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I launched a t shirt line a bit ago and got press in a decently hackerish way. The t shirts were geared toward gamers so I went to Alltop.com and scraped all of the blogs in the sections of gaming, t shirts, etc.. Used amazon turk to turk for the emails of those blogs, about 300 or so. Created a unique promo code for a percent off that was derived from the blogs name in the url. Used mailgun to construct and send the…
I launched a t shirt line a bit ago and got press in a decently hackerish way. The t shirts were geared toward gamers so I went to Alltop.com and scraped all of the blogs in the sections of gaming, t shirts, etc.. Used amazon turk to turk for the emails of those blogs, about 300 or so. Created a unique promo code for a percent off that was derived from the blogs name in the url. Used mailgun to construct and send the…
Please, expand in the amazon turk to turk for getting emails.
Just don't do anything too crazy. You don't want to go to jail or hurt anybody. Keep it legal and moral, and you should be on your way.
Edit
Also, giving early access to smaller blogs/bloggers will allow you to create a given amount of buzz around the product. When reporters research your offerings (using Google for 99.99% of the work), they will get a lot of favorable hits about your product from these smaller blogs. Plus since they are smaller, they dont take away from the big news chance they might have with your story. Just be careful about who you contact, and be aware that some people will write about anything. They might write nicely about you in one post, and then praise Hitler in the next thus putting you in very very very very bad light.
Just honestly build these relationships. I use Twitter and events to do it, just speak to journalists honestly about what you're working on without full on pitches. Roughly 25 useful tech journalists are following my progress via Twitter and I regularly reply offering my perspective on stories. With a few from time to time I'll ask for their advice when they can add value and eventually when I have something fit for…
Without the knowledge of Fred, we created an automatic podcast for his blog, AVC.com, using our API. We had no idea how he would react. It was weeks of effort, time, and money spent to build AVC.fm with the hope that Mr. Wilson would love us (or at least not send us a cease and desist!) And then, there was the tweet that made the weeks of brainstorming, trials and errors, and late nights, all worth it:
"AVC.fm, the unofficial blogcast of @avc created by @VoiceBunny avc.fm via @VoiceBunny." by — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 21, 2012
Fred tweeted our work and our name to his 207,000+ fans. That day, VoiceBunny.com got a huge amount of visits, with most coming out of Silicon Valley. We, of course, reached out to Fred right away and a few emails later, you can now hear AVC.fm right on Fred's blog at AVC.com.
Before you get into the “how” of a PR stunt, you must first figure out the “why”. You don’t want attention just for the sake of attention. You have got to capture the attention of the right people. And for VoiceBunny both Fred and his audience were the right audience.
The VoiceBunny team is a big fan of Fred Wilson’s work and especially his blog, AVC.com, but we didn’t always have time to read it everyday. So, we thought it would be great if AVC.com had a podcast so we could listen on our commutes or while we were working. So we thought, let’s make one for him! What better way to show off our technology and get the attention of the VC community? Mr. Wilson is a big supporter of the “freedom to innovate” and that’s why we felt creating AVC.fm was the perfect project for VoiceBunny.
So, since Mr. Wilson publishes under a Creative Commons license, we did not have to worry about getting his permission first. The VoiceBunny API automatically pulls the text from AVC.com after Fred posts and posts a project. One of our voice talents accepts the project and uploads a finished read. It is then screened for quality and automatically uploaded to SoundCloud and AVC.fm.
We wanted to make it very obvious we did this as a tribute, not to capitalize on his name or work. Yes, we did it to show off our technology, but, we created something of value to him and to the community. We also made it very easy for him to add to his blog if he chose to do so. We included a link asking, “Are You Fred?” that included instructions on how to embed the widget onto his blog.
On his blog, Fred said:
"In any case, I like they way they used a stunt to get my attention. So much more effective than sending me an email saying “I’d like to come talk to you about a new project we are working on”. So I’m going to start auto-embedding the avc.fm voice overs at the end of the posts on AVC (via the SoundCloud embed of course)."
You can read his entire post at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/feature-friday-listen-to-thi...
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…
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…
This video is no longer available because the
uploader has closed their YouTube accountThere were also text articles on the blog, one of which was even on the HN front-page for over 24 hours (it reported some friendly social-engineering by a then-competitor, now a YC company). The comics significantly outperformed the text articles in terms of engaged readers, though I didn't run the whole thing long enough to be of any practical help.
My partner and I are releasing an iPhone game soon, and we're planning to repeat this experiment but with somewhat longer-form comics. The idea is to communicate the human story behind the making of the app. If anyone is interested, my email is in my profile.
It's not just about hacking the press. Sometimes it's plain just learning to interface with people and having a unique angle on a story. Most press I've seen from friends being TC'ed is minimal. Unless your customers are people who read TC, the effect is minimal to converted customers. They had a ton of visitors which might have increased mindshare. TC can be a vanity metric if you're not careful, especially if TC's…
Yes, I think most first-time entrepreneurs have a fantasy about how all they need to kickstart the viral growth is a bit of coverage in the major tech blogs. But the reality is that unless your site is squarely targeting early adopters (the ficklest of markets) and your product is knocking the socks of jaded San Francisco tech hipsters (well-nigh impossible against such perpetually-bored countenances), then this cove…