Most founders start looking for a tech PR agency at exactly the wrong moment. The round is closing, the launch is six weeks out, the analyst report dropped. Suddenly there are six pitches in the calendar and very little time to figure out which one is right.
I have been on both sides of those pitches. I have also watched companies regret their choice eighteen months in. The pattern is consistent enough that I am going to lay out what I would actually look for if I were a founder hiring a tech PR agency for the first time.
The first decision is whether to hire a tech specialist or a generalist with a tech team. The two look identical in a credentials deck. They are nothing like each other in practice.
A generalist agency with a tech team has access to the firm's broad relationships but has to share senior attention with the firm's biggest accounts. Those accounts are usually consumer brands or financial services clients spending two or three times what a tech founder will. Your work gets handed to a junior team that is doing tech PR for the first time.
A specialist agency lives or dies on tech outcomes. The relationships with technology journalists are not borrowed from a corporate parent. The crisis playbooks are tuned to product launches, security incidents, founder departures, and the rest of the tech-specific patterns. The senior people on the team have done this for ten years.
Neither model is automatically right. Generalists win when the campaign needs corporate-affairs ballast, government access, or a household-name retainer for political weight. Specialists win when the campaign is about cutting through to a tech audience that knows when it is being talked at by a non-specialist.
Most pitch meetings are choreographed. The agency walks you through a credentials deck, a sector slide, three case studies and a recommended approach. By the end you know what the agency wants you to know about itself. You learn very little about how it actually works.
These five questions break the choreography.
You want the senior people you met in the pitch, present and accountable. The honest agencies will tell you that the pitch team and the delivery team are different. The good ones will give you names, titles, and hours per week. The poor ones will say something vague about a "dedicated team".
Agencies that have never walked away from a campaign are either lying or unsafe. The right answer is a concrete example: a client whose facts did not hold up, a moment where the agency advised against an announcement, a campaign that was killed mid-flight. The honest answer here tells you the agency has principles and will tell you the truth when you need to hear it.
Specialist agencies know exactly which doors are closed. The Financial Times will not run a Series A story unless the round signals something structural about the category. TechCrunch will not write the third coverage piece on a stale milestone. Sifted is harder to land than founders expect. An agency that promises everything to everyone is bluffing.
Watch the answer carefully. If the agency cannot tell you what is out of scope, the scope is whatever the client demands at midnight, and the team will burn out by month four. An agency that says "we do not write internal communications" or "we do not handle paid social" is being honest about its centre of gravity.
Coverage volume is a terrible KPI for B2B tech. A single FT exclusive plus eighty trade follow-ups is worth more than three hundred wire pickups. The agency that answers this question with share of voice, message penetration, journalist relationships built, and inbound interest sees the work the way you should.
A handful of things impress in a pitch and predict trouble later. None of them is decisive on its own, but stack two or three and the picture is usually consistent.
The single most useful question I would ask a prospective agency is: tell me about a campaign where you and the client disagreed about the approach. Who was right, and how did you find out?
Switching tech PR agencies costs more than most founders expect. The visible costs are the second retainer onboarding fee, the duplicated work in the handover, and the few months of slower pace while the new team learns the business.
The invisible costs are bigger. Journalists notice when a company changes spokespeople, agencies, or narratives in quick succession. Relationships that were warming up with one team go cold when a different team arrives. The story arc gets reset. For a Series B or Series C company building toward an exit, a wrong-fit agency hired and replaced costs twelve months of momentum.
This is the reason we recommend founders talk to a few agencies seriously rather than collecting six pitches. Two or three deep conversations beat half a dozen surface-level credentials runs.
If you are about to brief a few agencies, take a copy of the five questions above into each room. Compare the answers, not the decks. Specifically watch the pattern of who hedges, who pushes back, and who tells you what is out of scope.
And if you want a second opinion before you decide, we are happy to give one. Even if it ends with us recommending another agency, that is a better outcome for everyone than a wrong-fit hire that has to be unwound.
How much should a Series B technology company budget for PR?
Most credible specialist agencies will quote between £8,000 and £25,000 a month depending on scope, geography, and the seniority of the team assigned. Beware of anything under £5,000 a month from a senior team. The economics of doing the work properly do not support it.
Is a retainer or project model better for a first-time PR engagement?
A short-term project (six to ten weeks around a launch) is the lowest-risk way to test fit. Use it as a paid pilot. If it goes well, move to a retainer with the same team. If it does not, you have lost weeks rather than a year.
How long before I should expect to see results from a new tech PR agency?
Pipeline-level results (warmed journalists, analyst briefings, framework articles) inside thirty days. Tier-one coverage that genuinely moves a category inside ninety days. If you are still waiting at six months, the engagement has stalled.
Should a tech PR agency handle analyst relations too?
For most B2B technology companies, yes. The analyst layer (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and the category specialists) influences buyer decisions as much as press coverage does. A PR agency that ignores analysts is leaving the most important audience untouched. See the full Beachhut service map →
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