VCs are in a different business with a different model. VC is always great for the VC, not always so much for the founder. So this is a great alternative
38 karma · joined September 10, 2016
Cision is one of those behemoths that doesn't care too much about UI or UX, or improving their product quickly for that matter.
Used Cision in the past and hated it, figured there was a better way to build something for this use-case.
Working on a lot of data science opportunities here + integrating other web services like gmail to 10x the efficiency of the PR outreach process.
For 'fish' we have almost 17k results. A lot of media outlets related to fish like Fishipedia.
For 'fishing travel' there are results from Voyages de Peche (which I'm pretty sure is literally "fishing trips" in French), who writes about 'fish' and 'travel'.
We have their writer Julien's name, email, and phone number here.
If you're not in there and want to be added, just let me know. If you're in there and don't want to be, just leave a message in the live chat of our site. Same goes if you'd like to update your tags!
From launching our own blog we’ve discovered just how much a PITA it is to maintain it—let alone actively grow it.
Blogs are great growth mechanisms for products (SEO, targeted traffic, branding, etc.), but they also require a lot of love & attention. Beyond writing the blog in the first place, you also have to get it in front of the right people.
We heard all about this problem when we launched Scribble (an on demand blog writing subscription for startups), and thought we had the right background to address it.
Exclamation is a seamless way to promote your blog posts on targeted subreddits. Here’s how it works:
1. Send us a link when you publish a new post 2. We’ll generate a custom list of 10 targeted subreddits for each post you submit 3. We’ll hand-submit the posts (to avoid getting flagged as spam) to the subreddits within 5 days
Exclamation is for those who have enough time to write a great blog post, but not enough to share it everywhere they should. Your blog should help your product grow, not suck time away from working on it.
Exclamation is really exciting when it’s combined with Scribble: essentially with these two you can automate both the writing of your blog and the promotion of it. You can just sit back, relax, and leave your entire blog on autopilot. That way you can focus on what actually matters: product & users.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this! We’ll be around all day to answer questions.
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Last month we launched Howler: AI-powered media outreach. So far Howler’s working really well for our users and were excited to make it better and better.
In doing so we’ve had to build out a comprehensive database of journalists that includes their name, email, and tags that represent what they’re interested in writing about (determined by what they’ve written about before, where they write, and what they’ve tweeted about). We have just about 500,000 journalists now.
Our goal is to perfect the matching of stories to journalists, helping startups get featured faster and helping journalists get less spam. Our tagging system is great this (and getting better), and we think it’s the right time for this database to be a standalone product.
While there are a few comparable services, they’re either a. too small (10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too niche (only TechCrunch emails).
In our experience with cold media outreach, we’ve found it to be a game of numbers. Assuming you’re only pitching to people interested in writing about stories similar to yours, around 1% - 2% on average will feature you. Given this, a database of 10k contacts isn’t very useful (especially when only a small number of the contacts are relevant).
The best strategy is to find as many relevant journalists as possible (a few thousand), and push cold email campaigns with a compelling story (but emails must be direct, not en masse spam––like sniping).
As always, we’ll be here all day to answer questions!
Check us out on PH here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/press-hunt
- Matt
P.S. Our goal is to launch 2 products a month for all of 2018. This is product #5 of the year!
TLDR:
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.)
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Last month we launched Aidem Network: a simple tool to launch your product on hundreds of websites with one click. We expected to get 5-10 customers, but instead got over 50. It was super MVP, so our system (both operations and tech) was primitive––and obviously this amount of demand blew it up entirely.
While we’ve been drowning in emails and operations backlog, the product still worked really well for most of our customers (especially Bitcoin Regret Club who went viral with features from Mashable, The Next Web, and Tecmundo). We got a ton of feedback on what was wrong with our product and how to improve like:
1. “I’m doing an ICO, can I choose which media outlets you target? I don’t want to waste time pitching to Cosmopolitan.” 2. “I would rather you pitch to 10 hyper-targeted media outlets than 150 general ones.” 3. “If the 150 media outlets don’t respond, I want you to iterate the pitch and send it to more.” 4. “I want you to follow up a few times with everyone you’ve pitched to." 5. “I don’t think I’ve framed my product well enough to get press. I want an expert to work with me to refine my pitch for a few days before launch.” 6. “I want to see the emails and confirm them before you send." 7. “I want a report of all the emails you sent with open rates.” 8. “I want to pitch all sorts of media outlets: everything from small niche blogs to CNN. Getting CNN would be great, but so would a few local new stations in Ontario––where our customers are.”
With our version 1 system, all the above was either physically or economically impossible. So for the past few weeks we’ve been working on a pivot away from our original product that solves all this and more.
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.) Here’s how it works:
We personally work with you to refine your pitch to press and framing strategy, build a custom hyper-targeted list of 500 media outlets to pitch to, send your pitch to 500 of the writers (1 writer per outlet), send 2 personalized follow-ups to each of them, then send you a report of everything sent complete with delivery, open, and reply rates. This process takes 1 month and starts at just $149.
We’ve made Howler this affordable by refining some open-source topic modeling (NLP) algos to scan through pitches and company profiles to match them with outlets in our database of 50k+ journalist profiles. We’ve also automated all non-essential operating activities (like physically clicking the “send” button on thousands of emails each day) by building a custom system on top of a stitch-together of almost 10 third party tools (thanks Airtable and Zapier). Now the only thing we spend man-hours on is perfecting our customers’ pitches and engineering.
Thanks for taking the time to read this! We’d love your feedback. We’re also hiring growth hackers with experience in media outreach. @ them here if you know anyone!
PS: All of our past customers will be getting a free month of Howler on us.
FutureList is meant to provide a place for anyone [on the internet...] to put the future. The 'future' can be a subjective idea, but we define it as something that few people know about or have access to, and has the potential to change many lives for the better.
Keeping track of all these futures is an arguably impossible task for any one person or centralized group. By leveraging submissions of the future from anyone, FutureList might be able to keep up with the breakneck pace of creation.
This list spawned out of another project I work on called Worlds Fair Nano (https://www.worldsfairnano.com), which is an attempt to get the future in the same physical space for people to experience. Our long-term goal with the fair is to bring a 6-month Worlds Fair back to the U.S.
I am obsessed with organizing the future and making it accessible to everyone because having knowledge of 'the future' enables a person to think creatively about how to affect it. I hope you enjoy FutureList and add a cool future or two!
We'd love feedback!
- Matt & Michael
My Co-founder and I have completed dozens of growth hacking projects like Rumblr (featured by 200+ media outlets in 4 days: https://goo.gl/Xbp7R2) and Hacbook Elite (six figures in sales through press and forum marketing: https://goo.gl/LFNVc5).
In our experience, launching is the most annoying, tedious part of building something new. Spending months pouring your heart and soul into a completely new product––only to have it seen by 100 people––is exhausting.
Aidem is a simple tool to get your product in front of thousands of people with a single click.We hand-craft custom pitches for every product, then manually submit them to hundreds of journalists, communities (like Indie Hackers), and directories (like the Startup Button).
Aidem is the tool we’ve always dreamt of to take care of shitty launch days where we’d imagine spending our time––instead of filling out hundreds of forms and sending hopeless press outreach emails––talking to users, fixing bugs, and getting upvotes.
“What if we could just, like, pay someone to do this for us?”
That’s what Aidem’s for. It’s a completely manual solution: no bots and no spam. Daniel and I write all of the pitches ourselves, then manually send them to our own network of writers and journalists. We don’t copy/paste/spam “open databases of reporter emails.” That doesn’t work.
Our process takes 5 days, submission takes 30 seconds, and it starts at just $49!
We’ll be here all day answering questions! We’re going to continue refining this system, so we'd appreciate any and all feedback.
P.S. Bonus points if you can figure out where our name comes from.
From here on out we're going to focus on simplifying the product down and cutting back on meh features (and their accompanying bugs). As time goes on our categorization and labeling systems will get better--that's just an editorial problem. We're refining as we go.
We're currently working on adding a simple voting system to make user curation less challenging, and also video thumbnails to liven up the view a bit.
We found it really hard to self-learn with Google and YouTube because you constantly have to sort through a ton of ads and news articles. So we spent a few hundred hours hand-curating the best learning resources we’ve found all over the Internet (on topics ranging from startups to hydraulics to morality).
We put the ~25k links into spreadsheets (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XI4BS-_9BpDw8wMGWUqZ...) and labeled all of the links as blogs, courses, podcasts, lectures, videos, etc. We used this internally for a while and found it pretty useful, but to make it better we decided to build a real UI and a crawler that scrapes link metadata to make it easier to search through.
While we’ve managed to build up a pretty good collection ourselves, we think the best way for us to make this really useful is to open it up as a community project. Anyone can contribute to the repository through our Github (https://github.com/AthenaAI/community-search) or through our Typeform (https://athena-ai.typeform.com/to/DeChoI). We filter all contributions to ensure quality. When someone’s contribution gets added to the collection, we add their names to our contributor wall (https://www.athena.cool/#/contributors).
We hope this project can:
1. help self-learners learn more, quicker, and 2. help grow the collection into something more refined and comprehensive (which supports 1.)
This project is still rough and WIP (mvp af), but we’re refining it more and more everyday. All feedback is greatly appreciated!