The Affordable PR Strategy Every Entrepreneur Needs - Jim Edmondson

This is the beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Ross. Jim, welcome to the show. Hey, Sebastian, how you doing? Good man. Good to have you here. Great to see you again. We connected on the the Summit at Sea 2000 Very Interesting Human beings, very thought provoking human beings, very successful human beings jumping on a cruise ship for four days to find out what was on the other side of that. So it was great to, to run it. Actually. You and I connected first in the WhatsApp group. They created a WhatsApp for us all to connect and then you tracked me down on the ship and then we started having a conversation about what you're doing and you're kind of anti PR mindset and I thought, huh, share that those sentiments as well. You know, we want to connect further and of course, as a podcaster, I like to invite people on the podcast to share their story and connect with them further. So that's exactly what we're doing here. So it's great to see and thanks for your time, ma'. Am. Oh, it's such a pleasure. Yeah, it was lovely to meet you on the ship. It was, it was great to kind of connect on WhatsApp. And then we just bumped into each other in that bar. It was, it's quite, it's an interesting experience how they force people together. You know, there was 2,000 people and we ended up meeting each other anyway, so, you know, fantastic. But yeah, I'm glad my story connected with you. Yeah, absolutely. It was crazy that I, you know, I felt like I was meeting hundreds and hundreds of people. But as I went through my system of find somebody on Instagram or LinkedIn or the Summit app and whatever, and I would screenshot and then I would put them in a folder, a photo album folder on my phone and I go, well, then I can, I have easy way to follow up. You know, I got back and I only had 34 people that I put in that album. Oh, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, it felt like I'm like, when I get back, it's going to take me months to get through. Hundreds and hundreds of people. There weren't hundreds of people in there. So perception isn't always reality, right? Well, exactly. But for me, you count as 100. So there you go. All right, fair enough. I appreciate that. So on this show, I love telling people's story. I always like going back for some context for our listeners. Going back to the beginning of the story. The beginning's different for everyone. So you decide where the beginning is for you, but let's take a couple minutes and bring us back to where it all started and what really brought you to present day with what you're doing. So origin story is that initially I, I was part of a, a two man team who created an engine company and we, we created engines for paramotors in the US you call that PPGs. And so we made these backpack engines and aircraft and that grew dramatically and it grew so fast, in fact we actually turned into a defense company and it wasn't something I particularly chose to go into it just where we ended up. Anyway, fast forward it grown fairly big. We'd won through, we would gone through several investment rounds and we'd got to final investment round of over $100 million. And at that point I decided that actually it was a good point for me to exit. So that was about eight years ago. So since then I've done multiple different things. Tech startups, I've had a little bit of success, a little bit of failure. Usual kind of tech story. But in the context of what we're talking about is that one of my best friends is possibly the most published historian of World War II and he and I have been collecting World War II jackets. I've got quite a few behind me for years. And we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we made a company that made these World War II jackets, made them exactly the same, remade the fabrics and made them an artisan like skills and then gave the, gave the money, the profits back to veterans charities. Right. So we were doing this like a little part time gig on Saturdays building these jackets, having a lot of fun and we got the company, it turns out it's pretty small. It turns out about half a million a year. So that's pounds, not dollars. And I thought this is a really cool story. This should get, this should get pr, right? We should, we should, PR company should pick this up and it should have press. We're giving money back to veterans to ptsd and we're making beautiful jackets that last generations. No one wanted to touch it. We gave it to PR companies and they were quoting about three and a half thousand to five thousand pounds a month. That to me seemed like an exorbitant amount of money. To do what? Right? To basically email our story out to a database. And I felt that this wasn't really that cool. And so that's what's taken us to the present day. I don't know how much you wanted to go into present day, but that's how we got here, that's what pissed you off about the world of pr, right? A lot of money for. Not really that much. It seemed like quite a bloated industry based on some old relationships and a lot of money for really not doing a huge amount of work. I know that's going to piss a lot of people off, but that's what, like, a lot of the smaller PR agencies felt like. Sure, sure. So do you guys still have the. Do you guys still sell the jackets? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we still made the jackets. We're still. We're just. We've just done a US Navy shawl jacket from the Second World War, which is very cool. What's the name of the company? It's called Avri Avre Industries. So that's the name of a tank in the Second World War called the Churchill Avri Tank. So we called it Avri Industries AV R E I-N-Com and, and it's just a cool little company. I mean, we've, we've got some amazing supporters, like Jack Carr, the author of Terminal List. He drinks our whiskey. So we made a whiskey with the company too, that supports the. The greatest commando raid of all time. So you can see this, this company's like, it's a passion project. That's. That, that it's not a. It's not a massive money spinner. But I felt that that's a story that should have press. Right? It feels like, you know, it's a little company that should have press, but it's very hard to get press as a small company unless you're kind of in. In with the. No. Right, yeah. And so, so I started actually contacting a lot of journalists. I started speaking to a lot of journalists from all over, from Fleet street, which is the kind of the, the mecca of journalists, journalists in the uk. So that's, you know, the Times and the Guardian, they're all based in one street in the UK called Fleet Street. And I started talking to them and also New York as well, with Wall Street Journal and various New York papers. And what, what was coming back was these journalists were getting over 200 PR pitches a day from press companies. From PR companies. Right. So 200 pitches a day. So what do you think they do with it? They just ignore all of them because, you know, to them it's too. And most of the time they're not even researched. So they're being pitched these stories that aren't even anything to do with them. You've got somebody in finance who, you know The PR agency is pitching them a story with the hope that the guy they're sitting next to is actually somebody they're going to give the story to. So these stories aren't even relevant to them. So now they're just like, I'm just going to bin everything. So the journalists aren't winning, the companies aren't winning, the only person who's winning is the person in the mini middle taking $5,000 a month, pitching your story to an email list. Right? Right. So was there ever any traction at all? Because it seems to be a pretty interesting product that you've guys got. I mean there seems to be some sort of angle there, especially with the, with the, with the social responsibility of, of, of having a charity tied to it. Right, you think? So we'd had nothing. We, we literally had nothing. And so that's what, what took me down a new avenue, if you like, where I'm a fairly obsessive person as it comes to math and that kind of thing. So I sat down one evening and thought, I can crack this, right? Millions of people haven't been able to crack this. But because I'm, you know, slightly arrogant and I, you know, take myself far too seriously, I felt like, you know, I can crack this. And so I sat and for about a month I vibe coded and basically thought, well, why couldn't I look at all the journalists in the US and the UK and actually map them properly? So now with tools like AI, and I don't think you should use AI for writing your actual pitches, but where it is interesting is about deep research. So if you could map all the journalists in the world but actually look at their previous 100 articles, you could actually really understand what they're interested in, what their beats are, and actually start building a map where if we understood your story you're trying to pitch, we could actually target the right journalists. So now we're saying, okay, rather than just spamming every single journalist in the world, we're only going to let you pitch to 20 journalists. The 20 journalists we think think are most interested in your story. And that's what we ended up creating. And we wanted to do it at a price, which was basically a no brainer. So you know, you can do it, we'll help you, you'll get some SEO out of it and also you can go and pitch journalists that might actually be interested. All right, break this down for me. I'm on the site right now, by the way, it's presswhisper.com I'll put that in the show notes and I, so you guys can check it out as well. But break it down here. I was looking at the, how it works, but I don't want to get distracted here and have you, I want you to break it down to me like I'm a five year so everyone can understand how simple the process is. Right? Let's take it back to the ship and imagine we've just, we've just done 15 tequilas, so you can, you can understand it properly. Right? So, so the, the basics is it's really on two sides. One side is that we want to help you actually create a press pack. Because a lot of people is when I go and talk to users about this founders, they're like, no, no, it's fine. We, we live on Claude now. So Claude is basically our source of truth. That's fine. Right? But it's only going to help you write your actual press release, as in the kind of the narrative about what your story is about. But journalists are after quite a few things. They're after a Google Drive with bios with the actual story, with specifications, with all the different elements of this. And I think that's where a lot of founders get this wrong, right? They think they're just sending an email. No, you need to send an email with a press pack. So the first part of this is helping you craft as a founder or any type of business, an actual press pack. So that's the first half and it's designed, we take you through each stage, create your organization, create your team bios, create a talking point. So what is it? What are you actually trying to talk about here? Create some specifications. Then we help you craft an actual press pitch which we then create into a press kit. And this press kit lives on a URL. So you have a URL slug, which not only then gives you SEO, because there's another website which has got your story on and it's pointing back at your website, but it's also a single area where the journalist can go to. And rather than having to go to a Google Drive and keep that updated, you now have this great good looking URL which is specifically done for that story. And you can create as many of these as you want. So let's say it's about, you know, podcast suck. You might do one for local news in say the east coast. And then you might go, actually I'm going to do one for the west coast and I'm going to do one for podcast journalists. So you can create different pass packs and it will keep it updated with your bio, with your headshots, with your logos. So you only have to change it in one place and that kind of goes all the way through it. So you have these dynamic URLs. That's one side. We help you create that. And it's pretty brutal, right? We score it, and we score it in a way which keeps you fairly honest. So we score out of a hundred. And when you first put it in, you're likely to get 40, maybe 30 out of 100. And if you try and pitch that to journalists, we say, look, it's not a great idea because this isn't actually going to get anywhere. So that's the first bit. The second side of this is actually then matching it. So when you've done that, you can then say, yeah, brilliant, I really like the press kit I've created. You can then match that to journalists. And so what we do is we look at your story and we've helped you build it. So now we can actually score that and we can map that across the journalists where we think this is going to have the biggest traction for you. Now, we're not guaranteeing you're going to get press. And to put this into context, when I first did this with the prototype for Avary, we got pressed within 24 hours. So that gives you a good idea of where we got to with this. And, you know, I spent a lot of time with it, so I feel like I maybe crafted a story and it took a while, you know, it took a while to learn how to craft that story. But hopefully, if you do this and you put a bit of time into it, then your traction is going to hit. Hit a home run and you're going to get somebody who's interested in what you're trying to do. And my suggestion would be just a little side note on this, my suggestion would be don't try and go for the Wall Street Journal on day one, because it's unlikely they're going to pick up your story. So try and go local, try and go niche. And the idea is about actually bringing up news cycles, which we can talk about in a minute as well. But then. So the second part is about matching and distributing it. So what we do then is we try and match your story with journalists that want to pick it up. And that's the bit I was just talking about, where we've mapped every journalist across the US and UK so that we can actually understand and mathematically match you to the right journalist. Does that. Does that give you in a five year old's kind of pitch? Yeah, it definitely does. So, so how much work is involved when someone has to go sign up on there? Do they after or does the. Is the platform helping them choose which outlets to go based on the scoring? And after you know, if the score is low, does it give you pointers on how to adjust it to get a higher score so that the story is more likely to get picked up? Yeah, exactly. So all of those points. So to your first question, how long does it take? So it's not, it's not a free lunch, right? You have to put some work in. And if you were doing this with a PR company, they were charging you $5,000, you'd still be sitting down for a couple of hours with them and they'd be pinging you a lot of questions over emails and stuff. And you'd still be putting time in to actually build that dossier up initially. So I would say it takes between two and four hours, but you can break it down over time. So you could do it over a week or two weeks. And that's the things like putting in your bios, putting in the different bits. And a lot of people have already got this information on their about pages on LinkedIn. So it's about copying and pasting it and then it judges that and it tells you what it scores it in terms of how press might take that. So it goes, yeah, I think this is actually quite good. Or no, you need to adjust it here or you need to put more facts in or, or, you know, you need to put more proof points in. So it does all that initially and then the matching part takes seconds. So you just press match and it comes up with a list of publications. Now what you can do with that is steer it so you can say, I just want to, I just want to aim specifically at, I don't know, Portland, Oregon. Right. And that's the one place I want to specifically aim at. And it will just look at that tiny area. Or you might say, I just want to look at engineering magazines and it will just look at engineering magazines globally for you and find the journalists within that. And what it will do is it will score it against the 20 most likely journalists who are going to do that. What it doesn't do is give you the journalist email addresses because our goal is to protect the journalist. So rather than just giving out thousands of email addresses, our goal is to protect both sides. So rather than giving you their email addresses, we send it out for you. Oh, Got it. Okay, that's. That was my next question. So you get in there, you set up the profile, you set up your page, you pick your. You could put your story together, your pitch, your press pack. You choose the areas you want and then you submit and then you guys send on the. On behalf. Now, how does the, how does the publication get back to you? They email you so they can actually. So the way we set it up is they can just hit reply in their inbox and it will come back to your inbox within Press Whisper. So you don't have to give your email address out. You can do. And they don't have to give their email address out. What tends to happen is if a journalist comes back and gets in touch with you, so they might say, actually contact me on this number or contact me on this email address, and then that way you can take it offline. We're not trying to keep it within Press Whisper. We're just trying to protect the journalists initially so that all their email addresses aren't just free for everybody to go and hit up straight away. Got it. All right, so if you're listening to this, you've never done any PR before because you share the same sentiments. Maybe you're. It's a belief system. My story isn't relevant enough to get picked up by the press. Or I've gotten, you know, I've hired PR companies in the past and it hasn't worked out. This is a very economical way, streamlined process for you to be able to dive back into the world of pr, create, reshape a story, create a story for your brand and get it in front of the eyeballs that you want to get it in front based on. I mean, it looks like there's a tremendous amount of, of AI technology that you've leveraged to build the platform in addition to your crazy ideas. And now here we are in Press Whisper, you know, became a reality. So I'm going to put the link in the show, not notes description of this podcast episode. Any questions? Shoot me a dm. I'll connect you with Jim and his team as well, if you have any questions on that as well. But I love it, man. I'm gonna give it a shot myself. I know it sounds like a lot of there's a little bit of work involved on here, but I mean, when is there not work involved? So I got one thing as well to give away to your listeners. So anybody who logs in now and if they DM me either on LinkedIn or they go on to Press whisper and just say, listen to Sebastian's show. We will give you a thousand credits, which is a year's worth of PR for using the platform for free. And we'll also white glove you through the process. So we will hand build it with you. And so we'll build it with you, we'll take you all the way through it. Because for us right now it isn't about building like building for scale right now. It's actually about building for you as the users. We want to build it with you so we understand what you need, what you want to use, how you want to make it work. So there's an opportunity now we, there's only, I think it's probably about 30 places left with that left. We did 100 in total. So there's an opportunity for you to a get involved and build this and try and actually disrupt an industry, which is, I think, a fairly bloated industry, and also to get your PR done for free for a year. Love that, Love that. So make sure you take advantage of that. That's a stellar offer. And Jim, thanks for doing that. I appreciate it. I'm going to put Jim's link to his LinkedIn profile, a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well. Shoot him a dm, let him know you heard him on beyond the Story and that you want to take advantage of that offer. So that's, that's great. I'm going to take advantage of that offer myself. I love that. Well, Jim, it's been great to connect with you. I love hearing more about this. Can't wait to check out the platform. Take advantage of that awesome offer too, and, and better understand, you know, what's possible in the world of PR here in 2026. Any final thoughts for our listeners? Go and disrupt your own industries. Just get out there and, you know, make, make some noise. That's it. Lots and lots of noise. Thanks again, Jim. I appreciate your time, brother. Thank you so much. You got it. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the beyond the Story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com comp studios. We'll talk to you next time.