The best time to build press relationships is before you need them.

Most founders call a PR firm two weeks before their announcement.

They have a round closing, a product launching, or a hire worth making public, and they need coverage. Now. The ask is always the same: can you get us into TechCrunch, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal? The timeline is always the same: we go live in fourteen days.

What follows is usually a scramble. Pitches go out cold to journalists who have never heard of the company. A few stories land. Most do not. The founder is disappointed. The PR team is frustrated. And the opportunity that should have been a defining moment for the company becomes a lesson in why communications strategy cannot start the week before you need it.

The journalists who write the stories that actually move the needle for a company are not responding to cold pitches from unfamiliar names on a tight deadline. They are writing about the founders and firms they already know, already trust, and have already been paying attention to.

That trust is not built in two weeks. It is built over months and years of consistent, genuine engagement. And it has to start long before there is anything to announce.

What a journalist relationship actually is

It is worth being honest about what you are building here, because the word relationship gets used loosely in PR and it means something specific.

A journalist relationship is not a contact in a database. It is not someone who has opened one of your emails. It is not a follow on Twitter or a connection on LinkedIn.

A journalist relationship is built when a reporter knows who you are, understands what you think, and has come to see you as a credible source on a specific set of topics. That happens through repeated, low-pressure interactions over time. A comment on a piece they wrote that adds something rather than just praising it. A data point or a source offered without asking for anything in return. An introduction to a founder who is a better fit for the story they are working on than you are.

Every one of those interactions deposits something into a relationship that has no immediate return. The return comes later, when you have something worth announcing and the journalist already knows your name.

The asymmetry nobody talks about

Journalists are pitched constantly. The volume they deal with every day is genuinely staggering, and the vast majority of what lands in their inbox gets deleted without a response.

What cuts through is familiarity. When a pitch arrives from someone a journalist has met at a conference, whose work they have read, whose perspective they have found useful in the past, it gets read differently. The bar for engagement drops significantly not because the story is necessarily stronger but because the relationship has already done part of the work.

This asymmetry is the most underutilized advantage available to any founder or venture firm building a communications program. The companies that figure it out early spend less time pitching and more time being sought out. They are not chasing coverage. They are receiving it, because they invested in the relationships before anyone had a reason to write about them.

What building looks like in practice

It does not require a press tour or a media dinner, though both of those have their place. It starts with something much simpler.

Know who covers your market. Not just the publications, but the specific journalists whose beats overlap with what your company does. Read their work seriously. Understand what they are interested in, what angles they gravitate toward, what questions they are trying to answer in their reporting.

When you have something genuinely useful to offer, a data point, a trend you are seeing on the ground, a source who can help with a story they are working on, offer it. No strings. No ask attached. Just the kind of contribution that makes a journalist's job slightly easier and positions you as someone worth talking to.

Over time, this builds a network of reporters who understand your perspective and think of you when they need a credible voice in your space. That network is one of the most valuable assets a communications program can create. It is also one of the slowest to build, which is exactly why starting early matters so much.

The conference question

One of the most efficient relationship-building environments available to founders and VC partners is a major industry conference, and most firms dramatically underinvest in what happens before they arrive.

Getting on the agenda matters. But the conversations that build the most durable press relationships often happen in the hallway, at dinner, or in a deliberately organized meeting that most attendees are too busy to schedule. The firms that extract the most from conference season are the ones who arrive having already identified which journalists will be in the room, having already reached out in advance, and having already created reasons to connect that are specific and useful rather than generic.

A one-on-one conversation with a journalist at a conference, where you are not pitching anything and they are not on deadline, is one of the rarest and most valuable interactions in media relations. Most companies waste the opportunity by waiting until they have news before making the introduction.

The call you want to be able to make

There is a version of this that plays out in every market, in every news cycle. A major story breaks in your industry. A journalist is on deadline and needs a credible source with a genuine perspective. They have thirty minutes to find one.

The founder who has been building relationships quietly for the past year gets that call. The founder who has been waiting until they have news to engage with the press does not.

Being the person who gets called is not luck and it is not about having the best story at the right moment. It is about having done the work to become a reliable, accessible, credible voice before anyone needed you to be one.

That work starts now. Not when the round closes. Not when the product launches. Now, when there is nothing to announce and no pressure on the conversation, is exactly when the most valuable relationships get built.

CodePR has built media relationships for some of the most recognized venture capital firms and technology companies in the world. If you are ready to start building before you need it, let's talk.

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