Posterous (YC S08) launches group blogs that are also email lists

We're definitely excited about the potential for this feature to grow into its own product!

You can expect improvements to this coming fast and furious.

Would love for you to use Posterous for this, and would love to chat with you offline about how it works out for your team and how we can get better. My contact info is in my profile. =)

For a brand that's gaining momentum, getting coverage is a bit easier. You might already follow the writers on twitter or vice versa, or if you're in SF/the valley you might even grab coffee with them.

For a company starting out, you need to either have a product so thoroughly badass that it trounces something else that is hot, or you need a connection / intro to someone who knows them well.

It doesn't have to be Michael Arrington himself -- in fact, he's obviously such a busy and important guy that it's almost impossible to get his attention. However, at each of these blogs there are staff writers. They're the ideal person to reach out to -- they're looking for great stories, and hey, you've got one.

Final tip: use bullet points. Include screenshots if you can. If you make it so compelling and so obvious that it's a story, and you practically write it for them, you make their life easier and that makes it a no-brainer for them to write about you.

As for API -- that sounds very cool. We're very psyched about becoming a more open platform to let people build apps on top of Posterous.

Always know, and work an angle. Most stories have multiple facets - the entrepreneur's personality, background, the product, it's target market, where it's developed, what tech it uses etc - they can all be turned into angles interesting to specific blogs and bloggers. Take every single facet and work out who that angle will be appealing to and pitch it to them right.

And I'm not sure how a mundane feature gets to the top of the homepage just because the company behind it was funded by this site's owner....oh, wait.

Absolutely. Great ideas never die.

It's something we talked about even back during last summer when we first launched Posterous. It's great to finally be able to put it out there.

Once we launched group blogs though -- we did start hearing a lot of requests for this feature too. There's absolutely a validation piece to it. When users ask for it, you know there's something there.

Good point. I did an experiment a few weeks ago to see how this was handled on posterous by sending an email to a friend and cc'ing post@posterous.com.

It was handled well on their end with a solid line on the left side of the reply. So it looks like something they are already prepared for.