In this episode of the Speak PR podcast, host Jim James interviews Joanna Drabant, CEO and founder of Prowly, a SaaS platform that helps business owners and PR professionals find media contacts, build press releases, and manage outreach. Joanna explains how Prowly simplifies PR by offering a searchable database of over a million journalist contacts, customizable media lists, and an online newsroom. She differentiates Prowly through a free 7‑day trial, transparent monthly pricing (starting at $210), no long‑term contracts, and responsive chat support with free consultancy calls. The platform’s data is gathered automatically from web sources via a proprietary search system, avoiding manual researcher teams. Users can filter journalists by topic, region, influence score, and view full contact details, social profiles, and recent publications. Prowly enables mass‑personalized email outreach with dynamic tokens, tracks opens and clicks, and provides suggestions to improve email performance. The service is English‑based but supports content in any language and serves clients worldwide, from the US to South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. For niche verticals, customers can request assistance via chat, though Prowly may be unable to cover every niche. While media monitoring is not yet included, the company, now part of Semrush, plans to launch a monitoring feature in early 2025, aiming to become an all‑in‑one PR solution. Joanna reflects on Prowly’s branding, noting it grew organically through product focus and customer referrals, and she intends to invest more in brand marketing. Listeners are directed to contact Joanna via LinkedIn.
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Right, 3, 2, 1. Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. I am thrilled to have with me Joanna Drabant, who is joining us from Prowly. She's the CEO and founder of Prowly, and this is an amazing platform to help business owners to find the right media contacts and to manage the outreach, all using technology.
Thank you, Jim, for the invitation. Thank you for this introduction. I'm not sure if I would be able to introduce myself better than you. So thank you once again. I'm really excited of having this possibility to talk to you.
Now, you ran a PR firm before, and then you started a business to help your clients and other PR owners, but also business owners. So Can you just tell us, how does Prowly solve a problem for business owners?
Okay, so like in the simplest words, I would say that Prowly is a PR software that enables to win media attention in the most effortless way, I would say. Thanks to the tool, business owners can easily find journalists and their contact data, build powerful media lists, create eye-catching press releases, and then also they can make the online newsroom a definitive source of information about the brand. It all just got simple and easy for actually like everyone who's dealing with PR on a daily basis. I think that it also includes business owners because in my opinion and from my own experience, I know that PR, like, from the perspective of PR, business owners can be the really big PR resource for the company and the brand itself.
So Joanna, there are a number of different software solutions out there, some quite big and some quite small. How do you differentiate then Prowly from all these, all these other companies? Because you say you've got a million contacts.
First of all, we offer a free trial period. During this period, everyone can actually try all the features that are available at Prowly. So we are completely transparent on the matter of the product. You can get instant access whenever you want. The pricing is also much more attractive than in the case of other PR software solutions available on the market, which is also very important from the perspective of the business owner. There is no lifelong commitment, so you can try Prowly during this 7 days of free trial, upgrade whenever you want, downgrade whenever you want. We've got monthly subscription, no annual like commitment. So it all helps to make a decision about trying the tool. And also from the— from what I've heard from our customers, They really appreciate our chat support, our general support along the way. We help our users by offering free PR consultancy calls. So that all makes Prowly— that's what I think, that's my personal opinion, but I think that all makes probably the most accessible tool in the PR space.
Let's just talk then, Joanna, because you've mentioned price. What does it cost then for a business owner? Is it by number of press releases, or how do you price it?
Pricing is flexible. The monthly price depends on the resources, like the number of users you want to have on your account, number of newsrooms you want to create and manage along the way, a number of media contacts or emails you want to send to journalists during a month. So the starting point is $210 per month if you want to use all the features. Uh, basically most of the business owners Are okay with, with this plan.
Let's just talk about from a practical point of view, because to have that much functionality and that many media, do you have teams of researchers then all over the world? Joanna, how are you connecting this data?
Okay, so this system works like a Google search, but it's— it was like personalized and customized to the PR needs. So instead of putting in Google contact, I don't know, for example, the name and the surname of the journalist that you want to reach out to, and doing the research manually, we, we did it the same, but it was, it is customized for the PR needs. So we've got only contact data that are available on the web. And we make the research process much more shorter than you would— it could be once you would use, for example, Google search. So it's a matter of technology. There are no people behind who are, you know, updating the lists every day. It's a system. You can call it AI, but it's a buzzword nowadays, so I would rather avoid it. It's just a system that helps us to identify the contact data using different sources available on the web.
And how accurate is that compared to, say, a person, you know, doing the research, Joanna? Are you talking about it being equally accurate or a margin on it?
It's really, you know, hard to compare for us. At the end of the day, you pay $100 for the access to over 1 million media contacts. You can use around 1,000 per month, but you choose which kind, which media contacts you want to use. So you've got full control on that, and it takes you seconds. On the other hand, you've got a PR person who needs to do the manual job do the research, it takes hours. So it's really, you know, hard to compare the accuracy without having in mind the efforts and the costs related to the time that you need, you know, that takes this kind of research while doing it manually.
Great. So I'd be able to find the contact details And what sort of profiling of journalists would I have? Because if I've, you know, if I've got a business and I want to go into certain niches, have I got the name of the contact, the publication, what they've written before? Just take us through a little bit more of what I'm gonna find.
Sure. So in general, you can search by different parameters. You can search by topics that journalists are covering. You can search by region, by city, by country, by influence score. And also, once you will find the journalist that you're potentially interested in, you will get the full contact data, including email address, phone number, or phone numbers if there are— there is more than one available on the web. You can get their social media profiles and the latest publications from the press.
Can I personalize the press releases en masse or one-on-one? Because it's the workflow that actually takes a lot of the time, right, when you're sending emails out to many journalists.
Yeah, we— that's true. The personalized— personalization is the, is the key, uh, when it comes to the mass mailings. We tried the best we could, uh, by offering different personalization methods you can use. There are— we call it personalization tokens. You can use different elements of the contact data in the dynamic fields or in the email. So in this case, you can send the press release to 100 or 200 or 1,000 journalists with one click, and it will be personalized. At the same time, journalists will only see your email address as a sender. There will be no branding in the email itself. It will look exactly like the one that you are sending using regular mailing systems like Outlook or Gmail. And right after that, you are able to track the results of the mailing. So who exactly opened your email, who clicked on your materials, who who came to your online newsroom to check what's there. You can see the general statistics, so the general open rate and click rate. We also, during the email creation process, we show you suggestions regarding the email content to make it more powerful from the results perspective. And those results you can also compare with the general statistics. So if you will see, for example, that you've got a 30% open rate after your email was sent, you can see if it was good enough, if it's below the average, above the average for the industry, etc. So we are trying to help our users all the time. Also, like, both by suggesting, suggesting, showing different tips inside the app, but also via chat.
And I think you've also got some consultancy, have you, for any owners that want to talk to your PR team? You've got people who can guide them, I think.
Yes, right. Yes, we've got a special button inside the app right after registration. You can just book a free PR consultancy call with us. There is a calendar available so you can book a time slot that suits you. And during the session, we will try to help you get the most of of the tool considering your biggest challenges in PR.
Now, one of the challenges people have is going international, Joanna. So you're in Poland, you've built an English language platform. Can Prowly work across multiple languages? How do people use it?
Yes, as every software as a service tool, we are available anytime from anywhere in the world. In general, the whole interface of the app is in English. So you need to know at least the basics to be able to use it. But all the content you create using the app can be in any language you want. Also, our media database consists of media contacts from different countries all over the world. So at the end of the day, we've got clients from the US, from South Africa, including, for example, South America, So for example, Mexico, Europe, Portugal, UK, Germany, Sweden, and many others. Also Asia and Australia. Basically, we've got customers everywhere because, and that is because the PR needs, you know, and challenges are similar everywhere.
If somebody has got a, say, a niche, a vertical that you're not covering, Can, can they give you instruction to find like a trade publication, for example? Because that's sometimes in some niche industries an issue with these media databases, they don't have a particular smaller sector.
It depends on the specific topic that the business owner or potential customer in general General wants to cover. So basically, anyone who is struggling with the search results, with getting the proper search results, can always reach us out via chat. We always do our best to help, but if we won't do it, we will be transparent and tell that we just simply, you know, are not able to help in this specific case. So That's fair.
Now, what about monitoring? Because I noticed on the website it says that monitoring is not part of the Prowly service. And obviously, if you use some of the bigger services, they include the monitoring. How are people supposed to solve that part of the PR puzzle?
That's actually a great question. This is a very exciting topic for us because it looks like 2021 is going to be a year of much faster product development for us than ever. And thanks to the previous acquisition and being part of Semrush now, we've started to craft our own roadmap for media monitoring feature. And we plan to launch it in the first half of the next year. It will basically be one of the biggest product milestone for us. And it will help us turn Prowly to a complete all-in-one PR solution because at the end of the day, all the effects of the PR campaigns run with Prowly, we'll be able to track real-time by the media coverage, which is the end result of every— of work of every PR pro.
Will that be part of the same sort of pricing package, or do you think people will have to pay more for that?
I don't know it yet. It's too early to say. We are now considering different options. We will include it into the plans for sure, but I'm not sure how it will affect the pricing at all. But still, we have in mind that we want to be the most accessible software for PR pros. So even if we will decide to offer it with an additional price, it won't be a deal breaker for a business owner.
Now, Joanna, you're also a successful business owner in your own right. So can you maybe as a final question, give us a little bit of advice of how you've built the brand of Prowly? Because you've done an amazing job. You've built from Poland a global business. You sold it now to, I think, an American SaaS company. What's been the secret of your success?
Oh, okay. So from the perspective of branding, I do not share your opinion. I'm not sure if we're happy about our branding for now. This is something that we have just started to work on. Everything what happened in the past was rather accidentally because we consider ourselves as a product-first company, which means that product is always the biggest priority for us. And it turned out that once we started to acquire first customers in the US, they started to recommend the tool to themselves, they started to leave opinions and reviews on G2 Crowd and other services. That was actually the foundation of our brand, of building a brand, which is good because it comes— it came naturally and we are able to talk about ourselves with the words of our customers. So not sure if there's anything more precious than that. But on the other hand, this year will be the year when we will definitely fasten our brand marketing activities. We need to speed up a little bit on that matter.
Well, Joanna, I hope that being on the Speak PR podcast may help a little bit with that. Now, if people want to find out about you, Joanna? Where can they contact you?
Happy to connect via LinkedIn, for example. I'm there almost all the time. So I think that LinkedIn is the best way to reach me out.
Just tell people your address on LinkedIn.
My address on LinkedIn is J. Drabant. G no, it's like J D J my address on I will do it once again. It's it's like that's that's funny Jim because it turned out to be the most difficult question for me today.
I mean I just I'll tell you what I'll help out. We've been talking with and giggling with Joanna Drabin, the CEO and founder of Prowly Software. We're struggling with getting the final details from Joanna, so I'll just put them in the show notes for you about how to get hold of Joanna. Joanna, thank you for joining me, sharing and giggling with me online.
Thank you very much, Jim, for the invitation. And it was great talking to you. And yeah, Thank you for, for all your support. It was really, really nice conversation.
You're more than welcome. So thank you for sharing SpeakPR with us today. We talked to Joanna Drabent of Prowly. So in the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're looking to amplify your message through public relations, that you have a look at prowly.com. It's a great software. It's affordable. And it's going to help you to get noticed.
