PR for startups: is it only for the rich and famous? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

PR for startups: is it only for the rich and famous? (2020)

anhtho.substack.com

72 pointsAnhTho_FR35 comments

There have only been two founder-spam emails I've received that I ever followed up on, and one of them landed me a feature in The Atlantic and an interview on NPR.

I got an email from a guy who was launching a PR startup, which basically helped founders create relationships with journalists via cold email outreach. I was very early stage and figured it was worth a shot (I think they had a free trial).

I used the platform to email several dozen technology-oriented journalists. Although most of them did not email back, James Hamblin from The Atlantic did. He really liked our innovation, which partially overlapped with his medical reporting beat (our tool makes reading more cognitively efficient, both for neurotypical readers and those with dyslexia, ADHD, or other challenges).

It took a couple months of follow up, but he eventually wrote a solo feature about BeeLine Reader in The Atlantic. [1] The next morning I got an email from a producer on a nationwide NPR show, [2] who heard about us through The Atlantic. It was an amazing couple weeks, and we have benefitted greatly from being able to point to these pieces as social proof in the years since.

The lessons for me were:

• it's a numbers game — you have to reach out broadly to get any leads

• even when a journalist is interested, it will still typically take months to get something written

• there is momentum in media, so try to get follow-on coverage if you are able to get that first hit

• once in a blue moon, founder-spam is actually worth reading

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-bet...

2: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/eurek...

What was the PR startup?

Honestly, I don't even know. I tried searching my inbox for my first contact with James Hamblin, but it looks like they ran the initial outreach through their servers.

After the pieces in The Atlantic and NPR came out, I circled back with the startup and offered to give an enthusiastic testimonial, but I never heard back.

That is exactly the reason I am building https://presscatalog.com , I think solo founders can benefit by pitching to journalists directly. I would really really love if you can give me some feedback.

Happy to!

The first thing I noticed is that the pricing is monthly (and not trivial, at $90/mo to start). Do you expect folks to use the product for a short time when they're focused on PR, or would this be an ongoing thing? I can imagine that there would be periods where startups wouldn't want to be spending that much when they're focused on other things (product, fundraising).

Thank you very much, for now, it is monthly pricing, but certainly an area of improvement. The plan is not to charge in case there are no exports in a month.

Do you get consent from journalists for listing their emails? I thought about building something like that in the past but then the GDPR law took effect in EU and I was scared I could find myself sued to oblivion.

I have been reaching out to some journalists over Twitter and most of them have been supportive. In case they are not I remove them from the list. I am yet to cover all, but I intend to abide by GDPR as much as possible.

And the fact is that there are all manner of lists out there of various levels of quality. I get emails every day even though I'm not a regular journalist.

One way to prove that your product works would be to get your company to featured by journalists :)

Interesting, have you had any success stories?

>it's a numbers game — you have to reach out broadly to get any leads

A caveat to that is that it's a little bit like job hunting. On the one hand, you don't want to stake everything on getting that feature article in The New York Times. At the same time, that doesn't mean you have to blast out the same low quality generic pitch to every email you can get your hands on.

The good PR people I know have relationships with journalists, tend to know what things I'm interested in, the type of coverage I do, etc. You're still going to drill a lot of dry holes, but there are certainly PR folks that I'll listen to if they reach out even if I ultimately decline.

>Explain why the problem you’re solving is impacting society, rather than brag about the amount raised, valuation, or the VCs pedigree

I feel like this fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of "startups". Startups exist to make fast cash for investors, with the downside of often being vaporware and being worth nothing. This is *not* a model in which solving a problem is your objective, your objective is to capture a market or (most likely) be bought by a bigger company who has more confidence than you do. Accept that and producing a shiny toy for the VC ecosystem to play hot potato with.

If you want to *solve* a problem, you should form a business with the expectation of slow, but steady growth and long term objectives (or if you're feeling really bold, a 501c3). Anything which can be created by 2 fresh college grads in 6 months isn't solving anything major, honestly it's probably just a wrapper about some POSIX and a few APIs.

This is it exactly - "startups" that are concerned with solving a problem and NOT with playing with VC are just bootstrapped companies, doing business things.

> (or if you're feeling really bold, a 501c3)

The profit incentive is a powerful one that often leads to solving real problems. Some of the worst-run, most ineffective organizations in the world are nonprofits, so you'd have to be very bold indeed to go that way.

Since some of the biggest money losing ventures are similarly poorly run (ftx, Uber, we work, etc).. wouldn’t it be better to not look at charter type and instead find something that actually differentiates the good from the bad?

> Anything which can be created by 2 fresh college grads in 6 months isn't solving anything major, honestly it's probably just a wrapper about some POSIX and a few APIs.

Um, Google? And yet it solved something major - better search results.

Larry Page was literally a PhD student studying search space. From a basic search, it looks like page rank took at least 3 years to become something coherent and implementable.

And then once it was coherent and implementable, he took venture funding to scale a business around it. I'm not sure I see your point.

> I feel like this fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of "startups". Startups exist to make fast cash for investors...

No, a startup is a company intended to grow large (or be bought out on the expectation of same). It may be small early on but it's different from a small business. Intel and Cisco are classic startups that didn't grow like lightning but were intended from the start to be very large companies. Obviously the investors would like sooner rather than later, but ultimately the intent is larger returns than you'd get in the open market.

The term "startup", like "entrepreneur", has been seriously diluted over the past 10-15 years so any old business is now a "startup" when it begins; while any business person is by definition an "entrepreneur", the old definition of that in English has been watered way down.

There's nothing wrong with small business -- it's the backbone of normal society. But these small businesses designed to flip aren't startups in the classical sense. In particular, in Europe, 99.999% of what I see touted in the blogs and at conferences are simply small businesses that happen to have a web site or API.

Having founded startups both bootstrapped and venture funded I know the difference. A lot of it comes from scratching an itch rather than starting with a desire for cash.

Here's an example of effective startup PR that was followed by rapid growth (August 7 2019). Note how they get the tone just right: a big challenge, a dedicated leader, working around the clock:

https://www.theblock.co/post/35056/inside-the-derivatives-ex...

> "But new Asia-based crypto derivatives exchange FTX has accepted the challenge and has bolted out of the gate; born out of U.S.-trading firm Alameda Research. In the three months since launching, it's turned over up to $200 million in daily volumes, allegedly KYC-ed 10,000 clients, and conducted its own token offering. It's perhaps little surprise, then, that CEO Sam Bankman-Fried answers the phone at 1:00 a.m. local time, still chained to his desk."

That's the kind of marketing approach you need to be a real success!

So far, my wealth did not correlate to my number of PRs on Github, unfortunately.

How about a bootstrapped startup that's past $1MM ARR. No external investors, no big agencies, just a well placed PR.

https://rocket.net/blog/how-rocket-net-bootstrapped-our-way-...

FD: I work at Rocket.net, but did not work there at the very beginning.

I built a linkinbio tool https://Bigger.Bio for adding multiple links to your social medial profiles to help people get more followers and cross promote all their social media.

Will it change the world? No. Can I get any bloody coverage in any of the media? That's a big fat no also.

I'd think that journalists (who have historically been big on Twitter, though less so in the recent month) would be interested in using a tool like this to grow their own following. I wonder if you could pitch it to them not as something they should cover, but something they should use? Then if they like it they might cover it also.

My favorite PR stories will always be the "self-made millionaire" who managed to get himself a multi-million dollar startup valuation via his personal investment from his trust fund and another investment from his father's hedge fund.

I can’t think of any company that fits that profile that I’ve come across PR from. Mind sharing a few names?

I won't name names, but I know of a founder who raised tens of millions without a whisper of a product, any technical chops, or even an impressive resume. His dad was very well-connected in SV, though.

I've followed the son's career, and it seems that he has squandered tens of millions of dollars over the course of a decade. Glassdoor reviews are not kind to his company, or him specifically. Apparently he lies to employees and recruits about milestones and such. I have wondered if his gravy train will ever run out of steam. So far, it hasn't — he lives in a multimillion dollar house and drives fancy cars. Oh, and his startup was covered in TechCrunch, of course!

Depending on who his dad is, losing tens of millions over a decade on the son could be worth it. A lot of bribery works by giving money to family members. The gravy train might only end when his dad is no longer in a position to repay people with favors.

Not the one I'm thinking of, but Kylie Jenner is referred to as a self-made millionaire:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalcovers/2018/07/11/...

For reference, she had a 9 figure trust fund when her father passed away.

Kylie Jenner's father is still alive (Caitlyn Jenner). But yea, not self-made.

Do you have any actual examples of this?

The SV version of getting your kid a "VP" job at a golfing buddy's firm, straight out of graduating from their 2rd-tier rich-people private university, I suppose.

I wasn't sure what universities fall under the "2rd-tier rich-people private university" category, so I asked ChatGPT

> According to recent reports, several second-tier private universities have gained a reputation as being "rich people universities." These schools include New York University, Boston College, and the University of Southern California, among others. These institutions are known for their high tuition costs and their large endowments, which are often funded by wealthy donors. While they may not be as prestigious as Ivy League schools, they are still considered to be among the top tier of private universities in the United States

The stuff about dealing with journalists is pure bs... As soon as they find out that your project isn't funded by big VC, they ghost you. The role of the modern tech journalist isn't to bring attention to new/interesting technologies, they're an extension to the PR arm of big VCs. I've seen a tech journalist in the software development niche being reprimanded (they shut down their blog) shortly after they wrote an article covering one of my open source projects. In the closing article they said something like "I made a few bad decisions..." - It was crystal clear to me what they meant and I suspect they were covering too many indie projects.

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