The hacker's guide to getting press

customerdevlabs.com

14 points·jgonzalez··4 comments

This seems committed to a "big bang" launch model. It's often more useful to give different perspectives on your product and your startup to different writers depending upon their audience's interests. This seem more about how to automate the mass email of a one size fits all press release. You are probably just as well served by a service like e-releases.com, including supplementary material, if you want to get the same message in front of a lot of reporters in a short period of time.

Fwiw, I've used press release services like this in the past, and haven't gotten coverage like this. No doubt a targeted approach per author would be more effective than mass email, but from my experience, this certainly more effective than a press release.

My experience has been that ereleases.com is a cost effective vehicle for getting the word out (I have no relationship to them other than as a customer). Part of the variance our different outcomes may be due to market focus and differences in content of the release.

Mass e-mailing reporters you have no relationship with strikes me as a poor way to make a first impression: I would spend the same time cultivating relationships with a key set of reporters who write for an audience likely to be interested in your company or product.

The risk to me in the blog post is that you are suggesting to technical startup entrepreneurs that they can code their way out of developing some necessary relationships with bloggers and reporters.

I've used MTurk before to find emails and I know that part works. The Google news API to get leads is ingenious!

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