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Nobody Wants to Read About File Transfer: Making an Unglamorous Category the Story

Project duration

2021-2022

Published date

Jul 2026

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Summary

About Salient PR

Salient is a B2B tech PR agency. We help startups become the story — landing tier-one coverage, building executive visibility, and turning attention into pipeline.

Senior team. No hand-offs. Radical transparency. If you’re ready to talk, reach out.

At a Glance

  • 13 pieces of earned coverage across the acquisition and the review cycle
  • 83 average domain rating, 91 at the top — VentureBeat, Fortune, Phoenix Business Journal
  • 5.7M combined monthly reach across the outlets that covered
  • VentureBeat and Fortune’s Term Sheet coverage, plus AP, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance syndication

The Partnership

Files.com had been profitable and bootstrapped since 2008, back when it was called BrickFTP. Thirteen years, no outside money, over 1,500 business customers, almost no public identity. In February 2021 it took $46.5M from Riverwood Capital, its first institutional capital ever. Six weeks later, Salient PR started.

The Challenge

The round had already been announced before we walked in, so the one news hook most companies get was spent. And nobody wants to read about file transfer. It’s plumbing — the thing that breaks at 2am and gets ignored the other 364 days. Files.com was quietly pulling enterprise customers off IBM, HelpSystems, and Progress, but “cheaper, better FTP” is not a story an editor clears space for. The category didn’t even have an agreed name — analyst firms filed it under eight different labels.

The Strategy

Sell the market shift, not the product. Legacy vendors charge enterprise prices and haven’t innovated in decades. That makes this a displacement story, not a feature comparison.

Meet buyers where they actually shop. Nobody picks a file transfer vendor off a funding story. They pick one off a review. We briefed IT Pro, PC Pro, and Tom’s Guide and got Files.com onto the shortlists buyers build from.

Save tier one for the moment that earns it. We banked tier one for the ExaVault acquisition.

The Results

VentureBeat ran the acquisition as a business story: the largest cloud-native file platform, 6,500+ customers, nearly 2 million GB of stored data. Fortune’s Term Sheet covered it too.

The reviews compounded quietly all year, plus a G2 Best Software Award. Those are the pages a CTO reads before taking a sales call.

The unglamorous categories have the least competition for attention. You just have to hand an editor a reason that isn’t the product.

Publications: VentureBeat, Fortune, IT Pro, PC Pro, Tom’s Guide, Phoenix Business Journal, Reworked, The Middle Market

About Salient PR

Salient is a B2B tech PR agency. We help startups become the story — landing tier-one coverage, building executive visibility, and turning attention into pipeline.

Senior team. No hand-offs. Radical transparency. If you’re ready to talk, reach out.

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