Document 1 of 6. Companion docs: 02 Multi-Agent System, 03 System Design, 04 Product Design, 05 UI/UX, 06 GTM Strategy.
Founders: Shilika Jain (PR operator, 50+ tier-1 placements). Rahil Jain (systems, agents, GTM).
Stage: Pre-seed. Live operating data from May 2026.
Working name: Newsroom OS. Brand candidates: Embargo, Beat, Pitch Lab, Bylined.
Build a vertical AI-powered PR firm for funded Web3 and AI founders, where the agent stack is the cost moat and the operator is the brand. Sell senior-only fractional PR at $5K to $10K per month, half what Coinbound, Wachsman, and Lunar Strategy charge, with placement quality matched to the top of the agency market. Use the savings on operator time (compressed 3 to 5x by the agent stack) to fund margin expansion, not price competition.
The original instinct was a two-sided SaaS plus managed-service marketplace. The Notion operating log refutes that order. Shilika is already running the managed service today with the agent stack as her internal layer. The validated wedge is founder services first, productize for other operators later. Operator SaaS becomes Year 2, not Year 1.
This mirrors how Aleph built FP&A software (run the service, then sell the tooling), how Athena built the EA marketplace (curate operators, then layer software), and how Mercury sold banking before becoming a platform. Service-first, platform-second.
Funded Web3 and AI founders spend $5K to $25K per month on PR and get poor outcomes. Three structural problems.
Generic agencies recycle fintech playbooks. A $15K retainer at Coinbound or Wachsman buys a junior account manager and a recycled deck. Founders churn at 6 months.
Horizontal PR tools serve in-house comms teams, not founders. Muck Rack and Cision are media databases plus monitoring. They cost $1,000+ per month and assume a comms team already exists.
New AI pitch tools (PressBeat, Press Pitch AI, AstraMedia, Press Ranger) automate outreach but skip strategy. They send cold emails to journalists with no narrative architecture, no embargo coordination, no KOL layer, no APAC depth. The MarketAcross fake-journalist scandal in late 2025 has made the entire AI-in-PR category suspect.
The market needs a fourth model. Senior-only, vertical-deep, founder-embedded, agent-augmented, with a public methodology that earns journalist trust rather than burning it.
Three lenses. The operator-tooling lens (from the PR Process page in the Notion) sizes the SaaS expansion. The service lens sizes the wedge.
Service TAM. Crypto and AI startups globally that raised $5M+ in the last 18 months spend on PR at an average $96K per year ($8K monthly retainer). Conservatively 2,000 such companies are active and underserved. $192M annual addressable spend.
Service SAM. Web3 funded $10M+ Series A in last 6 months in Singapore, Dubai, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, US, UAE (Shilika's Tier-A) plus AI startups Series A or Seed $8M+ outside the US (Tier-B). The v2 strategy in Notion sizes deal flow at 8 to 12 fitting companies per month, roughly 120 to 144 per year. At $8K average retainer, $14M annual addressable spend.
Service SOM, 18 months. 20 retainer clients at $8K average plus 8 launch sprints at $35K average = $2.2M annual revenue. This is realistic against the 50 active relationships in Shilika's network and the 4 booked Calendlys per month target in the v2 marketing plan.