

Show HN: Pressfarm – Find journalists to write about your startup - heidar
https://press.farm

======
shortformblog
Replying to this comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000928)

As a journalist, I don't want my information on some random website like this.
I'd rather see you work for those contacts so you know I'm the right person
you want to reach out to about your startup.

A better approach would be to create a database for journalists to enter their
information in case they want to be contacted for this reason, and tagging
their contact info appropriately so PR folks know they have a good match.
There's actually a biggish startup that does this already. It's called
MuckRack: [http://muckrack.com/](http://muckrack.com/)

Time is not just precious for entrepreneurs—it's also precious for most
journalists, and they will ignore emails that are off-target. This adds to the
noise of their inbox because they will have to ignore another 50 emails from
someone who didn't do their homework. I write a ton of stories every day. I
_am_ looking for cool stuff, but I'd rather know the person who's bugging me
actually spent five minutes bothering to look at my story coverage to
understand why I cover what I do.

Liked the idea initially, but when I read this reply, I got an instant red
flag. Abort. Abort.

~~~
eli
I get what you're saying... but as a journalist you are surely aware that
you're already on at least a few dozens commercial PR lists that you never
asked to be on, right?

~~~
filmgirlcw
Right. And there's absolutely no difference between an actual PR person I
develop a relationship with a some jackass who wants to sell my email to
people who are too dumb to properly Google.

Downvote all you want. This is grotesque and insulting.

~~~
eli
Sure, there's a huge difference. But I bet most of the pitches you get are
from people who spent just as little time gathering your contact info, but a
whole lot more cash through something like Cision.

And I don't downvote people I merely disagree with.

~~~
filmgirlcw
And actually, in this case I would argue that spending more cash is a decent
way of filtering the people who are serious from the amateurs. Look, JigSaw,
et. all piss me off too. When I get phone calls from people on my cell phone
(personal) pitching me stuff I know it's usually because DEMO or the CEA or
someone sold my phone number years ago. And that makes me EXTREMELY angry.
Like, livid. If you have my phone number, it's because I trusted you enough
with it. Otherwise I have a desk phone that I don't even print on my business
cards because it would be asking for trouble.

But if you pay hundreds of thousands a year for my info -- as gross as I may
find that -- chances are, the person paying is more serious about their job
than someone who pays $9 a month. It's sort of like having a fee for
developer's for the App Store. $100 is a super-low barrier to entry -- and
it's low enough that it means plenty of terrible stuff makes its way to the
store. But it's not so low (zero dollars) that there is NO barrier to entry.
And that's an important distinction.

------
fookyong
Disclaimer: I started pitchpigeon.com which was recently acquired. Press
release platforms for startups.

A few folks in this thread are saying that what they want is tagging and
curation so that they can write "targeted emails" to the journalists who are
more inclined to write about their industry.

I think this is a great idea in principle, but having run a service like this
I can tell you that literally 1% of customers actually go through with that
kind of targeting. It's just too much work. The rest just want to send one
tight, focused pitch to as many people as possible and hope for the best.

I'm not saying that either method is the best, but from a business standpoint
you have to optimize for where the customer preference is. You could have a
whole bunch of customization tools for the 1% that would just get in the way
and reduce your funnel completion rate for the 99%.

The simplest method is always the best - at least as a starting point - and I
think that's one thing pressfarm does get right.

------
cwilson
I'm slightly surprised by the name of this product. Do you not realize this
will come across as very insulting to journalists? I have a tech journalist
sitting next to me and her immediate reaction was not a good one.

~~~
hyperpape
I read "pressfarm" and my first thought was "who would highlight a site for
paid shills on HN?" The associations are terrible.

------
wuliwong
I'm not quite sure how this is offensive to journalists? According to the
author, these aren't private email addresses. He basically just did the
footwork of finding all these email addresses and put them in a list. Sure
$9/month seems expensive and I'm not quite sure what I get for that but that's
far from offensive. How is this different than what Crunchbase is for
entrepreneurs?

 __edit __Who adds the info to Crunchbase? The person themself or anyone? Or
the proprietors of the site? Or...aliens?

~~~
filmgirlcw
It's offensive because it implies I'm a commodity that has nothing better to
do than write about someone's shitty Swift website. It's offensive because
someone is charging money to send me spam.

You want to pitch me? Do the work yourself. Chances are I won't even see your
pitch because my inbox is clogged from shitty pitch emails from assholes like
pressfarm. Pass.

------
_puk
Do you have any sway with these writers, or are you simply acting as the
Yellow Pages of startup journalists?

If I make contact with a journalist through your service and indicate I have
done so, do I get any form of preferential treatment?

Actually thinking about it, is there mileage in that? These guys must get a
mammoth amount of mail a day asking for them to review this and that. By
setting yourselves up as a filter, but with preferential access to them then
everyone wins. Someone submits their app to you for review and potential
publication (price point higher than $9 suggested..). You review the app
internally and decide whether it is worth putting forward and to which
writer(s). You then submit it to them and they see it's from you so give it
their full attention and decide whether to run with it.

No guarantees etc.. Would take some leg work, and / or a decent contact list.

Anyways, all the best with it, thanks for sharing.

~~~
filmgirlcw
On the contrary, if I ever get an email claiming to be from these clowns, not
only will it get no preferential treatment, it will get marked as spam.

There are filters. They are called GOOD PR people (people who frequently bring
us solid stuff and not junk), personal recommendations and sometimes luck. I
get enough useless mail each day. Anyone who adds to my already insane inbox
will get nothing but contempt.

Excuse my anger but I already have to dedicate a minimum of 90 minutes a day
to email on top of my average 9 hour workday. This doesn't help. And it
doesn't do anything for the entrepreneur who is trying to get coverage. I'd
rather be pitched on Twitter. If you don't know me, that's the sane way to
reach out if you're not established.

~~~
avalaunch
What does a good pr person do when hired by a company that journalists
wouldn't ordinarily want to hear from? Do they simply refuse to do business
with said company or do they try to spin the company into something more
interesting than it is?

I think I'm confused as to how the interests of a pr person (to promote the
companies that pay them) and a journalist (to write interesting, newsworthy
stories) align.

~~~
filmgirlcw
They spin or they offer something interesting. If you're good at what you do,
you can almost always make a story interesting if you're pitching the right
person.

Case in point, I got pitched this morning from a big publicly traded company
that isn't generally that "hot" for an anniversary of something or another.
The pitch from the PR person wasn't that great -- if I'm honest -- but talking
about it with my managing editor, I found an angle in it that is actually
interesting for me. Now, the approach and angle I take may not align with what
the PR person/company intended (in fact, they might not love the final article
I write), but there was certainly something interesting there if spun
correctly. If I were in the PR person's shoes, I would have pitched people
like me the angle I'm going to go with, rather than the more generic party
line.

And then there is also the unspoken, but part of the game, quid pro quo. Which
basically means, "I have this shitty client, I'll tell you it's shitty but if
you'll give it a chance, I'll give you better/early access to my better
clients in the future." There are some journalists and publications that will
claim they don't follow this sort of arrangement, because it's one of he
unseemly aspects of how stuff works, but everyone does it to some degree.
Anyone (or publication) that claims otherwise is either lying or is
inconsequential in size and influence. That doesn't mean every journalist will
write up something they don't like or care about because it will get them
access to something better, but if a PR firm has a good history of access and
offering good stuff and they say, "look, will you talk to X" \- you might have
a conversation when you otherwise wouldn't strictly on the strength of that
relationship.

And yes, the best PR places simply refuse to take on shitty clients. And as
journalists, we learn what PR people to ignore and which ones consistently
bring us good stuff. There's always a line.

It all comes down to relationships. Which is why blanket pitches and idiotic
"services" like pressfarm are so misguided. You might get the attention of the
D-List or C-List journalist that way (and we all start out at the bottom so
that's not even a dig -- there are founders and PR people I still talk to to
this day because of relationship building that started when I was a nobody),
but if you want to get A-list coverage, good luck.

And luck does actually play a big role too. I often write stuff up I randomly
come across that was never pitched to me. In fact, I'd say at least half the
time when I write about smaller apps or companies, it's something I discovered
myself and then reached out to them for more information.

------
ericmsimons
I was just thinking of building something like this. If you could give me a
few tags for each reporter on what they usually write about, that would be
amazing, as I don't want to pitch a social media startup to a clean tech
reporter.

------
tannerc
This could be really neat, but showing me an ambiguous sampling of some ~250+
writers around the web isn't very helpful. In addition: most of the writer's
have their email listed on the bio Pressfarm links directly too, so why would
I pay for what I can already find?

There's a lot of potential here to be a helpful site for startups or
independent creators, with a little fine-tuning I'd pay $9 just to access the
list.

~~~
kordless
Came in here to say just that. Without a list of topics or industries they
write about, it's fairly worthless.

~~~
heidar
It's only tech/startups journalists right now. If we decide to add more groups
we'll implement a tag system but we decided it was not needed for now.

The reason for making this was that we really wished something like this
existed when we were trying to get press. Some of the emails are easy to find
but many of them were pretty tedious to find!

~~~
webmaven
Even tech/startups is too broad a category. Consumer? B2B? SaaS? Apple-
related? Hardware? Media? Advertising? Food tech? Mobile?

------
grimtrigger
Ah, your sites down.

I'm a bit skeptical of the value, but $9 isn't much of a risk so I can go for
it.

I think a better place would be for you to find a way to filter emails for
writers. The list you're building is going to get less valuable any time
someone signs up for it.

~~~
heidar
Cheers man. It's back up now. We only spent the weekend on this and there was
bound to be a bug somewhere.

~~~
erikto
want to jump into the comments on
[http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pressfarm](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pressfarm)?
tweet producthunt your personal twitter and we'll log you in to verify the
post

------
tzaman
Let me get this straight, you charge me $9 to get contact emails for various
journalists? What if I decide to contact them and also reveal how I got it?
Did they consent to this? I would certainly not be comfortable with the fact
that someone is _selling_ my email address.

~~~
heidar
I don't see a problem with that. You're welcome to spend time on google
yourself to find their contact details or you can just get them here. Time is
precious for most entrepreneurs. There is no private information there.

We just wanted to make a useful tool and if it's something people find useful
there are endless directions to take this in. :)

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philipDS
I would rather pay for this if you give me some more context on the journalist
and the niches/types of startups they usually write about. $9 for just an
email is pretty weak if I already have their name and company. :)

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betadreamer
I like the idea but something is not right.

$9 for getting their email is weak. As an entrepreneur I want to write an
email that is curated to each writer and I spend majority of the time looking
for the relevant article.

------
hack_edu
Good luck further destroying the credibility of startup journalists. :)

------
Rufhwifnwoejfns
Healthy reminder that modern news coverage is mostly product placement and
paid advertising.

Investigative journalism as we once knew it is dead.

