Kevin Ferguson pitched at Autodesk and Microsoft before running his own product marketing and PR practice, and he joined the podcast the same week Procore’s $845 million DroneDeploy deal was dominating the news cycle, which made a useful live example. His read: the funding announcement is the laziest kind of news a startup can chase. Proprietary data, real partnerships, and founders willing to have a point of view are what actually earn coverage.
Every piece of news breaks down into two separate things, Kevin Ferguson argued on the show: the substance, meaning how big or interesting the underlying story actually is, and the execution, meaning how well it gets packaged and distributed. He used the DroneDeploy news, still fresh that week, as the example sitting right in front of everyone. The press release wasn’t perfectly written, he said, missing section headers, light on bold text in the places it mattered. None of that stopped it from getting picked up everywhere. The substance, an $845 million number, was large enough to carry mediocre execution on its own.
That’s the exception, not the rule, and it’s the wrong lesson for most startups to take away. Kevin’s actual advice was for founders who don’t have an $845 million number sitting in their back pocket, which is nearly everyone. His answer to what does work starts by throwing out the assumption that a funding round is the only newsworthy thing a company ever does.
Funding Is the Easy Story. It’s Not the Only One.
What reporters actually want to cover
Most startups hire a PR firm with nothing to say beyond a fundraise, get frustrated when nothing sticks, and churn the engagement within a year. Kevin’s fix is to build a genuine point of view backed by data the company actually owns. His go-to example is Bridgit, the workforce planning platform, which published its own State of Workforce Planning research using internal data. That gave reporters already covering labor shortages something concrete to cite, a subject matter expert with numbers nobody else had access to. Bricks & Bytes covered it too, which is precisely the mechanism at work: proprietary data becomes the hook that gets a company mentioned inside a story it didn’t have to pay for.
Partnerships work the same way, especially with a company larger than you. Kevin’s framing: if you integrate with someone bigger, you inherit access to their customers and their credibility by association. Thought leadership counts too, provided it’s an actual position rather than a restatement of the obvious. He pointed to Dustin and Ediphi’s CTO as an example, both of whom have a specific, arguable view on where preconstruction is headed that’s different from where it sits today. That’s the kind of claim a reporter can build a story around. A press release confirming a company exists is not.
Why Generalist PR Firms Miss This Beat Entirely
The trade press isn’t where the traditional playbook looks
Every large PR firm leans on data aggregators like Muckrack to find journalist contacts. Construction tech’s actual influencers, the newsletters, podcasters, and trade outlets an operator audience actually reads, largely aren’t on those lists. Hiring a firm with no specific experience in the category, Kevin argued, is a near guarantee of both weak messaging and a distribution list that misses the outlets that would move the needle for a construction buyer.
Kevin’s own path into this work makes the point personally. Earlier in his career, inside an a16z and Insight-backed Series B startup, he was the executive managing a PR firm engagement running $20,000 a month over a 12-month contract. What he learned sitting in that seat: the firm’s monthly calls were full of people, an engagement lead, a strategist, a handful of others, but the actual work of shaping the message fell to him, the internal product marketer, because nobody at the agency understood the product as well as he did. That experience is why he eventually built a leaner, construction-specific practice instead of returning to the agency model he’d been a client of.
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Credibility, not column inches
Kevin’s clearest framing of what PR is actually for goes back to his time at Gartner, where the opening sales line was simply “have you heard of us.” If a prospect hadn’t, the deal was effectively over before it started, because the brand’s reach had already done the qualifying work. That’s the outcome a startup is really buying: the moment a salesperson shows up to a call and the prospect already recognizes the name.
He closed with a comparison to venture investing that’s worth remembering before judging any single campaign. Most individual placements won’t move a needle you can point to. Expect a string of quiet misses. Then one story lands somewhere with real reach, a founder’s face ends up next to a recognizable name or venue, and that single hit can change the trajectory of the business in a way no average ever would have predicted. Judge the portfolio, not the month.
According to Kevin Ferguson on the podcast, news breaks down into substance (how significant the underlying story is) and execution (how well it’s packaged and distributed). Strong substance, like a large acquisition, can carry weak execution. For most startups without a headline-sized number, proprietary data, real partnerships, and genuine thought leadership matter more than polish.
It’s the easiest story to tell, which is exactly why it’s the most common and the least differentiated. Kevin’s advice is to treat funding as a starting point, not a strategy, and to build a recurring point of view or proprietary research that gives reporters a reason to come back between rounds.
Bridgit, a construction workforce planning platform, published its own State of Workforce Planning report using proprietary internal data on labor shortages. That gave reporters and outlets, including Bricks & Bytes, a concrete, citable data point tied directly to Bridgit, positioning the company as a subject matter source rather than just a vendor. (Source)
Most PR firms rely on aggregators like Muckrack to find journalist contacts, and construction tech’s actual media ecosystem, its trade press, newsletters, and podcasts, is largely absent from those databases. A firm without category-specific relationships and messaging experience tends to produce weaker positioning and miss the outlets that actually reach construction buyers.
Kevin Ferguson described paying around $20,000 a month on a 12-month engagement as a client at a Series B startup, with larger firms charging up to $35,000 a month elsewhere in the market. He argues much of that spend goes toward account management rather than the actual message development, which typically still falls to the internal team.
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