
Show HN: Find the best journalists to cover you with our DB of 500k - juhaszhenderson
https://presshunt.co
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juhaszhenderson
Hey guys!

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(10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too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](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!

