Among top-tier PR firms—the ones charging $15K to $40K per month—you’ll notice something interesting: they all push long-term contracts.
Minimum three- to four-month engagements, often more.
Here’s how it typically goes:
Month one, they fiddle with messaging docs.
Months two and three, they deliver underwhelming results.
Then they say they “just need more time.” You extend the contract.
Six to eight months in—with little to show for it—you churn and start over.
It’s usually after that exact experience that clients find their way to us through a word-of-mouth referral.
Here’s why we do things differently:
We—the founders of Bonfire—are venture-backed tech founders ourselves. (To be clear, Bonfire isn’t a venture-backed company. But we’ve built other businesses, raised capital, and sat on the client side of the table.)
We’ve hired PR firms. We’ve lived the frustration. We’ve watched money go down the drain. So when we built Bonfire, we designed it to be the exact opposite of what we experienced.
That’s why we only work on a month-to-month basis.
And here’s the thing: even though we’re philosophically opposed to long-term contracts, our client retention is incredibly high. We rarely lose clients. When we do, it’s typically because they were acquired, went under, or pivoted their business.
We work month to month because we believe in trust. If we’re doing great work, clients will want to keep going. If we hit a snag (which happens—this is PR), we’re transparent about what’s not working and how we’re fixing it. That’s how we build long-term relationships without locking anyone in.
It’s through trust and transparency—and, obviously, by getting results—that we’ve come to represent some of the fastest-growing companies in the portfolios of Founders Fund, Lightspeed, Craft Ventures, Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz.
We don’t cold outreach. We’ve never—literally never—landed a client through prospecting. 100% of our business comes through word-of-mouth. One client tells another. And so on.
So no, we don’t do long-term contracts.
We don’t do cold sales.
We just focus on doing great work and building great relationships.
And so far, it’s working pretty well.
