Ask HN: How did you hack the press when you launched your startup(s)?

It's not as "hack"-y as a HN reader might like, but the bottom line is you should help your journalist tell a story. That's their job, so make it easy.

When we launched Precorder, we got little (and so-so) press by describing a newly launched app w/ X Y and Z features.

When we started telling writers that we saw the camera technology used to capture great white sharks jumping out of the ocean and ported it to iPhones, we were covered by Kottke (http://kottke.org/11/01/precorder) and other influential photography bloggers who immediately triggered a long wave of follow-up press.

The key thing which helped me reach bloggers was understanding that they're not interested in covering my start-up, but in getting more people to read their blog. Give them all the materials they need to write a good post - great story, something personal, good images, video, and you have a much better chance to get covered. Good materials helped me increase my success rate by about 5X. Even though most of your future users will not come from TC or RWW, it builds your company resume. It's much easier to approach medium-small blogs with a TC/RWW reference, than the other way around. It also helps when raising (more) money.

To add to this (and as patio11 has said several times in his articles) OKCupid does this with regularity, and has provided a people with great deal of entertainment and information value, and have been covered many times in the press. They've also possibly indirectly helped their business doing this.

http://blog.okcupid.com/

KISSMetrics is another:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/

I agree with J45, but if you really want to get press, here are some strategies that we used early on.

1. Do searches on Google News for topics or companies you compete with. See who has covered them and create a spreadsheet with their names, contact info, etc -- This tells you they might be interested in what you have

2. Reach out and personalize -- Show them you've seen and taken time to understand their perspective on the industry or competitor. In a nice way, suggest an angle that you feel is more interesting or which often gets overlooked which hopefully dovetails with your product and piques their interest. This helps the blogger/journalist think about the storyline and whether readers would find it interesting quickly and not your X, Y, Z feature which only you care about.

3. The angle should ideally be something you have unique insight into. It might be directly related to your product or just something you have data on because of your product.

4. Use data as possible. There are lots of unsubstantiated claims out there so journalists/data appreciate useful facts supported by data. Warning: Don't make data/facts up or don't try to draw inane trends from 2 data points as smart journalists/bloggers will see through that. Yes, hack doesn't mean being dishonest. You're trying to build a relationship based on trust so don't be short-term greedy and try to kickstart things on a lie.

There are some downsides to this. The biggest being that your data might get featured and not your company. This may not be what you want. But, at the same time, you may become a resource for the journalist which means mentions over time, they may come back to you for additional data and you get mentions. This has happened for us. We're a data company so we might not be apples to apples for you, but we're a go to resource for journos/bloggers and see mentions 1-2 per week in a slow week in major media because of early legwork we did (note: our press page is hopelessly outdated so don't judge us based on that)

Hope this helps. Good luck.

This AirBNB Mixergy interview is a must-watch - they explain how they hacked their way onto top news sites like CNN & NYTimes (start watching at 31 minutes in):

http://mixergy.com/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/

They explain how to get press coverage using the "pyramid" method: start at the bottom, with small bloggers in your space. Email them, ask them to cover you. Then move up the chain. At the top of the chain are the big media people like NYTimes, CNN, etc.