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Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

submit.co

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Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#31

Post by austenallred »

onion2k wrote: post #22

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. Resp…

I put together a (free) guide on how to find hundreds of emails for press contacts within your specific niche (or those of people writing about your competitors) and how to contact them (which is even more important).

I can get a list of 200 or so reporters who would be very interested in hearing about my product (and often have written about competitors), and send them (personalized) emails in a few hours. I usually get about 20 write-ups when I do it right.

http://austenallred.com/user-acquisition/book/chapter/press/

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#32

Post by jkestner »

dheera wrote: post #25
onion2k wrote: post #22

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. Resp…

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…

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.

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#33

Post by 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.

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#34

Post by yarone »

onion2k wrote: post #22

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. Resp…

If you're going to use Muckrack, you should pay for it.

HN users might be interested in knowing that Muckrack was built by Greg Galant, who brought us the excellent and free VentureVoice podcast, where he interviewed dozens of top startup founders: http://www.venturevoice.com/library.html

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#36

Post by marc »

hoop wrote: post #33

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 ne…

Site might have been briefly down (perhaps a minute) when pushing some changes. Should be back up: 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.)

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#37

Post by 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.

Re: Submit.co – Where to get press coverage for your startup

#39

Post by derwiki »

hoop wrote: post #33

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 ne…

... unless you can't afford an agency.
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