How I started BetaList | Hacker News Reader

How I started BetaList

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92 pointsmarc38 comments

As someone who went through almost the same exact process, these are my tips for getting coverage:

-Keep your email brief (three sentences, tops).

-Tell a story. Many of the stories on publications like TechCrunch are as much about the founders as they are about the startups. Look for an interesting angle related to yours and pitch it accordingly.

-Bloggers have to create several stories a week. Do as much of their job for them as you can by framing the outline of the story they will write in your pitch for coverage (related to previous point). If you started it as a side-project while in college, great, mention that. If your startup is in the same space as [hot trendy startup], great, mention that. Just make sure the whole thing is less than four sentences.

All that said- don't waste your time trying to get covered if you don't have a regular user base. Yes it is true, if you are covered it will result in an enormous spike in traffic. That spike will quickly diminish and you will be back to trying to find more users. I'm very happy for the author that BetaList turned into a profitable business, but getting covered and hatching a profitable, sustainable business because of it is the exception, not the norm.

Not to say PR isn't useful (and surprisingly easy to game), but that should come after you've grown a reliable customer base.

Great advice here. So many founders pitch their startups by describing the features of their product instead of telling a story. Whenever you're selling something you want to make it as easy as possible for the other person to say yes. You want to remove any concerns. Same when pitching a journalist. Don't let them figure out why your startup is interesting, but explain it. How is your startup different? How is it remarkable? Whether it's the product, team, vision, etc doesn't really matter, as long as you've got something interesting to tell that the audience of the journalist will love to read.

(Founder of BetaList)

I totally agree with keeping the message short. Also I have read from several other sources that telling a story is key. But how are you supposed to tell a story in 4 sentences?

You don't have to tell the whole story in the first email. In fact, it's often better to only tell half the story so they get curious to hear the rest.

The title of my article is a decent example: "How I tricked TechCrunch into writing my startup"

Happy to give some feedback based on your individual situation if you like. Email: marc[at]betalist.com

This reminds me of Fredric Brown, who was able to tell a horror story in two sentenced: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."

So I don't think it should be that hard. I guess the idea is to _not_ tell everything, but let them directly see the potential of developing on some loose ends of that story.

Don't feel the need to be courteous or overly polite. In my pitch I didn't even use complete sentences.

Citing my previous example:

Hi,

My name is X and I'm a founding member of [insert name of startup]. We've developed a new way to [do awesome thing phrased as simply as possible, preferably in the context of other popular startups] and are launching today. We like your publication and wanted to give you first crack at a write-up.

Please message me if you're interested and would like more details.

Regards,

The title should actually be "How I trick all of you into reading this story". I'm probably not alone in hoping that this story contained some slick hack.

Nice! That will be my next article:

How I tricked Hacker News into reading about my writing about how I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup.

I'll probably read that one too

+1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.

The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.

Ah! I think this gets lost somewhere in the telling of the story.

Yeah, started skimming it, looked at what betalist is (startup reporting service)... link on startupnews to post by startup founder of startup tracking service on how he got coverage from a startup oriented news site for his startup. This is some inception-level circle jerking IMO. "The best minds of our generation" :)

I was honestly out to thrash you guys in the comments when i read the title. But the article indeed turned out interesting. I guess this is what people have now termed "growth hacking"!

absolutely - this was fascinating! that is some serious lateral thinking!

Haha. Glad you found the article interesting in the end.

I made sure to explicitly thank TechCrunch at the end of the article as BetaList wouldn't be there if it weren't for them.

And don't forget, while it is unethical to intentionally deceive a reporter, a large part of a journalist's job is to vet sources and do some research to make sure claims are true.

In reality, blogs make their money on advertising so if they publish downright fabrications or knowingly stretch the truth, they do not care as long as they are getting clicks.

In other words, don't feel bad for the blogs.

I honestly didn't consider for a second I'd feel bad for the blogs. The reality is they get tons of e-mails and you have to sell it like you'd sell your handmade flutes in the market to somebody that is bombarded by people selling flutes. Now, lying about it through your teeth is a different story.

Not sure if you're saying this was unethical, but what I emailed them was 100% true. It's just that I disclosed only one reason for starting BetaList (wanting a platform like that) and not the other one (wanting to leverage TechCrunch's article to also promote my own startup). Whether that's deceit depends on whether you consider the other reason being relevant to TechCrunch. As far as they were concerned they wrote about a cool platform that was interesting to their audience.

It would be different of course if I swapped out the sites at the last minute, lied to them about how long I've been working on it, etc, etc, but that wasn't the case.

Again, not sure if you were saying you thought it was unethical, just trying to clarify.

Certainly not. I don't think there's anything unethical about what you described.

What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's.

If I send a bogus tip to the Washington Post and they immediately run a story on it without question, that's incredibly irresponsible on their part and the fault lies with them. That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the same thing happens on a daily basis on blogs and slightly lesser-known news outlets with readership in the millions.

100% agree. Thanks for clarifying.

(In this case there was not much to vet for TechCrunch of course as they could see what I described exist)

This was actually an enjoyable read. The best part for me was making good on the promise they made with BetaList, having successfully featured Pinterest, Mailbox, IFTTT, and so on.

Love the hacks that turn into something useful. I know it may have been a 'trick' or whatever, but this is an example that proves that "scratch your own itch" to build a great product. He could've used BetaList for his own startup, so he built it.

That it was built quickly, using Tumblr, and then evolved is just being fast on your feet and doing good work.

There's a great IFTTT trigger that takes betali.st startups and adds them into an email[1]. I have it directed to a folder in my mail which I go through once in a while to find good products I like.

[1]: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098

Cool! Thanks for sharing.

Keep in mind we publish about 4-5 startups a day, so if it's too much we also offer an 'official' newsletter which you'll receive either daily or weekly depending on your preferences. http://betalist.com/newsletter

I prefer the individual emails for each startup so I can read the startup name and first line of each description quickly. This is what my email folder looks like right now[1].

It quickly builds up to 100+ emails if you don't check it every second day.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/oUNaFSO.png

Oh wow, thanks for sharing. That's great feedback. I didn't consider that approach.

Would it be helpful if we provided a daily or weekly email that showed the startups like that? Name + pitch.

Glad I could help! That kind of option would be nice. Someone in this thread mentions that short pitches are easier to consume.

Since there are many startup posts everyday, it's hard to go through all of them in detail, so I have to pick out the best one from all to discover at the end of the day.

Maybe there's a way to build up on this concept? Looking forward to seeing what comes out, good luck!

So in order to "trick" techcruch into writing about your website, you made a more interesting website that techcrunch would write about which would in turn, help you gain enough leverage for them to write about your other website.

This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.

"How do you make a small fortune in the airline industry?"

"Start with a large fortune..."

Fair point. I don't think the initial website was necessarily uninteresting (it was later featured by Fast Company, The Next Web, Wired, and many more), but it was likely at a too early-stage for TechCrunch to feature. My way around that was create something quick that, due to its simplicity, could be launched immediately and therefore more likely to get picked up by TC.

He didn't trick them. He stilled emailed them.

That headline makes no sense.

My goal was to get publicity for Openmargin. I created a quick site called BetaList, emailed them about it, and as an end result got publicity for Openmargin. That was the trick.

Thank you for taking the time to write this inspiring post!

You're welcome!

Of course part of why I wrote it was to create additional publicity for BetaList and myself, but IMO one of the best marketing strategies is to inspire others with your own stories.

linkBait spammy spam spam. Bah.

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