If there is a PR hell, it’s a place where all you do is manually send out e-mails. Luckily, Joanna Drabent (one of top 100 Female Startup Founders in Europe according to The Hundert) and her team are working hard to keep that vision away. Their stunning platform, Prowly, is a must-have tool for everyone working in public relations. It helps you manage contacts, press releases and the image of your brand – all in one app.
Joanna Drabent, before co-founding Prowly, used to run a PR agency. “Although SaaS-based specialized tools already became popular, PR industry still relied on outdated and non-cost-efficient software like Excel or Word,” she says. Drabent couldn’t find any tool that would boost the effectiveness of her team, so she decided to build one herself. Together with Sebastian Przyborowski a front-end engineer and a UX Designer, they made their vision – a light, intuitive PR app – come to life.
Prowly offers three main features: content management, media management and brand journals. The first one is simply a platform facilitating the creation of content, is it a press release or an interactive PR story. While you concentrate on making content unique, Prowly takes care about it being SEO-friendly, visually attractive and released at the right time. The second is a tool for communication with your audience. It is possible to import mailing lists and create automatic personalized e-mail pitches, but also analyze the responsiveness of your audience with just a few clicks. Instead of flooding your audience with heavy attachments, you can now create landing pages – branded websites with all files ready to be downloaded.
Brand journals are a unique feature of the Prowly app. They are interactive journals that gather all of the information about your company scattered around the Internet, from media coverage to tweets and Youtube videos, and present it in a way that best expresses the feel of your brand. And the best part? They take only 15 minutes to set up.
Prowly’s main strength lies in flexibility. Since the launch in 2013, the company has strived to work closely with clients, listening to feedback and offering many customizable options, including flexible pricing plans. This strategy turned out to be extremely effective – right now Prowly has over 120 clients, including companies such as Spotify, National Geographic or Ikea. Over 25 percent of clients are based outside of Poland, even though Prowly launched the offer for foreign clients in March 2016.
The story of Prowly funding is equally impressive. They raised $70k from IQPartners fund in the seed round, which was enough to launch a beta version in 2013. End of 2015 they’ve been granted $1,1M series pre-A by Internet Ventures FIZ, managed by Private Equity Managers Group, and Bluerank, a digital marketing agency.
Prowly doesn’t rest on their laurels, though. Since January 2016, their growth rate reached over 210%. Their goal? “To become a platform of first choice for brands & agencies all over the world who want to offer content to their audiences.” Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed!
