

Ask YC:  How do you get your press? - iamelgringo

Just curious.  I'm seeing people get press on places like the NYT, Business Week, etc...  For those of you that have gotten that type of press, how did you manage it? Any tips or tricks?
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pg
YC-funded startups get it partly through us, partly through YC "alumni," and
partly through random connections. Reporters now often approach us when they
want to write about startups, because between 118 alumni, odds are there are
at least 1 or 2 that would fit in their story. Plus when YC-funded startups
meet reporters, they tend to introduce them to other YC-funded startups.

Basically YC + the alumni act like a large surface that's highly refractive:
the large area means lots of inquiries hit it at some point, and then when
they do they tend to bounce around within it.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Damn you and your awesome metaphors, PG :)

~~~
safetytrick
Damn you and your fanboy comments ;)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Interesting. This is OT, but before your comment, my little joke was at like
+5 or +6 within an hour or so. After your comment was posted, people
immediately began downvoting me. I've seen this quite a bit...people seem to
agree with a comment until someone else disagrees, then the community
sentiment shifts the other way.

~~~
unalone
It's the primary problem with group mentality and crowdsourcing. Sometimes it
takes a second commenter to change somebody's opinion - not in this case, but
if somebody sounds convincing, gets upvoted, then gets a powerful argument
from somebody else, the votes start swaying.

That's probably a good thing, because it shows that people aren't just
mindlessly upvoting. The follow-up comments are convincing people to think.
The problem of course comes from the fact that because we can see the points a
comment gets, we assume that we're being judged when really the points are
effectively meaningless.

(If we're allowed to comment like fanboys, can we congratulate PG for breaking
40,000 karma?)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
This brings up an interesting point: why are the vote counts even shown on HN?
Why not just use them for ranking and ordering, but don't display them, at
least by default?

~~~
unalone
I've tried to bring that up a lot - I honestly don't know what vote counts add
to the conversation beyond bias on the part of the readers. That's the one
thing that a site like Metafilter offers that Hacker News doesn't, and I feel
like it's something that HN and Reddit and Digg before it all lack: the
ability to speak your mind openly without _any_ worries about karma and public
downvoting.

~~~
robotrout
I feel that there is a need for feedback after undertaking an action. If you
click a button, and nothing happens, you'll quit clicking the button. We do
want people to vote.

So...

How about hiding the points until after you vote. That way, you're not
influenced, but you still get feedback that is necessary to keep you voting.

~~~
unalone
That's the other thing that's been proposed. I've always felt that doesn't
seem like an elegant solution to me. The act of the button's disappearing once
you've clicked is a response enough for me. It also serves as a visual cue of
what you've read and what you haven't.

The question I'd ask you is what matters more, the discussion or the
moderation? Shouldn't the attraction to the people commenting here be the
quality of the conversation, rather than the ability to vote things up and
down? The latter is _important_ , but does it have to be seen?

~~~
sam_in_nyc
I agree, it's a pretty elegant solution. However, I like seeing how many
points a comment has, before I vote, for several reasons:

* I often don't vote

* to see how, exactly, the community feels about it

* to see if I should actually read it

* to get a feel for the story's exposure (more votes, more eyeballs)

This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the first point... I don't want to
have to vote on each comment to reap the benefits of the other items on the
list.

The second item on the list allows me to have the "blink" effect. By taking in
the vote #'s of hundreds or thousands of comments, I just get a "feel" for
what HN likes and dislikes. To me, that's it's important.

I think something in between would be a color-coded and/or normalized
indicator of each comment's popularity. Kind of like how the grayed out text
is more intense for more downvoted comments... upvoted comments could have
some indicator of how popular they are.

If normalized, it would show how popular they are, but only relative to other
comments with the same parent as them.

Just my $.02

------
froo
The best advice I can offer is target your reporters and be persistent.

My experience was very different because I rode a wave of interest around
something and put myself in front of that wave.

What I found to be effective was actually reaching out to various
reporters/bloggers who have written on that subject or similar subjects in the
past.

I wrote fairly specific emails to both an LA times and Wired journalist and
after being published on both sites, from there it snowballed with many
journalists (TV/radio/newspapers) soon contacting me afterwards.

Also, one thing I did do (which was a little naughty at the time) was create
news that I thought was unbelievable at the time, but pushed it to as many
gossip columnists and bloggers as I could find (mostly disreputable folk) and
through various network effects (and many many hours of typing emails) the
same news ended up on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk for about 16 hours.

Screenshot below - the rickrolled again story in #1 spot on Yahoo's UK
homepage... was a result of my imagination.

<http://files.marklancaster.org/images/yahoo-page.jpg>

This same story was also on Cnet's homepage too, but I never got a screenshot
of that sorry.

Really the best thing I would do is set up a whole lot of Google Alerts around
a subject that your startup is targeting and whenever a story pops up online,
contact that writer with your perspective.

I did this approach during October last year, this is the traffic that was
generated for the entirety of the blog's short lifespan (that month
essentially).

[http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...](http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oct1-nov11)

These journalist's incomes depend on putting content out there, help them out,
they don't bite.

------
sachinag
It's very important to have a Press Kit that allows reporters to quickly see
why they'd want to talk to you. You can see an example of ours:
<http://www.dawdle.com/press/> I give topics we're good at, and proof of
social status. Note that our Press Releases are at the very _bottom_ of the
page.

In addition, most people I talk to think about getting press for their
company's launch or greatest new feature - that's wrong. The best press comes
from being a good _resource_ to reporters, regardless of the story. You want
to be mentioned as an example of a general trend. Those are the stories that
have "legs" - i.e. another reporter will contact you for their related story
on something similar.

------
wheels
Mike Arrington's talk from startup school on dealing with press is quite good:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbUnatPfSgg>

It's not really geared towards the mainstream press, but a good watch
nonetheless.

~~~
huhtenberg
Upvoted from zero. I am not the biggest Arrington's fan to put it mildly, but
this talk is actually quite insightful.

------
shansinha
A part of the process that I think everyone is ignoring here is also to pay
attention to what your story is. It takes a lot of careful time to think about
what makes a great story. Pay attention to what the press writes about and
where they see conflict (always a good source for a story). Creating your
story around how you are going to be a game changer relative to 4 unknown
startups vs how you are going to revolutionize a market dominated by google,
microsoft, etc.. journalists and press will obviously write the latter.

why? b/c what they care about is driving page views and readers. some do care
about the topic and the story and trade on their reputation for being a deep
expert. But remember, they need to make money. help them craft a story that
will drive page views (which equals $ / CPM).

Have your collateral (screenshots, product videos, exec summaries) so that
they can just clip in your content.

there's some press that will take the time to really understand your story.
there's others that fall into the category of, "if i spend 5 minutes writing a
story here i can generate tens of thousands of page views which gives me $x".

make it easy for both categories to write their articles.

remember.. it's all about understanding other people's motivations.. not
yours.

------
sanjayparekh
Serendipity is your friend. The very first article I had written about my
company (Digital Envoy) happened because I randomly met this reporter at an
event (Red Herring Venture Market South - that tells you how long ago this was
since both the magazine and the event are now defunct). This one story (online
only, not even in the magazine) ended up leading our first customer to us and
getting them to signup.

So make sure you get out there and network and talk about what you're doing.
No one will know what you're working on and, more importantly, they won't be
able to talk about it if you just sit at your desk all day slaving away at
code.

------
nolanbrown23
HARO - <http://www.helpareporter.com/> It's a good way to reach reports.

~~~
fallentimes
In addition to what Paul mentioned, we've received a few minor hits from HARO
as well. Most of them (there are 3 per day) aren't useful, but they're usually
worth a skim. Also, if you don't have a company blog, start one. It's a good
way for people to see what you're up to and encourages feedback and inquiries.
We try to update our company blog once per week [1].

My advice is to be willing to talk to anyone and respond to customer feedback
emails as quickly and helpfully as possible. You never really know who's on
the other side of the email. And please don't ever ever use form letters;
you're dealing with people, not robots.

One of our biggest press hits at TicketStumbler was in the Financial Times [2]
[3]. Paul referred the writer to us as a freelancer who was still in graduate
school, and I honestly had no idea the article would appear in the FT. I
always figured if someone cares that much about what we're doing, I'd be more
than happy to talk to them.

[1] <http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/>

[2]
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2ac.html)

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442435>

------
petervandijck
I got great press with mefeedia in the videoblogging years (2004, 2005). The
press was all over it (NYT, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone etc...), and I
had a service that could provide them with some numbers. That and being
available (my phone nr. was on the homepage).

~~~
dawson
Why is this being down voted, seriously, I'm interested? I figured if you were
going to down vote it would be polite to explain your reason(s) to the
commenter.

~~~
brlewis
People usually don't explain their reasons. It does seem like there's a rash
of senseless automatic downvoting these days that I don't remember happening a
year ago.

------
auston
Things I've worked on have been featured in the NYT, TechCrunch(IT), Forbes &
Readwriteweb. In my experience - reporters/journalists are often looking for
stories, usually on blogs or through search engines.

In one instance - I reached out to a pretty small blog and got put on the map
that way (NYT).

In another instance a Forbes writer was searching google and we kept popping
up.

Also - I've offered favors to bloggers + try give them "story" flow. I believe
this may have had a partial influence on our TechCrunch coverage.

Also - I have a VERY good feeling that bloggers/press check out the front page
of Hacker News often...

~~~
nickcharlton
I have seen Mike Arrington link to stories on HN through Twitter, so I would
say that your final feeling is quite true.

------
freejoe76
This worked for me when I was looking to get some press with a project in
Chicago: I got written up in my local alt-weekly. It's easier than getting in
on the tv station or newspaper door, and also, the reporters at those tv
stations and newspapers often read those alt-weeklies, and if they see
something worth biting on they will bite. They bit, and I had articles in the
Chicago Sun-Times and a Toronto newspaper, as well as interviews with four or
five radio stations, and a talk with Playboy magazine.

