A Series A founder posted a job listing last quarter for a “Head of Marketing & PR.” The role covered social media, content, community management, and media relations, all under one title, one salary. Six months later the hire was excellent at Discord and useless at getting a journalist on the phone. Not because they weren’t talented. Because the listing asked one person to be two entirely different professionals.
Two Skill Sets Wearing One Job Title
Community management and media relations look adjacent from a distance and function nothing alike up close. Running a Discord well means being online constantly, responsive, likeable, present. Landing a story at Decrypt means something closer to sales: cold outreach, rejection, patience measured in weeks, a completely different daily rhythm. A person hired for one skill set rarely arrives with the other fully formed, and job listings that ask for both usually get a candidate strong in whichever skill was emphasized in the interview, weaker in the other.
This isn’t a knock on generalists. Early-stage teams need people who can do five things adequately more than they need one person who does one thing brilliantly. The mistake is expecting adequate media relations to produce the same coverage a specialist agency delivers, then concluding “PR doesn’t work for us” when it doesn’t.
What an In-House Hire Actually Does Well
Founders who’ve built the strongest in-house comms functions usually use them for a specific job: being the fast, always-available voice during live moments. A protocol exploit at 2am needs someone who already has Discord and Twitter access, not someone waiting on an agency’s business hours. Routine updates, changelog posts, community AMAs, technical explainers written with real protocol knowledge, all of that tends to land better coming from inside the team than from an outside writer translating a technical spec secondhand.
Where in-house comms consistently underperforms is exactly where relationships matter most: getting a reporter who’s never heard of the project to take a first meeting. That’s not a writing problem or an availability problem. It’s a trust problem, and trust with a specific set of editors takes years to build, not a job description to assign.
What an Agency Brings That a Hire Can’t
An agency’s real product isn’t the writing, most in-house marketers write perfectly well. It’s the relationship inventory: a list of editors who already open that agency’s emails because of a track record built across dozens of other clients over years. A brand-new in-house hire starts every single editor relationship from zero, no matter how talented they are. A rundown of what a real agency retainer includes makes the gap concrete, since most of what’s being paid for is access that can’t be built overnight.
The tradeoff is responsiveness. Agencies juggle multiple clients, which means a same-day crisis response sometimes waits behind another account’s fire. Founders who’ve been burned by this usually land on a hybrid model rather than picking one side outright.
The Hybrid Model Nobody Advertises
The setups that work best rarely get discussed as explicitly as “in-house versus agency,” because the honest answer is both, split by function. In-house owns community, real-time response, and technical content. An agency owns media relationships, journalist pitching, and the placements that require years of trust the internal team hasn’t built yet. Neither side is asked to do the other’s job, and neither gets blamed for underperforming at something outside their actual strength.
Budget-constrained teams sometimes flip this the wrong way around, hiring an agency for community management, work that genuinely benefits from being inside the team full-time, while trying to handle media relationships through a junior in-house hire with no press contacts. The pattern shows up constantly in early-stage mistakes, usually traced back to the org chart being drawn up before anyone asked which function actually needs external relationships and which needs internal presence.
A Simple Test for Which One a Project Needs
One question cuts through most of the confusion: does the next six months require someone reachable at 11pm, or someone with a journalist’s cell phone number. Those are rarely the same person, and budget is usually better spent hiring for the first and retaining for the second than trying to find one person, or one agency, capable of both. Founders who’ve already worked through what public relations actually covers tend to reach this conclusion faster, since half the confusion starts with treating PR as one undifferentiated function instead of several distinct skills bundled under one name. A shortlist worth comparing once the agency half of that split is decided is a reasonable next step from there.