How To Do PR With No Budget with Gina Gotthilf, Latitud

Figuring out how to become interesting to other people and how to become relevant is a key part of pr, and this comes through latching onto signifiers like numbers or words that mean something to other people. So that's like either well known people, well known companies, impressive numbers, or awards. It can be like Mark Zuckerberg, use my product yesterday and here's a quote from him right now, even if no one has ever heard of my thing, that's an important person. Or we launched and we got a hundred thousand downloads in one day. That's interesting. So figure out what makes people go to think from the perspective of each journalist and what stories are going to interest them. So you engineer relevance for the journalists or for the influencer, the person you're trying to impress.

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Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction Podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US and Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development, tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B O A S T AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA. Special thanks to our Podcast partner Content Allies from Podcast Production and Promotion content allies helps B2B companies build revenue generating podcast. We recommend them to any B2B company that's looking to launch or streamline their podcast production. Learn more@contentallies.com I am super excited to.

Have Gina with us. Gina is an OG Traction speaker. She Spoke at our in person Traction event in Vancouver a few years ago when we just had 10,000 subscribers or something. Today we've got 118,000 subscribers and I feel all our speakers are part of the community and they've been a big part in helping us build this community. So Gina today is a co founder of Latitude, a platform helping build the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America through a dedicated fellowship, community and fund. And previously she led growth and marketing at Duolingo from 3 to 200 million users. And Duolingo recently IPO'd. So Gina never probably has to work again. And overall, Gina is one of the most well known people in the growth marketing community and that's what I started with. She is the wonder woman of growth. Gina, welcome to Traction. Thank you for joining us.

Hi, it's such a pleasure.

First, why did you start Latitude?

So Latin America is an amazing place. It's actually the largest latitude on the map, the whole Latin America region, but it's not much of a region. It's. We consider Latin America in the United States, but if you're Brazilian, me, you don't think of yourself as Latin American and talking to other people in Mexico and Colombia on a regular basis. But there's tons of opportunity for collaboration and growth. Tldr we're really behind in Latin America when it comes to tech stuff. There's just so much green field and open space and low hanging fruit or whatever you call it for amazing innovation in health tech, prop tech, fintech, all the techs. Basically there's just so much stuff that's offline and manual that needs to be digitized and will be digitized. And so my partner sold his company for $600 million last year in Brazil. Kind of Zillow for Brazil. He started in 2011 and we decided to build a platform to make it a lot easier and faster to start and build really successful tech companies across Latin America. We connect people, we help them find investment and we help them figure out a bunch of the early steps from going to zero to one. And yeah, we've had four cohorts so far. We have an NPS of 90, a community of 400 people and we also have a fund. We've raised $5 million, we've made 21 investments so far and we're starting to launch products too. And people like David Veles, founder of nubank, is an investor in our fund. And so we're basically taking all this amazing money coming out of successful companies in Latin America and reinvesting it back into the ecosystem and helping put the region more on the map as a big tech hub.

What a great mission. And you're going to create massive impact. And then you were part of Tumblr as well. You launched Tumblr in Latin America and you help them lead to get to hockey stick growth spanning pr, community partnerships, et cetera. You're an all around growth marketing badass.

Lloyd gave me a very kind introduction, but I'd like to say that in retrospect I'm a growth badass. But the day to day of getting here and today does not, it does not feel that way at all. I was at Duolingo for five years and I was part of their executive team. I also led growth in Latin America for Tumblr and then some other oddball things. I worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign last year, which is interesting from a growth point of view because we were spending a million dollars a day on paid media and so got to ab test a lot, a lot of landing pages. So here's how I'm thinking about this presentation. First, I'll tell you guys kind of what my playbook is, but it's the playbook that we came up with at Duolingo was totally accidental. It seems brilliant now, but at the time it was just kind of shooting everywhere and seeing what worked. And it worked to an intro to pr. Just more holistically like what is PR and not from a textbook standpoint because I never studied PR more from what I've seen PR to be and how I think about it point of view. And three, what we did for Duolingo for some questions that I get a lot. Five, I'll just go a couple of through a couple of resources that I think are particularly useful if you're trying to start out in pr, especially if you're doing it in house. And then six, we're going to do a little very quick step by step exercise for everyone who's interested in coming up with like the start the beginnings of a PR pitch for something and then I'll open it up to questions. So first of all, I never actually studied pr. I never studied growth, I never studied marketing. I think that if I were trying to show off, I'd be like I'm a self taught professional. But the truth is just I studied philosophy in school. I was hoping to become a film major. You learn how to answer really difficult questions, but you don't learn any of life's basic skills or how to use Excel. And then you, you don't have any way of making money, because a philosopher doesn't make money. So unless you go be a philosophy professor or something like, that's kind of how I ended up in marketing. I really wanted to live in New York, and that's how I was able to find a job working in a digital media agency that served LVMH brands. So Louis Vuitton Hennessy. And when I talk about it now, it sounds really prestigious, but it was pretty crappy. And I was a lowly intern and I cried very often at work. My career took a big turn when I honestly gave up on it and decided to leave the United States because I'm also here. Well, I was on a visa. Now I'm finally on a green card, decided that this whole career thing is too hard, went back to Brazil to have a existential crisis. And Tumblr got in touch with me because one thing that I think I have done well so far, kind of accidentally too, is networking. Just meeting interesting people, doing interesting things. And those connections have led me very far. So with Tumblr, one of the agencies I worked with, we were doing campaigns for American Express Publishing, and I thought, ooh, Tumblr is new. It's super visual. Be cool to have American Express publishing magazines on Tumblr. So I got in touch with them and said, hey, tell you what, you guys helped me make like an amazing campaign for my clients, and then you can use American Express Publishing as a case study for future clients. And that's how I got to know them. And fast forward to six months later, maybe a year later, and they call me and they say, hey, we're thinking maybe launching in Brazil and Argentina and Chile. Can you help us out quickly? What I did there was they wanted me to find someone to lead Tumblr in Latin America. I didn't find anyone. They didn't like anyone that I found. Then they asked me to stay. So first tip is don't do a good job at recruiting. I'm just kidding. I actually legitimately tried to find them someone and we didn't have any budget. So a lot of what we ended up doing for Tumblr, it was just me. We was me in my parents bedroom, my childhood bedroom, and we ended up doing a lot of PR because I couldn't pay for anything else. And I just thought, okay, well, if I can get magazines and newspapers and blogs or whatever to write about Tumblr, then people can discover it. And I think that we can get a lot of users. And that's kind of how My love for PR started. Fast forward a little bit. I started working with a number of different tech companies that were interested in expanding Latin America. And Duolingo became my client. They were super tiny. There were, I think, something 19 employees. There was no Android app and same thing they were, hey, can you help us grow? We heard that Tumblr grew a lot in Brazil, Chile and Argentina last year. Can you do the same thing? We have no budget. Thank you. Bye. And so it kind of became the same thing. Okay, how do I figure out how to make this interesting for journalists? Because again, Duolingo was tiny. No one had heard of it. And the whole we're building a language learning app thing wasn't entirely sexy. So figuring out who to pitch and how to position it and how to make it into stories that made people across the region read this thing and go, ooh, I want to try this app and I want to check it out and then measure whether that was working or not. So that's how my love for PR became a little bit more structured. So taking a step back, what is pr? Obviously it stands for public relations. A lot of people think of it as a press release or it's okay, hiring an agency. To me, PR means finding people with a big audience to feature you. So it's really hard to find audiences and to talk to a very large number of people. So you have to find the people who do have the audience and the large number of people listening to them and have them talk about you if you're trying to grow something. And a lot of the times those people are editors or journalists or writers with a large following on social media or just with for big and well known publications. By definition, PR is really hard to measure because it's earned, not owned, which means it's not a thing, it's not a channel that you own. You're just getting attention from external sources. It's really hard to measure the impact of that because it's not always going to be as direct as, ooh, someone read it, they clicked and they came to your thing, right? It might be what they call brand awareness, which is, okay, more people are aware that you exist, more people are thinking of you. So that when their friend says, hey, I'm trying to learn French, they say, hey, I read about this thing called Duolingo. Or when you try to get a government with a partnership with the government, the person there says, oh, I think I read about you on Time magazine. Actually, you're legit. You're not completely random. So to Me, that's pr. And I think it's important to think about it loosely because it allows you to think about it in an evolving way depending on how the world is changing. So today, more so than when I was a Tumblr, for example, I think influencer marketing is a much bigger thing. And you have like teenagers on TikTok and technically they could be people that you want to get your message out to, so they get the message to more people. It might also be that you're super niche and you're just trying to hit all universities in the country. And so suddenly then thinking of what are the newsletters within those organizations or who are professors that are really well liked. To me, that becomes a PR source. Kind of a quick note about the press release is just a lot of companies I've seen will be okay, we're going to do pr, we're going to write a press release and we're going to put it out into the world and then we're going to wait for a journalist to pick it up. I've seen a lot of, not definitely, not all, but I've seen a lot of agencies do that as well. And that I think is a little bit of an old school way of thinking about it because you have to just, you're waiting for someone to go and find this, this kind of text that is a little bit obsolete. Instead of trying to go and find the people who want to write about you and position it to them in the most interesting way possible and the shortest, clearest message that you can come up with why you should care about pr, it's free. So caveat on that. It depends on where you are with your company. If you're a part of a huge corporation and you just don't have the time or the expertise or anything to actually do it in house, and it's not free, you're going to hire an agency. This presentation is a little bit more focused on my experience working in startups that have no budget. And so it is free. Unlike, for example, Facebook ads or billboards where you can't even get started unless you take out your credit card. It's amazing because it allows you to build external credibility and you can draw in not only users, as I said, people who discover your platform, your app, your product, but also investors and more broadly, people who believe in you. Because people need signifiers or external sources to tell them what to trust. So that a well known magazine or a well known university or a professor or whoever might be that for you, and you do that with pr, you're able to reach huge audiences, much bigger than you yourself have and your brand has. And it also accrues over time. This is important because oftentimes it's really, it feels really hard to focus on PR because it's hard to see an impact immediately. It's one of those things that just kind of builds and builds and builds and then one day you're oh, PR has really helped us along the way away. But it's not, it's rarely something, something that you do much SEO or even social media, something that you're able to do and see an impact that super quickly. But over time it builds and it takes time to build. Even companies like Airbnb have relied heavily on PR for growth and are now, now talking more, more widely about it. The Duolingo Playbook the first step is to engineer relevance. So find a way to latch onto signifiers, well known people, companies, numbers, awards, what that means. It's not always that your company or you are going to have something that's super shiny immediately, right? Let's say that I invent a, invent a vaccine today and it cures Covid that's relevant. But the odds of your company or you being in that place is very small. And so figuring out how to become interesting to other people and how to become relevant is a key part of pr. And this comes through latching onto signifiers like numbers or words that mean something to other people. So that's either well known people, well known companies, impressive numbers or awards can be. Mark Zuckerberg use my product yesterday and here's a quote from him right now. Even if no one has ever heard of my thing, that's an important person or we launched and we got 100,000 downloads in one day. That's interesting. So figure out what makes people go to think from the perspective of each journalist and what stories are going to interest them. So you engineer relevance for the journalists or for the influencer or the person you're trying to impress. So again, why I think that from my understanding and apologies to the PR professionals on this call who know more than me, the pr, the press release is a little old school because it's often just here's a big text and it has all the information and go. It's a lot more effective from my perspective and my experience to think of a story and how it applies to that journalist and what they care about. So for example, if I'm pitching, I don't know Duolingo very early days, no one cares. It's going to depend on whether I think this person's going to be interested on the tech aspect of it, or the education aspect of it, the gaming aspect of it, or the founder or women using Duolingo. There's a lot of different stories that can come up from a product or a company and you need to understand what the journalists you are pitching will be interested in and finally leverage your highest credibility Persona in the company or in the organization. So it's really hard to get attention from journalists and to be relevant. So you want to put your best foot forward. And that means if you have someone who's a little more well known, who has more followers on social media, who has like an impressive LinkedIn page or whatever, use that person as your spokesperson to craft a pitch. So a pitch is basically the message that you send out to a journalist or to a influencer or whoever, kind of getting them to want to write about your thing. So in startup life, pitching is normally associated with investment. You're going to pitch your startups that you get investment. This is you're going to pitch your company so that the journalist immediately wants to write about it. And you don't have a lot of time because journalists are super busy, have a million pitches and emails and whatever. So you need to get their attention super quickly. So what I learned is pile on all the signifiers I possibly can in the first sentence. So in reaching out to people that had no idea who I was or had no idea what Duolingo was in the first sentence, I would make a list of all the things that I thought I could list that might sound impressive, like x many users in this amount of time, or this person used the app, or Luis Vanon, the founder, created the Captcha. I was able to use that a lot with Duolingo, which is amazing in some countries. Even though Luis, who is the founder of Duolingo and creator of Captcha, did not want me to mention Captcha, but immediately I knew that a lot of journalists would know what that was and that would give us an immediate in, or if there's a university name or company name, anything that sounds important, impressive, whatever, you put that into the first sentence because assume they're only going to read that, make it super short. No one has. I think you want to include all the information in that email. In my experience, it's been more effective to keep it super short and get the person's attention. And even if they're, oh, okay, you have my attention. Tell me more. Now they're Much more to pay attention to the rest than they would have been if it was just one wall of text. Create fomo so it would Duolingo we'd be launching in these new countries. But it was kind of like what does launch even mean? Because Duolingo was already available on the app store no matter what country you were in. In some cases, if it was an English speaking country or Spanish speaking country, we weren't even going to change anything. It was the same exact app. So how do we figure out how to make people, and especially the journalists or the people you're pitching feel like they need to write about it now? It has to make it, it has to feel now. Otherwise you're going to get tossed into a pile of later or forgotten about test and iterate everything that you write. So if you're writing a pitch and you start you're messaging all the people you could possibly get to on Twitter and on LinkedIn and wherever, start trying to notice what works, what doesn't work. If the first sentence highlights this versus if the set first sentence highlights this other thing, which one did you get more of response? You can also gauge this just by talking to people and seeing what they react to. Taylor by Vertical Journalist I talked about that. So make sure that you understand who you're pitching. And I always like to end with a question because that makes it much more likely in my experience that someone will respond to your message. So super short and sweet. Give them enough information to make them impressed, leave them wanting more. And with a question, would you be interested in a 10 minute conversation? Would you be interested in learning more? That kind of thing. So here are just some examples of really early day duolingo pitches that I wrote in different languages across the world trying to get people to write about duolingo. And so here you can see I tested different things. So here's like I work with, you know, Louis Vuitton, the adventure of Capture recaptcha sold two companies to Google in his twenties, has given a well known TED talk one of MacArthur and create a duolingo. It's almost a non sequitur. And it's all stuff that Luis wouldn't have said about himself if he was meeting someone new. But I knew that they were all impressive words that would catch someone's attention. And then Luis will be in India for the first time. Would you be interested in interviewing him? This was especially short because I was using my LinkedIn and the reason I use LinkedIn is because I knew people would click on me and See that I have a bunch of connections, 500 connections. And I didn't have a photo with Obama at the time, but I, I don't know, I looked like kind of legit, so I thought that I had a better chance of, of them responding. And on LinkedIn you have a much shorter amount of words you're allowed to use than for example, an email. And the goal was to get people's emails so that I could then communicate them and them know my name when my email arrived in their inbox then. This is very controversial advice that is very faux pas for pr, which is spray and pray. As soon as I hired professionals in PR to work at Duolingo, they were cringe, hated my approach, but it worked really well for me. Spray and pray means I'm just going to get a message and I'm going to send it to everyone I possibly can and pray that someone will write about it. The more strategic, tailored approach is really craft each message according to each person and be very thoughtful about who you're going to pitch, etc. Etc. If you work for an UPRI agency, you have the time and the know how to do that. If you are a scrappy startup trying to just get on with your day and get like maximum bang for your book and move on to the next thing, this worked out really well. And you can pull it off if you're doing it internally. You cannot pull it off if you're doing it with a PR agency, because the PR agency needs to treat all of their connections with extreme care because they depend on those connections with the journalists. So if they pitch five people, for example, the New York Times, which is a huge faux pas, and someone at the New York Times finds out that someone else was pitched at the New York Times or they both start writing a story that's a disaster and then basically the whole agency gets shunned and. But if you're at a startup and you're sorry, no, you can get away with it, especially if you're the founder. I'm not saying that you should pitch five people at the New York Times, but basically what I would do is just make a huge list of everyone I wanted to try to get in front of and just go for it. And yeah, I think, yeah. So the way that I would order it is categorize them as tiers 1, 2, 3. So tier 1 is like super impressive, super important, CNN, the New York Times, etc. Tier 2, maybe TechCrunch, which is more specific to tech and then equivalence. Maybe I don't know, women's health magazine, that kind of thing. Still well known, but a little bit more focused. And then tier three are smaller, a lot more niche, a lot more focus. Newsletters or blogs or whatever. Start with tier three because you're going to make a bunch of mistakes when you start pitching and you don't want to be making the mistakes when you're pitching the New York Times. So start with your lowest, your lowest and most likely to forgive you sources. Figure out how to reach those people. So I just had this ongoing spreadsheet all over the world with all the journalists I could possibly find. And I found them mainly through LinkedIn or Twitter or Google. I'd google their name and see if I could find their email. Most of the time through LinkedIn and through Twitter. Yeah, start with tier three or exclusive. So exclusive means you could decide. I really want this particular source magazine influencer to cover this. It's really important that they cover this. So I'm going to give the story only to them them and that's a way to get them to be interested in the story because they know that they're the only person who's getting it or the only source. And finally it. And I'll talk about this I think a little bit later too. Relationship with PR professionals, especially the people that you are going to write or feature or talk about your product or company should be treated long term relationships and not like contact that you found them, then you use and then that's it. Really build friendships with them as much as you can. And I try to approach everything at work that way because then they'll trust you, then they know that you're not full of crap. And then you'll come to mind when they're thinking of a story that's going to feature something, what you're doing and they'll recognize your name on the inbox. So they're much more likely to open the email. Okay, I think this, yeah, this is an example of just like the spray and pray like a bunch of. I sent a bunch of messages like this and in a lot of cases people would be like, hey, sorry I didn't respond, I forgot what you wrote about. And I just repeat this is my message and just send it out over and over. Finally being a sweet pest, I was referred to a duolingo as Linkzilla. Not something that I'm excited or proud of. But it's funny because it's so important to get a link in things that feature in articles or tweets or whatever. Get a link back to whatever your thing is. Because I always assume that readers and people, myself included, are lazy. So thinking that someone's going to read a story and your name comes up or your company name comes up and they're going to then go and Google it, it's a dream, probably not going to happen. You're going to lose a lot of interest because there's not a really easy way to just click and check out whatever it is that you're trying to promote. Really trying to get a link into the story is important, but most journalism writers don't want to do that because they want to keep the traffic on their page. So there. And in many cases they're going to be, well, we have a policy, we actually don't link back. So you need to learn how to be really nice and really sweet and be pleased. It would mean the world to me. And it's going to be good for your readers because you're writing about this and they're, they might be curious and just try to do it, try to get it at the beginning of the story because again, people are lazy and they're probably going to drop off and try to get it as soon as it's published because it becomes less relevant. Send in an edit request. So as soon as it's published, read the story, find out if there's mistakes in the piece, there probably will be. And immediately, very kindly write back to the person, the journalist, and try to change it. Be super thankful for any help you get from this writer or journalist or influencer. Again, long term relationship, they are working, they're being respectful and it's important to cultivate that over a very long time. Network as often as you can and become a resource, become the go to source for whatever industry you're in if you can. So like, for me, like it was okay. Education, technology, special Latin America. I want journalists to think of me when they're writing a story that's not about Duolingo or Tumblr or Latitude, but they're thinking, oh, text and tech or Latin America or education, something, oh, Gina, Gina's gonna know. That's an amazing place to be because then you gain so many opportunities that you would have not been aware of finally. And this has really shaped how I thought about PR at Duolingo. Measuring PR and a lot of brand marketing is really hard to measure because I said it's long term and brand awareness is hard to measure. But in as much as possible, always be measuring the impact of what you're doing. To understand what works and what doesn't work. So with Duolingo, it only counted if the PR we generated directly brought in new users. That's what we were looking at. So if people went to the website or downloaded the app eventually, and that makes a big difference in terms of understanding what are the stories that get that kind of behavior and which stories do not get that kind of behavior. So, for example, if I, if we got featured in a 10 Best Language Learning apps story that doesn't do Anything because there's 10 apps listed there, or the most valuable edtech company in Silicon Valley, that's not a story that's going to get us users either. It's going to impress investors and it's going to impress business people, but it's not necessarily going to get users a story that says Juan learned English and was able to double his income potential. And then a feature about Juan and how he learned English with Duolingo and was able to work at a restaurant in Argentina and serve American visitor tourists and then get much better tips. That's a story that makes someone read and go, ooh, I, I want to try this out. I think that this could be good for my career, too. Thinking about what you're trying to achieve and actually looking at numbers to understand what kinds of stories, what kind of. You might even find that it's much more effective for you to go and pitch little tiny newsletters, then try to get big feature stories because they're just reaching your audience much more effectively. Here's an example of Parametrics and how we knew that it was working really well early on at Duolingo. So this is, this is Brazil and this is Turkey. This is when we launched in Brazil. So people are quick, slowly discovering. I forget what we did over here, but people kind of. There's a bump WWW and tnw or conferences that I had the founder and CEO of Duolingo go and give the opening talk at so that then I could reach out to journalists and say, oh, Luis Vanon, the founder of Duolingo, has been invited by one of the most important tech conferences in your country to give a talk. Would you be interested in interviewing him? So even if they didn't know who he was or Duolingo or anything, the fact that now there's a signifiers most important tech conference, or in many cases the Playbook became most important tech conference plus most important university in the country. So that would be our country Playbook launch. Because then I could imagine if I said, we're in the Us and I say, hey, so and so you've never heard of I don't know Tim Bob, but Tim Bob was invited to give the commencement speech at Harvard and also to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt. Would you be interested in five minutes of his time? You're. Yeah, I've never heard of this person or this company, but yeah, I'm interested. So now you've given the journalists a reason and a very specific time frame to act and to speak to you and to care about what you're doing. So here's Turkey and that's what we did there. We also same thing talk at very relevant, top fancy sounding tech conference. And it's interesting because in that case it was the opening speech, but there was no opening speech because the conference itself gave the opening speech. So it was just the first talk at the conference and we did it that way so that then I could say the journalist Luis giving the first talk. It sounds impressive. That's a goal. And then also he gave the commencement speech at Boazic University which is big in Turkey, but sometimes it was just in India. He gave a talk at IIT Delhi which is the top tech university there. The reason why we could get that is because Luis is a professor. So I knew that even if no one knew who he was or what he was doing, some person at IIT Delhi will understand that this is a big deal opportunity or that there's a lot of knowledge that's worthwhile for their students there. And now I have an evangelists in the university and say to say hey can you go talk to the superintendent and is there an event coming up that we can like do together or maybe is do you have a commencement speech speaker and that kind of thing. Questions? I get a lot in house or agency? Again it depends on where you are and how much money you have and how much time you have. In my experience I go for in house as, as often as you can. I personally have not been very lucky with PR agencies because especially if you're tiny startup because unless it's a very niche PR agency of two people who really care about you and are willing to go to bat for you, you're going to be bunched with a bunch of other clients and the people who work on your account are going to be a lot more junior than the people who you pitched or who pitched you. And because there's this conflict of interests in many times where PR agencies are trying to manage their relationships with the journalists and you're just trying to go for Whatever, and trying to get attention. Duolingo CEO Luis actually managed PR for sick in house by himself for the first six months, just like sending messages on LinkedIn and Twitter. And then I took over for the next year and a half. So you don't even need a big team in many cases. If you're going to hire someone for pr, who should you hire? My recommendation is first try to find someone who already has, we call it a Rolodex. A lot of connections. So if you're trying to grow in the United States or in Canada or in Brazil, wherever, and in tech, if that person has a lot of well established relationships with journalists or editors, bloggers, influencers, whatever, that's that already helps you a lot because you already have that pre established trust. But that's okay if they don't. If there's someone who's gregarious and can make those connections, hire someone who's scrappy, can do, won't give up attitude and who has experience successfully placing startups in media stories. Not someone at Google. So here it depends on where you are and what kind of person you're hiring for, but think about the experience they've had in their previous job or company and whether that experience is going to be similar to the one within your organization. So for example, we specifically did not hire PR people from Google at Duolingo in the early days because even though we hired a lot of people from Google, especially engineers, designers, product managers, we knew that to be a PR person at Google meant to get a lot of interest and then tell journalists that they can't publish about you or try to like manage what they actually say about you. If you're starting a company that no one ever heard of, you're going to go beg. You're going to go out and find names and beg them to pay attention to you. It's completely different job. So think about that and yeah, the whole scrappy attitude. I started doing this for Tumblr when I was 25. I don't know that at the very mature age of 35 I would have the energy to send out 200 messages in one day to try to get the traction that I need maybe, but I don't know. Resources, some. Just some ideas. So cision is a great resource for finding journalists emails and contact information. Oh, I want to reach out to cnn, whatever, but it's super expensive. So I just found some alternatives in case you're not in a position where you could get a scission type thing to find contacts. So here's one that I personally have not used but seems to be really solid. And then PR co also finally, we're going to do a really quick step by step exercise. I'm going to give you people on the call about 30 seconds to one minute for each slide. So before we start, have something that you can write with. Either it's like a pen or it's on your computer and try to think of something you want PR for that you would like to get a journalist or an influencer to feature. It could be yourself, it could be your company, or it could be a product. First step, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds for this. Define what success means. So what are you, why do you want to get featured? Is it because you're trying to get a lot of users? Is it because you're trying to raise money? Is it because you're trying to hire the best people that there are out there? Or is it just because you think that right now is the time for you to be building credibility and brand awareness and establishing your name in the market that you're in? I didn't start my timer, but that felt 30 seconds. So if you were hopefully you were able to write something down and if not, you were able to think of a question to ask me because we're almost at the end. Second, think through what are your targets are, who are you trying to reach? And there's two, two steps, right? Like who, there's who what journalists are trying to reach. But really it's like who out in the world are you trying to reach? Is it all the teachers in the world? Is it all the moms in the world? Is it kids? Try to think of who you' target audience is and then try to figure out what they care about and then who you're going to reach in order to reach those people. So for example, if I'm a kid, I'm going to be reading like these magazines, these blogs, I'm going to be watching cartoons, I'm going to be where am I consuming media? What am I listening to? One way to think about this is to try to understand what where you should be targeting in terms of journalists and sources is. Use coverage on similar topics or companies so that who's going to write or feature your thing? So for example, if I'm in a tech startup and I want to get some press, I want to get new users, I want to interest investors, I'm going to go on Google Duolingo and try to see who has written about Duolingo. Recently and write down their names and then search for them on LinkedIn and Twitter. So start thinking about who you're trying to reach and what they might be reading or listening to or watching. I included this template here, by the way, and I'm happy to share it with whoever is interested. I'm gonna actually don't know if you'll be able to open it because I'm not sharing it. But a template is just basically a very simple Excel sheet with names of publications that I want to reach based on the audience that I thought of and my goals and columns that categorize them. What tier I think they are, 1, 2 or 3, what's the topic of coverage, what's the country that they're in, and any other things that matter to you. I can share that at the end if anyone asks for it. Okay, now think of what your hook is going to be. What's the message that you can pitch that's really interesting to someone and it's not. Think about it from not your or your mom or your best friend's perspective. Everyone cares about what you're building because they love you. Think about the world. Someone who doesn't know you. What's something that's really actually interesting? Are there numbers that you can cite that you think are impressive names? Or if not, what's something that you could potentially do? A talk that someone could give or is there a survey you could send out to people and try to get some insight about an industry that might become of relevance to a journalist. Basically try to figure out what are interesting things that other people care about that you might have to say related to your product or industry. And also try to think of like who the most influential person in your company is and who would be the person who to give talks, workshops or interviews. Here's a little template for the really short pitch that you're going to write and think that you're going to send a message that's going to be a subject line and a really short email or a message on LinkedIn or a tweet at someone so super short. And try to formulate a list. The first sentence, what Remember signifiers, whatever names of companies, universities, people or numbers or it could be. Or you could say Covid. Covid is a catchy word right? Now, whatever words you think are relevant that you might want to include in that first sentence. So similar to Luis von Ahn is a professor Carnegie Mellon who blah blah, blah, blah. Duolingo has this many users. And then the third sentence should be A question. So I'm Gina. I. I helped the link over from 3 to 200 million users and worked on the Mike Bloomberg campaign. I'm launching a new company helping tech startups in Latin America succeed. Would you be interested in hearing more about it? Quick note about signifiers, because I don't know if there's anyone on this call feeling, well, I don't really have any impressive names or numbers, and now I'm feeling like crap. I'm just going to note and say that this can also be engineered. Okay? You think about, what do people care about? And then you backtrack your way into that. When I was at university at Brandeis, I was a super overachiever my whole life. I did all the degrees that I could possibly do and all the extra classes. Like, I was like, probably really annoying. And I. I remember I went to my college counselor in my junior year and she said to me, what have you done with your whole life? And just looking at my resume. And I went home and I cried and I was just, how could she? I've done so much. And then I thought, oh, yeah, you want impressive things on my resume? And I was. What's impressive? Neuroscience. So I went and figured out how to work at a neuroscience lab, which I did just so that I could later say I worked at a neuroscience lab. And I put that on my resume. And then suddenly people are, whoa, you're so smart. Neuroscience. Neuroscience is an impressive word. So. So you can engineer that even as an annoying college student. And I'm sure that everyone here can as well. Okay, next step is whether it's for yourself, your company, your product, what you want to generate an ongoing, like, cadence and drum beat of mentions in the press because you want to stay relevant. And then it becomes easier to get more stuff too, right? You're like, hey, I was featured on this in February. Now we're doing blah, blah, blah. And it just allows you to build credibility that way. So try to think of one different topic that you might want to get press around for each month. And I know that this is. It might not be every month if you're a startup, it might be every two or three or six months. But just try this exercise. So, example, March, I'm going to be fundraising. I want to get some great credibility for investors. And then in April, I know that we're launching a new feature. So. So that's going to be our big announcement in May, I'm going to. I don't have anything. So actually, I think I'm going To have this many subscribers to my newsletter then. So then I'm going to send out a survey and I'm going to try to get really interesting numbers for the press. And then in June I'm going to find one user that has that I think has a really incredible story and we're going to try to pitch them.

What about using an interesting fact data instead of some name dropping type thing in the sentence one? Especially if you don't have a big name.

Oh yeah, a hundred percent, A thousand percent, whatever is actually truly interesting to the other person. So if, if it's going to be like hey, I'm six years old and I'm in kindergarten, well that's already interesting. So that's not fair. All right, I'm 19 year old, I went to a college you never heard of. But and I launched this app and this many people downloaded or actually I found through the usage of my app that turns out 70% of people in this city do blah. That's fantastic for a journalist, right? They're looking for stories all the time. So if you have stats and data that's incredible and try to find ways and to piece it up and make it interesting. If not like the survey idea is just like go find data out into the world.

Awesome. And then how early did you start PR efforts? Would you use it to enroll beta users? I mean that's what Superhuman did. But I mean what's your take on that? When is the right time for pr?

It depends. So there's no right answer. Most annoying things in life or most things in life. But Superhuman did some really interesting stuff and I think it's valid. It depends on where you are and how you're thinking. So for example, at Latitude right now we're launching in a month we're launching a platform to make it super easy to launch and incorporate your company in Brazil. We just had a conversation about this today. I don't want to get pressed about it because we're afraid it's going to break. We're worried that if we are not able to beta test it enough in the beginning that we might have a large influx of people and we might not be able to actually handle it either. And your product might be like if you super succeed from a server side or it might just be that like it's just too buggy and then you lost a bunch of amazing potential users because the experience was really kind of crappy. So in that case I think that I would do PR in my broad definition of pr thinking how do I reach pockets of people that are audiences that might be a little bit larger than mine in order to get the beta testers that I need. Maybe it's like a referral thing. Maybe it's really niche. Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's your own newsletter. Maybe it's another newsletter. Like, try to figure. And that's newsletter. I know your own newsletter is more own media, but just thinking about it, how to get the message out, I just would caution against going and doing a big PR blast. If you're. If you think that your product is still very buggy because you might shoot yourself in the foot.

People are asking what FOMO means. FOMO is fear of missing out. But perhaps you can again solidify it with one statement in the context of pr.

So if I'm home and my friends went to a party, I have FOMO because I'm like, oh, no, they're having such a great time and I'm not there. In this context, it means making journalists or your targets or whoever, like, feel like if they're not able to do an interview with you now or feature you now, they're gonna miss the chance. So it's like a time box thing, right? If you say, like, hey, I just launched a new product. Do you want to talk about it? Like, it's just, it's too, like, well, whenever, maybe next year, I don't know, like, but if there's like a reason to make it, like, oh, my God, this is my chance. Like, I'm only speaking attraction today, and for the rest of the year, I'm not going to be available on zoom or text. Like, suddenly it's like, I have this day to like, reach Gina. Not that anyone cares, but, like, that's an example. So FOMO just means, like generating that fear of like, oh, my God, if I don't do this now, then I'm going to miss out on an opportunity.

Should you limit one story pitch per month or should you have multiple going just different for different interests?

Again, it really depends on the company and the size of the company. And for example, if you're Johnson and Johnson and you have a gazillion billion products, like, maybe you're going to have a different story coming out of your company and that they're going to be tailored to different journalists. If you are a small startup, you probably just don't have that much news and you should probably be focusing on building your thing and being amazing at it. So if you're using a lot of your time trying to Figure out how to talk about it. You're probably wasting valuable resources. And you also don't want to drain out a relationship with journalists such that they think, oh, it's like the FOMO thing again, if they think they're going to hear from you all the time and there's always news, then maybe it's just like a little less interesting because let's see what they come up with next month or like next week. So I think once a month is a good cadence, like for a company like at this, I don't know, I think that maybe when we had already like 50 million users. Okay, but that was specifically like in the context of Duolingo. I think just think about how often do you actually have newsworthy things and how often can you get a journalist to care and do you have the resources internally to actually do this? Because you still need a person to actually focus and get it done. And you might need like a person who convinces, like not convinced, but works with the product team or someone to like do something to then get like to engineer the, the interest. So it depends is the annoying answer.

Yeah, but with startups you have like you're tackling a large market, you likely have interesting data or viewpoints. You just have to. I believe in the seven deadly sins of marketing. People like fomo. Greed, sloth, like send journalists some really interesting information based on the data set that they can't access otherwise. And writing a unique story in it, whether pitching as a byline or directly reaching out. Right? So Mark asks here, Duolingo CEO used to do it. How do journalists respond to CEOs reaching out versus like you reaching out or an agency reaching out, do they welcome the CEO or CEOs lose credibility?

So there's two different ways of looking at this, right? Like on one hand, like if you're super tiny company, the journalist wants to talk to the CEO. Like the PR person just becomes an annoying in between person. Like, and it's more likely they'll respond if like the CEO has like some sort of credibility thing behind them. Like they went to, I don't know, they worked at a company, they worked at a school, they went to a school or something. So I think in general, like the CEO thing works if you're able to, I don't know, generate credibility. And the journalist will like that because it's a direct source. But then there's also like something that I started doing in Duolingo when I first visited Brazil after like having been in the US for a couple years for Duolingo was having someone in my team pitch me as a source. Instead of pitching me as a source to pretend that I was more important than I was, like, have like Gina Godhill if it's coming to Brazil, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, I could easily have sent that email myself. But, like, it was a way to make it seem like I was important and also so I didn't have to pitch myself because that's kind of awkward.

So it depends, what are the best hacks for finding journalists?

Yeah, so you can use one of the resources that I shared or like, session if you have the budget. I didn't, I just did it scrappy. And I just found people on Twitter and LinkedIn. So for example, if I wanted to launch in, we launched in India. I would go and try to figure out, like, who are the most credible people in organizations and publications in India, and I would make a list and then I would try to find who are the people in those publications that might be interested in Duolingo and why. And I would make a list of those names based on, like, other pieces they've written or whatever. I can read about them on Twitter and then I'm going to find how to contact them, like on Twitter or LinkedIn. I try to prioritize LinkedIn because I have much more credibility there now because I have the photo with Obama, but also because I've worked for Duolingo and you can see like all this stuff. Some people have a better following on Twitter or on Instagram or TikTok, whatever. Use your best channel and then just reach out with that really punchy short message filled with signifiers.

And there's multiple ways to scrape email, so we shouldn't. That's not something we'll talk about here. But if. What topics you're targeting, who's your ideal customer profile, what are the pains you're solving for them? And just search them in Google. You'll find journalists who've covered things, covered competitors, just putting in brackets on Google, searching a competitor in Google News, you'll find a lot of publications, right? Or just the industry as it's on its own, right? Like speaking about language or whatever it is that your software is doing. The customers want an outcome, whatever your outcome and problem that you're solving, whatever the outcome you're delivering, the problem you're solving. If you search that in Google News, you'll see a lot of journalists. Everyone's writing everywhere, right? Do you recommend having a press kit ready for journalists? What is your take on that?

If you have the bandwidth in your companies. Do it. Yes. Like I latitude. I just. We haven't gotten around to it. We were one year old. But yeah, especially as your company scales and as opportunities start coming your way, you want to have a really easy way to just be like, here's our logo. Here's like top numbers. And you want to have a place that's like your go to like what Duolingo. As we evolved and grew, we wanted to have one Google Doc and that's all it was, one Google Doc where we could all reference and say the same things. Because like there was a time where like our CEO would just come, like he would just update the numbers he was telling press without letting us know. So he'd be like, dueling was 30 million users. And we would be like, what? It has 30 million users? I'm like, we were saying 20 million users. No, no, no, we're at 30 million users. Like, so we would have one place as like our source of truth for like key messages that are interesting. So that's like when you're pitching, you identify like the data points that are interesting, the whatever, the signifier, names, numbers, all that goes there as bullet points so that anyone who in the future is talking to press or pitching might have an easy access to just like copy paste that information. Yeah, it's just a place to have like everything there. But I wouldn't do what I in general, I wouldn't just say like, hey journalist, here's our press kit. Go there. Like again, like you, you have to treat this relationship with the utmost care and like, treat them like they are very important because they are, they really matter to the growth of your company. And so making it easy and catering to them is important versus saying, hey, here's some stuff like, I don't have time for you right now.

Yeah, yeah. And we got a lot of press recently too at Boast, and we've been featured in Fox and TechCrunch. I have this one Google sheet that I share with everyone with canned photos with logos and a fact sheet on the business. So when they ask, I just send them so they understand the whole story and they can copy paste. Sometimes people don't have the time. They're writing so many stories. If you can help them write it, make it easy, they'll love you. How did you get the photo with Obama and Duolingo logo in the background?

It's Photoshopped. I'm kidding. It's not Photoshopped. But I like to say that no, it was it was like one of the craziest moments in my life that I was very lucky to have. The White House was having the first, and I like to joke, and last demo day, White House demo day. And they invited 30 different startups from all over the United States to showcase how we have brilliant people all over the country. Kind of. I think that that was kind of the point. And Duolingo was selected as one of them because, like, we're in Pittsburgh and, you know, I don't know. I think that's also one of the reasons why we were selected. But. And I. It was like, oh, come present to like the White House staff. I didn't think much of it. And we were, we were pretty sure Obama wasn't going to be there. It was just going to be like a White House presentation, which as a Brazilian, I was still very excited about. Like, I get to go to the White House and like, check out all the rooms. You don't get to check out other rooms, but whatever. I thought it was a cool experience worth talking about. And they took us to the last room in the house. And I remember saying to Louise, the CEO, like, wow, we're being taken to the loser room. Because I thought they were taking to the back. I'm like, okay, well, obviously we see how they're doing this. You know, we got to this, to this room and there were other startups there. And then suddenly I just noticed they were being very picky about everything. Like, your computer is not at a perfect 90 degree angle with this thing. You know, like from 0 to 10, what are the odds that Obama's going to be here? And they were like, they told me this. It was like five minutes before he actually walked into the room. And so I remember that then my focus became like, don't fall because I was wearing heels. Do not fall. Do not do anything too crazy. I actually, you can find this video online. I look really dumb in it, but I did get to explain Duolingo to President Obama, which was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And I shook his hand and then held it on for just a little too long because I didn't want that moment to ever end, which is awkward. And it was his birthday and I really wanted to sing Happy birthday, Mr. President, but Louis said that I would get fired if I did.

But you got a picture. Gina, this has been fantastic. Gina has this knack for making people feel at ease from, like the first minute of the conversation. You are phenomenal, Gina. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's B o a s t AI forward slash blog.