Four businesses, one word
The term covers four models with different economics, different deliverables and different failure modes. Establishing which one you are talking to is the first useful thing you can do.
| Model | What they sell | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| PR firm | Relationships, pitching labour, message discipline, a monthly retainer | You are buying effort rather than a placement, and the placement reaches a readership that has largely dispersed |
| Production shop | The film, the stills, the landing page, delivered on a date | Engagement ends at delivery, so nothing they control decides whether it lands |
| Distribution network | Reach on the day, through accounts your buyer already follows | Amplifies whatever it is given, including a claim nobody can argue with |
| Full-service consultancy | The plan, the positioning, the alignment across your own teams | Expensive, slow, and hands back a document that somebody still has to execute |
None of these is wrong. They are answers to different questions, and a company that has not decided which question it is asking will buy the one with the best deck.
Which one you actually need
Work backwards from the constraint rather than forwards from the budget.
- Nobody knows who you are and the date is fixed. Distribution. Reach is the binding constraint and it is the one thing that can be bought on a timeline.
- You need credibility artifacts for procurement or hiring. PR. A named publication does something a creator post cannot, and it is a durable asset rather than a distribution event. The comparison in full.
- The product is visual and the output is the story. Production, and only after the angle is settled. Usually the film is not the constraint.
- Your own team disagrees about what the product is for. That is a consultancy problem, or more cheaply a week of internal argument. No agency can settle it for you, and buying distribution before you settle it wastes the distribution.
The common error is buying production when the constraint is reach. It feels like progress because something tangible arrives, and it changes nothing about whether anybody sees it.
When in-house wins
Worth stating plainly, since this page exists on the site of a company that sells the third row of that table.
Your founder already has the audience. If their account reliably does the numbers you need, buying reach is buying something you have.
Post it yourself and spend the money on the product. Why founder accounts outperform.
The launch is small. A minor feature release does not need a campaign.
Save the amplification for the drops that could move a quarter, and use the small ones to keep the account warm. What to post between launches.
You launch constantly. Above roughly one significant drop a month, the economics favour building a bench you keep rather than renting one each time. A bench rather than a rental.
The product is not ready. The most important one.
Distribution accelerates the discovery that something is not good, and at any real scale the people who make that discovery have public accounts and long memories. No agency should take this work and the good ones will say so.
What to have ready before you call
Four things. A call booked without them produces a quote for a scope nobody can define, and two weeks later a scope change.
- A date, or a window. Timing is a distribution variable rather than a product one, and three to ten days of lead time buys the widest creator selection, with most launches live inside five. Picking the date.
- A claim somebody could argue with. An agency can sharpen this. None of them can invent the substance underneath it, because the detail that makes a launch travel is something only your team knows. Narrative design.
- One primary metric. Signups, qualified conversations, installs, hiring pipeline. One. The right answer depends on the kind of launch. The table.
- A product a stranger can use. Traffic arriving at a broken signup is the most expensive failure in this whole process.
Making two quotes comparable
Quotes for the same launch routinely differ several times over, and usually neither party is being dishonest. They are pricing different scopes under the same word.
Ask every one of them to break the number into five components: creator placements, management, narrative and briefing, creative, and reporting.
A quote covering only the first is a media buy. A quote covering the first three is a launch. What each component is and what moves it.
Then ask for the two things that make a proposal checkable. A creator shortlist before signing, because you should know the type of founders, engineers and creators who will carry it.
And a redacted example report, because the shape of the report tells you what they will optimise for. What one should contain.
What should end the conversation
- A guaranteed view count. Nobody controls the algorithm. A guaranteed ceiling means either guessing or buying fake engagement, and the second one is worse than the first.
- Reluctance to show a shortlist before you sign. You are the advertiser. You should see the type of account carrying your launch before you pay for it.
- No disclosure policy. The regulatory exposure on an undisclosed campaign lands on you rather than on them. Where liability sits.
- Totals with no distribution. Three million from one outlier and three million from twenty accounts are completely different products. If they will not show you the spread, the spread is the answer.
- Agreement with everything you say. An agency that has run these before will disagree with something in your plan inside the first call. One that does not is selling you a service rather than an opinion.
The longer diligence list covers the questions that separate a real scope from a dashboard, including the ones worth asking about referral fees.
Questions we get asked
What does a product launch agency actually do?
Four different businesses use the term and they sell different things. A PR firm sells relationships and pitching.
A production shop sells the film and the assets. A distribution network sells reach on the day.
A full-service consultancy sells the plan. Establishing which one is on the invoice is the first question, because the same brief priced by all four returns four unrelated numbers.
When should we run a launch in-house instead?
When your founder already has an audience that reliably delivers the numbers you need, when the launch is small enough that a spike would not change the quarter, or when the product is not ready. Distribution accelerates the discovery that something is not good, so buying reach for an unfinished product is the most expensive mistake available.
Is a product launch agency the same as a PR agency?
No. A PR agency sells coverage: embargoes, briefings and placements in the press. A launch agency sells the day itself: the positioning, the asset, who carries the post in its first hour and how the attention is routed into pipeline.
Coverage now follows attention, so the launch agency's work tends to produce the press rather than the other way round. Why that order flipped has the data.
How much does a product launch agency cost?
It ranges by which of the four businesses you are buying from and by the scale of the launch. What a product launch costs breaks the figures down by model, and launch as a service describes how we scope one.
What should we have ready before contacting a launch agency?
A date, a claim somebody could argue with, one primary metric, and a working product a stranger can use. Agencies can shape the claim and they cannot invent the substance underneath it, so a call booked before those four exist produces a quote for a scope nobody can define yet.