findings and our job is to find the part that may interest journalists.
That process can change the entire story.
A business might send us thirty spreadsheet columns because every number feels significant internally.
We may discover that one result is considerably more interesting than the rest.
Perhaps customers are behaving differently at a particular time of day.
Maybe one age group has adopted something much more quickly than another.
Perhaps demand for a particular skill has risen sharply within the actual market the client serves.
The PR opportunity comes from recognising the pattern and explaining why it matters.
Data needs to withstand basic scrutiny
Having numbers does not automatically mean you have research.
If you say "80% of British businesses are worried about X", a journalist is entitled to ask where that figure came from.
Was it a nationally representative survey?
How many businesses were questioned?
When?
How were they selected?
Or did 80% of twenty existing customers answer a poll?
Those are very different claims.
Internal platform data can still be extremely useful, but describe it accurately.
"Among 4,000 users of our platform..." is an honest description.
"British consumers now\..." may not be.
Data-led PR becomes much stronger when the methodology is treated as part of the story rather than an inconvenient detail to hide.
A small dataset can still be interesting
Representativeness is not the only form of value.
A niche technology platform may have highly specialised data that cannot reasonably be extrapolated to an entire country but still tells us something interesting about its own market.
A recruiter specialising in AI roles might have evidence about salaries within its own vacancies.
A fraud-prevention business might see an unusual type of attack appearing among its customers.
A SaaS provider could identify a particular task that users are increasingly automating.
The responsible way to pitch it is to explain exactly what the data represents.
That gives the journalist the information needed to decide how far the conclusion can reasonably go.
Founder stories can work, but being a founder is not itself a story
Technology has a habit of elevating founders into the centre of the brand.
Sometimes that is useful.
A founder may have an extraordinary personal history.
They may have built the technology because of something that happened to them.
They could have left a completely different career.
Perhaps they failed several times before creating the business.
Maybe they have experience in an industry that gives them a genuinely unusual perspective on the problem they are solving.
All of those things could become interesting.
"I founded a SaaS company because I saw a gap in the market" is much weaker.
As with any real-life story, the question is whether somebody who has no intention of buying the software would still find the person's experience interesting.
If not, expertise may be a stronger route.
Three hypothetical technology PR examples
The following examples are deliberately fictional, but they show the difference between pitching a company and creating an editorial proposition.
Example one: recruitment technology
Weak pitch:
"RecruitTech launches AI-powered hiring platform to revolutionise recruitment."
This tells me very little. Lots of technology companies say they are using AI.
A stronger angle might be:
"Employers are rejecting experienced candidates because AI-written CVs are making applicants sound increasingly similar, recruiter warns."
Now we potentially have a story.
The spokesperson would need credible recruitment experience. The business would ideally have evidence from its own hiring activity or platform. The target could include business, careers, recruitment, technology and potentially consumer media.
The technology sits behind the insight rather than demanding to be the headline.
Example two: cybersecurity specialist
Weak pitch:
"SecureCloud announces advanced cybersecurity solution."
A stronger proposition could be:
"Small businesses are leaving former employees with access to company accounts months after they leave, cybersecurity specialist warns."
Now there is a practical risk.
The expert could explain how the problem occurs, the consequences and what businesses frequently misunderstand.
If there is credible anonymised customer evidence supporting the observation, it becomes stronger still.
Example three: B2B SaaS founder
Weak pitch:
"Workflow company launches major productivity update."
A stronger editorial route could be:
"Managers are adding more productivity software but workers are spending increasing amounts of time moving information between tools."
If the company's own data genuinely supports that observation, there may be a useful business story about software overload.
Again, the story is not "our update is brilliant".
It is "we can show you something interesting happening at work."
Which publications should a technology company target?
Not automatically the biggest ones.
National coverage can be excellent.
But a highly relevant specialist publication may place your company in front of exactly the people whose opinion matters commercially.
Trade publications can also go much deeper.
A general newspaper may give a founder two sentences.
A specialist technology title might interview them at length about something directly connected to their expertise.
A business publication may care about commercial implications.
A consumer publication may only care once the technology affects ordinary people.
Those are not better and worse versions of the same opportunity.
They are different.
The question should always be: Which audience are we trying to reach and what editorial material do we actually have for them?
What should a technology company have ready before pitching?
The spokesperson needs a clear biography and credible areas of expertise.
The website needs to make sense.
If somebody claims to be a specialist in a particular area, the public information around them should support that.
Any data needs a methodology.
Any significant factual claim needs something behind it.
Professional photography helps.
So does clarity around interview availability.
If you are pitching breaking commentary, somebody needs to be able to answer.
If the spokesperson disappears for four days every time a journalist gets interested, the campaign becomes unnecessarily difficult.
Why technology PR pitches fail
Jargon is one reason.
Over-promotion is another.
Overhyping artificial intelligence has become particularly easy. Adding "AI-powered" to a product does not make it editorially significant.
Businesses also make enormous claims about superiority without evidence.
"Our revolutionary platform is transforming the future of work."
According to whom?
What changed?
How do we know?
Another common problem is trying to explain every feature at once.
A journalist does not necessarily need a product demonstration to understand an expert comment about a trend.
Start with what is relevant to the story.
The technical material can sit behind it for the journalist who wants to go deeper.
Successful technology PR does not necessarily mean software reviews
This is particularly important in understanding what Fair PR does.
We are not generally trying to secure software reviews or force B2B products into "best software" roundups.
Our technology work is much more likely to centre on founder expertise, technical expertise, business insight, thought leadership, original data and broader stories with technology relevance.
Our current Technology PR service is explicit that Fair is not a traditional specialist technology communications agency and does not position itself around analyst relations, investor relations, developer relations or guaranteed software-review campaigns.
That distinction matters because "technology PR" can mean very different things.
When is Fair PR not the right technology agency?
If you need an extremely specialised technical campaign aimed at a tiny number of niche publications, you may benefit from an agency built specifically around that ecosystem.
The same applies if analyst relations or investor relations are central.
Those are specialist disciplines.
Fair tends to be a better fit when a technology business has broader B2B or consumer relevance and wants to build credibility, awareness and authority through earned media.
We want clients who are reasonably broad-minded.
They may have specific priorities, but they are also willing to contribute to the wider conversations around their expertise.
A very narrow company that wants us to talk exclusively about one technical product to five specialist journalists may simply need something different.
I would much rather tell somebody that before they start paying us.
Can technology PR work without constant announcements?
Spectrum Search answers that pretty conclusively for me.
The company did not need eighty-six funding rounds.
The media opportunity was the knowledge inside the business.
Recruitment firms can use the same approach. For a more sector-specific example, see How Can Recruitment and HR Companies Get Featured in the Media?
That approach works particularly well in technology because technology intersects with almost everything.
Artificial intelligence affects hiring.
Cybersecurity affects consumers.
Automation affects workplaces.
Online fraud affects money.
Digital tools affect productivity.
Technology founders experience business growth, hiring, leadership and investment from the inside.
A company with credible expertise can therefore participate in many different editorial conversations without pretending that its own product is the centre of every one.
Frequently asked questions
Can a startup get press coverage without funding?
Yes. Funding is one potential news hook, not a requirement. Expertise, credible data, founder experiences, trends and wider industry insight can all generate media opportunities.
Do technology journalists review B2B software?
Some publications do, but software-review coverage is a distinct area and should not be assumed to be available simply because a product exists. Fair PR's technology model is not built around guaranteed software reviews.
Can a small SaaS company appear in national newspapers?
Potentially. The company or its people need something relevant to a national audience, such as useful expertise, credible data, an interesting founder story or insight into an issue affecting ordinary businesses or consumers.
What makes technology data newsworthy?
It should reveal something genuinely new or interesting, be described accurately and have enough evidence behind it to support the claim being pitched. Methodology and limitations matter.
Can founders get quoted without being well known?
Yes. Fame is not required. Credibility, relevant knowledge, clear communication and responsiveness are often much more important.
How long does technology PR take?
There is no fixed timeframe. Breaking commentary can move very quickly, while trade and B2B features can take considerably longer. Specialist technology subjects can also involve longer editorial lead times. Fair's current Technology PR guidance reflects that variation.
Should a tech company hire a specialist technology PR agency?
Sometimes. If the company requires highly technical communications, analyst relations, investor relations or an extremely narrow specialist-media programme, a specialist agency may be more appropriate. If the objective is broader brand visibility, expert positioning and earned-media credibility, a wider journalist-led approach may fit well.
Could Your Technology Expertise Become the Story?
Technology businesses do not need to wait for the next funding round before thinking about PR.
The starting point is understanding what your people know, what your data shows and where those things overlap with subjects journalists already care about.
Fair Public Relations works with technology businesses where that wider editorial opportunity exists, helping founders and specialists turn genuine expertise, insight and evidence into useful media material.
We are not the right agency for every technology business.
But if your company has something worthwhile to say beyond promoting its own software, there may be considerably more to pitch than you think.
Written by Jordan Baker
Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations and a former UK national journalist with more than a decade of experience in journalism, PR and media relations. He writes about technology PR, B2B media, expert commentary, founder positioning and how businesses can turn genuine knowledge into earned-media opportunities.
