ASTRSK, the startup communications agency behind more than 1,500 company launches and 500 product announcements over the past 15 years, launches ASTRSK Academy, a new AI-powered PR education platform designed to help founders take control of their own media outreach.
The platform is built for founders who aren't ready to hire a full-scale agency but still want agency-quality PR. It distills the same frameworks and methodologies ASTRSK has used to help its clients earn coverage from top-tier publications to niche trades, putting them directly in founders' hands.
"We're entering an era where domain experts can build the thing they're an expert in, not just write about it," said Elliot Tomaeno, Founder & CEO of ASTRSK. "We've spent over 15 years getting startups covered. ASTRSK Academy is an open-sourced system for founders who want to do it themselves. For years, I watched talented founders struggle to tell their stories because they couldn't afford an agency or didn't know where to start. Academy is years of frameworks turned into a system and a set of tools any founder can run on their own, with no PR background required."
ASTRSK Academy is self-paced and structured as a 21-day program with 25 lessons, each requiring as little as 20 minutes per day. Participants progress through three modules covering narrative development, media pitching, and long-term momentum building. Weekly assessments ensure founders demonstrate mastery before advancing. The first three days are free with no card required, and the program includes five integrated AI-powered tools that help founders run PR campaigns more efficiently.
Users are able to generate and refine media pitches with built-in scoring and rewrite suggestions, identify timely news opportunities and story angles in real time, build targeted media lists based on journalists' recent coverage, manage outreach and follow-up through a lightweight PR CRM, and streamline ongoing media engagement with reporter targeting capabilities and saved pitch history.
Upon completing the program, graduates receive a "Press Operator" credential and lifetime access to future educational content through the Academy's ongoing "Grad School" curriculum, which covers emerging topics such as AI search visibility, thought leadership, and newsjacking.
The launch comes at a time when AI tools are fundamentally changing how founders build companies, and how customers find them. Academy also includes a free AI Discovery diagnostic, which shows founders whether AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend their company, and what to fix if they don't. The tool requires no account and runs in about a minute.
As competition for attention intensifies, earned media has become both increasingly important and increasingly difficult for early-stage startups to navigate without guidance.
ASTRSK Academy is available beginning on June 25, 2026, for a one-time payment of $199, which includes lifetime access and future platform updates. ASTRSK PR also plans to introduce Academy+, a premium coaching offering that will provide founders with narrative reviews, mock interviews, launch support, and twice-monthly coaching sessions.
Image courtesy of ASTRSK
