250 words of PR drivel

Reporters and “thought leader” types get hundreds of pitches to write about companies and their news. Usually that news is either irrelevant or uninteresting, but every once in a while, a PR pitch comes through that is so thoroughly vacuous that you can only laugh.

This is that pitch.

I received this by email a couple of days ago. I’ve obscured the company name.

From zero software to AFR Fast Starter in under a year

Hi Josh,

[Redacted] has made the 2026 AFR Fast Starters list at number nn. The list ranks Australia’s fastest-growing companies, which is a funny thing to be called in the same year you rebuilt the whole company.

When [redacted] took over [redacted] earlier this year, it was a services business with no software to its name. Since then he’s rebuilt it around AI, launched a product brand called [redacted], and kept a team of about 40 rowing in the same direction across three countries. Most founders would have picked one of those for the year.

[Redacted] is his third company, and the idea came from the last one. After selling his childcare software business in 2025, he realised [redacted]’s clients were wrestling with the same problems he’d spent ten years on, and this time AI could fix them. So [redacted] now builds products instead of piling up projects, which lets it keep growing without hiring at the same pace.

[Redacted] can talk about what a rebuild at that speed actually involves: running one team across three time zones without anyone getting the “offshore” label, and testing AI on his own business before selling it to anyone else. [Redacted] is its own first customer.

Would Without Bullshit like to speak with [redacted] for your Fast Starters coverage, or for a piece on turning a services firm into a software company in under a year?
Refreshing the list one more time to check it’s still there,

Everything wrong

It takes real talent to write a pitch this useless in 250 words. What did you find wrong? Here’s my list — let me know if you spotted these or found some others.

1. I don’t cover “Fast Starters.” I don’t cover startups. I write about writing and books. Piss-poor targeting.
2. I can’t figure out what this company does. Can you? Saying what the company does is so basic that I would never have imagined a pitch that forgot it — until I read this one.
3. Who gives a crap about a somebody turning a startup service into a product? Not worth bragging about.
4. I have no interest in Australian businesses, per se.
5. “I built a business around AI” is so common that’s it’s practically a cliché. Absolutely worthy of ridicule.
6. “Kept a team of 40 rowing in the same direction” is just a hackneyed way to describe what every competent manager of every company ever does. It’s like bragging that you successfully made coffee.
7. Building a product based on your own problems is how most failed startups begin. No, everybody is not like you with the same problems you have.
8. And the pièce de résistance — the whole pitch was written with AI, according to Pangram. Surely you suspected this all along . . .

Sending content-free pitches about uninteresting developments to inappropriate targets is ordinary incompetence. But writing it with AI lets you scale your irrelevance.

Don’t pitch with AI

Most PR folks are smart enough not write empty releases like this.

But a lot of them are using AI. We can tell. And we’re insulted enough that we are going to hold it against you.

Please try harder.