Why I Didn’t Cover Your Startup

Pitching a major blog is essentially going through the same gate/different keepers as doing PR for the New York Times or whomever. There's a million people who want to go through, and -- dirty little secret -- the ability to reject you is key to the gatekeepers' power and status.

If you're going to send out pitch emails, I'm going to plug Peldi's technique for getting blog coverage yet again: find the wee little blogs in your community who will absolutely melt to learn that anybody reads them. Send them personalized emails. Bootstrap your way up the chain.

In particular, if you've been in a community for a while, you should have a sense for who the really influential people read. Watch which way the stories tend to spread, in particular the outlets a step or two before the story hits the large sites. Pitch that guy. Or, recursively, the guy one step before him. And every time you pitch someone, for goodness' sake, mention as social proof the people on his social graph who already like you. The Internet is Chicago politics with less Daley: "don't be nobody who was sent by nobody".

I got almost a realtime education in this watching my blog bounce around the mainstream media's sites this week. I'm fairly confident somebody at the New York Times reads Marginal Revolution, who reads Slashdot, who reads Reddit. And, of course, everyone in the mainstream media reads the NYT and most of them take direction from it.

Well, my experience of pitching to major bloggers has been frustrating. For example, I've mailed Mashable thrice and filled the Startup Series application but I never heard back from you. I can read from your post that you get a deluge of emails and it is totally understandable from your perspective. But from the startup perspective, it is frustrating not to hear back. After a few emails, you start wondering if anyone is even reading your email or even opening it. Being a major blog, of course, you cannot write about every startup that emails you but even a small (non-automated) reply saying that a particular startup might not be a good fit goes a long way. In fact, I started wondering if my mail was going to spam box or if something was wrong with my email program. Do you think replying to every mail is impossible? Of course, you don't have to do it personally.

One exception is RWW who replied saying they usually don't cover startups of my type. I liked the fact that they cared enough to atleast reply.

Reference thread: How to get major bloggers write about my bootstrapped startup? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351460

I'm not quite sure I still understand what the best way to "pitch" a blog for coverage is.

Are you saying startups should stop pitching you, and pitch the smaller publications instead? and if a story is hot, you'll automatically pick it up? or, should they fill in the form, and email news@mashable, but not email you, personally?

This press thing is new to most hackers, and because it's new, it looks fairly hard from the outside, so we fall back to the one thing we do know: persistence. Pitch everyone, all the time. Is there a better way of getting covered by the big technology blogs out there?

Many of those writers actually read hacker news and I've seen them break stories that were on hacker news the previous day (e.g. note Jolie replying in one of the threads on this page).

It might be better to still pitch big blogs even if they ignore it.

If you get some press from smaller blogs and the big guys read them, it may recall them that you tried to contact them and have them have a second look at it ?