You have a round closing and three ways to tell people about it. Founders usually pick by instinct, which is how a $3M seed ends up offered as an "exclusive" to six outlets at once — a thing that is not an exclusive and does not go well.
The three formats, plainly
Exclusive. One outlet gets the story first, and nobody else gets it until they publish. They choose the timing within an agreed window. You are trading reach for depth: a single named reporter with a reason to do the work properly, because the piece is theirs.
Embargo. Several outlets get the same material in advance, on the agreed condition that nobody publishes before a stated time. Everyone writes ahead; everyone goes live at once. You trade depth for simultaneity.
Open announcement. You publish it yourself, then tell people it happened. Nothing is held back and nobody owes you anything. This is a perfectly respectable choice, and it is the right one far more often than founders think.
How an embargo is actually agreed
This is the part that goes wrong, so it is worth being precise about it.
An embargo is a prior agreement, not a label. If you send a reporter the details and write "EMBARGOED UNTIL TUESDAY 6AM" across the top, they have not agreed to anything. You have simply given a journalist newsworthy information, unconditionally, and they are free to publish it whenever they like. Most will honor the note out of professional habit. Some will not, and they will be entirely within their rights.
The correct sequence is to ask first, with no details attached:
"I have a funding story I would like to send you under embargo until Tuesday 06:00 ET. Can I send it on that basis?"
Only once they say yes do you send anything. That one extra email is the difference between an agreement and a hope.
Which one to choose
A short set of honest questions:
- Would more than three outlets plausibly write this? If not, an embargo is a coordination exercise with no one to coordinate. Take the exclusive or just publish.
- Is there depth to reward? Exclusives earn their keep when there is a real story underneath — a contrarian thesis, unusual data, a founder story with substance. A round with nothing else attached rarely rewards the extra length.
- Do you need simultaneity? If the announcement is tied to a fixed public event — a product going live, a regulation taking effect — an embargo is the only format that lines everything up.
- Is your own channel your real audience? For many seed companies the customers, candidates and investors who matter are reading your own post, not a tech outlet. Then the format barely matters and you should not spend three weeks on it.
One more, rarely said out loud: an exclusive is only worth offering to someone plausibly likely to take it. Offering a seed round exclusively to the largest outlet you can name, with no relationship and no prior coverage, usually produces silence — and you have burned a week waiting for it. Offer it to the reporter most likely to say yes, which is normally someone who has covered two companies like yours in the last quarter — which is exactly what a properly built list tells you.
A working timeline
Counting back from a publish time of Tuesday, 06:00 ET:
- T−14 days. Story straight. One-sentence news, three checkable facts, quotes approved by whoever is quoted — investor quote approvals are the single most common cause of slippage.
- T−12 days. Assets ready: a linkable page, founder and product images, a short factual background document. Ready means ready, not "I can pull that together quickly".
- T−10 days. Exclusive offer to your top choice, with a clear 48-hour decision window stated in the email. Founders who leave this open lose a week to politeness.
- T−7 days. If declined or ignored, switch to embargo: ask ten to fifteen reporters for agreement, details to follow.
- T−5 days. Send full material to everyone who agreed.
- T−3 days. Confirm in writing with each of them: the exact date, the exact time, the time zone spelled out.
- T−1 day. Final facts and any updated numbers. Nothing new after this point — a change on the morning is how errors get printed.
- T−0, 06:00 ET. Your own post goes live at the same minute. Tell customers first, team second, social third.
- T+1 day. Send to everyone who passed or never replied. It is now ordinary news, and some of them will take it.
Time zones break more embargoes than bad faith
Always write the zone, and write a second one if any recipient is elsewhere: "06:00 ET / 11:00 BST, Tuesday 14 October". "Tuesday morning" is not a time. Neither is "9am" to someone three time zones away, and neither is a date without a year on a calendar invite sent in December.
If someone does publish early, handle it in one email, with no threat in it: point out the agreed time, ask whether they can hold the piece until then, and if they cannot, tell everyone else the embargo has broken and they are free to publish now. What you must not do is leave the rest of your list sitting on a story that is already public — that costs you every one of those relationships, and the original mistake was not yours.
When to skip all of this
If the round is small, the investors are not names anyone outside your sector will recognize, and there is no product or data angle attached, no format will fix that. Publish a clear post, email your customers, and put the three weeks into the launch you do have a story for. An announcement nobody covers is not a failure; an announcement nobody covers after a month of coordination is an expensive one.
Signal PR drafts the narrative, the shortlist and the pitches for a moment like this — the sequencing, the asking, and the sending stay yours, because those are the parts built on relationships rather than text.