Beyond press releases
Honeyjar was founded by CEO Michelle Masek and communications director Nadia Jamshidi, both veterans of in-house communications teams and agencies. Masek most recently served as senior vice president of marketing and communications at Obvious Ventures, the venture firm founded by Ev Williams.
At Obvious Ventures, Masek worked with 110 portfolio companies on why and when they needed communications and marketing. That experience prompted a broader idea: could AI help people handle communications with the initiative and professionalism of a senior adviser?
Honeyjar’s tools can prepare announcements, identify relevant journalists and surface speaking opportunities. Jamshidi says the product can also build media contact lists, track news and social posts, monitor mentions and flag opportunities. The company’s ambition is to bring signals, context, strategy, judgment, timing and execution into one communications workflow.
The intended users extend well beyond startup founders. Masek says many people are responsible for communications without having it in their job title: marketers, investors, writers, content creators, school district leaders and sports teams. In many organizations, the work is passed from person to person without the underlying communications needs being addressed.
Honeyjar says it is designed to support PR professionals, not replace them. Masek and Jamshidi built a tool they would want to use themselves; the company argues it could help agencies and in-house teams work more efficiently, or let an independent PR professional take on a third client without adding team costs.
The human still presses send
Honeyjar says its waitlist drew 10,000 sign-ups in its first day. Beta testers include Nextdoor, robotics startup Coco Robotics, investor Bloomberg Beta, and agencies Mission North and Full Picture.
The product can draft an email to a journalist or a social post in a client’s style, but the client has to send or publish it. Masek says the company does not want to remove people from the process. Through its Comms Lab initiative, Honeyjar is also teaching the product approaches used by other PR professionals.
That human checkpoint matters. Journalists already receive more pitches than they can handle, many written by chatbots. A tool that makes outreach easier could add to the volume even if it improves the targeting.
I think the more consequential test is whether Honeyjar can make restraint part of the product, not just polish the message. Masek says it may advise a founder not to pursue press coverage yet. That is a more useful promise than simply generating another pitch, but the announcement offers no evidence yet about how consistently the system can make that call.
Masek says journalists want better pitches and direct access to experts, and hopes their inboxes will eventually contain more credible messages from sources they want to hear from. Honeyjar’s case depends on helping users earn that trust without making the inbox problem worse.
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