Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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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. Respond to their tweets. Tell them you liked reading their articles. Treat them like human beings. Then pester them for coverage.

Naughty Hack: When I was building UsableHQ I signed up for a free trial on http://muckrack.com/ and scraped the entries using http://import.io to build a target list of 'journalists who write about business tools or write for business publications'. It didn't really help us considering we failed, but it felt good and with more runway it may have been useful.

EDIT: Looking at Muckrack again it looks like they've killed off the free trial. Probably because of people like me. That's a shame. I'm sure the same idea would work on any other journalist database though.

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/

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 own to feature one of my personal little embarrassingly-simple late night Arduino hacks, and my guess is only because I made a Youtube video out of it, and that it had good potential for a witty headline that could go viral on social media with its connection to something from popular literature that everyone knows. There was absolutely zero innovation in it as far as technology goes.

Tech publications, on the other hand, tend to have a higher bar in terms of content quality and meaning to society and the world, but mainstream, non-tech consumers don't read them.

Moral of the story is, if you want to get featured on the mainstream publications, make it catchy, witty, funny, fashionable, potentially viral on its own. Oh, and use technology to realize something well-known from fantasy, science fiction, or popular movies and you'll have an instant hit on mainstream media.

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.

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

Thank you! This, fwiw, is YC's general advice. Entreprenuers sometimes chase tech press because of Meerkat valuations and stuff, but getting customers is the real way to build a business.

Be careful. At least in the US scraping a list of emails and sending them a messages violates CAN-SPAM Act and possible CFAA.

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