How to Build a PR Strategy From Scratch for Apps – With Hily’s Tori Khutorna

• Effective PR for apps in crowded markets starts with finding a real story that benefits people, not just promoting the product itself.
• Strong PR teams create news instead of waiting for it, using tactics like newsjacking, data reports, or product tweaks tied to cultural moments.
• Every pitch needs a clear goal and audience—whether investors, users, or backlinks—because not all coverage serves the same purpose.
• Timing often determines success in PR, since journalists constantly ask “why now?” and late or early pitches can fail even if the idea is strong.
• The most successful campaigns happen when PR collaborates closely with product and marketing teams to build features or angles that solve real problems and generate organic attention.

Creating a PR strategy from scratch is tough enough.

But creating one for an app in a crowded marketplace can feel downright impossible.

That’s why I invited Tori Khutorna, the PR Lead with dating app Hily, who has a history of building winning PR strategies for apps in crowded markets.

Tori has an amazing background — she was a journalist, then she became an in-house PR at Hily, and was just recently featured on one of Michael Smart’s and Muck Rack’s roundups of really great pitches.

If you’re in the app space and are wondering how to get better press, give this one a listen.

Here is a slightly-edited transcription of our talk (including some links to the resources and campaigns Tori mentioned in our chat).

What are some tools that you learned as a TV journalist that you’ve been able to bring over to your PR career?

Tori Khutorna

It’s really interesting because I was working at an entertainment channel in Ukraine, but I was actually the digital editor.

So I was working with texts, interviews, and all of that. It really helped me to see a story in everything. I was working both for the entertainment section — news about celebrities, lifestyle and everything like that — but also covering the content that the TV channel was producing, like all the series, movies, TV shows, etc.

I had to balance trying to kind of sell our content to people who read this while keeping them entertained and having a great story.

So working there really gave me this perspective of seeing the story in full — how it’s going to be interesting to the reader, rather than just thinking “I want my brand to be featured.”

You need to come up with real, interesting stories to tell. And it’s not only about the product, but also about the mission of the product, who is behind it, the success stories, the data you can provide, and what is the actual intention that helps improve people’s lives — not just “we created this because it seemed fun.”

Of course that works sometimes too.

For instance, at Hily there was a time I decided to create an update for the app. Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Man Child” had just launched and I was like, oh my gosh, people are really relating to this on TikTok and social media.

I thought, what can we do with this? On dating apps you see categories like “I would like to have children,” “I have children,” and “I don’t want to have children” — and I was like, this is a perfect opportunity to let people indicate they’re not looking for a man child to take care of. We decided to just have fun with it, and our amazing product team at Hily decided to give it a try.

We got some coverage from professional dating media, and unfortunately didn’t land top-tier media, but it was so much fun to work on.

Even those funny small tricks can be communicated properly. The thing is, you need to do something that you can actually communicate.

How to deal with clients who expect huge publications right away?

Tori Khutorna

The first question I usually ask — like in one of those TikTok memes — is “what was the reason?” Why do you need those publications? It can be something like “we wanted to show something featured in investor decks if we’re going for investment,” or “we really want to get to our customers,” or “we want link building.” The reason can be whatever, but you have to have a goal for what you want to achieve with this specific type of communication. The audience matters too — Gen Z consumes most of their information from social media, not really from digital news outlets, which is fine, but you need to embrace that reality.

I would say that owners of companies and C-level not having a clear understanding that not everything can be communicated the way they’d like is also on us to explain to them. Obviously, they are pros at what they’re doing — they’re building the business, they’re building the product.

But that doesn’t always translate into communicating your successes, because simply having a success doesn’t always give you something to communicate. Saying “we grew in revenue” — is that something media is going to cover? What can typically be communicated is things like investments, or if you do an exit, or if you acquire new products to your portfolio. That can be communicated.

In terms of PR communication, we’re not sitting and waiting for something to happen with the product and then communicating it.

We actually create a reason to communicate something about our company, like I did with Hily and Man Child.

That wasn’t the best in terms of getting coverage, but it was something created from scratch and created relatively quickly.

What are some tactics for creating news for an app or product?

Tori Khutorna

Yeah, definitely. If we’re talking about something product-related, it can be a kind of newsjacking. PR specialists use newsjacking all the time — something happens, people get obsessed with it, and we try to tie it to the product, as we did with Man Child.

Another example that was really successful for me at another company I worked for, called Promova — a language-learning platform that in 2025 made Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies — was when we created a feature about American Sign Language.

We were teaching people ASL as a second language, so people who speak another sign language could learn this one, and also people without hearing issues who want to communicate with people who do, especially in extreme situations.

When we were preparing this course, we really saw the market gap.

We thought it could be a good idea to help people while also closing a niche and being more inclusive. But when I was looking for the right angle to present it, just saying “we released this course” doesn’t mean much. Yes, we helped people who want to learn ASL — but what else?

So I started researching and found cases of people with hearing impairments getting into dangerous situations — connected to things like shootings or fires — where they were hurt or, unfortunately, died because no one could communicate with them.

That really sparked something in me.

Our product team was incredible and quickly implemented additional lessons about danger warnings and asking for and offering help. It ended up getting so much earned coverage — we did a bunch of TV appearances on local US channels. That was a really successful one.

Close cooperation between the PR team and the product team is so important.

How do you communicate the potential ROI of PR for product implementations?

Tori Khutorna

I would say it’s 360 communication, because you have to communicate it to the marketing team as well. For instance, “if we do this type of product involvement with PR, it will save you money here, because more people will learn about the product organically.” It saves money on user acquisition. And really showing that people actually need it — if it addresses a real pain, people will react to it.

That’s what marketing and user acquisition are doing too, just through different channels.

Showing that people actually need it is the best strategy, along with showing how it saves money elsewhere.

You can talk to the C-level team rather than just the product team.

Another thing is to plan in advance when possible. With the ASL course, we could plan in advance and that’s what we did. The Man Child feature, on the other hand, was implemented in just a few days — the product team was incredible. I think they just liked the idea too.

Our Chief Product Officer is really supportive of creative ideas, and our product team lead is a woman, so she could relate to it and saw that it was funny enough.

Obviously, if they’re too preoccupied with a big feature, that’s okay — you can’t convince them every single time. And Man Child didn’t perform as big as I expected. But I still think if bigger competitors had done something like that, it would have been covered, honestly.

Are you always thinking about that when coming up with a pitch?

Tori Khutorna

Yeah, obviously timing matters a lot. A great pitch can fail just because the timing is wrong — you were too late, too early, or competitors did it already, even if you were working on it simultaneously. That happens a lot, for example, with reports. Dating apps launch their reports on a schedule, and I have a spreadsheet with all those dates.

Our process for creating a report is much smaller in scope than our competitors’, who, I can tell, start working on reports six months in advance. That’s not something we can afford in terms of team size — and we also need to make sure we’re not covering the same topics. So we really need to find something different that’s still timely, still urgent, and still relevant to the public.

For newsjacking, if you react too slowly, it doesn’t work.

There was a time I created a piece around the “Labubu” trend when it was trending — I created a piece about guys on social media saying that if a girl comes to a date with a Labubu on her purse, it’s a red flag.

There are so many red flags on social media — people can’t keep up. But it’s always interesting to read those pieces and understand the reasoning.

Another example on timeliness: at Promova, we created a dyslexia mode that switches all fonts inside the app to a dyslexia-friendly one, making it easier to read and actually learn a foreign language.

That was totally the head of brand’s idea — I can’t take credit for it, it was genius. But she also understood the timing: there’s a Dyslexia Awareness Week, and we needed to pitch the piece before it.

If we’d done it on a random day, it might have gotten some coverage, but it wouldn’t have felt as urgent.

Journalists are always asking “why now?” — and we were able to answer that clearly.

Would you say every pitch has to have a “why now?”

Tori Khutorna

No — I’d like to meet someone whose pitches always land coverage.

Honestly, that person would be a unicorn. It also depends on what type of coverage you’re going for.

Top-tier, definitely not every pitch will get there — but as you mentioned, it can get niche or professional media to talk about you.

For instance, there was a pitch I did about Tax Day and dating.

The angle was: would people be willing to find someone on a dating app who could help them with tax returns, since it’s a chore people try to avoid? The idea actually came from my own experience.

I was in Rome and really wanted to go to a Maneskin concert, but all the tickets were sold out.

I applied for press accreditation and didn’t hear back. Then I was talking to a guy on a dating app who worked in entertainment, and as a joke I asked if he knew Maneskin’s PR manager. He said yeah — and connected me. I got in.

It wasn’t planned, but it made me think: what if you aimed for that?

What if you specifically looked for someone with the profession you need?

That’s something people do think about — men with certain jobs meeting certain criteria.

So I applied that thinking to taxes. We got coverage in media that covers taxes and accounting, with a kind of warning angle: be careful with your matches during tax season — they might be coming to you for a different reason than you think.

Vince Nero

Right, but that still answers the “why now” — it’s Tax Day.

So, data-driven pitches should, more often than not, have that angle. If you were a journalist getting a pitch about relationships and finances and it wasn’t tax season, you’d be wondering why this person is sending it to you.

Tori Khutorna

Yeah, and the best thing was that I didn’t pitch it at the very start of tax season — honestly, I just missed it.

I was seriously panicking. But then I researched again and found that by the middle of the tax filing period, there were still over 100,000 people who hadn’t filed yet. More than half of taxpayers were still dragging their feet. So I reframed it: how do people react to someone who files their taxes early versus someone who drags it to the last minute?

Would you go on a date just to avoid doing your taxes?

That angle was hilarious too.

With some other surveys, you don’t really need a specific time.

There was one I did about how often you should update your dating profile.

You’d think it’s an evergreen story — what timing could there possibly be? It happened to fall in the spring, which kind of inspired a “spring cleaning for your dating profile” angle. But really it was just something people genuinely wanted to know — like “should I be doing this, and how often?” There was a really cool data point: one in ten people admitted they won’t change their photos even if their appearance changes dramatically.

After COVID, lots of people changed in terms of appearance and never updated their profiles.

And when you go on a date and the person looks nothing like their photos, it’s really frustrating. I wanted to help people be their authentic selves.

Every piece of PR work has to align with the mission of the company.

For Hily, that was showing you should be your authentic self and not waste anyone’s time — yours or the other person’s. Matches shouldn’t be superficial, but photos do matter. I just wanted people to feel more comfortable with that.

Can you briefly explain brand collaborations?

Tori Khutorna

Yeah, definitely. You should collaborate with someone who shares your values — the same view of the brand. The goal is to introduce each other’s audiences to one another, and those audiences already need to relate to something you both have.

With Trejo’s Donuts, it was really obvious. People love food and donuts, and Trejo’s Donuts are known for collaborations with all kinds of brands — movies, series, Netflix, Hulu, and more. We wanted to do something fun that involved a physical product, because when it comes to apps, collaborating with physical products is really good for reaching audiences in a different way.

We suggested creating donuts with a mystery filling — you don’t know what’s inside until you take the first bite. We drew the analogy with dating: you can judge by appearance and pick a specific person or a specific donut, but you have to actually get to know them. You don’t know until you try. So just give it a try, go on a date, see how it goes.

It was a really interesting collaboration because we caught the attention of local TV. They asked us to deliver several dozen donuts to the studio for their morning segment. It looked so cool — each donut had its own separate box because they were really big, made in the shape of a heart with these cute eyes. They gave each team member a donut and set everyone up in three rows. It was really cute and fun, and I feel like we showed people that you can have fun with Hily.

The best collaborations I’ve seen make sense when you can explain the connection, even in the silliest way.

Like the recent one with e.l.f. Beauty and Liquid Death — they created a lip balm.

I was not expecting that, but it was genius. Makeup and hydration are under the same umbrella, and they actually highlighted that in their creative assets: both brands are about hydration.

You can explain it, and that’s what makes it work.