Arguably the hardest part about creating a startup is getting the word out about your innovative solutions. Most larger companies have public relations professionals to craft releases and spread news, but as a smaller, budding company trying to break into (or establish) a market, hiring PR help isn’t always feasible.
Enter 24HRPR (24-Hour PR), a Charlotte- and Austin, TX-based workflow management startup designed to amplify your startup’s story at any stage to anyone who wants to listen.
Built by co-founders Liz Brigham and Adrian Johnson, who combined boast decades of experience working in the marketing and B2B software spaces, 24HRPR offers a comprehensive pipeline to bring any startup into larger conversations. (Editor’s note: Brigham is a 2026 GrepBeat “Rising Stars” honoree; nailed it.)
“Because of our roles in product marketing and product management, we were asked to do a lot of the activities associated with PR,” Johnson explained. “Because for a lot of organizations, they don’t have the resources to hire a dedicated PR/communications person. We realized that there was a huge gap in both the capacity and expertise of those teams to do those activities.”
The co-founders noted that it’s uncommon for a marketing associate to have a true background in PR, wherein people tend to collaborate with journalistic and societal organizations to craft announcement releases to their audiences. Johnson said that team members from marketing or sales often contribute to this communications side of the startup, but it’s not their main responsibility.
24HRPR was conceived as a dedicated platform to address that responsibility specifically.
How the product works
To make use of 24HRPR, a startup first has to choose the announcement type, whether it’s about a funding round, product launch, partnership or executive hire, etc., and then answer a few guided prompts. The platform then generates a structured, media-ready release that meets industry standards.
Once the startup is ready to share the announcement, the platform will generate a list of relevant journalists and outlets likely to be interested in the release. This step not only shortens the list of people there are to reach out to, but also specializes that list such that outreach isn’t spamming other journalists who may not have experience reporting in the industry at hand. 24HRPR then drafts emails to the relevant journalists.
While startups could turn to a stanadard AI chatbot to draft a press release, 24HRPR’s comprehensive database of journalists and its answer engine optimization (AEO) scoring standard are hard differentiators.
Brigham said the 24HRPR journalist database was built using a variety of different tools, including publicly available data. She explained that what keeps their startup as a major differentiator from other platforms is that the database was built to recognize more niche, granular spaces that your startup may be in. Assisting any given startup, 24HRPR will have looked at not only local, regional and national news outlets, and also newsletters, Substack writers and podcasters to truly ensure that there is someone who is interested in what the startup does.
As an example, Brigham noted that one of their customers is in the horse show and rodeo tech space. 24HRPR was able to narrow its search to 25 people who report specifically on rodeos across the country.
Brigham said the team is consistently checking their database to ensure that writers and creators are still in the spaces they report on.
“The more that we can understand the meat of the story and then do the due diligence to match to the 10 to 30 most relevant writers on a specific geographic standpoint or particular beat, the more successful that founder, that startup will be,” Johnson added.
AEO tracking and a place to publish
Johnson went on to discuss the AEO benefits of using 24HRPR.
These start with the platform building an end-to-end PR associate that creates the ideas, constructs the campaigns, writes the drafts, and identifies the hyper-relevant contacts across the board. It then sends and tracks personalized outbound emails and measures how these releases improve or affect specific AEO scores. It helps answer questions and identify if your startup is getting coverage from AI-powered search engines when someone asks for your solution.
Startups can book a demo with the platform or sign up for one of three different tiers depending on their needs. However, since the founders are dedicated to ensuring that startups have their time in the spotlight, they also encourage startup leaders users to draft a press release themselves and publish it in 24HRPR public newsroom for free. That way, those founders can still have a dedicated site where audiences can find their announcements.
“The current record is 13 minutes from signup to a published press release,” Johnson said. “We would love for any reader to come check it out. You could publish those releases to our public newsroom and share that out with your network or post it on your website. It makes it easier to share that news.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: 24HRPR
Co-Founders: Liz Brigham & Adrian Johnson
Founded: 2026
Team size: 2
Location: Charlotte, NC and Austin, TX
Website: 24hrpr.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
As of September 2026, the startup has onboarded some 20 customers across various industries, including accounting, music, and, as mentioned, horse and rodeo software. The founders added that roughly 60% of their customers are based in North Carolina.
They ask that any reader with a story to tell try out their platform.
“I talk a lot about empathy—and have had for a long time—in business building, and Adrian and I have lived this problem and these pain points,” Brigham said. “It was something we felt like we were going to be able to build a solution that was specific enough but drove enough value and benefit for our end users to be successful within a day, hence the name of our company.”
Johnson continued, “Learning about new businesses and helping those businesses succeed is my favorite thing to do and it doesn’t even feel like work. I think that’s really our overarching goal is to close the gap between the amount of work that startups do and all the effort they’re making to improve their products and platforms.
“That gap right now is huge because they don’t have the resources to go out and tell that story. We want to help them tell that story.”
