Hey thisisit, happy to! Leo replied with more specifics in the sibling comment to this, so I'll try to talk about the high-level aspects very briefly, although I'm working on a post titled "PR from first principles" that will do a better job of explaining.
The "software-powered PR agency" is more a description of the appartus/mechanism rather than the goal, so perhaps it'd be more useful to start with our mission. We want to enable anyone with a great story to reach those who want to hear it. Rather than trying to build up the audience yourself, we believe that it is much more effective to connect sources of great stories with storytellers who 1) already have an audience, and 2) can do a better job of telling the story for that audience than you can.
This is the role that today's PR agencies occupy as middlemen. However, they come with prohibitive price tags that restrict access for most stories, and their principle means of making these connections is through individual relationships with both sources and journalists, much the same way it has been done for decades. We think it's time for a change.
The software-powered part comes into play because we ultimately want to create a marketplace that more efficiently facilitates these connections— using both public and proprietary data, we're starting to get a really good understanding of what stories specific storytellers are looking for, and we connect them to the best sources.
(To expand on our process from David's answer): We believe that the modern PR agency system is broken. In the new digital media landscape, journalists rely less on traditional "relationships," as the news cycle moves increasingly quickly and journalists are expected to write upwards of five articles a day. This means they need more stories and sources, and they need them in a simple and straightforward process.
We're leveraging software to make the process more efficient and transparent for both companies and journalists. We've built a proprietary database that allows us to figure out what journalists are actually interested in, and to improve our targeting through matching algorithms compared to the traditional "spray and pray" model of many PR firms. We've also built an internal CRM that allows us to send out personalized pitches and easily monitor journalist engagement across campaigns.
For customers, we've built a dashboard that means that PR is no longer a "black box." Customers can follow the progress of outreach campaigns, from the timeline to advanced journalist engagement analytics like open rate and the the time they've spent on the media brief. They can also receive inbound media opportunities from sources like Help a Reporter Out and follow journalists who have engaged in their campaigns.
