The fourth year: Finding tech startups as forever clients

Time to read: 2 minutes

Sam Howard is hitting her prime and loving the tech startups

Perhaps freelance years are like dog years, for I’m starting to feel like I’m in my freelance prime! Four years in, and, as they say on those talent shows, ‘it feels like this is my time’! Oh, why’s that then? Well, I’ll tell you.

A cuddly pineapple! It’s perfect! It’s what I always wanted!

Tech in general and FinTech in particular is finally hot!

After 20 years of apologising for working in a sector nobody seems to have heard of. Countless conversations explaining what I do to those whose eyes glaze over in the time it takes to say ‘enterprise-wide trading systems’ – all of a sudden, our sector is hot!

Yeah, baby!

Not only is our sector hot, but my home town, London, has been fit to burst with tech start-ups for 30 years. And I love start-ups; I always have! Not for me, the 200-page branding guideline bible, the 83-slide PowerPoint on our ‘core’ USPs. Where’s the opportunity to add value to that (other than rip it up)?

I love the pace, the energy, vibrancy that comes with Tech startups

They are brave, bold, and quite audaciously brilliant. But it’s always struck me that when a young company needs to nurture its comms the most, it can least afford it.

Sometimes, that’s not a good fit for a standard agency, where there can be an expectation mismatch (a big PR budget for a small company is still a small client for a big PR agency). But it’s a great fit for collaborations and small networks of specialist freelancers like us. Freelancers, by our very career choices, have often rejected the status quo and defined ourselves as fellow disruptors.

Tech startups and the lack of formality

Another great thing about working with tech startups is the lack of formality. This suits me down to the ground; I want to use my time helping that company do smart comms, not validating my own smarts. Decisions are quick, turnarounds fast, reporting is a spreadsheet in Google Docs, and emails are brief, often littered with typos from both sides. Witness a recent email exchange informing the client CEO that we had secured media interest from a noted publication.

ME – OMG, We’ve got Forbes!
CEO – F*** yeah!

And, when you work in a hot sector, in a hot city, with hot clients, you get to talk to media that you’ve never had the temerity to approach before. It turns out they are just like us if you have a decent story to tell. Call me easily impressed, but for a long-toothed B2B fintech PR to be suddenly talking to the nationals is cool!

So yeah, in this fourth year, I find myself in the right place with the right business model at the right time. Happy freelance birthday to me and the crew. Being four rocks!