Ask a founder which agency they hired first and the answer is almost always the same: a performance marketing shop, brought in the moment there was a product worth running ads against. It makes sense on paper. Performance marketing produces a number - cost per click, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend - inside a week, and founders under pressure to show traction will always reach for the channel that reports back on a dashboard they can screenshot for the next board update.
PR does not work on that clock. A good PR relationship takes months to produce a placement, and the placement itself rarely moves a revenue number anyone can point to in a board deck. That is exactly why founders defer it, and exactly why deferring it is a mistake.
The two channels are not interchangeable
Performance marketing rents attention for as long as the budget runs. The moment spend stops, the acquisition stops with it - nothing about the channel compounds on its own. PR builds something that does not disappear when the budget pauses: a trail of coverage, quotes, and third-party validation that shows up in every due diligence call, every candidate’s pre-interview search, and every customer’s “let me just check if this company is legitimate” moment before they pay.
That trail only exists if it was started early. A company that waits until Series B to “do some PR” is trying to build in six months what should have been accumulating since the seed round. There is no way to compress two years of earned credibility into a single press cycle, no matter how large the check.
What this costs founders who get the order wrong
The founders who hire performance marketing first and PR later end up with a company that can buy customers but cannot explain, in a single sentence a journalist or an investor would repeat, why it exists. They have a growth curve and no story. When the paid channel gets more expensive, as it reliably does once competitors bid up the same keywords, there is no earned credibility to fall back on - only a CAC problem and an agency invoice.
Hiring PR first does not mean skipping performance marketing. It means accepting that the channel which compounds has to start on day one, even though it will not show up in a dashboard for months, because by the time a founder feels the need for it, the two years they needed to build it are already gone.