The most revealing thing about Zer0 to 5ive is a number that appears to be missing. Its name counts from zero to five, which sounds like the briefest business book ever written. But there are six steps. Zero is not decoration. Zero is objectives - the moment before anyone orders a new logo, drafts an announcement or decides that the company simply needs more “buzz.”
This is a small rebellion in the marketing business. Clients tend to arrive carrying a preferred cure. They ask for public relations, or a website, or leads. Agencies are paid to administer it. Zer0 to 5ive, an independent communications firm based in Devon, Pennsylvania, was designed around a more awkward conversation: What is the business challenge? What does the market believe? Which audience matters first? Only then does the team pick the channel.
Michelle Pujadas founded the company in Pittsburgh in 1999. At Ketchum, where she had built and run a technology practice, she watched technically gifted founders struggle with the less technical act of taking a product to market. Knowing the machine was not the same as explaining why anyone should care about it. She first imagined Zer0 to 5ive as a strategy firm. Its first PR client was Carnegie Learning; its first hire was her husband, Santiago, now co-CEO.
The menu is ordinary. The order is not.
Today the agency offers the expected full-service spread: strategy, PR and social media, brand and creative, websites, and lead generation. Its clients are less expected only in their complexity. Sony AI researches gastronomy, ethics and robotics. Digital.ai sells an AI-powered DevSecOps platform. NWEA turns assessment data into education research. Finxact set out to rebuild the core software used by banks. The agency has also worked across diagnostics, healthcare, cybersecurity, consumer products and financial services.
These are businesses with explanations attached. A generalist can make them sound vague; a specialist can make them impenetrable. Zer0 to 5ive occupies the narrow strip between the two. It researches like a consultancy, translates like a newsroom and then keeps enough production talent nearby to build the site, campaign, social feed or sales funnel.
The Roadmap - an order of operations
The Roadmap makes that strip visible. It begins with objectives, then research, positioning and messaging, brand strategy, brand identity, and finally the go-to-market plan. The research can include competitor analysis, industry work, primary surveys, and media or social audits. In the agency's published guide, a skincare-device project investigates parents, younger acne sufferers, older patients and dermatologists before locking the plan. The point is not to make a thick report. It is to make the later creative decisions less arbitrary.
“Never assume.”Michelle Pujadas, on the most important lesson she learned
A banking launch built on dislike
Finxact shows what happens after the research. In 2017 the cloud banking startup was still pre-product. It needed to introduce “Core as a Service” to bank executives accustomed to legacy core systems. Zer0 to 5ive acted as an outsourced marketing arm across positioning, website, PR, social and sales material. The campaign's line was “Love Your Core.” The phrase worked because it reversed an existing feeling: bank CIOs did not love the systems they had.
The launch produced more than 30 articles, according to the agency. A 2019 funding announcement produced another 35 and lifted the company's Twitter following by 40 percent. By April 2020, Finxact had appeared in more than 250 articles. The useful lesson is not to copy the rhyme. It is to identify the emotion already lodged in the buyer's mind, then position the product on the other side of it.
The receipts are part of the pitch
Communications agencies live with an attribution problem. A story is published; sales rise; a funding round closes. Which action caused which outcome? Zer0 to 5ive does not solve that philosophical puzzle, but its case studies are unusually willing to count the observable middle. The numbers turn “awareness” into a set of things a client can inspect.
For NWEA, the assignment was not merely to publicize an assessment product. It was to turn the organization into a recognized source on K-12 research. From 2017 through 2025, the agency reports more than 8,000 articles, 450 interviews, 1,500 features and 150 bylines or op-eds. Work around COVID learning disruption won a 2021 PRSA Silver Anvil in public service. The campaign changed the subject: from what NWEA sold to what NWEA knew.
Sony AI needed a public identity broad enough to include AI ethics, gastronomy, gaming and robotics. Its launch generated 60-plus articles and 44-plus interviews, with 955 million reported media impressions and 426 percent social audience growth. The Gran Turismo Sophy campaign later won two Philadelphia Pepperpot awards. In 2026, the relationship continued with Ace, a robotic system built to compete with professional table-tennis players.
Sony AI supplied the technical breakthroughs. Zer0 to 5ive built the public frame: researchers as experts, projects as stories, and a new lab as a coherent brand.
Chatmeter offers the other half of the integrated promise. Research and content were used not just for coverage but across search, paid social and a webinar. The agency reports 95-plus articles, seven million media impressions and more than 5,000 top-of-funnel leads in 2023. Here the handoff from reputation to demand generation did not leave the building.
What a founder can steal
The agency's method is most useful as a brake. It interrupts the expensive instinct to make things before the company agrees on the objective, audience and difference. A founder can reproduce the discipline without hiring an agency. The hard part is allowing the early answers to invalidate the tactic everyone was excited about.
A zero-dollar version of the Roadmap
- Write one business objective that can survive measurement.
- Interview customers and map competitors before drafting a claim.
- Choose the audience with the sharpest need, not the largest headcount.
- State the difference in language a buyer would actually use.
- Build the identity around that promise.
- Only now choose PR, web, social, content, events or paid media.
There are conditions attached. Research-first work needs access to customers, candor from leadership and enough time to change the brief. It is a poor match for an organization that has already decided the answer and only wants an agency to decorate it. Integrated execution also concentrates responsibility. That is valuable when the strategy is sound; when priorities shift, the client and agency must revise the same shared map.
The firm itself has stayed close to its original terrain. It remains privately held, with Michelle and Santiago Pujadas as co-CEOs, a leadership bench spanning PR, creative and development, and particular depth in education, health technology, fintech and enterprise software. It celebrated 25 years in 2024. Recent engagements range from physical-AI company Archetype AI to customer-support platform Zingtree and nonprofit NEXT for AUTISM.
The name once came partly from a joke about startups being “fast zero to five” instead of Fast 50. It sounds impatient. The company it named discovered something more durable: speed is helpful after direction. Before that, speed merely gets you lost sooner.
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