How I Pitched TechCrunch And How To Get Press When You Launch Your Startup | Hacker News Reader

How I Pitched TechCrunch And How To Get Press When You Launch Your Startup

jasonlbaptiste.com

136 pointsjasonlbaptiste26 comments

The true value in this post is that you gave your unedited email to TC. The world of information in general needs more of this. I'm tired of blog posts about how to do things - everybody wants to reveal what they think worked (e.g. the Secret Sauce) without showing how they acted on that advice (e.g. the meal and its recipe). I don't want a template of your advice, I want to see what YOU did.

Thanks for being strong and bold enough to provide a REAL example!

Yes. He shows a very good example of a short pitch, to the point, catchy without being misleading.

I'd like to see the initial response he got. I know the TC folks, did he get more than "send me more?"

Here's how it played out:

-Mike emailed back, asking Alexia to check it out.

-She called me about 30 minutes after.

-Went through vision, pitch, answered questions.

-She needed screenshots in a demo fashion, so we cooked them up in <45.

-Resulting article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/27/turn-your-blog-into-an-ipad...

I'm sure it doesn't always go like this. This is just one data point / use-case.

Looks great, Jason. Congratulations!

And +1 for the Zero7 track (although I'm not sure how appropriate it is for the product :-P).

The interesting thing is how the real thing doesn't necessarily follow all the advice, yet worked anyway. I don't think it tells a story, which is the primary tip. Of course, maybe there isn't a story you can really tell in a sentence or less.

On a different meaning of 'story', writing a headline for your email and an opening that the blogger can more or less copy and paste is always welcomed by less diligent bloggers :)

The real story was told over the phone FYI. Should have been clearer

Aha. Still, telling a story to get that phone call is sometimes crucial!

thank you :). I'm actually updating it with the subject line. I literally spent 30-60 minutes on that subject line testing how it would show up in Gmail.

I was wondering if you purposefully left it out! Very interesting post, and it made me rewrite my pitch-email (again). Thanks!

Ha, no no. I was sitting down at lunch, reading comments, and im like holy crap, i forgot an important part.

You can check out another successful one here: http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/10/18/how-i-got-featured-...

The fact that the email came from someone that's pretty well known and respected (Jason) may have also helped in this case. Regardless, good read.

It probably did a little more than help. By my estimations, having a reputation is far more important than having a product, especially when pitching to TC.

It was a valuable read like the others. Would you mind sharing how you created the product demo video? It would be another nice read if you covered this as a process.

Doing a new one now actually. Literally spent a lot of today scripting, online at bestbuy waiting to get better tripod. Will write an article up.

Fwiw, I find PadPressed an awful iPad experience. It is difficult to navigate the site, navigation between pages is slow, the body text font is not properly antialiased and is difficult to read, and from the front of the site, it wasn't clear I had to swipe to open the site. It's obviously trying to make a site feel like Flipboard, but no thanks.

It's the prototype. Were getting there and have lots of work to do. The direct link pages ie- what you see from here on an iPad needs work/ isn't like most others.

Okay. I went to the front of your site though and still found it a sub-optimal web-experience. If it's any consolation, I also hate the iPad optimized version of gmail. The iPad has a full browser, give me the full web.

Typo: I think you meant "Stunts are an unsustainable way to do press" instead of "Stunts are a sustainable way to do press"

thank you. Someone else pointed that out too. Going to stop being lazy and fix now.

I actually have a draft of a similar post (except for TUAW, LikeHacker, Mashable, and the like in addition to TC). It should be up today, look out for it. :)

EDIT: posted, check it out at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805510

did you send the email to tips@techcrunch or directly to mike?

The real question is, did it pay off? Did going exclusively to TC generate the traffic and buzz you were looking for? Would love to hear more about the results.

So PadPressed has somewhere close to 200 customers total. Not a ton in the grand scheme of things, but for an alpha version we're really happy.

I know I sit and preach multiple customer acquisition methods and distribution, but honest truth is, we haven't done any of that over the past 90 days except for the TC coverage. Our shit has been GHETTO. Literally, I left spelling mistakes, unoptimized funnels, analytics,etc. just to see at the worst case scenario how we'd do.

We launched, got the TC coverage, had an influx of customer support (supporting your startup is so overlooked) from customers, and then a trickle down effect of press. Some say the TC bump doesn't do much, but in our case it paid off. We're doing a real release, the new design is breathtaking, and planning real distribution channels/partnerships.

Given all of that optimization, I think that the last line of the email is a little superfluous:

"You Should Check Out JasonLBaptiste.com"

that's part of my signature. if you've ever emailed with me before that's there.

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