
Show HN: Find and follow journalists relevant to your startup using ML - dtran
https://app.upbeatpr.com/find-journalists/
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dtran
Hey everyone,

After helping hundreds of companies with PR and having talked to thousands of
founders, the most common thing we hear is: "I'm not sure how to get started
with PR" or "I'll think about it in a few months when we're ready to launch."
So for hack week, we brainstormed around this idea of "how to get started",
and one of the projects we built is a super simple, low commitment and low
effort way to get started with PR. Just tell us a little a bit about your
company in 30 seconds, and voila, we try to find the most relevant journalists
for what you're working on, and let you subscribe to a weekly digest to stay
on top of news about your industry, competitors, etc.

Whether you're working at a company, starting a company, or just thinking
about starting something, we hope this can help! It's still a very rough v0.1.
Feedback, bug reports, etc are would be SUPER APPRECIATED! Thanks so much!

A few different things going into generate the list of 5 journalists that we
think are relevant to your company, including a simple machine learned topic
model. Happy to give more details if anyone's interested. Some of the results
could definitely use some heavy tweaking— feedback is super appreciated!

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davecyen
This is cool, a few ideas:

1) Would like to understand why certain journalists were recommended to me. I
like the idea of showing example articles, but the ones provided weren't
relevant to me.

2) As a startup, I'm mostly interested in a journalist's influence and reach
(ie. how many people are going to see this?). Topic relevance is also
important, but at the end of the day I'd rather be written up by TC rather
than by a local news org. Does the ML take influence/reach as an input?

3) It'd be useful to select my ideal outlets, e.g. national outlets, industry-
specific, geo-specific, and then get results based on those preferences.

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rickyyean
Ricky here from team Upbeat. Great feedback. Yeah, the trickiest part was
relevance as perceived by users. What our team thought was relevant didn't
pass the sniff test in testing. For because a journalist has demonstrated
broad interest in AI, but if we only show the article about AI replacing jobs,
then she might appear irrelevant to an AI fraud detection company. Sometimes
it depends on your familiarity with the publications. Like you said,
TechCrunch vs. a more niche B2B publication read by CIOs, we do consider that
as part of the input. More customization in search seems like a logical next
step.

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neerkumar
I really like the idea. Feel there is lots of potential to build similar stuff
for anything related to sales.

~~~
dtran
Hey neerkumar,

Thanks for the kind words! We aren't focused on sales, but in case anyone here
is, what do you mean? It'd find sales prospects based on how similar their
companies are/what they tweet about?

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neerkumar
Finding the right journalists to reach out to so that they can then write
about your business can be seen as a special case of sales.

Similarly, I think it would be very useful something like: "I built product X,
scrape the web and find me the best sales prospect for it". This is something
that people do in a very manual way today and takes forever.

~~~
jevanish
Isn't that what Datanyze and a variety of other products do now?

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hbcondo714
Thanks for making this service and sharing on HN. Is it possible to provide
more contact info for the relevant journalists? I usually rely on Google News
alerts to find new & relevant articles for my investment / finance startup.
What gets me though is when I find a good article, the author's contact
information is usually nowhere to be found so it makes it pretty difficult to
do PR.

~~~
dtran
Hey Amar,

Thanks for checking out our project! What alerts do you have set up in Google
News Alerts?

Re: providing contact info— that's definitely one logical next step. We left
it out of this hack week project. Journalists already get hundreds of pitches
a day, so we're trying to experiment with something new and different in
addition to the usual pitch cycles. We're thinking of letting journalists know
that you're following them and reading their articles, and make it so they can
follow your company as well to receive updates from you, or ask you for
quotes/opinions on topics that you're an expert on. This already happens to an
extent, but we can make all this much more efficient by only routing their
relevant articles to you, and only showing your relevant quotes/updates.

~~~
hbcondo714
One Google News alert I use is _sec filings_ as that is what my startup offers
so I would want to know which journalists are reading sec filings and
incorporating sec filing content into their articles. I would then want to
contact them to suggest using my startup for sec fillings but your approach
makes sense too. Thank you for explaining.

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mingyeow
Upbeat is the major innovator in PR today, no one else is even close.

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iamwil
What kind of ML did you use here? How did you deploy it?

~~~
zackwitten
Data scientist for Upbeat here. We generated the topics using an unsupervised
LDA model trained on a couple million articles from high-quality publications.
We took the most intuitive/human-readable of those and used them as the
categories you see in the dropdown menu. To get relevant journalists for each
company, we scan through our journalist database to find writers whose
articles have a high vector similarity to the topics chosen.

