My recommendation, which worked very well for us, was to focus less on articles about the startup, and more on articles about the Pinterest, about all the challenges people face using it and growing their following. What types of images should you pin? How frequently should you pin things? So many people have no idea about these things. Then, often your product will naturally fit into some of these articles. You can write these articles on your own blog, or offer them to other blogs.
We did a lot of guest posting to get the first 100,000 users for Buffer.