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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

Based on the organizations you say are signing up for your product, you're spending an awful lot of time trying to get coverage on a site that doesn't focus on your core markets whatsoever.

All the time you spent literally begging TC to respond to your emails could have been spent getting published in trade blogs/magazines/sites that talk directly to your customer.

Get out of the startup bubble and focus on your customer. Companies that stay under the radar and are killing it are way cooler than a rewritten press release on TC.

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I didn't really spend a huge amount of time doing it to be honest. A little research, a few emails and Skype call, half a day tops.

We've actually been talked about in a number of trade blogs/magazines/sites and conferences. We saw some really good results from those as well, and yes, obviously a higher percentage of converting customers came through those sources.

I'm not in any bubble. I'm working really hard. We've got some really healthy revenue and within a month or so based on our current growth, we'll break even. Not bad for only launching a couple of months ago.

I appreciate your comments none-the-less :)

>We've got some really healthy revenue and within a month or so based on our current growth, we'll break even. Not bad for only launching a couple of months ago.

A blog post describing this would be more interesting to me than how you e-mailed a TechCrunch author and he wrote an article about you.

I don't mean for this to come across as snarky or belittle your post—it's just that you basically e-mailed a short pitch to a TechCrunch article and got an article out of it. That's not really revolutionary; lots of 'unsexy' (see: Enterprise) startups get covered on TC.

EDIT: Or, comparing the effects of your TC coverage against more targeted 'focused coverage'—since I think a lot of startups fall into the "we need to be techcrunch'd" trap and don't realize how effective other less buzz-worthy but more targeted media can be.

Sure, I'd be happy to write something about that, and I love the idea of comparing the TC "results" with the other, more targeted places that wrote about us.

You are right, all I did was pitch them in a certain way. I wouldn't call us an Enterprise focused start-up yet and I wasn't trying to come across as revolutionary— just sharing an experience of how I managed to achieve something :)

I'd appreciate that as well. It can be a challenge to establish relationships with these trade pubs and develop beneficial content. Interested to hear your take on it.

Agreed. A blog post regarding the story referenced by avree would be great.

Nevertheless, this story is refreshingly interesting and appreciated.

It's nice to hear this type of story after reading an article via TC about how some PR firm was claiming they can "Get your startup covered" by a site "like" TC for something like $750. Such behavior, I imagine, would ultimately dilute everything I like about TC and other similar sites. Thanks again for sharing your "real" experience.

My company has a few competitors and every now and then a new one will show up blazing through all the tech blogs.

If I'm being 100% honest I feel a little jealous because I'd like our team to get a little love from our peers in the tech community. But I reevaluate when they shut their doors 6 months later because they spent all of their PR money on coverage outside our industry. This has happened to us three times in about 4 years.

I've spent some time getting write ups and case studies on tech sites. I think it's ok to give yourself a little attention in that way as long as you keep in mind that it isn't really reaching customers. It can be good for developer morale though.

Great comment. We're in the enterprise space and we also see many competitors do the tech blog rounds and then fall off the face of the earth after a few months.

To add to your morale point, I look at tech blog coverage as great for recruiting engineers, as that's where engineers tend to hang out to find the next "hot" company (vs. websites specific to your vertical, where your customers hang out).

Yeah, we knew we wouldn't really be reaching many potential customers.

I did get a few interesting emails from potential investors, and people who work at other tech companies who saw integration potential.

I'd never spend a penny on outsourcing PR. Ever.

It was a great little boost for the team. Everyone felt really proud. Why? I don't know. It just felt good to have a wee bit of recognition after all the hard work everyone put in to launching the product.

That's excellent - Congrats on your project too. I hope the publicity leads to a deal or something. I'm sure any of us would feel pleased to get a writeup. It sounds like you guys have your priorities right.

The "emails from investors" are likely associates just trawling for new leads they can pass to the partners. Unless you're actively looking to raise, they can safely be ignored.

Would you care to share where all you got covered and which ones actually drove revenue?

You target various audiences separately with your PR. Techcrunch, while terrible for acquiring users in most categories, is great - probably a must - for raising funding and hiring.

Give me a break. If a VC is going to invest in a company based on whether or not it was written about in TC, they are pretty terrible investors.

The only thing it could _potentially_ help is valuation, but any good investor would negotiate that perk away anyway.

Social proof can influence funding. And TC is one avenue to get social proof.

I agree that they would be bad investors if that was their only criteria. But most investors (and in fact most consumers) are heavily influenced by social proof. Have you ever bought a certain article over another one on Amazon because it had great reviews?

What a feature by TC is saying, this startup is interesting enough that TC wrote about them. It is a sort of a filter, much like YC is one.

Being written about on TechCrunch can also help create a sense of urgency with the investors you are already talking to, because now there is potentially more people interested.

Social proof matters if you don't have paying customers and are trying to scale your user base to the moon. When it comes to raising as a B2B, the social proof that matters is paying customers.

This is misapplied cliche HN wisdom and it's unfortunate that this type of comment makes it to the top yet again. You have no idea what their time would be best spent on. As has already been pointed out, there are other very valid reasons someone might want to get in TC.

Like? Saying it's "necessary" for a raise is even more ridiculous than what I said.

I agree, especially with the last sentence. But there's an important point buried in one of the e-mails in the article:

2 weeks ago we walked away from $160,000 in seed funding because we decided [..] we should get profitable before we take funding to get a better valuation

Getting press from places like TC will be very helpful when it comes to finding funding, especially if it's from the typical Bay Area crowd.

But I do still agree with your last sentence and a company that does well in its own niche and doesn't need funding is certainly more cooler than one that does - it's just not what everyone wants to do.

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