Before you spend $10,000 on PR, spend $9.99.

Getting attention is only one part of the equation.

What happens before and after the attention is what decides whether a campaign becomes a business asset or an expensive screenshot you post on Instagram.

I've watched brands obsess over where they want to be featured without ever asking the more important question: what happens next?

PR creates discovery. Marketing captures attention. Sales converts the opportunity. When those three aren't connected, you get a campaign that looks wildly successful from the outside and produces almost nothing for the actual business.

So I put together the checklist I'd want if I were sitting on the other side of the table from me.

What's in it

Everything I'd want to know before signing.

• 1Seven questions to ask before you hire anyone. One of them almost nobody asks.
• 2The red flags. Including one that sounds like a good thing.
• 3The 14-day build that should happen before the push, not after.
• 4How one feature becomes fifteen assets.
• 5The 7-day playbook for the week after you're featured.
• 6The 30-day plan that keeps it alive without reposting the link.
• 7The PR-to-revenue loop — and how to find the stage where yours is leaking.
• 8The scorecard. Before, during, +30, +90.
• 9The message to send an agency before your discovery call. Copy, paste, watch how they answer.

Twenty minutes to read. Then you walk into the call knowing more than most of the people who will try to sell you a retainer.

I've been on the agency side long enough to know what founders find out too late.

I run a PR agency. This is the document I use to work out whether a brand is even ready for press — because sometimes the most useful thing I can tell someone is don't spend the money yet.

Maybe the website isn't ready. Maybe the positioning is confusing. Maybe there's no lead capture, or the offer isn't clear, or the sales process is broken. Pouring attention into any of those is pouring water into a bucket with holes.

So this is the honest version, including the parts that cost me work.

What this costs vs what the campaign costs

The cheapest part of your next PR campaign.

• —A PR retainer — $5,000 to $20,000+, often before a single pitch goes out
• —A launch event — thousands, and a lot of photographs
• —An influencer deal — hundreds to thousands, and no way to tell what it did
• —This checklist — $9.99, read in twenty minutes, before you commit to any of the above

You're about to spend real money getting people to look at your company. Ten dollars to check you've built somewhere worth sending them is not the expensive decision here.

The Agency Checklist

$9.99

One payment  ·  yours to keep  ·  read it before your next call

One payment, not a subscription.
Yours to keep and come back to.

Stop asking “can you get me press?”
Start asking “what are we going to do with the attention?”