The 90-Day Visibility Budget: What to Fund First at Pre-Seed, Post-Series A and Scale-Up

The mistake: four channels, 25% each, nothing compounding

The default plan for a company that wants to be visible is to do a bit of everything. A few LinkedIn posts, one agency retainer for PR, a blog that publishes when someone has time, and a vague intention to 'show up in ChatGPT'. Each channel gets a quarter of the effort and none of them reaches the threshold where it starts paying you back.

Visibility compounds, but only past a minimum viable dose. One byline in a trade publication does little. Six placements in the same niche, all describing you the same way, change how journalists, buyers and AI assistants characterise you. The same is true for search: a single article ranks for nothing, while a cluster of twenty on one topic becomes the reference. Spreading thin guarantees you never cross the threshold anywhere.

So the position of this piece is simple: sequence, don't split. For the next 90 days, fund one channel properly, run a second at maintenance level, and deliberately defer the rest. Which one you fund depends on your stage, because the stage determines what you have to prove and who you have to prove it to.

How the four channels actually relate

Before the stage-by-stage plan, one dependency map, because it drives the sequencing:

• Personal branding is the cheapest to start and the fastest to show signal. It costs mostly time and needs a founder with something specific to say. It is also the raw material for everything else: your positioning, your quotable opinions, your proof points.
• PR and earned media converts that raw material into third-party validation. Journalists and editors write about people and companies that already have a clear, repeatable story. Pitching without one wastes money.
• SEO for editorial content is slow and cumulative. It rewards consistency over months and punishes stop-start effort. It works best once you know what you stand for and can publish with real expertise.
• AI search visibility (AEO/GEO) is largely downstream of the other three. AI assistants tend to cite sources that are well-structured, widely corroborated across independent publications, and clear about who the entity is and what it does. You cannot shortcut your way into that; you can only build the inputs and make them easy to read.

Notice the order that falls out: say something specific (branding), get others to repeat it (PR), publish it durably (SEO), and make it machine-readable and corroborated (AI search). Your stage decides where you enter that chain.

Pre-seed: fund personal branding, run light PR prep, defer the rest

Fund first: founder-led personal branding. At pre-seed you have no track record, no content library, no budget, and one scarce asset: the founder's point of view and network. Investors, early customers and first hires all Google the founder before they take the meeting. That is the audience, and it is small and reachable.

Realistic budget: 4 to 6 hours a week of founder time and roughly €0 to €300 a month. The money, if any, goes to a freelance editor or a basic design and scheduling tool. Do not hire an agency at this stage; nobody can write your opinions for you before you have formed them.

What the hours buy:

• Two hours: one substantial post or short essay a week on a narrow problem you understand better than most people, with a specific claim rather than a summary.
• One hour: commenting on and messaging people in your buyer, investor and hiring pools. Targeted engagement beats broadcasting at this stage.
• One hour: collecting proof (customer quotes, numbers you are allowed to share, a before-and-after) into a single document. This becomes your press kit later.
• One hour: fixing your own surfaces: a LinkedIn profile that states in one sentence who you help and how, and a simple site that says the same thing in the same words.

Maintenance level: PR preparation, not PR spend. Write a 150-word company description and a founder bio, and use the identical wording everywhere. This consistency is cheap and is exactly what AI assistants and journalists rely on to describe you correctly.

Defer: paid PR retainers, a content-marketing programme, and any dedicated AI-search work. A retainer at this stage buys pitches for a story you have not finished writing. Publishing SEO content before you have a position produces generic articles that rank for nothing and say nothing.

Post-Series A: fund earned media, keep branding running, start SEO foundations

Fund first: PR and earned media, built on the founder voice you already have. After a round you have a news hook, some customers to reference, and pressure to look like a category player to buyers and the next investors. This is when third-party validation has the highest return, because you finally have both a story and proof.

Realistic budget: roughly €3,000 to €8,000 a month for specialist PR support or equivalent in-house time, plus 3 to 4 hours a week from the founder or a senior executive. The founder's time is not optional here; journalists want the person, not a spokesperson reading a script.

How to run the 90 days:

• Weeks 1 to 2: pick one narrative and one audience. Not three. Decide the single claim you want repeated about the company and the five to ten publications your buyers actually read.
• Weeks 3 to 8: pursue a mix of commentary, bylines and one or two reported pieces. Respond to journalist requests fast; speed and a usable quote beat a polished pitch. Aim for a small number of placements in the right outlets rather than volume in the wrong ones.
• Weeks 9 to 12: repurpose every placement. Quote it on your site, in sales material and in founder posts, and link it from a single press page that states the company description verbatim.

Maintenance level: the founder's branding rhythm (two posts a week is enough) and SEO foundations: fix site structure, publish four to six cornerstone articles on the exact topics your PR narrative covers, and make sure each has a named author with a real bio. Budget a few hundred euros a month for an editor or writer.

Defer: a high-volume blog and bespoke AI-search tooling. You will start collecting AI-search benefits as a side effect of consistent, corroborated placements, so spend your effort on getting the placements, not on optimising for assistants you cannot yet influence.

Scale-up: fund SEO and AI search as systems, with PR feeding them

Fund first: search and AI visibility as an owned, compounding asset. By scale-up you have a team, a product with a clear category, and enough brand to be searched by name. Now the leverage shifts to owning the questions your buyers ask, in classic search and in AI assistants, because that is where pipeline is increasingly shaped before a sales call happens.

Realistic budget: roughly €8,000 to €25,000 a month across content, technical SEO and PR support, with a named owner doing 8 to 15 hours a week and executives contributing 2 to 3 hours each on bylines and expert input. The wide range reflects team size and how much sits in-house.

What to build:

• A topic map of the 30 to 50 questions your buyers ask before they buy, with one authoritative, well-structured page per question.
• Clear entity signals: a consistent company description, named experts with credentials, structured data, and an about page that says plainly what you do and for whom.
• Corroboration: continued earned placements that mention you for the same category, because assistants weigh what independent sources say about you, not just what you say about yourself.
• A measurement habit: every month, ask the main AI assistants the questions your buyers ask and record whether you are cited, how you are described and who is cited instead. This costs an hour and tells you more than most dashboards.

Maintenance level: executive personal branding, which keeps feeding original opinions and quotable data into the system, and PR focused on category-defining moments such as research releases and funding or product news.

Defer: broad awareness spend and trying to be visible for every adjacent topic. Depth in your category beats breadth, in search and in AI answers alike.

Quick comparison by stage

• Pre-seed: lead with personal branding; 4 to 6 hours a week; €0 to €300 a month; defer retainers, content programmes and AI-search work.
• Post-Series A: lead with PR and earned media; 3 to 4 founder hours a week plus support; roughly €3,000 to €8,000 a month; defer high-volume blogging and AI-search tooling.
• Scale-up: lead with SEO and AI search as a system; 8 to 15 owner hours a week plus executive input; roughly €8,000 to €25,000 a month; defer broad awareness and adjacent topics.

These ranges are planning anchors, not quotes. Your market, geography and whether work sits in-house will move them, but the order of priority should hold.

Rules that apply at every stage

• One narrative, repeated. Use the same company description, founder bio and category claim everywhere. Inconsistency is the cheapest way to confuse both journalists and AI assistants.
• Judge in 90-day blocks. Visibility does not show up in week three. Set a leading indicator you can read sooner (placements landed, inbound conversations that mention a piece, branded search growth, AI citations) and review it at day 90 before changing the plan.
• Don't pay to start at the wrong link of the chain. Money spent on PR without a story, or on SEO without a position, is the most common waste in this space.
• Protect the founder's hours. The scarcest input is rarely money. Block the time first, then decide what the budget can do around it.

What to do this week

Write down your stage and pick the single channel from the list above that matches it. Block the weekly hours in your calendar before you spend anything. Draft your 150-word company description and use it everywhere. Then ask two or three AI assistants the questions your buyers would ask and note what they say about you today; that baseline is what your 90 days will be measured against.