# Sarah Delgado, Head of Marketing at Fieldnote (18-person B2B SaaS) — read of Press AI, May 9 2026

> Nine years in B2B marketing, three at Fieldnote. We do fleet inspection software for mid-market logistics companies. I have never hired a PR firm and I have never gotten press coverage.

## How I got here

I was Googling "press release template for seed round announcement" at 11pm on a Tuesday because our CEO mentioned at the all-hands that we should "get some press" around our new partnership with a large 3PL carrier and I said sure, I can handle that, and now I'm panicking. Some content marketing blog had a sidebar ad. I clicked it mostly because the headline didn't say "go viral" or "10x your brand reach."

## What I clicked first

The hero stat stopped me: "3.2x more journalist replies vs. DIY pitches." I immediately wanted to know how they measured that, against what baseline, and in what time window. They don't say. But the fact that it was a specific number rather than "dramatically more replies" kept me reading instead of closing the tab. The framing "Your story, finally in the right hands" is a little much but I let it slide.

## Where I paused

The live example section. The sample pitch to Rachel Kim at Construction Dive is the best thing on the page. "Your piece last month on digital permitting bottlenecks in Houston named exactly the right constraint" -- that's a real pitch. That reads like something a good publicist actually wrote. If the output is reliably that specific and that short, I get it. Four sentences, references actual recent coverage, one clear ask. I read that paragraph three times.

## What I distrusted

The testimonials. Marcus Chen from "Lattice Ops" got picked up by TechCrunch. The following week. First use. Five stars. Priya Nair went from two articles in 18 months with an agency to four articles in 60 days. Daniel Frost used it the night before an investor meeting and "the investor commented on how professional it looked." Every single one is a perfect little arc with a perfect little payoff. There's no "I got three opens and zero replies but the materials looked good." No partial win. No "I used it for a product launch that didn't get much traction but I would try it again for a funding round." Real users have mixed results. These read like they were written to cover the three most common objections, which they were, because that's what testimonials are for, and I know that, but it still makes me trust them less.

Also: "Journalists can publish it as-is." I don't think that's actually happening very often and I don't think I believe it.

## What would convince me

I want to see one real outlet that ran a story that started as a Press AI pitch. Not a founder saying TechCrunch picked them up. Link me to the actual TechCrunch article and let me read whether it was a brief mention in a funding roundup or an actual feature. Those are very different outcomes and the page treats them the same. If even two or three outlet links were real, clickable, and traceable to a Press AI user, I'd be a lot closer to buying.

I'd also want to know what the beat-matching actually looks like for a niche B2B product. Fleet inspection software is not a TechCrunch story. Who are the 12,000 journalists and do any of them cover supply chain, logistics tech, or industrial SaaS? The example is a construction tech seed round which is more legible than what I do. If I put in "Fieldnote helps logistics companies reduce fleet inspection time by 40%" does it map me to FreightWaves and Supply Chain Dive, or does it shrug and send me to a Forbes contributor?

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The Rachel Kim pitch references three of her recent articles. Can you show me what that beat-matching actually looks like in the UI? Like, does it surface journalist names with linked recent work before it writes the pitch, or does it just write the pitch and tell me it referenced her coverage?

2. What's a realistic open rate for the pitch emails? You show the tracker feature but you don't say what "good" looks like. I'm trying to figure out if this is going to feel like mass emailing into the void or if there's genuine signal.

3. For a product that's not consumer-facing and not VC-darling territory -- something like fleet compliance software -- are there enough relevant journalists in the database, or am I basically paying for a tool that works great for funded SaaS companies announcing rounds and not so well for B2B niche software announcements?

## Verdict: curious-enough-to-reply

The live example is genuinely good and the pricing is cheap enough that I'm not risking much. But I want one real answer before I hand over a card -- specifically whether the beat-matching covers logistics and supply chain trade press, because if it maps me to TechCrunch I'm going to feel like I wasted an afternoon.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-09. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*