Muck Rack Revenue Growth: How CEO Gregory Galant Scaled to Over $50 Million ARR

For most of Muck Rack’s life, the smartest people Gregory Galant knew kept giving him the same review. “Everyone was like — you’re growing 50, 70% year over year, and you’re profitable. Like, you idiot, why don’t you raise money and grow 300% year over year?”

He told this to a room full of founders at SaaS Open in April 2024, two years after the punchline arrived: a $180 million round in 2022, taken at what he says was over $50 million in ARR, with him and his co-founder still holding majority control. “Since 2022, no one ever says that anymore,” he said. “Everyone’s like, well, what’s the secret to being profitable?”

The secret, as he delivers it, is one sentence long. “Spend less than you make.” The interesting part is everything Muck Rack did while following it.

A podcast, a Twitter handle, and an $8 budget

Galant did not set out to build PR software. He started podcasting in 2005 — “originally you could only listen on your iPod” — interviewing founders like Reid Hoffman “back when LinkedIn had 50 employees.” One 2005 guest was Ev Williams, then running a podcasting startup called Odeo. Odeo didn’t work; Williams pivoted it into Twitter. Galant, watching from the front row, signed up early enough to claim @gregory.

Being early to social media produced the Shorty Awards in 2008 — he and co-founder Lee Semel built the first vote-by-tweet system, and within 24 hours it was the top trending term on Twitter. The awards became a real business (DJ Khaled, Karlie Kloss and Lizzo have all turned up), but the useful part was a side effect: instant coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BBC, from a founder who knew exactly how hard press usually is. Journalists were clearly living on social media. There was nowhere to find them in one place.

So they built one. The name came from Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1906 dubbed investigative reporters “muckrakers”; journalists had long since adopted the insult as a badge. “We embraced our bootstrapping constraint. We had an $8 branding budget, which is what it cost to buy a domain name on GoDaddy at the time.” The first version of muckrack.com was built in two weeks — “kind of wafer thin” — and over 10,000 journalists asked to be added in the first year.

10,000+journalists asked to be added to muckrack.com in its first year

The revenue idea came from the users. New York PR people kept telling Galant they used his free site to decide whom to pitch. “We have the data. We even have a little brand amongst these people. And like idiots, we’re not charging for it.” In 2011, Muck Rack relaunched as SaaS.

The slog, and where it flips

Nothing about the next stretch was fast. “It was a real slog to get to a million — pretty much three, four years of just hacking away at it.” GetLatka’s records put Muck Rack at $1 million in 2014, three years after the pivot. Total outside money in that era: under $200,000 of angel capital — the only primary funding the company took until 2022 — topped up with profits from the Shorty Awards. Galant answered support tickets himself “for longer than I care to admit.”

From there the compounding is visible in the record: $6 million by 2016, $21 million by 2018, $34 million by 2020, with a GetLatka estimate of $50 million at the end of 2021 — the 50–70% profitable growth investors kept calling too slow.

His most practical observation is about where bootstrapping actually hurts — and where, he says, it flips.

His working rule through all of it: keep two to three months of total expenses in the bank, and reinvest the rest.

Bets a spreadsheet can’t see

Galant is frank that some of what worked would never have survived an ROI review. Muck Rack runs a free PR certification, academy.muckrack.com, aimed at people too junior to buy anything — “we know we’re not gonna see ROI on that for three or four years,” the bet being that today’s student is a director in four years and a VP with budget in ten. He points at the company’s Google Trends line as the cumulative result of PR, events, content and the academy stacked over fifteen years.

“A lot of us, when we’re bootstrapping, feel like we have to be so analytical. With a lot of these long-term brand bets, you’re not gonna be able to see it immediately in a spreadsheet, unfortunately. But as I’ve seen our continual lift, especially for profitable growth, it really matters.”

Gregory Galant, co-founder, Muck Rack

The 2022 round

“Never too late to do your Series A”

Muck Rack had been swatting away investor emails for years when Susquehanna Growth Equity got a yes in 2022 — a firm Galant had known for a while, at a moment when the company was big enough to raise on its own terms. The round gave the company “firepower should we ever wanna do an acquisition” and, he admits, worked as a signal: “we’re here to go long, to go big.” Then came the branding question. “What do we call this round? I looked it up — Series A just means it’s your first series. So I’m like, well, it’s our first institutional capital, so it’s a Series A. Never too late to do your Series A.”

What actually changed was recruiting. Before the round, executives quietly wondered whether a bootstrapped company was serious — “this unfortunate perception of bootstrappers that we’re spending most of our time surfing or playing golf” — and whether the equity would ever be worth anything. After it, the questions stopped. In the year before the talk, Muck Rack added a new CRO, CMO and AI lead: the CRO in the Bay Area, the CMO in Boston, the CFO in New Hampshire. The company had ditched its Soho office — rooftop and all — after surveying New Yorkers who admitted they’d only come in “once or twice a week to see my friends,” and Galant says it has “pretty much quadrupled in size” since going remote. The office got replaced by offsites; the December before the talk, 250-plus people went to Cancún.

On GetLatka’s books as of 2026, Muck Rack’s revenue stands at an estimated $143.1 million — an estimate first logged in October 2024 — with a team last recorded at 315 in March 2024, and the 2022 round still the only funding line. Founded 2009, still active, still majority founder-owned. The current numbers live on the Muck Rack profile; the talk itself is on the interview page.

GetLatka records for Muck Rack; the Dec 2021 and Oct 2024 rows are GetLatka estimates.

Thirteen years of being called an idiot, one afternoon of being asked for the secret. “Spend less than you make.”

SourcesGregory Galant’s SaaS Open talk, April 2024; GetLatka records and estimates for Muck Rack through October 2024.