Rebuilding a PR Program From the Ground Up — Then Watching It Dominate

At a Glance

• Category Ranking: From #3 to #1 in Unique Coverage
• Coverage Quality Shift: 100% Low-Tier → 50% Top/Medium-Tier
• Awards in Year One: 6 Wins & Finalist Nods
• Tier-One Placements: InfoQ, The Register, Ars Technica

The Partnership 

Sauce Labs pioneered cloud-based browser testing — the company that created the category. But when they came to us, they were frustrated. Their previous agency was coasting, competitors were eating their lunch, and they needed a partner who would actually do the work. 

The Challenge 

The previous agency had left nothing to work with.

Cheapest wire tier. No media relationships. No pitch calendar. No thought leadership. No awards strategy. Nothing proactive — just waiting for quote requests and calling it PR.

Meanwhile, competitors were flooding the zone with syndicated content. Sauce Labs' coverage was 100% low-tier: user-generated content, aggregator sites, no real journalism. In competitive tracking, they trailed LambdaTest and BrowserStack in unique coverage.

The program wasn't underperforming. It was dying.

The Strategy 

• ‍We didn't optimize. There was nothing to optimize. We built from scratch
• Infrastructure: 120+ outlet media list. Relationships built reporter by reporter. Proactive pitch calendar spanning research reports, product launches, executive thought leadership, rapid response
• Thought leadership engine: A standing Forbes Tech Council seat for the CPO. CEO contributed columns in Entrepreneur. Technical leadership across InfoQ, The New Stack, DZone, and DevOpsDigest — everywhere developers read. A 100+ show podcast pipeline putting executives in front of engineering and CTO audiences
• Launch machine: Full embargo campaigns for every major product moment — the Real Device Access API (the industry's first programmable mobile device cloud for the AI era), Sauce AI for Insights, and the GA of Sauce AI for Test Authoring.
• Awards strategy: Identified every credible award in the category. Built applications. Drove voting campaigns.
• Rapid response: When the Cursor AI hallucination story broke, we had their spokesperson briefing Cade Metz at the New York Times within hours. Landed The Register and Ars Technica before the cycle moved on.
• Measurement that holds up: We built a custom share-of-voice and organic-coverage framework — separating earned journalism from wire spam — and ship an automated coverage report every week

The Results 

Within twelve months: invisible to dominant.

Unique coverage ranking went from 3rd place to #1 — passing LambdaTest and BrowserStack. High-authority placements went from zero to seven per quarter. Coverage quality shifted from 100% low-tier to 50% top/medium-tier.

Then it compounded — this time in earned journalism, not just bylines. Forbes ran an independent profile, "Meet The Small Business Claiming To Have Cracked AI Software Testing." Every product launch drew real reporting: SD Times and SiliconANGLE on the first programmable mobile device cloud, InfoQ on the AI test-authoring agent, and QA Financial on the AI coding boom's testing crisis for banks. Beneath the news coverage, a steady thought-leadership layer kept the executives visible between launches — the CPO in a recurring Forbes Tech Council column, the CEO in a contributed Entrepreneur column on whether anyone is actually checking AI-written code.

The awards kept stacking: a Stevie Award in the American Business Awards, on top of a CODiE Winner for Best Debugging & Testing Tool, Intellyx Digital Innovator, Cloud Awards Finalist, DevOps Dozen Finalist, and InfoWorld Technology of the Year Finalist — with the CPO named SF Business Times C-Suite Finalist and Products That Count Best Product Leader.

As Kelsey put it: "We feel like we have a full-time employee's worth of work."

Publications: Forbes, Entrepreneur, InfoQ, The Register, Ars Technica, SD Times, SiliconANGLE, QA Financial, The New Stack, DZone, DevOps.com, DevopsDigest