A Guide to Pitching Funding and Launch Stories
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
My solution to this is to pitch stories that don't require embargos. "We exist, and we are great" is generally not a tactic I have had much success with anyway. Your affiliations and successes serve as credibility the week of your funding/launch just as well as they do on the day of your funding/launch. The only thing you're gambling on is the time-sensitivity.
I solve this by focusing on the angle. If you tie yourself into an existing popular media narrative/topic/event with a short lifespan, they have to cover you promptly. You also increase your chances of being covered because now you're offering an educated hot take on something everybody is already scrambling to cover. This also boosts social engagement, if you're going for that.
Before a reporter has explicitly agreed to an embargo, he or she is under no obligation to keep a story under wraps. So, in the example email from this post with EMBARGO at the top of it, the journalist could immediately publish your funding amount, investors, etc. without breaking any of the established norms around embargoes.
The correct way to do this is: write an email with very little information ("we just raised a round from a top VC") and ask for explicit agreement ("if you can agree to an embargo of date_time, we'll send over all the details")
edit: I've used Upbeat and think the product is really cool – so while I find this post to be lacking I don't mean to diminish the team that worked on it.
"Can journalists break embargoes? Yes, some journalists notoriously will not honor embargoes. There’s an easy solution though — only include information in the pitch email that you would be ok with a journalist publishing. Once they agree to the embargo, you can share the rest of the story."
However, we've worked on hundreds of campaigns under embargo, and a journalist has never broken one. With early-stage startups, you can't really afford to be cagey with your news, as response rate will be so low anyway. You have to provide the lede upfront to get journalists interested in the first place.
My point is that they are not breaking the embargo by publishing the contents of your initial email.
Whatever you send in the initial email is decidedly not embargoed. Totally get that the risk can be worth it, but you're implying in this post that the information is actually under embargo when sent before explicit agreement.
Journalists take you more seriously when they see you know how works: https://twitter.com/ceodonovan/status/773966062974926848
It's not a problem with the honor code, it's the overhead. Don't make writers interact with you. You'd be surprised by how little TechCrunch writes about early-stage startups anymore. In a given week of 250-300 stories, there might be 10-20 that are early-stage companies who have raised <$10M and don't have a truly novel hook (our co-founder used to be in prison!).
Send over the entire press kit, full description, etc. in the first email. Generally, if you tell the reporter you're announcing on X date, they'll not publish before that. Especially if you're launching a new product or something, they don't want to link to your site when the newsworthy bit isn't live.
My advice for most startups is to reach out to TechCrunch, the best publication in your vertical (e.g. Skift for travel), and a local tech paper/site. For something as routine as a small fundraise or YC announcement, try to get three good clips. In a given YC class there are literally dozens of companies with the same basic story so don't try to position yourself as you've got inside info on the new iPhone.
If your company is legitimately novel, so novel that your grandparents would get the pitch and be interested, by all means go wide, but for the average "We help people find cheaper airfare" or some SaaS thing just choose a few high-value targets and get back to work.
The insight here into TechCrunch is too true unfortunately. It's every startup's dream to be in TechCrunch, but we see publications like VentureBeat have much better engagement.
The "software-powered PR agency" is more a description of the appartus/mechanism rather than the goal, so perhaps it'd be more useful to start with our mission. We want to enable anyone with a great story to reach those who want to hear it. Rather than trying to build up the audience yourself, we believe that it is much more effective to connect sources of great stories with storytellers who 1) already have an audience, and 2) can do a better job of telling the story for that audience than you can.
This is the role that today's PR agencies occupy as middlemen. However, they come with prohibitive price tags that restrict access for most stories, and their principle means of making these connections is through individual relationships with both sources and journalists, much the same way it has been done for decades. We think it's time for a change.
The software-powered part comes into play because we ultimately want to create a marketplace that more efficiently facilitates these connections— using both public and proprietary data, we're starting to get a really good understanding of what stories specific storytellers are looking for, and we connect them to the best sources.
(To expand on our process from David's answer): We believe that the modern PR agency system is broken. In the new digital media landscape, journalists rely less on traditional "relationships," as the news cycle moves increasingly quickly and journalists are expected to write upwards of five articles a day. This means they need more stories and sources, and they need them in a simple and straightforward process.
We're leveraging software to make the process more efficient and transparent for both companies and journalists. We've built a proprietary database that allows us to figure out what journalists are actually interested in, and to improve our targeting through matching algorithms compared to the traditional "spray and pray" model of many PR firms. We've also built an internal CRM that allows us to send out personalized pitches and easily monitor journalist engagement across campaigns.
For customers, we've built a dashboard that means that PR is no longer a "black box." Customers can follow the progress of outreach campaigns, from the timeline to advanced journalist engagement analytics like open rate and the the time they've spent on the media brief. They can also receive inbound media opportunities from sources like Help a Reporter Out and follow journalists who have engaged in their campaigns.
By leveraging software, we're able to charge a fraction of the price of PR firms. We're also constantly working on new tools for both journalists and companies like Question Board (https://questionboard.onupbeat.com/) and Journalists You Should Follow (https://app.upbeatpr.com/find-journalists/).
We have an FAQ that breaks some of this down in greater detail (https://www.upbeatpr.com/faq/).
Couple questions:
1) How long after receiving funding do you have to announce it? Does it have to be within 6 months, or if it was never announced, could you still announce the funding a year or more later?
2) You said less than $5M is not notable, should startups even try if they raised less than that? What should they do instead / are there alternatives?
Cheers!
1) As long as there hasn't been any public notice of your funding (from your VC's blog, an errant mention in a a round-up article, or even a tweet), you can make the announcement when it's most advantageous. Journalists don't care about when the actual round was closed as much as that it hasn't been covered yet.
That being said, if it did happen a while ago and a journalist happens to connect the dots and ask why you waited so long to announce, you should have a good reason prepared. We've never seen it be an issue.
2) You definitely should try! It just means there's less of a guarantee the news will be covered. We've seen funding announcements of as little as $500k get covered. In these cases though, it helps to have another piece of news to include: a substantial product release, a notable new advisor, a major partnership, etc.