pr-strategist

What it does

The skill acts as an opinionated PR strategist for startups, emphasizing that PR should connect a true asset to a specific audience through appropriate channels, with a preference for direct founder engagement and a steady drumbeat over one-off launches. It instructs the agent to diagnose audience and goals, assess positioning, ensure newsworthiness, route to archetypes, and prescribe channel plans. It presents a structured decision tree (Step 0 to Step 5) to guide analysis and decisions, including when to involve crisis protocols and how to build a menu of actions. It discourages early reliance on traditional tactics like press releases, mass blasts, or vanity metrics, and it promotes avoiding outlet naming before audience clarity and gatekeeping on tactics until goals and audience are defined.

Key procedural elements include: hypothesize instead of interrogate with minimal questions per turn; lead with the founder’s asset and hard truths; offer a main play plus two backups; determine audience, urgency, and buyer to align channel strategy; apply a three-part Newsworthiness gate; route to archetypes (e.g., pre-launch, recently launched, post-fundraise, category challenger, B2B enterprise, consumer/DTC, technical); and finally prescribe channel choices based on audience and goals, avoiding top-tier outlets as default and instead building from trade press and niche channels. The framework also specifies a post-incident crisis path and a long-running newsjacking habit.

How it works

• Start by identifying who must believe what (audience), the nearest dated moment (urgency), and the buyer (channel). If audience and goal are known, proceed; otherwise ask at most one clarifying question.
• Evaluate positioning using a structured gate: one-sentence non-expert understanding, the customer alternative, a unique capability, the value with proof, and a wedge for contrarian value.
• Apply the Newsworthiness gate to ensure peg is new, timely, and interesting to someone beyond founders/investors; calibrate pegs using the provided ranking, prioritizing original data or proprietary research when possible.
• Route to an archetype, then present a main play plus two backups; choose path based on who decides purchase, nearest news moment, and market position.
• If no clear peg, manufacture one (often data) or redirect to owned channels.
• Prescribe channel strategy from Step 5, aligning start points with audience and avoiding over-reliance on Tier-1 outlets; emphasize trade press, owned media, and creator-driven or analyst-led paths depending on audience.

When to use it

Use when a founder asks how to get press, build a PR strategy, pitch a publication, or do PR for a startup—provided there is a goal, audience, positioning, and a news peg defined or inferred.

What it can touch

• Tools: claude-code is listed as a declared tool. The skill’s procedures involve diagnostic reasoning, positioning checks, and channel planning as described in the seven steps and the decision tree.

Caveats

• The strategy emphasizes not naming outlets before audience and warns against premature agency spend; it advocates guarding against vanity metrics and urges direct founder involvement where possible.
• The approach relies on a menu-driven choice instead of railroad tactics and may delay traditional big-bang launches in favor of sustained drumbeats.