Co-Founder and CEO: Alexander Shartsis
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Stage: Seed
Website: Skyp.ai
Social: LinkedIn

Most outbound efforts lead to wasted time, poor personalization, or flat response rates. Skyp flips that by turning outbound campaigns into smart, scalable micro-campaigns.

You define your campaign goal and tone, then upload or sync your contacts via CRM or spreadsheet. Skyp’s AI drafts tailored emails and follow-ups for each contact. You can review or tweak messages before launch.

Skyp removes friction from outbound sales and lets small teams punch above their weight. It replaces cold blasts with personalized, human-feeling outreach at scale, without paying per lead or hiring an entire SDR team.

A December holiday playlist for people who hate December holiday playlists. Pure soul, Motown edges, seventies warmth, and modern smoothness. Music for wrapping presents, sending last-minute emails, or pretending you’re not already checked out for the year.

All the major news sites keep sliding in reach. Traffic is not just down a little. It is falling off what I already thought was a tiny base. Just look at this chart.

Now layer on the next hit. Google is pushing AI overviews and zero-click results to the top of the search results page. That means fewer people click through to news sites and the actual article. Many pubs are staring at something close to an extinction-level event.

I know what you are thinking. If large language models cite news sources, that will save the outlets and rescue industry PR. You get quoted in the training data. They get traffic. Everybody wins.

Not really. At least not according to the latest data from SimilarWeb.

Organic traffic continues to decline, while zero-click share rises. The platform wins. The publisher loses. Keep in mind that these are the major national publishers. Trade pubs are struggling even more.

Before COVID, when I was still VP of Marketing at a mid-sized tech company, I spent about $250,000 to $350,000 annually on global PR.

It worked really well. Then COVID hit.

Most news sites scrambled for new revenue and adopted a paid model. I am not judging them. They did what they had to do. But there was a cost. The result was a 40% to 60% decline in traffic and an even larger decline in influence.

At the same time, social platforms really started to take off. The idea that you could speak directly as a CEO or industry executive began to gain broader acceptance. The lockdowns accelerated this, as founders, operators, and investors began talking to each other without a journalist in the middle.

It was clear to me that social media would become the primary channel for business leaders to share ideas, particularly startups. Legacy media was becoming increasingly hostile to tech as their business models eroded, accelerating the need for tech companies to develop their own properties.

It was at this time that I made the call to shift my energy, focus, and budget from traditional PR and into scaling my own social distribution on LinkedIn, X, a newsletter, and now Reddit.

Building a social media following and an audience is not optional for today’s founders and operators. Industry PR is now a nice-to-have, not a growth engine. Treat it like a bonus, not the core of your go-to market. Does it still matter? Yes. Should you chase it? Definitely not before series A.

The real value comes from building a voice in your industry through founder-led content on social media, your own email list, a small but engaged community, and niche podcasts your buyers actually listen to.

Start small and make a real commitment. I got my start by posting 25 times on X per day for months before anyone cared, and I documented my journey here.

Here is a social starter guide that works for most early-stage teams.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, you’re right, it is.

Which is why I know you need help. But as luck would have it, I know the perfect battle-hardened startup marketing pirate that all the founders love…

On The Gregory and Paul Show, we break down the latest in startups, SaaS, AI, and whatever the internet is debating this week.

🎙️ Episode 026 – Smell-Gate, OpenAI Ads-Gate & Other Controversies on X

This episode covers Smellgate and the anatomy of a social media pile-on, why jokes collapse when context escapes, how founders should respond when the timeline turns hostile, the return of cancel culture debates, and more…

I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, devising new ways to get people to click on things, I now help early-stage B2B SaaS companies scale their businesses through strategic sales and marketing consulting.

Some VYS clients have grown 3x, 5x, 8x, and even 24x while working with me. No, really, one VYS customer grew revenue by an incredible 24x.

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