Newly relaunched PR platform connects small brands to freelance journalists eager to tell their stories

Blish Mize Connor and Allison Hogan are working to change the landscape of the public relations game, they shared, starting with firing themselves.

The PR veterans — with a combined 35 years of experience — have launched DeskSides, a dual-sided digital hub to connect brands with journalists/freelancers.

“We were tired of traveling and schlepping goods with all of our clients to New York,” Mize Connor said of the PR capital. “So we figured out that there was an easier way to do this.”

Although they have partnered with a variety of brands from luxury to small businesses, Hogan noted, the Kansas City duo’s new platform specifically will help them scale smaller brands.

“It’s so expensive to even get in the game in the first place and hire a PR firm,” she explained. “So we kind of thought, ‘Well let’s fire ourselves and we can get this facilitator going where we’re allowing them to relationship build, but for a quarter of the cost.’”

The platform is a dual-sided marketplace, Mize Connor explained, meaning it allows brands to apply and fill out a questionnaire to determine their goals like what kind of press placements they are looking for; then journalists can sign up and declare the kind of stories they are looking for and how many meetings they want a month.

“Then we are matching on the back end,” she added.

Mize Connor and Hogan — who first connected while Hogan was an intern during college at Mize Conner’s firm — were inspired to start DeskSides during the pandemic, which forced them to go virtual with all their deskside meetings between clients and journalists.

“We were getting the same results,” Mize Connor recalled. “So we thought, “This is a no brainer. This is the way of the future.’ We were offering journalists a much more streamlined way of working as freelancers. We were sort of cutting out the fat.”

“We met them where they were and we were hand delivering these relationships to them versus pitching, pitching, pitching, pitching, pitching like a robot,” she added. “We were vetting and saying ‘Hey, these people are great for you. You don’t have to lift a finger. Here is the DeskSide meeting.’”

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In May 2023, the PR veterans — who earlier received funding from Digital Sandbox KC — launched the first version of DeskSides, attracting about 20 brands and journalists. Then in the summer, they noted, they hired former Meta and AWS principal engineer Jeffrey Barber as fractional CTO to build the hub on his own data platform, Adama.

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“He’s brilliant,” Hogan said. “We’ve been able to build and build really quickly. So we re-launched it in October and now we have 70 users, between brands and journalists.”

“Our tech roadmap has been fast forwarded thanks to Jeffrey,” she continued, noting that they plan to start fundraising a seed round this year. “So we’re just focusing on the user experience and how we can overhaul that as much as possible to make it easy for not only early adopters to use but for everyone to use.”

With Barber’s latest additions to the platform, Mize Connor noted, brands and journalists are able to conduct in-platform meetings.

“It’s just about connecting the brands and the journalists for those relationship moments,” she said.