Helped 50+ brands get featured in Forbes, Time, GQ → PR agency behind Amber Duncan, Mark Clayton, Carved → From unknown to authority in 45 days → Free Audit👇
Toronto/New York
Joined October 2010
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From bankruptcy to Business Insider in 45 days.
Here's how we helped Amber Duncan turn financial rock bottom into a media movement:
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had a founder pitch a tech reporter with a 9-page PDF explaining his vision for supply chain software.
the reporter forwarded it back with one sentence: "i am on a train with 1 bar of service."
we cut the email to 3 sentences and booked the interview that afternoon.
a CEO paid $15,000 to speak on an industry panel in Las Vegas to build personal brand authority.
there were 14 people in the ballroom and 9 of them were assistants answering Slack messages.
he flew home coach with a lanyard.
spent 45 minutes on a discovery call with a founder who wanted a national magazine profile by Friday.
his product had 11 users and a checkout page with a broken Stripe key.
i told him to fix the payment button first.
when we pitched TrapTap on Dragons' Den, one dragon told me nobody would ever buy a hardware radar detector again.
we did $1.2M on Kickstarter eight weeks later.
i still keep the rejection clip on a hard drive in my desk drawer.
a founder spent $40,000 on an agency retainer to announce their Series A.
they got one syndicated release on Yahoo Finance that his mom shared on Facebook.
he called me asking why his calendar was still completely empty.
a client couldn't get a single reply from a Forbes editor.
so she baked banana bread, taped her pitch to the foil, and dropped it at the lobby desk.
the editor called her that afternoon.
her competitor spent $15K on a PR firm that month. zero coverage.
what journalists want vs what founders think they want:
→ conflict, not your launch
→ trend data, not your funding round
→ a weird origin story, not your mission statement
→ someone willing to say something real on the record
you can be the most impressive person in every room you walk into and still not exist on the internet.
credibility gets you nothing if a journalist can't find you in 4 seconds. they google your name, skim page one, and decide.
going viral is the participation trophy of the internet. one forbes feature still sends me leads 4 years later. your reel from last tuesday is already dead.
went on dragons den. one dragon said it was the worst idea he'd ever seen. we sold out on kickstarter two months later. sometimes the room is wrong.
what journalists actually write about vs what founders think they write about:
→ conflict, not your launch
→ trend data, not your funding round
→ a weird origin story, not your mission statement
→ someone willing to say something real on the record
founders will chase a logo placement in a magazine their customers don't read, then wonder why revenue didn't move. the goal was never coverage. the goal was leverage. most people confuse looking impressive with being findable.
journalists don't read your pitch first. they Google your name.
if page one is empty, they close the email. if page one has a knowledge panel, a podcast, and a quote somewhere, they keep reading.
your Google results are your real pitch.
everyone thinks credibility gets you press.
credibility gets you nothing if a journalist can't find you in 4 seconds. they Google your name, skim page one, and decide. your PhD means nothing if your LinkedIn looks like a ghost town.
a founder once cold pitched a journalist by emailing her personal Gmail. said he found it on a data broker site. thought it showed initiative.
the journalist screenshot it and posted it on X.
he got press. wrong kind.
A client told me journalists would find his story on their own. 6 months later, nothing. We spent one week rebuilding his Google presence. Within a month, inbound started. The story was always there - just buried under a blank page.
a therapist called me. 84% close rate. no insurance ceiling. debt-free.
i said "you're not missing tactics. you're missing the room."
things that actually moved my career: a flight to a conference where i knew nobody. a ghostwriter for my book proposal. dinner with someone smarter than me. things that didn't: logo redesigns, business cards, a second monitor.