Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

There have only been two founder-spam emails I've received that I ever followed up on, and one of them landed me a feature in The Atlantic and an interview on NPR.

I got an email from a guy who was launching a PR startup, which basically helped founders create relationships with journalists via cold email outreach. I was very early stage and figured it was worth a shot (I think they had a free trial).

I used the platform to email several dozen technology-oriented journalists. Although most of them did not email back, James Hamblin from The Atlantic did. He really liked our innovation, which partially overlapped with his medical reporting beat (our tool makes reading more cognitively efficient, both for neurotypical readers and those with dyslexia, ADHD, or other challenges).

It took a couple months of follow up, but he eventually wrote a solo feature about BeeLine Reader in The Atlantic. [1] The next morning I got an email from a producer on a nationwide NPR show, [2] who heard about us through The Atlantic. It was an amazing couple weeks, and we have benefitted greatly from being able to point to these pieces as social proof in the years since.

The lessons for me were:

• it's a numbers game — you have to reach out broadly to get any leads

• even when a journalist is interested, it will still typically take months to get something written

• there is momentum in media, so try to get follow-on coverage if you are able to get that first hit

• once in a blue moon, founder-spam is actually worth reading

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/a-bet...

2: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/eurek...

>it's a numbers game — you have to reach out broadly to get any leads

A caveat to that is that it's a little bit like job hunting. On the one hand, you don't want to stake everything on getting that feature article in The New York Times. At the same time, that doesn't mean you have to blast out the same low quality generic pitch to every email you can get your hands on.

The good PR people I know have relationships with journalists, tend to know what things I'm interested in, the type of coverage I do, etc. You're still going to drill a lot of dry holes, but there are certainly PR folks that I'll listen to if they reach out even if I ultimately decline.

That is exactly the reason I am building https://presscatalog.com , I think solo founders can benefit by pitching to journalists directly. I would really really love if you can give me some feedback.

Happy to!

The first thing I noticed is that the pricing is monthly (and not trivial, at $90/mo to start). Do you expect folks to use the product for a short time when they're focused on PR, or would this be an ongoing thing? I can imagine that there would be periods where startups wouldn't want to be spending that much when they're focused on other things (product, fundraising).

Thank you very much, for now, it is monthly pricing, but certainly an area of improvement. The plan is not to charge in case there are no exports in a month.

Do you get consent from journalists for listing their emails? I thought about building something like that in the past but then the GDPR law took effect in EU and I was scared I could find myself sued to oblivion.

I have been reaching out to some journalists over Twitter and most of them have been supportive. In case they are not I remove them from the list. I am yet to cover all, but I intend to abide by GDPR as much as possible.

And the fact is that there are all manner of lists out there of various levels of quality. I get emails every day even though I'm not a regular journalist.

One way to prove that your product works would be to get your company to featured by journalists :)

Interesting, have you had any success stories?

What was the PR startup?

Honestly, I don't even know. I tried searching my inbox for my first contact with James Hamblin, but it looks like they ran the initial outreach through their servers.

After the pieces in The Atlantic and NPR came out, I circled back with the startup and offered to give an enthusiastic testimonial, but I never heard back.

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