# Our press release is out. Here's what nobody told us about getting one.

> what the experts don’t mention. Discover the hidden challenges and real-world lessons from our latest media launch.

- **Author:** David Verbustel
- **Category:** YSs2UMCjXWkLxhzffb26
- **Published:** 2026-04-27
- **Language:** en

We shipped our first press release last week (April 23, 2026) . For a startup that's been heads-down building for months, this felt like a milestone. It also felt like one of the hardest writing exercises I've done as a founder, and I wasn't even the one writing the final copy.
If you're a founder thinking about doing a press release, this is the post I wish I'd read before we started.
## 1. The first hard question: who are you actually talking to?
### A press release is a message. Before you write one word, you have to answer: to whom?
At Joobs we have two audiences. On one side, employers: SMEs, startups, and scale-ups who need to hire. On the other side, candidates: people searching for work, often before the job ad even exists. Both matter. Both are valid. And both have completely different reasons to care about what we do.
The temptation is to write for both at once. Don't. Pick one for the press release, and be ruthless about it.
For us, the choice was employers. Not because candidates are less important (our marketplace doesn't work without them) but because this release was about signaling to the Belgian business ecosystem that we exist, that we're serious, and that we solve a problem founders and HR leaders recognize. A candidate-facing release would have been a different message, different outlets, different angle entirely.
 Lesson: if you have two audiences, write two different communications. Don't compress both into one.
## 2. The brutal exercise of summing up your startup in three sentences
I've pitched Joobs hundreds of times. In bootcamps, to investors, at Start it @KBC events, in coffee chats. I thought I knew how to describe what we do.
Then I had to write it down for a journalist who had never heard of us.
Every word I defaulted to (role visibility, programmatic pages, hidden job market) was insider language. Stuff we use internally and with people already in the recruitment tech space. Useless for a general business audience. The first draft was embarrassing. It sounded like a product spec sheet wearing a marketing costume.
What forced the clarity was our PR partner, Evoke PR, and specifically Herlinde Rollez, who kept asking the same question in different ways: "What does this actually do for a company that's trying to hire?" Each time I answered, the language got simpler. Each time she pushed back, the positioning sharpened.
The output I was most proud of wasn't a paragraph. It was one sentence. The kind of sentence you could say to your parents and they'd understand, but that a VC would also nod at. Getting to that sentence took weeks of drafts.
If you can't explain what your startup does in one clean sentence, you're not ready for press. Finding that sentence is worth the pain even if the press release never goes out.
## 3. The journalist's impossible task (and why the back and forth matters)
Here's the thing nobody warns you about: you can delegate the writing to a PR firm, but you cannot delegate the understanding.
A journalist reading our press release has maybe 90 seconds to decide if Joobs is a story worth their time. They don't know our space. They don't know that the recruitment market has worked the same way for 25 years. They don't know that most SMEs never appear in candidate searches. They arrive with zero context, and they have to build that context fast enough to write something an editor will approve.
That's genuinely hard. The quality of their coverage depends almost entirely on whether we gave them enough to build that understanding without overwhelming them.
The back and forth with Herlinde was essentially a translation loop. I'd explain something technical. She'd reframe it for a business reader. I'd flag what got lost. She'd adjust. Repeat ten or fifteen times per angle.
By the time the release went out, I could predict which questions journalists would ask and in what order. Not because we'd written a perfect document. Because the process had forced us to anticipate every point of confusion.
## What I'd do differently
Three things, looking back.
 Start earlier. We treated the press release as a milestone. It's actually a forcing function. We should have done this exercise six months ago just to sharpen our positioning, even without publishing anything.
 Separate the audiences from the start. Write the employer story first. Write the candidate story second. Run them as different campaigns with different outlets. Don't compress.
 Trust the pushback. Every time Herlinde told me a sentence didn't land, my instinct was to defend it. She was right nine times out of ten. If you hire a firm and then override every call, you're just paying for a typist.
A press release isn't the end of a process. It's the first serious public test of whether your story is clear enough to survive contact with a reader who doesn't care yet. Ours is out now. The real work starts on the other side of it.
A genuine thank you to Herlinde Rollez and the team at Evoke PR for the patience, the pushback, and for treating our story like it mattered.
## FAQ
How long did the full process take? About six weeks from first conversation to publication. Most of that was drafting and refining the core positioning. The actual release writing was maybe two weeks of the total.
Should a startup hire a PR firm or do it themselves? If you've already nailed your positioning and know your target outlets, you can DIY. If you haven't, a good PR firm is worth it for the positioning work alone, independent of whether the release lands. You're paying for the clarity as much as the distribution.
When is the right time for a first press release? Not at launch, in most cases. Do it when you have something journalists can anchor a story on: a product milestone, real traction, a funding round, or a narrative about your market that's genuinely new. "We exist" isn't a story.
How do you measure success? Not by media pickups alone. The clearest signal for us was inbound: founders and HR leaders reaching out after reading coverage, saying "this describes exactly what we're dealing with." Pickups create opportunities. The opportunities are the real metric.
What's the biggest mistake you'd warn other founders about? Writing for everyone at once. A press release that tries to reach employers, candidates, investors, and partners simultaneously reaches none of them. Pick one audience per message. You can always do another release.

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*Source: [Joobs.be](https://joobs.be/en/blog/our-press-release-is-out-here-s-what-nobody-tells-you-about-getting-one)*