Show HN: Howler AI – Get more press with AI-powered media outreach
howler.media
howler.media
TLDR:
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.)
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Last month we launched Aidem Network: a simple tool to launch your product on hundreds of websites with one click. We expected to get 5-10 customers, but instead got over 50. It was super MVP, so our system (both operations and tech) was primitive––and obviously this amount of demand blew it up entirely.
While we’ve been drowning in emails and operations backlog, the product still worked really well for most of our customers (especially Bitcoin Regret Club who went viral with features from Mashable, The Next Web, and Tecmundo). We got a ton of feedback on what was wrong with our product and how to improve like:
1. “I’m doing an ICO, can I choose which media outlets you target? I don’t want to waste time pitching to Cosmopolitan.” 2. “I would rather you pitch to 10 hyper-targeted media outlets than 150 general ones.” 3. “If the 150 media outlets don’t respond, I want you to iterate the pitch and send it to more.” 4. “I want you to follow up a few times with everyone you’ve pitched to." 5. “I don’t think I’ve framed my product well enough to get press. I want an expert to work with me to refine my pitch for a few days before launch.” 6. “I want to see the emails and confirm them before you send." 7. “I want a report of all the emails you sent with open rates.” 8. “I want to pitch all sorts of media outlets: everything from small niche blogs to CNN. Getting CNN would be great, but so would a few local new stations in Ontario––where our customers are.”
With our version 1 system, all the above was either physically or economically impossible. So for the past few weeks we’ve been working on a pivot away from our original product that solves all this and more.
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.) Here’s how it works:
We personally work with you to refine your pitch to press and framing strategy, build a custom hyper-targeted list of 500 media outlets to pitch to, send your pitch to 500 of the writers (1 writer per outlet), send 2 personalized follow-ups to each of them, then send you a report of everything sent complete with delivery, open, and reply rates. This process takes 1 month and starts at just $149.
We’ve made Howler this affordable by refining some open-source topic modeling (NLP) algos to scan through pitches and company profiles to match them with outlets in our database of 50k+ journalist profiles. We’ve also automated all non-essential operating activities (like physically clicking the “send” button on thousands of emails each day) by building a custom system on top of a stitch-together of almost 10 third party tools (thanks Airtable and Zapier). Now the only thing we spend man-hours on is perfecting our customers’ pitches and engineering.
Thanks for taking the time to read this! We’d love your feedback. We’re also hiring growth hackers with experience in media outreach. @ them here if you know anyone!
PS: All of our past customers will be getting a free month of Howler on us.