startup-marketing
(7)
The Marketing Department Designed to Disappear
Most agencies are paid to remain indispensable. Department of Growth has built a stranger proposition: join the client, build the machine, and then hire itself out of the job.
The PR Agency That Learned to Say No
HeadStart began as a PR shop for any startup with a pulse. Then it made the decision young agencies resist: fewer kinds of clients, deeper kinds of knowledge, and evidence that attention can be engineered without pretending every company is news.
The Agency That Put Mashed Potatoes in a Blender
Spool built a people-first PR agency, then proved its taste for odd ideas with Thanksgiving smoothies, pocket-filled jeans and whisper-quiet pickleball paddles. The joke is visible. The operating discipline underneath it is not.
Firebrand’s Clever Bet: Make Every Marketing Channel Feed the Next
The San Francisco agency stopped treating PR, search, content and paid media as neighboring departments. Its wager is that one sharp idea, passed intelligently from channel to channel, can beat four disconnected campaigns.
VSC knows your product. But where’s the story?
The San Francisco communications firm turns technical detail into something people can repeat. Its more revealing trick is what happens after the headline: recruiting, sales, and sometimes a place on the cap table.
StrtupBoost Has 30,000 Members. Its Next Bet Is a Smaller Room.
The New York startup community pairs investor introductions with the unglamorous work of sales, design and fundraising preparation. Its latest pitch: fewer people at the table, more reasons to talk.
Netscape Alumni Built Sparkpr. Now an AI Brain Helps Run the Pitch Room.
Born in Netscape's afterglow, Sparkpr has spent 27 years translating complicated technology into stories people can repeat. Its latest experiment is to encode some of that instinct in an AI system called The Brain.