
Why I Didn’t Cover Your Startup - jolie
http://jolieodell.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/why-i-didnt-cover-your-startup/
======
patio11
Pitching a major blog is essentially going through the same gate/different
keepers as doing PR for the New York Times or whomever. There's a million
people who want to go through, and -- dirty little secret -- the ability to
reject you is key to the gatekeepers' power and status.

If you're going to send out pitch emails, I'm going to plug Peldi's technique
for getting blog coverage yet again: find the wee little blogs in your
community who will absolutely melt to learn that anybody reads them. Send them
personalized emails. Bootstrap your way up the chain.

In particular, if you've been in a community for a while, you should have a
sense for who the really influential people read. Watch which way the stories
tend to spread, in particular the outlets a step or two before the story hits
the large sites. Pitch _that_ guy. Or, recursively, the guy one step before
him. And every time you pitch someone, for goodness' sake, mention as social
proof the people on his social graph who already like you. The Internet is
Chicago politics with less Daley: "don't be nobody who was sent by nobody".

I got almost a realtime education in this watching my blog bounce around the
mainstream media's sites this week. I'm fairly confident somebody at the New
York Times reads Marginal Revolution, who reads Slashdot, who reads Reddit.
And, of course, everyone in the mainstream media reads the NYT and most of
them take direction from it.

~~~
jolie
The trickle-up approach definitely works. Look at The Next Web and Inside
Facebook... they break so many cool apps that then get picked up by RWW,
TechCrunch, or Mashable.

Also, if you catch a night or weekend writer/editor, you could be in luck.
There have been so many times -- especially at RWW -- when I was absolutely
starved for something to write about on a Sunday night. I would have
killed/maimed to get a pitch email then, but everyone was waiting until Monday
morning to flood my inbox.

~~~
derefr
> I would have killed/maimed to get a pitch email then, but everyone was
> waiting until Monday morning to flood my inbox.

Why not just dig through the pile of things that didn't end up getting
published on Monday (or, to be more systematic, why not have a "slow news day"
queue that less-interesting stories could be shunted into after a first pass)?

~~~
patio11
I have learned that when a woman says "All the good men are taken", she is
_really_ making a comment about herself. The relevance of this as it regards
journalists with a full inbox and dearth of story ideas is left as an exercise
for the reader.

~~~
jolie
I'll give you my inbox for a day, and we'll see what you can make of it. =)

Snark aside, it's really different on this side of the divide. Finding a
relevant angle or some aspect of a startup that your average Internet user can
relate to is extremely difficult, and writers and editors have to be very
picky sometimes.

~~~
lincolnq
Aha! So you have to do what PR people do anyway, which is send a pre-canned
interesting story which just happens to highlight your company.

------
paraschopra
Well, my experience of pitching to major bloggers has been frustrating. For
example, I've mailed Mashable thrice and filled the Startup Series application
but I never heard back from you. I can read from your post that you get a
deluge of emails and it is totally understandable from your perspective. But
from the startup perspective, it is frustrating not to hear back. After a few
emails, you start wondering if anyone is even reading your email or even
opening it. Being a major blog, of course, you cannot write about every
startup that emails you but even a small (non-automated) reply saying that a
particular startup might not be a good fit goes a long way. In fact, I started
wondering if my mail was going to spam box or if something was wrong with my
email program. Do you think replying to every mail is impossible? Of course,
you don't have to do it personally.

One exception is RWW who replied saying they usually don't cover startups of
my type. I liked the fact that they cared enough to atleast reply.

Reference thread: How to get major bloggers write about my bootstrapped
startup? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351460>

~~~
jolie
Hey there!

So, I can see why Mash didn't get back to you and why RWW didn't write about
your company.

It's really hard to get regular people who don't own websites interested in
stuff like security, optimization, downtime monitoring... anything to do with
the backend of the Internet, anything that shows the "man behind the curtain."

And in your case, I'd say you don't even really need coverage on a major blog.
The majority of readers of a major blog aren't going to be paying customers.

I'd honestly advise you to go after a niche publication. Sure, it's not as
splashy, but I guarantee it'll get the job done a lot better and convert a
higher percentage of post-readers.

Make sense?

~~~
paraschopra
Hi Jolie,

Thanks for your reply. Yep, I totally understand (in hindsight) that my
service may not be the best fit for your audience. All I was complaining about
was a lack of response :)

Actually, I had pitched Mashable only after doing a fair amount of research
which concluded that you do write about web analytics, optimization and
marketing sort of stuff. Here a few recent stories which nicely fit your
description of "man behind the curtain"

<http://mashable.com/2010/01/04/quantcast-funding/>

[http://mashable.com/2010/05/11/ibm-social-media-analytics-
to...](http://mashable.com/2010/05/11/ibm-social-media-analytics-tool/)

<http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/webtrends-facebook-analytics/>

<http://mashable.com/2007/06/25/analytics-toolbox/>

Of course, now I am going ahead with niche blogs in web analytics and online
marketing domain (and finding success too) but when I was preparing to pitch
you (and other major bloggers) I had made sure that they covered similar
stories in the past (except that I am bootstrapped and they got funding!)

EDIT: fixed typos

------
aditya
I'm not quite sure I still understand what the best way to "pitch" a blog for
coverage is.

Are you saying startups should stop pitching you, and pitch the smaller
publications instead? and if a story is hot, you'll automatically pick it up?
or, should they fill in the form, and email news@mashable, but not email you,
personally?

This press thing is new to most hackers, and because it's new, it looks fairly
hard from the outside, so we fall back to the one thing we do know:
persistence. Pitch everyone, all the time. Is there a better way of getting
covered by the big technology blogs out there?

~~~
jolie
I still welcome (and need) emails from startups -- I just want everyone to
understand that if I don't get around to them, this is why.

As for persistence, it can work for you and against you. Knowing when it's a
good tactic and when to back off... that's a fine line. =)

------
rythie
Many of those writers actually read hacker news and I've seen them break
stories that were on hacker news the previous day (e.g. note Jolie replying in
one of the threads on this page).

~~~
jolie
Absolutely true. At Mash, we monitor HN every day and night.

------
ecaradec
It might be better to still pitch big blogs even if they ignore it.

If you get some press from smaller blogs and the big guys read them, it may
recall them that you tried to contact them and have them have a second look at
it ?

