Why we built a publicist that runs on agents

The manifesto

Somewhere on the internet right now a founder is writing the same post: we paid an agency $10,000 a month, we got a trade mention and a call every Thursday, and we cannot leave until March.

We read those threads too. Then we read the invoices. A boutique retainer at $3,000 to $10,000 buys two to four pitches a month.1 The senior person who won the account is not the person writing them. Wire fees appear on the bill at a markup nobody explains.6 Reports count "impressions" from a database and "pitches sent" as if they were outcomes.7 And the contract runs six months because the first two are spent "getting to know the brand".2

Meanwhile the other side of the inbox got worse. Journalists now get five times the AI-written pitches they got a year ago and can spot them from the first line.3 One publication has gone phone-only.4 Half of them say fewer than a quarter of what they receive is relevant.5 The tools that promised to fix PR sent more.

Here is what we think is true.

Most of an agency's hours are research, list-building, drafting, watching and counting. Reading everything about you. Finding the twenty people who actually cover your beat and the piece each one wrote last month. Drafting a hundred words to one of them. Checking who mentioned you overnight. Reconciling the numbers on Friday. Agents do this well, around the clock, without getting bored on week nine. That is the labour, and it is most of the bill.

None of that is the job. The job is judgement: which angle, which journalist, which week, whether the number is true, whether to send at all. The job is a relationship: a person a journalist can reply to and trust. And the job is accountability: a name on the work. We do not think a model should do any of that, and the law increasingly agrees with us.8

So we built it that way. Twelve agents, each named by its job, each with a list of things it cannot do. A desk where everything they make waits. A named human who clears it, whose mailbox it sends from, whose name a journalist sees. A ledger where every claim has a receipt, and an approve button that stays grey until it does. A weekly chapter that counts outcomes and has no field for ad-value equivalents.

Then we did the thing agencies do not do: we put the prices on the page, made it month to month and wrote our limits down where journalists can read them.

It is twice the speed of an agency at a fraction of the cost, and it is also simply better behaved. Fewer pitches. Better stories. Honest numbers.

A publicist who never sleeps, and a human who always answers

Every client has a named lead. She reads the desk every working day, approves every pitch on Buzz and above, takes the weekly call, and answers within a business day. Her name is on every email a journalist receives, and journalists reply to her. On Debut you are the approver and our editor checks behind you. In a crisis, two named people sign every public sentence, and one of them is on a rota that answers at 3am.

The agents never impersonate her. When an automated channel replies on its own (only ever with an approved statement) it says it is an AI-assisted reply from her team.

Female-led is a structure, not a colour

We do not signal who runs this with a palette. We do it with the three things below, which are written into how the company works.

The editor of record

EDITOR OF RECORD · SIGNS EVERYTHING

Every public sentence Mainlore produces, for a client or for itself, has a named human editor. That chain ends with [LEAD NAME], editor of record. She signs the Journalist Promise, the Code of conduct and this page, and no guardrail in the system can be loosened without her and one other admin agreeing.

A.R. · [LEAD NAME] · she/her · editor of record

[LEAD NAME]

The founders' desk programme

Seats each quarter for women-led companies at pre-seed: Debut at cost for six months, a named lead rather than the async model, and a monthly desk session with the editor of record. Alumni keep their canon and their chapters whatever they do next.

seats a quarter: not yet · applications open when the number is real

The policies

Quiet hours are for humans too. The desk does not page anyone after 18:00 or at weekends unless the severity rule fires, and that rule needs two signals.
Parental leave at full pay, for every parent, from day one. The number of weeks is published here when HR has confirmed it; until then it reads not yet.
Pay bands are published internally, and the band for every role is on its job post.
Caregiving days are separate from sick days, and neither needs a note.
Nobody on the team is ever asked to put their name on a pitch they would not send from their own address.