

Ask HN: Startup PR - How could they get so many coverages? - alexdong

Check this out: http://www.printgreener.com/news.html
WSJ, CNBC, Entreprenuer, ComputerWorld, CNN, Inc, ...   How could they get so many coverages?<p>I've written a similar algorithm and sold it to a few companies, which you could find at http://purifyr.com/.  I've also emailed all relevant bloggers for review. But I just couldn't imagine getting so many positive coverages.<p>How did they make it?<p>Ideas?
======
mixmax
There are a few things:

\- You have to tell the press a story, and it has to be interesting. The best
stories are about people, the worst about technologies. For startups the story
of how you have struggled through countless insourmountable obstacles and are
now making big money is perfect. It is personal, it fits the cliche, and it
gives readers something to look up to. Don't focus on your technology (unless
you are trying to get an article in a trademag or something similar) normal
people just don't care. If you need to talk about technology try to find a
story where people are using your product to gain some advantage. Involve
emotions if possible, it makes the story better. How Tim re-found his long-
lost kindergarten girlfriend in old age and the two of them now happily living
together because of Google is a much better story than how good Google's
serach algorithm is.

\- Personal connetctions and relationships. This is what PR people do.
Journalists are different, have different taste, and find different things
interesting. A story that may seem uninteresting to one might be picked up by
another. If you don't know anyone try to read through the newssources where
you'd like to be covered and see which journalist writes about stuff that is
close to what you do. Then contact him. By phone. Talk to him and ask him what
he thinks and whether he would like to do an interview with you. Journalists
are nice people, and they make their living talking to people, so don't be
afraid of it.

\- Give them an easy story. Combining one and two above to make an easy story
that can more or less be copy-pasted to give a full article. Journalists are
lazy. Don't forget to include photos. (Again, it's people that are
interesting. If you include product shoots make sure there are some with a
proud owner showing off the product)

\- Don't ever lie. Journalists have an excelent nose for liars, and when (not
if) they catch you they'll never talk to you again.

~~~
Alex3917
"This is what PR people do. Journalists are different, have different taste,
and find different things interesting."

You might experiment with PR Matchpoint to find journalists who have written
on similar topics in the past. The site lets you cut and paste in either your
entire press release, or else your website copy, or your keywords. It will
then return a list of journalists who have written on similar themes.

These guys presented at NY Tech last week. According to them, there isn't
really any other way to do what they do because all of the other databases of
journalists are sorted based on beat or a few keywords, but not the actual
text of what the journalists are writing. I haven't actually tried the site
myself yet, but I probably will fairly shortly.

<http://www.prmatchpoint.com/>

~~~
raffi
This makes me feel better (or not): I wrote a prototype of a similar system
for social media sites. The idea was to collect a database of content
submitted to different sites and use Pearson's correlation coefficient to
compare a submitted press release to content on these sites. My goal, help
people find the right place to submit to. The technology worked but I didn't
pique any interest so I let it go.

------
rythie
I'm not a expert, but, I'll would suggest a few things:

printgreener.com has a lot of information describing what they do and why.
They play on green card a lot which is bound to generate interest from
mainstream media where as you hardly tell the user why they would want to do
this.

Also a free account allows you to view one page/30 seconds and the only
version that fixes this costs $299/month where as printgreener.com costs $29
which is a one off - I don't understand the massive difference in price. Who
is the target market that would actually pay $299/month for this. You need to
explain this better or drop the price. To me this is the type of thing that
could tend towards $0 with open source and/or a firefox plugin.

Some of their coverage goes back to 2006, so they have a first mover advantage
over you.

~~~
alexdong
printgreener.com sells software at $29 whereas purifyr.com charges for $299
for the developer API account. (Hmm, seems like I haven't made it clear
enough, maybe?)

As for the "green card", yes, that's right. Their whole message seems to be
geared towards this. A good execution.

"you hardly tell the user why they would want to do this." Hmmm, I think
you're right. Let me think of this and give the homepage one more shot.

Thanks a lot, rythie.

------
tdonia
Your approach, Purifyr, seems as though it should be a more consumer friendly
alternative to printgreener. From a story perspective though it's not being
presented as a consumer-oriented product which limits the market a prospective
reporter/blogger sees when they think of writing a story. i suggest you start
with this: "Free account could submit requests no shorter than 30 seconds. If
you'd like to send requests more frequently, please check out our commercial
offering."

if you're intent on not using a passive payment model (advertising) to
subsidize consumer traffic, this page is destined to be your main conversion
choke point. this page needs to sell your product. there should be a big,
friendly button that lets the consumer (not developer) immediately make that
purchase. alternately, show an interstitial ad and count down the 30sec before
letting them see the content.

more fundamentally, you need to decide who your market is and optimize for
them. are you really set on targeting webmasters and if so, how many content
producers out there can afford 300/month while accepting a maximum of 10k
views/day. seems like your major competition there is any freelancer who can
hack out a "print view" wordpress template or even a simple print-view css
file for less money. seems like a consumer model might make more sense, but
then i would think about this almost more like an rss reader - if you're
targeting consumers, you should consider ways to make it as easy as possible
for people to maximize the content they see through your lens. the bookmarklet
is a step in the right direction but isn't something most web users are used
to.

once you have your market more clearly defined, alert the media that's
producing content to entertain said market. they always need a story but they
have discriminating tastes.

~~~
alexdong
hmm, you've raised a good point: "who is your target audience"?

So far, all paid customers are using the API as a web service. Two of them are
quite famous iPhone applications provider paying the standard $299/mo fee,
three of them are vertical semantic search engines or recommendation engines
that paid much more to have the code deployed behind their firewall. Hopefully
this could make it easier for you to understand why the website is designed
with developers in mind.

The reason that I'm making this site more consumer oriented is that I found
the current market is a bit too limited. There are many opportunities, for
example integrated with Epson's Web2Print software, that I simply don't have
the BD resources to attack. I was hoping that by raising more awareness of the
service on the consumer side, I could get more publicity which in turn will
bring more developer customers.

I guess my question is: 1) Do you think my strategy make sense or not? 2) If I
were to make this a paid service targeting consumers, what might be the good
pricing point? $20 per year? What might be the 'selling point' to normal
users?

~~~
eli
This all makes perfect sense, but keep in mind that you are marketing to more
than just developer customers. Your website needs to cater to journalists,
curious members of the public, potential business partners, maybe investors?

And then you need to pitch journalists. They aren't going to find you on their
own. If you want to do it yourself, I suggest writing direct, honest emails to
journalists who have covered this sort of thing in the past. Don't worry about
making it sound like a press release.

------
markessien
Human Interest. Look at what you put out from the perspective: Would this be
part of the human interest category in a newspaper? If not, then you're
unlikely to get covered unless you know someone.

Furthermore, who are you? You have to be someone newspaperable, for example:

"The guy who made a robot that sang songs"

"A 16 year old boy"

"A guy who traded a paperclip up"

There are so many standard developers, you need to make a press friendly
definition of yourself. Then email interns who are always looking for a story.
Locate them on linkedin.

------
vivekamn
Timing is another thing. When we tried to get press for a site targeted at
moms, we had a lot of luck approaching news papers, tv shows and blogs around,
surprise!, women's day and mother's day.

------
aliasaria
I wrote to their PR person to see if they can offer us any advice -- I will
post any response I get...

------
geoffw8
Its not what you know, its who you know. Always.

~~~
Pro2755
It's _never_ who you know. It's _always_ who knows you.

------
aquaphile
Public relations (p/r). A good p/r person or team can work wonders: provided
that you have something useful or interesting.

------
medianama
In my personal experience, if you want press to write about you/your startup,
you'll have to give them interesting stories that their readers like to read.

They don't have too much attention span. They don't care about how hard/easy
it is do, or even if it is true or not. They just care about interesting
stories...

For one of my stories I told them that we did some survey and just made up the
findings. They loved it and published it next day without looking at my data
or even asking me methodology of survey/research

~~~
alexdong
For the 31 emails I sent out to the bloggers, 4 replies and only 2 really
spent time looking into it. Only 1 blogged about it.

So how did you get hold of them in the first place? Why won't they simply
ignore you?

~~~
froo
Were they form emails or did you specifically target the journalists/bloggers
you were talking too?

Form letters get ignored - personal emails less so.

Choose your words carefully when approaching these guys. It might take a extra
time, but the end result is worth it.

Just work harder.

~~~
alexdong
How could you get 'personal emails' of the mainstream journalists? I seem to
be outside of the 'media circle' at this moment.

Also, what would you suggest to do with the bloggers I've already contacted?
Maybe I could use the "new version launched" as an opportunity to contact them
again?

~~~
froo
With bloggers, I always find it's better to try and push your content to the
smaller bloggers first - everyone's always trying to get promoted on the
techcrunches or the mashables.

As for emails - really, just look for journalists who've written on your
subject in the past. They usually have contact details up there.

