Ask YC: How do you get your press? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: How do you get your press?

55 pointsiamelgringo24 comments

Just curious. I'm seeing people get press on places like the NYT, Business Week, etc... For those of you that have gotten that type of press, how did you manage it? Any tips or tricks?

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YC-funded startups get it partly through us, partly through YC "alumni," and partly through random connections. Reporters now often approach us when they want to write about startups, because between 118 alumni, odds are there are at least 1 or 2 that would fit in their story. Plus when YC-funded startups meet reporters, they tend to introduce them to other YC-funded startups.

Basically YC + the alumni act like a large surface that's highly refractive: the large area means lots of inquiries hit it at some point, and then when they do they tend to bounce around within it.

Damn you and your awesome metaphors, PG :)

Damn you and your fanboy comments ;)

Interesting. This is OT, but before your comment, my little joke was at like +5 or +6 within an hour or so. After your comment was posted, people immediately began downvoting me. I've seen this quite a bit...people seem to agree with a comment until someone else disagrees, then the community sentiment shifts the other way.

It's the primary problem with group mentality and crowdsourcing. Sometimes it takes a second commenter to change somebody's opinion - not in this case, but if somebody sounds convincing, gets upvoted, then gets a powerful argument from somebody else, the votes start swaying.

That's probably a good thing, because it shows that people aren't just mindlessly upvoting. The follow-up comments are convincing people to think. The problem of course comes from the fact that because we can see the points a comment gets, we assume that we're being judged when really the points are effectively meaningless.

(If we're allowed to comment like fanboys, can we congratulate PG for breaking 40,000 karma?)

This brings up an interesting point: why are the vote counts even shown on HN? Why not just use them for ranking and ordering, but don't display them, at least by default?

I've tried to bring that up a lot - I honestly don't know what vote counts add to the conversation beyond bias on the part of the readers. That's the one thing that a site like Metafilter offers that Hacker News doesn't, and I feel like it's something that HN and Reddit and Digg before it all lack: the ability to speak your mind openly without any worries about karma and public downvoting.

I feel that there is a need for feedback after undertaking an action. If you click a button, and nothing happens, you'll quit clicking the button. We do want people to vote.

So...

How about hiding the points until after you vote. That way, you're not influenced, but you still get feedback that is necessary to keep you voting.

That's the other thing that's been proposed. I've always felt that doesn't seem like an elegant solution to me. The act of the button's disappearing once you've clicked is a response enough for me. It also serves as a visual cue of what you've read and what you haven't.

The question I'd ask you is what matters more, the discussion or the moderation? Shouldn't the attraction to the people commenting here be the quality of the conversation, rather than the ability to vote things up and down? The latter is important, but does it have to be seen?

I agree, it's a pretty elegant solution. However, I like seeing how many points a comment has, before I vote, for several reasons:

* I often don't vote

* to see how, exactly, the community feels about it

* to see if I should actually read it

* to get a feel for the story's exposure (more votes, more eyeballs)

This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the first point... I don't want to have to vote on each comment to reap the benefits of the other items on the list.

The second item on the list allows me to have the "blink" effect. By taking in the vote #'s of hundreds or thousands of comments, I just get a "feel" for what HN likes and dislikes. To me, that's it's important.

I think something in between would be a color-coded and/or normalized indicator of each comment's popularity. Kind of like how the grayed out text is more intense for more downvoted comments... upvoted comments could have some indicator of how popular they are.

If normalized, it would show how popular they are, but only relative to other comments with the same parent as them.

Just my $.02

The best advice I can offer is target your reporters and be persistent.

My experience was very different because I rode a wave of interest around something and put myself in front of that wave.

What I found to be effective was actually reaching out to various reporters/bloggers who have written on that subject or similar subjects in the past.

I wrote fairly specific emails to both an LA times and Wired journalist and after being published on both sites, from there it snowballed with many journalists (TV/radio/newspapers) soon contacting me afterwards.

Also, one thing I did do (which was a little naughty at the time) was create news that I thought was unbelievable at the time, but pushed it to as many gossip columnists and bloggers as I could find (mostly disreputable folk) and through various network effects (and many many hours of typing emails) the same news ended up on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk for about 16 hours.

Screenshot below - the rickrolled again story in #1 spot on Yahoo's UK homepage... was a result of my imagination.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/yahoo-page.jpg

This same story was also on Cnet's homepage too, but I never got a screenshot of that sorry.

Really the best thing I would do is set up a whole lot of Google Alerts around a subject that your startup is targeting and whenever a story pops up online, contact that writer with your perspective.

I did this approach during October last year, this is the traffic that was generated for the entirety of the blog's short lifespan (that month essentially).

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...

These journalist's incomes depend on putting content out there, help them out, they don't bite.

It's very important to have a Press Kit that allows reporters to quickly see why they'd want to talk to you. You can see an example of ours: http://www.dawdle.com/press/ I give topics we're good at, and proof of social status. Note that our Press Releases are at the very bottom of the page.

In addition, most people I talk to think about getting press for their company's launch or greatest new feature - that's wrong. The best press comes from being a good resource to reporters, regardless of the story. You want to be mentioned as an example of a general trend. Those are the stories that have "legs" - i.e. another reporter will contact you for their related story on something similar.

Mike Arrington's talk from startup school on dealing with press is quite good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbUnatPfSgg

It's not really geared towards the mainstream press, but a good watch nonetheless.

Upvoted from zero. I am not the biggest Arrington's fan to put it mildly, but this talk is actually quite insightful.

A part of the process that I think everyone is ignoring here is also to pay attention to what your story is. It takes a lot of careful time to think about what makes a great story. Pay attention to what the press writes about and where they see conflict (always a good source for a story). Creating your story around how you are going to be a game changer relative to 4 unknown startups vs how you are going to revolutionize a market dominated by google, microsoft, etc.. journalists and press will obviously write the latter.

why? b/c what they care about is driving page views and readers. some do care about the topic and the story and trade on their reputation for being a deep expert. But remember, they need to make money. help them craft a story that will drive page views (which equals $ / CPM).

Have your collateral (screenshots, product videos, exec summaries) so that they can just clip in your content.

there's some press that will take the time to really understand your story. there's others that fall into the category of, "if i spend 5 minutes writing a story here i can generate tens of thousands of page views which gives me $x".

make it easy for both categories to write their articles.

remember.. it's all about understanding other people's motivations.. not yours.

Serendipity is your friend. The very first article I had written about my company (Digital Envoy) happened because I randomly met this reporter at an event (Red Herring Venture Market South - that tells you how long ago this was since both the magazine and the event are now defunct). This one story (online only, not even in the magazine) ended up leading our first customer to us and getting them to signup.

So make sure you get out there and network and talk about what you're doing. No one will know what you're working on and, more importantly, they won't be able to talk about it if you just sit at your desk all day slaving away at code.

HARO - http://www.helpareporter.com/ It's a good way to reach reports.

In addition to what Paul mentioned, we've received a few minor hits from HARO as well. Most of them (there are 3 per day) aren't useful, but they're usually worth a skim. Also, if you don't have a company blog, start one. It's a good way for people to see what you're up to and encourages feedback and inquiries. We try to update our company blog once per week [1].

My advice is to be willing to talk to anyone and respond to customer feedback emails as quickly and helpfully as possible. You never really know who's on the other side of the email. And please don't ever ever use form letters; you're dealing with people, not robots.

One of our biggest press hits at TicketStumbler was in the Financial Times [2] [3]. Paul referred the writer to us as a freelancer who was still in graduate school, and I honestly had no idea the article would appear in the FT. I always figured if someone cares that much about what we're doing, I'd be more than happy to talk to them.

[1] http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/

[2] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2...

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442435

I got great press with mefeedia in the videoblogging years (2004, 2005). The press was all over it (NYT, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone etc...), and I had a service that could provide them with some numbers. That and being available (my phone nr. was on the homepage).

Why is this being down voted, seriously, I'm interested? I figured if you were going to down vote it would be polite to explain your reason(s) to the commenter.

People usually don't explain their reasons. It does seem like there's a rash of senseless automatic downvoting these days that I don't remember happening a year ago.

Things I've worked on have been featured in the NYT, TechCrunch(IT), Forbes & Readwriteweb. In my experience - reporters/journalists are often looking for stories, usually on blogs or through search engines.

In one instance - I reached out to a pretty small blog and got put on the map that way (NYT).

In another instance a Forbes writer was searching google and we kept popping up.

Also - I've offered favors to bloggers + try give them "story" flow. I believe this may have had a partial influence on our TechCrunch coverage.

Also - I have a VERY good feeling that bloggers/press check out the front page of Hacker News often...

I have seen Mike Arrington link to stories on HN through Twitter, so I would say that your final feeling is quite true.

This worked for me when I was looking to get some press with a project in Chicago: I got written up in my local alt-weekly. It's easier than getting in on the tv station or newspaper door, and also, the reporters at those tv stations and newspapers often read those alt-weeklies, and if they see something worth biting on they will bite. They bit, and I had articles in the Chicago Sun-Times and a Toronto newspaper, as well as interviews with four or five radio stations, and a talk with Playboy magazine.

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