Media Growth Apprentice

Liminal; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Liminal, a Founders' Studio, is seeking a PR professional to help founders be found and build attention across channels. You’ll craft launch narratives before products exist, engineer media where needed, and drive traffic through earned, owned, and paid strategies.

You’ll curate pitches to reporters, editors, and bookers, manage press kits, and coordinate with agencies to ensure high-quality results. This is an in-house strategic role for early-stage growth.

Qualifications

• Deep narrative instinct and the ability to explain why a story works across platforms.
• Editorial taste with a sharp sense for ledes, intrigue, and timing.
• Platform-native fluency across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and emerging channels.
• Strategic clarity to distill a founder's message into one compelling sentence.
• Comfort with ambiguity: work with blank pages, evolving products, and evolving briefs.
• Contrarian thinking and willingness to defend unpopular but strong ideas.
• Early-career experience in a newsroom, agency, or in-house comms or growth team.

Responsibilities

• The working-backwards release: draft the release before the product exists and pressure-test the idea.
• The pitch: build relationships with reporters, editors, bookers, and writers; time embargoes and exclusives.
• Earned, owned, and paid channels connected as one system to drive attention and traffic.
• Social, native, and platform-fluent content designed to travel and be shared.
• Press kits: bios, boilerplate, Q&A, and a compelling narrative spine.
• Manage and source PR agencies; set quality standards and measure output.

Skills

Deep narrative instinct

Editorial taste

Platform-native

Strategic clarity

Comfort with ambiguity

Contrarian streak

Early-career, high-trajectory

Job description

You'll get founders found. Not \"manage their reputation,\" not \"own the narrative\" in a deck no one opens. Coverage, traffic, attention you can measure, for founders the world hasn't met and products that don't exist yet. Some of it you'll earn from a reporter. Some you'll engineer straight on the feed. You'll write the launch before there's anything to launch, then get the world to show up.

What Liminal Is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because \"venture studio\" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Most people in this job never make the distinction. PR controls the message. Real craft, wrong job. Founders don't need their message controlled. They need to be found. Coverage that sends traffic, podcasts that send listeners, posts that travel, paid when it's the fastest line to people who'll care. Media as a growth channel, run as hard as each channel allows. Story is the engine. Traffic is the scoreboard.

Some of it has no gatekeeper. Blog or podcast: win an editor's yes. The feed: no one's permission. Straight at the audience on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, algorithm distributing whatever earns it. Half the job earns a reporter's attention. The other half needs nobody's, engineering the post people can't help sharing, in the format each platform rewards this month. Different platforms, different physics. Learn each cold.

Then the strange part. You write the press release first, before the product exists. Amazon-style: release, then product defined to deserve it, then build. Sometimes the same launch five ways, not to publish five times, but to make a founder see their product from an angle they'd missed. The release is a pitch, a forcing function, and a thinking tool, often in that order. Chasing logos isn't the job. Coverage that moves people is.

The Work

• The working-backwards release. Write the release before the thing exists. Pressure-test the product, expose the hand-waving, force clarity on who cares and why. Multiple drafts as a lens, each a different bet on the story. Where comms and product development quietly become one activity.


• The pitch. Real relationships with the people who decide what gets covered: reporters, editors, podcast bookers, newsletter writers. Craft the angle, time the embargo, place the exclusive, get someone whose inbox is already on fire to care about yours. The thrill of the pitch should be the part you'd do for free.


• Every channel, pointed at traffic. Earned, owned, and paid as one system, not four jobs. When an exclusive beats a blast, when a podcast does what a release can't, when a feed beats a pitch, when the fastest path to the right thousand people is an ad. Earned where you can, paid where it's worth it, always aimed at attention that converts.


• Social, hacked. TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn first, then wherever attention moves next. Not a posting calendar. Native, platform-fluent attention-getting: the hook in the first second, the format the algorithm rewards this month, the post engineered to be shared, not seen. Learn each platform's physics, use it fast, before the tactic decays.


• Press kits. The kit a founder needs to be coverable: bios, fact sheets, boilerplate, Q&A, a narrative spine that keeps every mention on-message without sounding scripted.


• Agencies, managed. Brief, direct, and hold PR agencies to a standard on quality and volume. Help source and vet them. You're the in‑house bar they answer to, not the client who hopes for the best.

Who You Are

• Deep narrative instinct. We don't care about your degree (or if you have one). We care if you can explain why Dollar Shave Club's first video worked, why \"Don't Buy This Jacket\" should have cratered sales and didn't, and what a great embargo and a great magic trick have in common. Misdirection, timing, the reveal.


• Editorial taste. Not \"good writer.\" Exquisite. The kind where a buried lede physically pains you. Where you have opinions about email subject lines and newsletter openers. Where you can feel a story forming three news cycles before the trend desk runs it.


• Platform-native. You live on these feeds and read them like a first language. You've made something travel, your own account, a side project, a post that outran its follower count, and can say why without reaching for \"it just blew up.\" Going viral is something you engineer, not something that happens to you.


• Strategic clarity. You can take a founder's 45-minute monologue about why their thing matters and hand back the one sentence a stranger would click on. Not the line that sounds smart in the room. The one that travels.


• Comfort with ambiguity. Zero-to-one. No brand yet. No press history. No product, some weeks. A founder with a world-changing obsession and a blank page. That should thrill you, not paralyze you.


• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.


• Early-career, high-trajectory. One to three years behind you: a newsroom, an agency, an in‑house comms or growth team, or your own scrappy projects that got real attention. We care about evidence of work that landed, not titles you held. You write fast and clean.

Unicorn Points If

You also have a real second gear: you can turn coverage into numbers and know which numbers are vanity, or you've held a byline at a publication people have heard of, or you can build the press kit and shoot the founder portrait yourself. Bonus, not the job. The job is the story, the pitch, and the traffic they produce. That's the bar. But if you can take a cold pitch all the way to a standing relationship a reporter actually returns, without a handoff, you become unreasonably dangerous.

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded in a core project alongside experienced builders. Not fetching coffee, that's the leaders' job. Not blasting embargoed releases into a void and calling it a campaign. If you've got the ear, the nerve to pitch, and an instinct for what actually gets people to show up, this is the door.