

Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup - arihant
http://submit.co

======
onion2k
These publications are only relevant if you're building a tech business - eg
one that sells to tech businesses or consumers. If you're doing anything else
then these are worse than useless because they'll distract you from things
that will help your company grow. Find the media _that your potential
customers read_ and target those publications and the journalists that write
for them. Build relationships with them. Respond to their tweets. Tell them
you liked reading their articles. Treat them like human beings. _Then_ pester
them for coverage.

Naughty Hack: When I was building UsableHQ I signed up for a free trial on
[http://muckrack.com/](http://muckrack.com/) and scraped the entries using
[http://import.io](http://import.io) to build a target list of 'journalists
who write about business tools or write for business publications'. It didn't
really help us considering we failed, but it felt good and with more runway it
may have been useful.

EDIT: Looking at Muckrack again it looks like they've killed off the free
trial. Probably because of people like me. That's a shame. I'm sure the same
idea would work on any other journalist database though.

~~~
dheera
The funny thing is that the truly mainstream publications (e.g. NYT, Time,
CNN, etc.) no longer have such a high bar about what's interesting or
meaningful to the world. Rather, they're already down on their knees losing
impressions to Facebook and Twitter and the only thing they care about is
"what has the potential to be forwarded like crazy on social media and
generate impressions".

Time magazine decided on their own to feature one of my personal little
embarrassingly-simple late night Arduino hacks, and my guess is only because I
made a Youtube video out of it, and that it had good potential for a witty
headline that could go viral on social media with its connection to something
from popular literature that everyone knows. There was absolutely zero
innovation in it as far as technology goes.

Tech publications, on the other hand, tend to have a higher bar in terms of
content quality and meaning to society and the world, but mainstream, non-tech
consumers don't read them.

Moral of the story is, if you want to get featured on the mainstream
publications, make it catchy, witty, funny, fashionable, potentially viral on
its own. Oh, and use technology to realize something well-known from fantasy,
science fiction, or popular movies and you'll have an instant hit on
mainstream media.

~~~
jkestner
It's a good point - to some degree, you design not just for your customer, but
for the distribution of the message. (This is also why packaging is underrated
as a product in its own right.) Design the product so that it's self-
explanatory in an image, and balancing against feature deep, include a feature
that has a level of novelty.

------
anacleto
Don't chase coverage. Chase customers.

I need to take this advice myself.

~~~
tomasien
I agree but at launch, I think it's good to take some time to chase coverage
and then stop. Here's why:

\- Search results. People will google your company, and if you lay some nice
groundwork at launch, there will be descriptive google results from
publications that the user has at least somewhat heard of. SEO doesn't hurt

\- Logos. It's proven that having a few "as seen in" logos on your website
sets yourself apart from the average SaaS/app people find. There's so much
junk, it's nice to easily be able to set yourself apart as at least a mildly
serious thing.

\- The "Oh I've heard of them" effect- if enough people see your launch, there
are now a lot of people in various networks who will say "oh I've heard of
them" or "oh have you heard of?" when people are describing problems. This has
an effect later on.

It's good to get these things out of the way, put some logos on your website,
and establish yourself early as "not just another weekend side project" and
put yourself into another tier in the users' mind. After that's done, be done
with it - handle the leads that come in, get good feedback, go back to work
and go find your actual customers where they actually are.

------
thenomad
My word this is impressive.

How did you find all of these outlets? I always find that in the aggregation
era, it's very tricky to find _everyone_ covering a topic, rather than just
the top 2-3 people.

I wish there was something similar for the film world.

~~~
keesj
I've accumulated this list over time. I've also curated it with the help of
virtual assistants (FancyHands.com).

> I wish there was something similar for the film world.

Noted! Definitely worth considering branching out to other verticals.

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Submit.co

~~~
arxpoetica
puhLease make a film one. :)

------
rexreed
You probably are already aware, but your twitter counts are off. TechCrunch
has followers in the millions, but indicated as non-million units. You might
want to check your counts. Also, allow this to be sortable in this list view
(understand that there is a Google doc on the back of this).

~~~
keesj
Yeah, there seems to be something funky going on with the Twitter followers.
We currently use a Google Spreadsheet Script to fetch these numbers. Will have
a closer look today!

As for sorting, I think it's a limitation of embedding a Google Spreadsheet.
We'll probably move away from it shortly so we have more flexibility, but for
now you can visit the document directly:
[http://edit.submit.co/](http://edit.submit.co/)

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Submit.co

------
hoop
I can't actually get the link to load here so I can't evaluate the site
itself.

But on a general note: Hire an agency and spend your time growing your
business in other areas and stop doing your own PR.

A good agency will help you create the proper messaging to use from your
business' strategy, make sure that the announcement newsworthy, and, frankly,
likely already has rapport with journalists and knows what they need to write
a good story -- this will make them more effective and more efficient than you
at pitching your announcement.

The opportunity cost on the pitching alone is insane so, seriously, don't do
your own PR.

~~~
keesj
Site might have been briefly down (perhaps a minute) when pushing some
changes. Should be back up: [http://submit.com/](http://submit.com/)

As for delegating your PR I'm curious to hear on your personal experience with
this. I generally do my own PR and it works out really well. Doesn't cost too
much time either if you know what you're doing and at least the tech media
prefer to deal with the founders directly. (I happen to be in the fortunate
position that tech media actually cater to my customer group, so that's where
my experience lies.)

------
RichardKain
If the community is interested, you can easily build a custom list of
reporters based on keyword searching their articles or twitter accounts at
www.BoloHQ.com; there is a 21 day free trial. We have 32,000 profiles, mostly
of tech and gaming reporters. We ask people not build massive lists (or, ahem,
scrape, as I see in a comment), but have a targeted approach to interested
journalists and accordingly build a relationship. E.g., you're a food delivery
startup search for that and see the authors that write most frequently, set an
email alert, note relationships with colleagues and in general build a
communications workflow, not just spam a list, only a small subset of whom may
be interested in food delivery startups. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

------
huhtenberg
Impressive.

A CSV download of the whole table would've been very nice.

~~~
anilgulecha
Press on edit, which opens the google doc backing this. Then download in
whatever format.

~~~
amolgupta
I am unable to add more links even on opening in google docs

~~~
guava
The Google Doc is on comment only mode.

~~~
vruiz
Just copy paste it on excel

[http://pastebin.com/Lxx1Cjpt](http://pastebin.com/Lxx1Cjpt)

------
pla3rhat3r
I saw this on Product Hunt and immediately bookmarked it. I love the
simplicity and the abundance of information contained within the site. Bravo!
More more!

------
cones688
FYI - your domain is currently rated with Bluecoat as suspicious so will get
caught on most corp proxies.

[http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=submi...](http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=submit.co)

~~~
keesj
Thanks for noticing! I acquired the domain name a while ago. There must have
been some suspicious content on it before. I have reached out to Bluecoat to
see if they can reconsider.

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Submit.co

------
garagemc2
Impressive work.

------
u04f061
Good initiative.

------
markkat
[https://hubski.com/tag?id=startups](https://hubski.com/tag?id=startups),
[https://hubski.com/submit](https://hubski.com/submit),
[https://twitter.com/hubski](https://twitter.com/hubski)

------
bradvl
Great resource. Thanks for sharing!

