

Show HN: JustReachOut – Forget PR Firms, a tool to pitch reporters yourself - dmitrydragilev
https://justreachout.io/

======
austenallred
I like the concept. I and my team have probably reached out to tens of
thousands of reporters and have seen hundreds (maybe thousands) of write-ups
written, so I would like to think I have some experience in this (though I'm
not a PR firm).

A few months ago I wrote "the hacker's guide to getting press"
([http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-
pre...](http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/)) that
distills the basic strategy and how someone could hack a solution together for
free. Granted, it's nowhere near as elegant or simple as yours.

My concerns: 1\. I'm not sure your questions are driven enough to create a
short enough pitch. I tried it, and my pitch was 3-4 paragraphs long (2-3
paragraphs _too_ long)

2\. I know you think your pricing is fair, but you need a cheaper option for
the lowest tier. Most of the people I talk to and work with are happy to shell
out a bit, but $50/month is too steep. I would say $30/month is the right
target, and that's month to month.

3\. I got 10 results; trying through a Buzzstream scrape or a Google News
scrape I'm getting hundreds. Part of the value is in quantity; I need to make
sure that it is there. Are you only showing contact information if you can
find it? What if you can't find it programmatically and I'm supposed to go out
and find it on my own? I guess the question deals with the method, since this
is one of the most difficult parts of reaching out to reporters.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
> I and my team have probably reached out to tens of thousands of reporters

If you said you put together a list of emails 10k in number I'd believe you,
though I'd say a lot of those emails are worthless. I _was_ a PR firm, or at
least a founding partner in one, and those kinds of numbers aren't realistic
if you're talking about having a valid, active contact and actually having
some meaningful interaction with that journalist. PR, or at least PR done by
professionals, is always quality over quantity.

The kind of PR you're talking about is what's provided by sites like prweb,
which is just north of worthless unless your sole metric is the number of
places that have re-printed your press release.

Most programmers here (myself included, I changed careers) would, I imagine,
cringe if the marketing guy said he was going to do some of the coding.
There's a reason programming is a profession and people who know what they're
doing get paid well. Same goes for PR. You probably _can_ build that iPhone
app yourself, but you probably shouldn't. Leave PR to the people who do it for
a living.

Having said that, most small companies shouldn't bother with PR. Small
companies should focus on sales. I say this from experience having built
companies and having done PR for companies from the largest (major airlines,
telecom companies, hotel chains) to the smallest local businesses. Put another
way, when we launched our PR agency we didn't PR ourselves -- well once, and
it was a complete waste of time.

A mention somewhere might be neat but it's nearly worthless for a new company.
If you don't believe me dig up the research on how valuable that mention in TC
actually is.

When journalists start coming to you, hire a PR person.

~~~
AznHisoka
"Having said that, most small companies shouldn't bother with PR."

Yep, at least not the typical definition of "PR". Expand that to industry
blogs about your niche though, and you might want to put some investment into
that type of PR.

~~~
lenepp
I totally agree. Actually it would probably be better if small companies,
especially small startups, would think about this activity as "Attention"
rather than "PR" or "Marketing". What you want when you're a small startup is
the right kind of attention from the right people at the right time.

------
subbu
In "You are reaching out to Reporter at XXX..Over a story titled.." screen,
the screen keeps moving back to the top blocking me from entering any
information in fields below. Won't even let me scroll down from second time
onwards.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
That's because you have to enter information in there... we do not want you to
go on without entering something in that screen. Reason being is because
formulating the pitch is a vital part of the process..

~~~
muchcomment
To me, this was annoying. I was interested in "trying" the product, i.e.
seeing what kind of questions I would have to answer. You should just
highlight empty, required fields when the user hits submit.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Got ya... will make that look more elegant. Going to make changes now. For now
type in something in there and hit next if you'd like to see what's next...

------
nlh
Please pardon if this is a stupid question/comment as I'm not a PR
professional:

My first reaction to searching a phrase for my industry was "great!" \-- I
found 5 articles written by reporters over the past few months.

My second reaction was "Wait -- these are stories they just wrote. If I reach
out to them, their response is going to be 'Thanks - but would have been great
to know about you before I wrote the story!'"

One of the things our PR firm did very well was have a connection to reporters
so that they knew about us _before_ the story got written.

If the story's already done, unless they have a beat on the same topic, then
isn't it already too late?

~~~
rmason
If they wrote about the topic once its probably because either they're
interested or their editor thinks readers are interested. It's highly likely
they will write on the topic again.

Introduce yourself and tell them briefly what you're doing. Then do quick
checkins with them every ninety days or so. When they write the follow up
story it's highly likely they will reach out to you. You will probably
accomplish more than you could with a limited PR budget.

------
650REDHAIR
So this is the same price as PressFriendly, but without the PR professional to
help me review the story? Do you guys have any PR folks on staff?

I think all of these services that make PR easier are great, but I'm not sure
that I see the value here over your competition.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
try it and you'll see. its free for 14 days. i can answer questions you have,
done this for 7 years.

~~~
melindajb
so you cannot articulate your differences from your competition? I'm genuinely
curious to hear how you are different from existing options I have.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
the way we work is very different, but the end result is the same. We focus on
relevant timely trending stories reporters are writing on the topic you might
have interesting facts about. We help you connect with these reporters over
the timely article they wrote. We also help you think though your pitch and
give you the contact information to reach out. We make sure it's a very
relevant fit for both your pitch and the reporter's interests.

I'm not familiar with PressFriendly, but it looks like they look through
entire archives of what reporters have written and curate lists of reporters
based on their past articles and their fit with your topic. Again, I'm not
100% sure.

Two different approaches, both helping people with the same issue. I think
it's great to see companies such as PressFriendly around. There should be more
of them around, this is a painful problem for companies and PR Firms is a bad
solution.

------
faizdev
The hiding of the reporter's email doesn't really work/is broken, since if you
fill in data for the fields on the page, and then hit 'send' it takes you to
your email client with the reporters email in the 'To' field.

Someone could just as easily fill the fields with junk just to get at
reporters emails', I suggest implementing a character counter for the fields
at the least to ensure content is being entered and not junk/useless data.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Sounds like you're not signed up, so you'll never see reporter's email
address. Once you properly register and sign up you'll see their email
address.

But good suggestion, will give that a try.

------
ethnomusicolog
It's a neat tool ! But the pricing is a bit steep. Considering that for a
bootstrapped startup the alternative is free (google and some rapportive
hacking). maybe a plan with a limited quantity of "reachouts"?

~~~
dmitrydragilev
There is a 14 day free trial. Try it, I bet you'll see the value. The problem
with google/rapportive hacking is that it does not work all the time to get
the correct contact information. Also a major part of reaching out is
composing an email which will get opened and is tailored to each reporter. Our
tool helps you do that.

Try it for 14 days. Would be happy to hear your feedback.

------
spada
I suspect you're getting a lot of traffic. it's going on 3 minutes for load.
I've tried both chrome and firefox on os x on a high speed connection.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Hmm, that's odd. We are using a lot of APIs. Tell me what is taking a long
time specifically?

------
emhart
It appears the next beer is on you:
[http://imgur.com/YcqwAI1](http://imgur.com/YcqwAI1)

Crossed the 60 second mark just now.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Crap, never seen it take that long. Really 60 sec? You have good internet
connection?

Where are you at? Send a note through contact form. Will do my best to send a
beer your way.

~~~
lazyant
My request has been stuck for like half an hour.

(edit, I re-tried and it was fast, I guess site was HN'ed)

~~~
dmitrydragilev
hit the contact link, shoot me a note, would love to hear your feedback.

------
instakill
Nice, the scrolling back up is annoying.

I use this:
[http://press.customerdevlabs.com/](http://press.customerdevlabs.com/)

~~~
dmitrydragilev
So we want you to fill in answers to all those questions, it's crucial for us
to help you formulate a good looking email pitch. That is why we don't want
you to go on. Will work on a better solution for this so it's not that
annoying.

------
AznHisoka
I entered a keyword, and only got 5 results, but I know for a fact there's at
least 100+ articles written about that keyword in the past 3 months alone.

Also, you don't need the form for asking ppl questions and formulating the
email. That's the EASY part.. the hard part is automating the process of
finding the journalists, and getting their emails. Just show me that list, and
let me export via Excel. That's all. Everything else is plain overkill and
dilutes your value proposition.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
That is exactly what we are trying to avoid. We do not want you to spam 1000
reporters at once with a generic email. We want you to formulate very highly
tailored emails to very relevant reporters. That is why we are look at
articles from just last 24 hours. We are still improving the news search
results.

Again - 14 day free trial with all the plans, and we just launched private
beta, so not much to loose here.

~~~
AznHisoka
Yes, I am able to formulate highly tailored emails, I don't need help on that.
I need help on actually finding those reporters, and their emails. Right now,
I can easily duplicate your service, by doing a Google News search and
manually finding the contact info for each of them.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
It takes much more effort and time if you do it on your own, but agree it's
doable in theory. In practice, takes too much time vs. JRO. Our service helps
people find relevant reporters, tailor their pitches and make sure they are
truly relevant, and then it gives you the contact information for the
reporters.

We want to make sure you are reaching out to highly relevant reporters with
tailored pitches.

~~~
AznHisoka
Nope, that's a lie. Even with a broad topic like paleo, there's only a handful
of very influential reporters that write about that in the past 24 hours. No
need to lie!

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Not lying. Formulating a highly tailored email to the reporter's interests and
getting up to date verifiable contact information for every reporter who wrote
about "Paleo" will take you MUCH more time and effort if you do it on your own
vs clicking a button and using a tool for it. We made this tool because I
myself do this every day. It's doable, but it will take more time.

------
gdilla
Would you need this monthly? What about a pay per use, and you could say sell
bundles of emails, like reach 10, 25, 50 reporters?

~~~
dmitrydragilev
we are not selling emails here, we are trying to have you reach out with very
tailored highly relevant emails to relevant reporters, Think quiality vs
quantity. Its free for 14 days, so give it a try, nothing to loose.

------
thenipper
You guys are going to owe a lot of folks beers... every search I'm doing
doesn't complete after over a minute.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
sorry for the delays, lots of traffic coming in, ping us, we'll send you beer:
hi@justreachout.io

------
corford
2+ minutes and yet to see any results. I think that means you owe me a beer...
:)

N.B. I searched for "travel"

~~~
dmitrydragilev
We are having some issues, overwhelmed with traffic at the moment. Shoot us an
email through contact form? Will notify you when we're back up and send you a
beer.

~~~
kordless
Beer timeout here as well. I only accept beer in person, however. Give me a
shout when you are in SF, and best of luck!

~~~
dmitrydragilev
will send you beer. Ping us: hi@justreachout.io

------
subbu
Do you guarantee reply from reporters? What's included in the price?

~~~
dmitrydragilev
No gurantee of reply. You do all the reaching yourself. We help you find a
relevant story, relevant reporter, create tailored pitch, and then we give you
the email address.

~~~
weavie
How is this different from just searching the news with your favorite search
engine?

~~~
dmitrydragilev
We help you construct your email pitch and give you the contact information to
reach out to the reporters. We make sure your pitch is a very relevant fit to
the reporter's interests.

------
technicalfault
I claim my free beer. Or at least I would if the contact form worked.

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Weird, which browser are you on? Just ping at hi@justreachout.io if contact
form is giving you trouble for some reason.

------
pesome
how it works? We don't mind to pay for the package but too sure how it works?
if you have instructions, please send us email to info@pesome.com

~~~
dmitrydragilev
It's pretty easy. You search for a story, you answer questions to formulte
your pitch, the tool creates a tailored email draft for you and gives you
their email address.

14 day free trial.

------
geekboys
You owe me a lot of beer!

~~~
dmitrydragilev
we sure do. ping us through contact form with deets, will send beer!

Would love to hear any feedback you have.

------
pesome
Great tool, we will try to get more buzz for www.pesome.com

~~~
dmitrydragilev
Would love to hear your feedback.

~~~
poweribo
the logo looks like a zombie hands trying to grab me

~~~
dmitrydragilev
i know, you scared? wakes you up a little doesn't it? :)

