The first thing SBS Comms failed to explain well was itself. The company began in 2017 as Strange Brew Strategies, a name borrowed from a 1980s comedy and paired, naturally, with a beaker. It was a cheerful fit for a boutique willing to take on artificial intelligence, blockchain and advanced manufacturing before those beats swallowed the technology press. Then the work grew up faster than the wardrobe. By 2023, the firm would describe its own website as a trip back to 1996, complete with a logo floating around like a DVD screensaver.
That is an endearing problem for a communications agency to have. It is also a useful one. Public relations firms sell the ability to notice when the outside world's picture of a company no longer matches the company itself. SBS eventually took its own medicine: the beaker went, Strange Brew contracted to SBS Comms, and a frontier-tech consultancy started presenting itself as a tech-and-culture agency.
The interesting move
A retainer built for the company before the retainer
The more consequential redesign arrived six months before the new name. In January 2023, SBS launched OnBoard for early-stage startups - companies that needed credibility to recruit, sell and raise money, but were too young for the cost and ceremony of a traditional agency relationship. At launch, the Foundation tier cost $5,000 a month. It included a senior communications strategist, messaging, media training, introductory pitching, funding and product-announcement help, plus playbooks and outside instruction. A later documented tier cost $10,000 a month for companies farther along.
The price mattered because conventional tech PR retainers can be a frightening line item for a seed-stage founder. But the delivery mattered more. SBS took much of the work into Slack. Less email. Fewer standing meetings. Advice delivered in the same window where the product broke, the financing closed and the founder changed the launch date. O’Brien described the changed assumption plainly: seed-stage companies were once told to build quietly, but the market had become too competitive for silence.
“If founders want to work primarily on Slack, then we won't fight that.”John O’Brien, speaking at the launch of OnBoard
This looks almost comically small as an innovation, yet it changes the basic direction of the service. Professional firms usually force a client to enter the firm's operating system: kickoff decks, status calls, account ladders, elaborate reporting. OnBoard went the other way. The agency met the client where the work already happened and put a boundary around it with a flat price.
The timing should have been dreadful. Technology companies were cutting costs, newsrooms were shrinking and a large agency contract looked easy to postpone. Yet Fast Company reported that SBS revenue rose 27 percent in 2023 to more than $9 million, helped by 30 new clients. SBS later said OnBoard's client count grew nearly 95 percent from 2023 to 2024, while the program's revenue rose 180 percent. In other words, the small door did not cheapen the house. It brought more people inside.
OnBoard: 2023 → 2024
Relative growth reported by SBS Comms in January 2025. Bar lengths compare the two percentages, not total dollars.
The craft underneath
Begin with the problem, not the photonic computer
A cheaper retainer is only interesting if the advice inside it works. O’Brien's best description of that advice came during a discussion about Lightmatter, a photonic-computing company. A pitch about a computer moving data ten times faster sounds impressive and dies in the same inbox as six other impressive chips. A pitch that starts with the share of the world's power AI may consume creates a problem big enough for the technology to enter.
This is the SBS distinction between go-to-market messaging and press messaging. The first explains the platform. The second explains the tension that made someone build it. Startups routinely confuse the two because product fluency feels like authority. Reporters, however, are not prospects waiting for a feature tour. They are deciding whether a change in the world is real, timely and legible to readers.
Lead with the expensive, strange or newly urgent problem. Make the reader feel the world before introducing the tool.
Funding alone is weaker than a working demo, a customer, a contract or a result that a skeptical reporter can inspect.
Learn what an individual journalist follows and how that person reaches an audience. An outlet logo is not a beat.
Prefer one story that changes a sale, hire or financing conversation to a heap of incidental mentions.
That recipe has limits, and SBS says so. Founder-led direct publishing tends to amplify people who already have a profile or companies that already possess heat. An unknown founder cannot assume a clever thread will produce legitimacy, customers and press. Nor can a thin company story survive on phrasing. In its 2026 forecast, SBS argued that reporters increasingly want demos, customers, technical depth and real-world use. When the proof is missing, the agency mechanism has little to amplify.
A founder's voice is an ingredient. It is rarely the whole recipe.
A specialist with bridges
SBS chose partners instead of pretending to do everything
The agency's market position is narrow by design. Its center remains earned media for technically complex companies: Cursor, Ramp, GitHub, Glean, Lambda, Lightmatter, PsiQuantum, Astranis and venture firms including Paradigm and Greycroft appear on its public roster. Those clients need someone who can translate infrastructure, chips, artificial intelligence, fintech or space hardware without sanding away the interesting technical edge.
In 2025, SBS paired with 829 Studios as a sister agency. The arrangement is revealing because 829 supplies what SBS openly is not: web development, design, SEO, paid media, influencer work and broader content. SBS keeps the earned-media specialty and borrows the integrated stack when a client needs it. A climate-focused partner, Redwood Climate Communications, follows the same logic: specialist knowledge joined by a bridge, rather than one agency claiming universal competence.
That also describes the business model. Full-service retainers remain custom. OnBoard standardizes the early steps. Partnerships widen the offer without blurring the pitch. The competitors are specialist tech agencies, an in-house communications hire and, increasingly, founders publishing directly. SBS's bet is that judgment still deserves a line in the budget: the ability to identify the right problem, choose the right messenger and know when the company has not yet earned the story it wants.
The part worth copying
Remove ceremony before you remove expertise
The portable lesson from SBS is not “sell PR in Slack.” It is to separate the expensive human judgment from the expensive ritual that accumulated around it. Keep the senior strategist. Reduce the meetings. Define the useful unit of work. Put it where the customer already makes decisions. Price the first step clearly enough that a nervous buyer can say yes.
It works when the service has repeatable bones but still benefits from expert choices. It works when the client moves quickly and has evidence worth translating. It weakens when a company needs a large corporate apparatus, many markets at once or continuous crisis, policy and investor coordination. And it cannot manufacture substance. A Slack channel can shorten the distance between a founder and an answer. It cannot shorten the distance between a claim and the proof.
SBS has grown into a remote team of roughly 50 to 80 people, added 23 people in 2024 and turned an early-career fellowship into 11 full-time hires by mid-2023. It hosts an old-school media party called NIGHT MOVES and still calls its employees the Brew Crew. There is humor in the packaging, but the underlying position is sober: journalism remains valuable precisely because nobody controls it completely. The reporter brings a point of view. The editor brings another. Sometimes the headline is snarky.
For an agency that began with a silly movie, an unruly beaker and an embarrassing website, that loss of control seems to be the point. A credible story is not a polished object handed from a company to the public. It is a negotiation with reality. SBS Comms sells help at that table - now with a smaller cover charge.
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