Peter Friis and the business hiding in the follow-up

A shower fitting is an unlikely place to look for the beginnings of a public relations company. Peter Friis had one to sell. It clipped onto a shower pipe and delivered fragrance into the water. Explaining it, getting it in front of people, and persuading them to buy it produced another piece of machinery: a system for reaching the press. That system eventually acquired customers of its own.

Today Friis is the founder and CEO of PR Volt. The route between the two businesses is worth following because it gives an unusually practical answer to a familiar entrepreneurial question. Where does the next idea come from? In his case, part of it was already sitting inside the work required to keep the first idea alive.

A product with a family resemblance

ESSIO began as a family collaboration. His mother, Candace, contributed the idea for bringing fragrance into the shower. His father, Nils, brought the experience of a chemical engineer and patent holder. Peter brought the work of building a business around the device. The division of labour had a certain domestic logic: somebody imagines the thing, somebody makes it possible, and somebody must explain why anybody else should care.

The product launched in January 2013. It was a small physical object with a substantial explanatory burden. A customer looking at a clip and a pod had to understand where they went, how they worked together, and why the arrangement belonged in a bathroom. Familiar objects can coast on recognition. An unfamiliar object has to give a little demonstration before the sales conversation can properly begin.

Friis came to this problem from Amazon, where he had worked in digital marketing and product development for the video business. Moving into a physical product changed the consequences of a decision. Software can be revised after release; a manufactured object requires tooling, production and inventory. The career change put marketing beside a different set of practical constraints. A promising response could arrive much faster than another shipment.

The box had to do some talking

By early 2014, Friis was discussing a redesign of ESSIO’s packaging. The details were plain enough: white space, bright colours, photography and clean typography. The objective was more interesting. The package needed to help a shopper understand the product at a glance. For a new kind of object, the outside of the box is effectively the first instruction manual.

He also wanted to simplify the act of opening it. “Essio is like chocolate,” he said. The comparison was cheerful, but the commercial point was precise: once somebody has bought the thing, unnecessary packaging stands between anticipation and use. Nobody has ever fondly remembered the extra tab they had to wrestle with.

Recognition arrived early. ESSIO and Friis received a 2013 ISPA Innovate Honorable Mention. It gave the young business an industry acknowledgement during its launch year. Awards help a founder introduce an unfamiliar product; they supply a small piece of reassurance before the rest of the explanation begins. They also make a useful distinction visible. Being recognised and being purchased are separate events, however pleasantly they may occur together.

A Good Morning America appearance followed in ESSIO’s early years, bringing the product in front of an audience that could see how it worked. By April 2015, Friis was publicly discussing the interest generated by that exposure. Television was particularly suited to an object that benefited from demonstration. A presenter could accomplish in a few gestures what a still photograph might leave a shopper trying to work out.

An inbox becomes a business

Publicity brings its own backstage work. A journalist replies. A sample is requested. Someone has to arrange delivery, record the exchange and remember what should happen next. At ESSIO, Friis connected applications including Streak, Zapier and Asana to move those tasks along. An editor’s interest could trigger a task for the person responsible for sending the product.

“I love Zapier,” he said. It is an endearingly specific declaration of enthusiasm. Some founders talk about their favourite investors. Here was one enjoying the prospect of an application handing a job to another application.

PR Volt grew from those systems. In its early form, it would learn about a business, build a media list, write pitches and send outreach. Interested replies would then go to the client to handle. The boundary mattered: the initial offer helped create a conversation, while the client still carried the conversation forward.

There is a revealing change of customer here. A shopper buys a product for something it does. A business buys help because it needs something done. Friis had spent time on both sides of that distinction. He knew the object on the shelf and the small organisation behind it, including the amount of unremarkable work required to put the object there.

Two hundred people raise a hand

PR Volt reached 200 sign-ups on July 1, 2018, Friis later reported. The beta had started a little over a year earlier as a side project. His account named three principal ways people arrived: word of mouth, cold email and appearances on podcasts where he discussed using publicity to grow his ecommerce business.

The connection between experience and customer acquisition was unusually direct. He could talk about work he had already done, then introduce a business offering to help other people do related work. His previous company furnished the subject matter; the new company furnished somewhere for an interested listener to go.

The number deserves its original label: sign-ups. It marks interest in the product, without requiring the reader to turn every registration into a paying account. The appeal of this early milestone lies in its scale and specificity. There were two hundred expressions of interest, a date, and an account of the channels that produced them.

200

PR Volt sign-ups by July 1, 2018
Founder-reported milestone

During this period, Friis also discussed running ESSIO and PR Volt alongside each other. His Business Method appearance covered remote teams, combining media coverage with Facebook advertising, and effective landing pages. Those subjects belong together in a small business. Getting attention, paying for traffic and deciding what a visitor sees are parts of the same commercial journey, even when a larger organisation assigns them to different people.

His public advisory profile offers a similar view of his working interests: ecommerce, Shopify, advertising, email marketing, automation and landing page optimisation. The range is practical. A customer does not experience a company's departmental chart. They experience the advertisement, the page, the promise and whatever happens after they act on it.

The spreadsheet meets the gut

Friis’s business education included an MBA at UCLA Anderson and a mentoring relationship with Dermalogica co-founder Jane Wurwand in 2012. Their published conversation two years later caught him talking through the freedom and responsibility of making decisions. He valued advice, he explained, while accepting that the final choice belonged to the entrepreneur.

He also described a small personal signal: a good idea made him want to text people in other parts of the world. It is a useful glimpse of excitement before the forecast gets built. The first audience for an idea may be whichever trusted person happens to be awake.

The more measured side of his work appeared in a 2022 question about startup CTO performance. Friis wanted recommendations for useful metrics. Feature delays were a concern; the accuracy of estimates was particularly important to him. He listed other possibilities, including uptime, bugs and team satisfaction.

Then he raised the complication himself. Measuring estimate accuracy might encourage sandbagging. A team could improve its score by giving itself more room, while the underlying question of delivery remained unresolved. It is a small management question with considerable bite: how do you ask for more dependable information without rewarding people for making the promise less ambitious?

That question adds texture to the founder whose earlier work involved pitches and packaging. Once a business is operating, its internal promises need attention too. A release schedule, like a marketing promise, becomes meaningful when somebody else has to plan around it.

Keeping the robots in check

PR Volt’s present offering combines technology with managed public relations. Its website describes developing story angles, targeting journalists and managing outreach, with campaign managers involved in the work. The business also markets tools for PR teams and services concerned with visibility in AI answers. The object of attention has expanded beyond the familiar search result and magazine page.

The company has also invited PR professionals into an early-access software programme combining contact discovery, pitching and AI visibility tracking. That invitation places another version of the original question in front of prospective users: which parts of the job can a system make easier, and where does a person still need to exercise judgment?

Its stated mission is to make PR more affordable, efficient and transparent for small businesses, reducing manual tasks that add expense without corresponding value. The team page gives the human contribution a lighter description, presenting the staff as the people who keep the robots in check. It is a sensible job description in a business where software can organise an approach and a journalist can still decline it.

Friis’s route began with an object that needed explaining. It passed through packaging, publicity, advertising and the work behind an interested reply. Along the way, an internal process became something other businesses could use. The next business had been hiding among the tasks of the first. Someone still had to notice it.