

Ask PG: Do you still see value in traditional PR? - JohnN

After reading your article on PR, I was wondering if you still see any value in trying to court print publications. You spent $16,000 a month on your PR. Would you advise people to hire PR firms today?<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a>
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pg
It's still valuable, especially for larger companies, but no longer critical
for newly founded startups. You probably shouldn't pay for PR till you have
enough money that it doesn't hurt.

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rams
But, the YC startups themselves seem to be the beneficiaries of excellent PR
efforts, appearing in Time, Newsweek etc. Somebody who is equally smart, but
not YC-funded will not get this kind of visibility. I just quit from a startup
funded by VCs and led by a Harvard M.B.A. While working there, I realized that
we were no smarter than our competitors, yet managed to hit the headlines
every now and then, for reasons that I didn't quite understand. Since a lot of
investors, and at times even enterprise customers display herd mentality, this
does make a difference. For instance if on the strength of it's PR efforts a
startup manages to make a sale to an enterprise customer, it's valuation does
go up, No ?

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JohnN
It seems to me that two startups can have be roughly the same in terms of how
good it is, but one gets much better PR. Maybe PR only matters all things
being equal.

I am thinking of PR strategies for my startup, any ideas? BTW its an open
source newspaper

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rms
How is your startup different from Wikinews?

Here is one PR idea that I've never actually tried, though I would be very
curious to see if it worked. Write a press release about the problem your
startup is solving in the style of a human-interest story. Try and put a human
face on the story. Send it to every local newspaper in America and see what
happens.

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JohnN
its different because there are profiles, voting, comments plus we are focused
on comment and opinion

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DaniFong
Surely it depends on the audience. When we get the resources we need, we'll
certainly use PR -- the people most in need of our service are possibly a
hundred times more likely to read the Sunday paper than to browse Slashdot.

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thomasptacek
Slashdot is a PR venue.

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thomasptacek
It's amusing that anyone would disagree with this.

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webwright
I was interviewed on a nationally syndicated radio show about my product and
barely saw a blip in traffic...

I'd say it totally depends on your audience/product. There are plenty of
people outside of our Web 2.0 echo chamber who pay a lot more attention to old
media than new media.

Profile your buyers/users, understand where they spend their time, and make
sure that you've got good visibility there.

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thomasptacek
There's a nationally syndicated radio show about your product? That's awesome.

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carter
The best PR is satisfied users. If you achieved product/market fit, then you
don't need all these PR investments. I think.

