Marija Butkovic

It’s always better to send a press release to a small and selected number of targeted media outlets / journalists than to a big number of them. Send personalised tailored emails. Make sure it’s really something relevant and newsworthy. Make sure to have good assets such as high res photos and backlinks to any resources and data sources you are quoting in your press release. Follow up when needed, but not more than once. Remember, it’s about building a relationship, PR is a marathon, not a sprint. Consider sending the release to smaller outlets and relevant newsletters and blogs too.

Having a strong background in your respective space will give you credibility to pursue a career in PR. This means that you also need to have a strong knowledge of the latest trends and news, key players, investment opportunities, etc. Creating meaningful relationships with other colleagues, as well as journalists helps a lot. Sometimes, the key is to get in front of a certain brand or a person several times before you make a connection and start working together. Find your niche and stick to it, whether it's AI, women's health or food. The more niche you are, the better. There is no one size fits all, so try to offer personalised support to brands and people you work with.

Buffer or Hootsuite for automation and scheduling, BuzzSumo / Google Alerts for content discovery. Newsletters are also a good way of discovering great content. Or if you're looking for news, simply type the keyword in Google Search, choose option 'News' and the search engine will list relevant news for that particular keyword.

Two good platforms to use: BuzzSumo - set up an alert for your brand name and/or Google Alert - same thing. Every time your brand name is mentioned you will get notified via email.

I've been using Buffer for years to schedule and automate my social media posting. For finding content, it's fairly easy - find 10 key newsletters in your industry and find relevant news there that you can share. Also, just type in a keyword such as 'women's health' in Google search and choose option 'News' and the relevant news will be listed out. BuzzSumo is another great tool for finding relevant content (it's expensive, so if you're not using it literally daily, don't bother paying, unless you really have that money).

First of all, founders need to decide if they want to run a kind of business that requires external funding or if they want to run a bootstrapped business or a lifestyle business. Obviously, depends on the type of sector and type of business idea/product. Startups in the biotech space more often than not need to raise funds asap. Digital health might get away with it with some bootstrapping. Depends on the founder, too. Some who have exited have enough of their own cash to cover initial costs themselves. Most don't. So it's not really a black or white type of answer here. Depends on loads of factors and situations.