I spent years on the receiving end of crypto PR, with hundreds of pitches a week hitting my desk and most deleted in under ten seconds (sorry to say). This was not because the projects were bad or that their products did not solve real problems. In fact, some were building things that deserved attention from the crypto audience. Rather, it was because the pitches were written by people who had never once sat where I was sitting.
These PR execs led with token metrics nobody asked for (after some time behind the news desk, the numbers start to blend in together and are not as eye-catching for an editor). They buried the actual story in paragraph four. Some attached a press release that read like it had been generated from a template, and I suspect in many cases, it had. Some avoided all the landmines, but offered such a short timeline for an embargoed story that it clashed with our editorial calendars.
Eventually, my co-founder John and I asked the obvious question: if we know exactly why these pitches fail, why isn't anyone building a PR agency from the editor's side of the desk?
What's broken in today's crypto PR?
The crypto PR industry's biggest problem is structure: most of it was built by marketers who learned media relations second-hand, resulting in three predictable failures.
- Volume over story: Agencies blast the same release to 400 inboxes and call the three pickups on syndication sites "coverage." Editors see the CC-list pitch a mile away and delete it on principle.
- Guaranteed-placement theater: Pay-to-play "coverage" on sites no investor or target user reads, dressed up in a report as earned media. It fools founders only once, before they move on to another agency that does the same thing.
- Zero editorial instinct. Most agencies can't tell you why a story is, well…a story. They pitch product updates and executive hiring as news. A journalist knows a funding round is only interesting if it says something about the market, and knows which reporter is already writing that market story.
What does "journalist-led" change in practice?
It's not just a slogan; it changes the mechanics of our work.
We pitch people, not lists. Between us, we spent years at Cointelegraph, BeInCrypto, Forbes, and Business Insider, and I later ran comms at Binance and Coins.ph and handled accounts for Crypto.com, Chainlink, NEO, and OKX. When we pitch a reporter, we know their beat, their editor's preferences, and what they turned down last month. We have been interacting with the reporter for months on socials, reading their articles, and learning their interests.
We kill weak angles before they embarrass you. If your announcement isn't a story yet, we are not afraid to let you know, and then we build the angle that makes it one. Sometimes that means waiting two weeks for a news hook. An editor's instinct for timing is worth more than any media list.
We write like the outlet writes. John has 3,000+ published articles and has run publications with over a million monthly readers. When we draft a byline or an exclusive, it arrives close to publishable, and that's exactly why it gets published.
We spent years deciding what got covered. Now we use that judgment on the other side of the desk.
Does it actually work?
The record so far: clients we've represented have raised over $100 million, off the copy we wrote and marketed ourselves. They have received coverage on crypto and mainstream media outlets, including Forbes, Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, The Block, Decrypt, The Street and The Guardian.
Unlike many agencies, especially in crypto, we do not rely on a spray-and-pray distribution list. Our track record came from knowing which story each outlet needed and giving it to them first.
Why does this matter more in 2026?
Two recent shifts in the media sector make editorial judgment the whole game now. First, crypto media has consolidated, with fewer outlets, fewer reporters, and more pitches per inbox. The bar for getting a reporter's attention keeps rising. Second, AI-generated press releases and sloppy copy have flooded the zone, so anything that smells templated is dead on arrival. The only thing that cuts through is a genuine story, told with the outlet's own standards in mind.
This has always been our sole product. The market just caught up to it.
Related: What Crypto Journalists Actually Want From Your Pitch · Our services · The work