ReadySpaces used a PR agency for nine months early on. I treated the retainer as tuition. Since then, every placement, TechCrunch to Bisnow, was pitched and landed by me, with zero agency spend. A repeatable process, not luck.
In 2021, ReadySpaces had no name recognition outside its own customer base. Co-warehousing was a category most journalists had never heard of. We did the standard thing: hired a PR agency. For nine months I treated the retainer as an apprenticeship. I watched how pitches got shaped, how journalist relationships got managed, how press releases got written, and what data a reporter actually wants attached to a story. That era produced two real placements, the LA Times in August 2021 and The Real Deal in November 2021, and I studied both until I understood why they worked.
Then the retainer ended, and PR became my job alone. Since 2022: one operator, no agency, no placement fees, cold inboxes, and the craft the agency months paid for.
The core insight is that company news is boring and almost everything around it is not. No journalist wakes up wanting to cover a warehouse company’s announcement. They wake up needing a trend piece, a data point, a human story, or a credible source to quote, whatever their editor will approve. The job is to find the version of your news that is actually their story.
I learned that sorting from the agency era before I ever ran it myself. The LA Times piece in August 2021 was not about ReadySpaces at all. It was about a pop-up bookstore, one of our customers, barely surviving the pandemic; ReadySpaces was the setting, and that was exactly right. The Real Deal placement in November 2021 tied the Great Resignation to our New York expansion. The trend carried the pitch and the company rode along. Both were agency placements. Both were lessons I took apart line by line.
The five placements since are the process running on its own, each pitched and landed by me. National tech press wants funding and trend angles: TechCrunch covered ReadySpaces securing $20M in debt in November 2022 because a funding event is a story shape they already publish daily. Trade press wants market data and category shifts: RENX covered the industrial sublease concept expanding to Toronto in January 2024, CRE Daily ran a piece on co-warehousing reshaping the industrial market in June 2025, and GlobeSt covered a new platform helping businesses find flexible warehouse space in July 2025. And there is a third story type beyond the trend and the human story: expert commentary, where you become the source journalists quote. In September 2025, Bisnow, national CRE press, featured me as one of five practitioners in “Is AI for Commercial Real Estate a Tool or a Toy? 5 Power Users Explain,” a profile built on how I actually use AI in the marketing operation. Same sorting, no agency in the room.
Nobody covers your announcement. They cover their story. Your job is to show up already holding it.
Earned media compounds in a way paid never does. Each placement made the next pitch warmer: a journalist who can see The Real Deal and TechCrunch in your history reads the second paragraph. By the time the 2025 placements landed, pitches were opening with a track record instead of an explanation of what co-warehousing is.
The placements also outlive the news cycle. They became sales collateral: press logos on the site, links in outbound sequences, third-party proof in enterprise conversations where a self-description convinces no one. A skeptical prospect will not take our word for what co-warehousing is. They will take the LA Times and TechCrunch’s.
Five placements pitched and landed personally, on top of the two the agency era produced, and zero dollars of agency spend since going solo. Not luck. A sorting process, learned once, then run repeatedly by one person who kept pitching.
Pitch the journalist's story, not your announcement. The pitches that landed were never about ReadySpaces first. They were about a trend, a market shift, or a person, with ReadySpaces as the proof. The company news the CEO wants covered and the story a journalist wants to write are almost never the same email.
Match the story type to the outlet before you write a word. TechCrunch got a funding angle. CRE Daily got a market trend. The LA Times, an agency-era placement I studied closely, got a human story about a bookstore. Bisnow got an expert source on AI in CRE. Sending the funding pitch to the local desk, or the human story to the tech desk, gets you silence. The sorting happens before the pitch, not after.
An agency is tuition, not a subscription. Nine months with an agency taught me how to shape a pitch, manage a journalist relationship, write a press release, and assemble the data journalists actually want. The LA Times and The Real Deal came from that era, and I studied both. Then I ran the craft myself; five placements since, from TechCrunch to Bisnow, at zero agency spend. Learn the craft, then run it yourself.
Code samples are simplified from production systems. Performance figures are queried from the warehouse or indexed to protect confidential data; demo inputs are illustrative.
How organic, paid, earned media, and the data layer fit together into one compounding growth system.