Emilie Gerber
Emilie Gerber is the founder and CEO of Six Eastern, a top PR agency that’s worked with over 100 tech companies, from stealth startups to publicly traded companies. Before starting her own firm, she worked at Uber, where she led PR for the business development team and B2B programs. Prior to that, she worked at Box on product communications, with a focus on product launches and partnership announcements.
Launch & Go-to-Market Skills
Selecting the right publication involves matching your news type to an outlet where that specific category of story is a well-understood, high-volume 'machine'.
"And I'm talking about TechCrunch specifically here only because the reality is they are the publication that's going to be most likely to write your funding story, that's just kind of the way it works..."
For consumer products, press drives growth most effectively when the product value is immediately graspable and the friction to trial is nearly zero.
"The barrier to trying the product is very low, you can quickly type in a query, get the answer, and then see the power of the tool. It takes one time to see the power of the tool. So in that case, I t..."
For B2B companies, the primary value of press is third-party validation that builds credibility with potential buyers, candidates, and sponsors.
"So I think, yeah, that's the value from the B2B perspective and it's not necessarily going to directly drive signups, but when that AE is sending their sales emails and they can link to a story, I thi..."
Funding announcements are highly reliable PR opportunities if you approach them with a direct, non-convoluted message that matches media patterns.
"I also think not all PR people are going to agree with this, but I do think funding rounds, you can always get a reporter to cover if you go about it the right way."
Launch announcements should avoid complex problem statements and instead use straightforward language that allows anyone to instantly understand the product.
"You can get so in the weeds with your own messaging that you want to set up this massive problem statement, you want to make it a huge trend story, but if you're very straightforward and you're patter..."