Kelly Boynton and Paul Loeffler : Real Cost of Being Ready for PR

Founders hire a PR agency expecting coverage. That's not what they're buying. "What you're actually getting when you hire an agency is strategy, you're getting some support on storytelling, you're getting the media relations, the pattern recognition," says Kelly Boynton, head of communications at Gusto. Most of the frustration founders feel afterward comes down to that single misunderstanding.

This episode of Recall Sessions, a Village Global Podcast series hosted by Somrat Niyogi, follows two communications leaders, Kelly Boynton of Gusto and Paul Loeffler, formerly of Bill and Atlassian, through the three-hours-of-prep-for-every-hour-of-conversation math that decides whether a founder is actually ready for an agency, and the 5% of stealth companies that have a real reason to be hiding.

Key Insights

Coverage isn't what you're buying from an agency, strategy is

The single most common source of founder disappointment with agencies isn't price. It's a mismatch between what founders think they're purchasing and what the engagement actually delivers. "Founders think that they just bought coverage, and that's not what they actually bought," Boynton says.

What an agency actually provides is strategy, narrative shaping, media relations, and pattern recognition built from working across many companies and stories. None of that guarantees a specific placement. Founders who understand this going in evaluate the relationship on whether their story is getting sharper and their credibility is compounding, not on a count of articles.

Your customers are the real test of whether you have a story

The most common trap founders fall into isn't having a bad story. It's validating the story with the wrong audience. "The group that really determines if you have a great story is not inside your company and it's not your VCs, it's your customer," Loeffler says. Internal enthusiasm is nearly worthless as a signal, because everyone in the room already has a reason to believe.

The same instinct explains why funding-announcement stories tend to fall flat. A story built around a valuation is a story about the company, for the company's own benefit. A durable story is built around value, what the company actually does for the people who use it, which is a story worth telling on someone else's behalf. "You are doing storytelling not for your own purposes, you are doing it on behalf of somebody else," Loeffler says. The test in both cases is the same: would a customer, unprompted, tell this story to someone else.

PR readiness is a time commitment test, not a budget test

Founders who can afford an agency aren't necessarily ready for one. Loeffler frames the real constraint as calendar space, not capital. His rule of thumb: every hour spent in a conversation with a journalist or podcast requires roughly three hours of preparation and research beforehand. Three conversations a week, then, is closer to a ten-hour weekly commitment once agency time is added in.

"If you're ready, it feels very manageable. If you're not ready, it's very expensive. It's a waste of money," Loeffler says. A good agency will tell a founder this directly before signing on, because a relationship built on a founder who can't show up consistently doesn't produce results either side can point to.

The gatekeeping era ended, but media didn't become irrelevant

Boynton draws a clear line between what changed in the last five to ten years and what didn't. Ten years ago, a journalist deciding to cover you was close to the only way to matter publicly. That's no longer true, founders now reach audiences directly through LinkedIn, podcasts, and newsletters without needing anyone's permission first.

What didn't change is the value of earned coverage itself. "Media is actually an incredible credibility accelerant. It's just not the only channel anymore," Boynton says. The shift isn't that storytelling matters less. It's that distribution stopped being a bottleneck controlled by a small number of gatekeepers, which makes owned channels a genuine lever rather than a consolation prize.

Most stealth companies are hiding because they haven't figured out their story

Loeffler puts a number on a decision most founders treat as a given. "For the probably 5% of companies in stealth that actually have IP to protect, smart move. For the 95% others, I think they just haven't figured out how to tell their story," he says.

The distinction matters because the two situations call for opposite responses. A company protecting real IP has a legitimate reason to wait. A company that's actually just unprepared is spending that same time exposed to a different risk: a faster-moving competitor defining the category first. Loeffler's advice for the second group isn't to perfect the story before going public. It's to get moving before someone else's story becomes the default one.

Reddit is an underrated channel because of how LLMs surface it

Among current, tactical shifts, Boynton points to something founders are still underweighting. Reddit content is increasingly valuable specifically because of how large language models retrieve and surface information. "For LLMs, they are having a huge value of Reddit content," she says, and engaging genuinely in a relevant thread, not just promotionally, shows up in both search and AI-generated answers in a way that's grown significantly.

It's a concrete example of a broader pattern in the conversation: channels that look old or minor by traditional PR standards can carry outsized weight once you account for how information actually gets surfaced today, rather than assuming the value of a channel is fixed.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen.

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About the Guests

Kelly Boynton is head of communications at Gusto, where she leads communications and economic research, overseeing corporate, executive, product, financial, and crisis communications alongside proprietary economic insights on the small business economy. Before Gusto, she spent 15 years across agency and in-house roles building communications programs for companies including Facebook, Instagram, Intuit, TripActions, Notion, and DocuSign.

Paul Loeffler is the former SVP of communications and brand at Bill. He joined Atlassian pre-IPO and helped scale its global communications through its public listing, covering product and financial communications, M&A, executive thought leadership, and crisis management. Before Atlassian, he led integrated communications at Gusto, and has also worked agency-side with startups that went on to successful IPOs and acquisitions.

About the Host

Somrat Niyogi is the founder and GP of Recall Capital and a Village Global Network Investor, writing first-checks at the pre-seed and seed stage into B2B SaaS companies. He previously served as General Manager and Head of Business Development at Gusto, with earlier operator roles at Clari, Miso, Stitch, and Salesforce. Together, Village Global and Somrat back early-stage founders across AI, fintech, and B2B SaaS.