How to Get Press for your Startup During & Post COVID-19 with Conrad Egusa of Publicize

Hey everybody, welcome to this webinar. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I'm a co-founder at the Founder Institute, and today or tonight, depending on where you are, we're going to be talking about how to get media during these, these really interesting times in the world. And obviously it's a pretty unprecedented time we were, we were living in, and I would have told you that a week ago, and now these events over the last week have have made things a lot more challenging and a lot more interesting, so to speak. So I just want to acknowledge that we do understand all of the hardships that are going on in the world right now. But today or tonight, wherever you are, we are going to focus on some other things. I doubt you came here to see more about the terrible things that are going on in the world. So we're going to focus on the topic at hand. And that topic is, how to get press and how to get media, not only in a time like this where the news cycles are obviously focused on some very specific things, but also into the future. And I'm just looking here. We already got a bunch of people online, which is great. And I'm seeing— let us know where you're from. So I'm seeing here from Toronto, LA, Kazakhstan. That's great. Portland, Oregon. And please let us know where you're from. And also know that we do have a member member of the team in the chat. So all throughout this event, at any time, if you have any questions or comments, please throw them into the chat. And after we go through some of the contents of the event, after we go through a presentation, we're just going to answer all the questions that you have. So again, as I was saying, we're going to be talking today about media and how to get press during these times. And we got a pretty amazing speaker today, and his name is Conrad. Hey, Conrad.

It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

Yeah, yeah, great to have you. So let me just— I'll let Konrad introduce himself in a second as well, but just to, just to give a little bit of background, Konrad runs a company called Publicize. It's publicize.co. This is a company that pretty much specializes in helping small and medium-sized businesses and startups get PR, because if, if anybody out there is has tried to get PR for their small business or their startup, they know that that's usually something that you're priced out of. And Publicize is a great company. A lot of FI alumni use it, and we use it ourselves at FI. So if that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is. But yeah, Conrad's the guy to talk to if you want to get media. He also runs an incubator called Despacio down in Colombia. And yeah, Conrad, any other things that you want to say about yourself or Publicize?

No, thanks. I mean, I really appreciate the introduction. I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Adel and Founder Institute and the entire program as well. And yeah, I guess my hope just kind of leading in with this presentation is to basically take everything I've kind of learned about PR and media and to give that knowledge to everyone kind of watching right now. So if it's okay, I'd love to kind of hop in to give a presentation and of course answer any questions anyone has.

Yeah, no, that would be awesome. So before I let Konrad take over the screen here and get on the presentation, just a couple other things. Please, at any time, okay, Konrad's going to go through a presentation. I think he aimed for something like 20, 25 minutes. Don't hold it against him if he goes a little longer. But after that, we want to answer your questions, okay? That really is the benefit of these events. Otherwise, you know, you can just go to YouTube or something, right? Like, we're here to answer your questions into the chat. So please, at any time, don't be shy. We have somebody in the chat who's interacting in there right now. They're going to collect all the questions that you have, whether you ask it right now or you ask it in 10 minutes, whenever. And then after Conrad's done with his presentation, we're just going to go through them one by one.

All right.

Well, with that, Conrad, if you want to take it away.

This sounds perfect. Cool. All right.

I'm going to hide my video and my audio and let you take over.

Thanks so much, everyone, for having me. I think this presentation is called "How to Get Press for Your Startup During and Post-COVID-19." I think one of my aims with this presentation was to kind of outline these core principles for media and kind of at the high level, but also go into the details as well. So actually, in this presentation, I have kind of exact emails that we've used in the past that have been really effective and kind of responses from journalists. I'm happy to share this presentation after with everyone as well. I think maybe to start off, I think as many people have seen, COVID-19 has changed industries across the world, and media, of course, isn't an exception. I think 3 highlights just to start. I think when you are pitching to journalists, COVID-19 is the elephant in the room. In a lot of cases, of course, when you watch the news, it's almost taking all the oxygen out there. I think the second is the way we as founders actually engage with the media has really changed. So in many ways, we're as close to our neighbors as we are to journalists across the globe from us. And the third is that news organizations are being forced to adapt right now. So you see, I think this week, The Atlantic laid off about 20% of their staff. And this does have implications to us as founders and how we approach the media. My aim with this presentation is actually to first outline essentially the basics of PR, the principles of PR that you can follow, and followed by that is really to go into press in the time of COVID-19, specific strategies that you and your companies can use. And I actually just want to give some background about myself. I was a writer at a tech publication called VentureBeat. I've contributed to— written for TechCrunch. I'm a longtime kind of mentor of Founders Institute, a big fan of, again, of Jonathan Hideo and their entire team, the CEO of a company called Publicize. It helped a lot of startups, larger companies like Microsoft, others as well. But I actually want to bring you way back to when I first got started. I was introduced to the tech scene because while I was in university, I'd raised funding for my first startup in Silicon Valley. And I remember I used to see all of my friends who'd, you know, who'd raise funding and they'd get on the Wall Street Journal or they'd get on TechCrunch. That's when you knew that you made it, right? When you're on one of these publications. And I would send out emails to different journalists and I wouldn't get any responses. Remember you're thinking like, man, did I screw something up? And just to tell you how bad that I was, I remember running into this person, he was the editor, Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch at the time. I ran into him in an elevator and I was so nervous around him. I told him that he was a tech celebrity and I ran out of the elevator. And he gave me this really weird look. And, um, so I basically hit rock bottom at that point. And one of the things that I set out to do was I began writing for VentureBeat, and one of the things I looked to do was essentially figure out, hey, is there a process there that a founder, even if they don't have prior success to stand on, can use to get media coverage? How do we kind of reverse engineer that process for founders just like yourself and entrepreneurs could use again, whether it's for the TechCrunches and the New York Times or these other industries? And I wanna start off the presentation by explaining that, 'cause I break it down into a 6-step process. It actually has an acronym, which is FAMOUS, okay? I wanna lead off by that. And I was thinking actually, hey, how can I best express kind of this 6-step process? And the example I wanna use is actually a coworking space I founded in Latin America. And I use a coworking space because when you think about it, coworking is probably about as boring of a business as it gets, right? Like you're renting office space. And there are new coworking spaces literally every single month around the world, right? We shouldn't have gotten on the Financial Times, on BBC, on TechCrunch, these others, but we did. So I wanna explain the strategies that we use that each of you can use for your own companies as well. All right, let's get started. The first step, the F in FAMOUS, the acronym, is formulate. It's important when each of you as founders go out to media that you have an announcement to make. So when I was writing for VentureBeat, I remember in New York, a number of friends would come to me. They would say, "Hey, Conor, can you write about my company?" And I would say, "Sure, what do you have to announce?" They would say, "Well, we don't have anything to announce." And I would say, "Well, you know, if you don't have anything to announce, then I can't write anything 'cause there's no story there." So a lot of founders would say, "Hey, what announcements do startups make?" And almost all startups in general, as kind of their cycle as they're growing, may make the following announcement. Their company launches, as an example. Maybe they have a new product launch. They launch an app on Android, on iPhone, a version 2.0 of their platform. Maybe they raise a small angel round of funding, a larger venture capital round of funding. They'll hit a milestone, et cetera. These are all announcements that are great when they happen. You should communicate to the media. So it may seem kind of— it's hard to differentiate, but as opposed to reaching out to the media and saying, Hey, will you write about my company? What you should say is, my company is making this announcement. We're launching a new product. Would you like to cover that specific announcement? And one of the things you, you'll see is— and actually most people don't realize this— is actually the articles that you read every single day, the announcements in many cases are in the title. So just as an example, this TechCrunch, this article, when we had launched Espacio We— you can see in the title that it says Espacio launches. If we, for example, had raised $500,000 in angel funding, it would say coworking space, the title, Espacio raises $500,000 in funding, et cetera. So the first step is formulate. The second is amplify. It's important when you go out to the media that you look to kind of explain the big mission of your company. You know, how is your venture going to change the world? If applicable, how we'll become a $100 million company. And something I like to tell founders is, do you know, do you know when you're, um, about to, like, you're in the gym or you're about to go to bed and like you're daydreaming about your company, you're like, wow, in 3 or 4 years we're going to be taking over the world, right? Like that, that great feeling. So whatever vision it is that you see there, that's what you should communicate to the media because that's a really interesting story. And an example with the coworking space, when we contacted the TechCrunches, etc., we didn't say, "Hey, we're, you know, our goal is to rent out offices for $75 a month," or whatever it was. What we said was, "Hey, our big mission is to help turn this city of Medellín into the Silicon Valley of Latin America." And that was a really interesting story that they wanted to cover. So amplify is the second step. The third is messaging. I think this is actually one of our favorite quotes from Jonathan about company messaging that we actually share across our team and publicize. With messaging, it's important when you communicate to the media that you have essentially two primary documents. You're gonna wanna have a press release which follows a very specific format. We actually have a bunch of examples if you wanna see. With these, it's really important to use as much data as possible. So as an example, a lot of founders will say, you know, "Hey, this is a really big market." I don't really even know what big means, you know, as opposed to 100 million, et cetera. The— something to keep in mind with press releases is that a lot of people think that the role of the press release is to sell a journalist on why they should cover the story, but that's actually not its purpose. The purpose of the email pitch is to explain why it's a really interesting story. The purpose of a press release is basically once a journalist decides that they're interested, to basically make it as easy as possible for them to write an article. And the reason for that is many journalists around the US and other countries they live in really expensive cities, whether it's New York, whether it's San Francisco, et cetera. And in many cases, they're paid a relatively small amount per article. So they have to author a lot of articles. And it's important basically to make it as easy as possible for them to do so, kind of reduce that friction. When you're authoring an email pitch, it's important to lead with social proof. I actually call it type 1 versus type 2. Type 1 is the, hey, if you're an alumni founder, it's 2. It infers, hey, you're really ambitious, et cetera. Maybe you, or maybe you're a Harvard Business School graduate, et cetera. These kind of things people can infer. Type 2 is actually the other end of the spectrum. Let's say you have an interesting story. You used to be a sports star, or you used to be homeless, or maybe you're a very young founder. I remember I got this email a little while back from this founder, and they said, TechCrunch would never write about me. I'm only, I'm this 13-year-old founder from Australia. And I said, "No, you don't understand. That's why they will write about you. There are not many 13-year-old founders that are emailing TechCrunch. You really stand out with that." I recommend including links to social profiles as well, LinkedIn, etc. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fake stories that are sent out, and by including social proof, you're basically saying, "Hey, I'm putting my name behind this story." It is really important to address a journalist by name in the subject line. Editors do, keep in mind, read emails. Just as a data point, back in the day at VentureBeat, about half the stories were sent to tips@venturebeat.com. So those emails are read. The last, the O, U, and S in the famous acronym, outreach, unrelenting, and strategy. For outreach, you basically have two options when you're gonna be sending out this press release and email pitch, an exclusive which basically gives first right to a journalist to cover a story. And the second is an embargo. And the embargo basically says, hey, we're gonna email, let's say, 10 different publications. We ask that you not publish an article before, let's say, you know, 1:00 PM on Wednesday, as an example. And the reality is, is every single day you experience embargoes. 'Cause sometimes you might notice like a big company like Apple might make an announcement, and suddenly at 2:00, every single company right after the announcement, they publish an article. And you might think like, how is it possible that they all published it kind of at the same time and in such a short period after the announcement? And it's because they were given that information ahead of time, but they agreed to the embargo not to publish it until that specific time. And a lot of founders say, hey, exclusive or embargo, it's really risk-reward. Exclusive, you can kind of guarantee a certain amount of coverage, which is why I often recommend that, especially to earlier stage founders. Something to keep in mind as you're doing, kind of being unrelenting with outreach, is to also coordinate media with other social platforms. I think Product Hunt's a great option. I think Hacker News, these others are great options as well. There are kind of pros and cons to using a newswire. I'm happy to go more into that in the QA. And the last, the strategy is really, you can actually, as a founder, look forward, look ahead the next, 3, 4, 5 months and say, "Hey, we actually, we do have these great announcements that we can make into the media." You know, I think one of the mistakes I see a lot of companies make is, you know, maybe in 2017 they make an announcement and, you know, they wait 2 years later for their next one. When they're actually, you as founders building these companies constantly have, you know, great things that you could present to the media. This is actually, so this is one of the most important slides that, that I wanted to share, which is I remember when, um, you know, one of the things I used to hear so much about the media was, hey, if I want to be on, uh, on the New York Times, if I want to be in TechCrunch, etc., you know, I have to be best friends with the editor. You know, I'm sure many in the audience, you know, you hear that over and over again. And, you know, when I was a part of the media, I realized, yeah, but that, you know, actually, you know, the relationships can help, but so much of it is following the right process that famous acronym, those 6 steps that I just explained. And I remember as I was leaving VentureBeat, I said, "Hey, I really wanna see if this, you know, that actually that process actually works, right? Or is it just about being, you know, best friends with, you know, the editor XYZ publication?" So actually the very first company I helped was called Safely Filed. I got this call, this older founder from Chicago, he says, "Hey, I have no background in technology and media and Silicon Valley, New York, et cetera." "Can you help with my company?" And I said, "Sure, I'm gonna help, but there's actually one thing that I ask, which is that I don't want anyone to know that I'm involved, and I actually want you to set up an alias email." So he set up this email, Mark Snow at Safely Followed, that I would email from. So you can imagine if I'm emailing VentureBeat, I'm not saying, "Hi, this is Conrad." I'm saying, "Hi, this is Mark Snow." And I followed literally the exact 6-step process I shared, just shared with each of you. Kind of formulate the announcement, amplify it, look to include a press release, etc., and sent it out. And I remember the next day I woke up and I went to my email and I'm super nervous because I'm wondering like, hey, is everything I just told you, that 6-step process, is it actually going to work or is it just— is media just about these relationships, right? Is this going to work? So I go on, I go, I check my email and I don't have any responses. And I'm super, I'm like, I'm like very nervous at this point. I'm like, you know, hey, did you know what I just explained? Does it actually work? Right? I'm like, you know what, just, I need to give myself 24 more hours. So, you know, the day goes on, I go to sleep, I wake up the next morning and I'm super nervous about to open up my email to see like, hey, is like, will this process actually work that I just followed? So open up my computer, I check my email. And I don't have any responses. And at this point, I'm just like depressed. I'm like, oh, this is just terrible. I guess it just didn't work, et cetera. And literally right at that moment, I get this phone call. It's Mark Snow. And he calls me. He says, he said, Connor, you've done this fantastic job. We've gotten all these media results. And I'm like, I'm so confused. I don't know what's going on. I'm like, oh, I just realized. I've been emailing as Mark Snow on this other email, but I'm checking my personal email account. So actually, I go check the other email. We've gotten all these responses back, right? We've got them on VentureBeat. These are the founders. Got them on The Next Web. Got them on PandorDaily, a bunch of these others. And all, you know, everyone that I, you know, was speaking to, they all said, "Oh, Conor, of course you got it from VentureBeat. Like, you know those people really well, et cetera." And I said, "No, you don't understand." No one knew that I was involved. We followed the right process. And we actually had tested this out over dozens and dozens of data points. And we found, hey, if we follow the right process, we can get great Results, etc. And it's great to cultivate relationships, and you should, you should absolutely do that. But also for the founder, again, who doesn't get a prior success to stand on, you can get great results for yourself. Okay, I want to hop into the next section, which is thought leadership. I think this is such a key area that I— it's one of the most kind of overlooked areas for a lot of founders that I found, which is if you ever see, again, whether it's whether it's, you know, Wired magazine, you know, whether it's Inc. magazine, VentureBeat, etc. Oftentimes it is contributed articles. In a lot of cases, we will help with ghostwriting, etc., but this is a key area that a lot of founders can do themselves. And it's great to essentially position you and your team as basically thought leaders in a very specific space. And it's really important because one of the key areas, of course, for PR or any marketing channel is you have to drive leads for yourself, you have to drive new revenue and hit these key metrics, whether it's traffic, et cetera. But I think in the long run, one of the key wins for PR is you basically wanna own share of space, own share of mind for a really specific space. The reality is, is I think when, to me, anywhere around the world, when people think about accelerators, about fostering entrepreneurship, they think of Founders Institute, they think of Jonathan, they think of Adele, and that's because all this effort that they've done has kind of compounded over time. And each of you, whether you founded an accounting startup, you want to be kind of known as the thought leader for that specific space. It could be for any industry, it could be for any product, etc. This is actually the exact email that I sent the very first time that I sent an article to TechCrunch to be published there. And I think I'm happy to go more into this in the Q&A. To me, two things to highlight is when you first send out the email, actually attach, actually author the first article. That'll basically get your foot in the door. Because in many cases, people will read the article and say like, "Hey, like, I might not know this person, but it looks like a really good article. It's not too self-promotional." I'm happy to again answer this more later on. A couple things to mention are the article ideally shouldn't be too self-emotional and it should look to kind of follow the guidelines of the specific publication, that format. In general, most articles tend to be between 1,000 to 1,500 words. and they usually follow a 5-paragraph format. Just something to mention. Okay, I want to go into PR and press outreach during COVID-19 and kind of another acronym. 6 principles I want to focus on just follow kind of the word change. And the first is COVID, and it's really this elephant in the room. And I understand, I know a lot of people are saying, hey, maybe there's COVID fatigue in the media, etc. But the reality is, is my recommendation is to align at least 70% of any media outreach you do related to— and relate those to COVID-related angles. And just as an example, if you're looking to pitch a thought leadership article on marketing insight, I'd recommend revising the angle slightly. For example, for marketing in the time of COVID-19. If let's say you have a startup in the medtech space and health tech, you know, even, and you're looking to make a huge impact in this space, I would also look to align and say, hey, it's not just going to alleviate this, but obviously a certain, you know, the pandemic is impacting individuals in this large way, can also impact it there. I think that's increasingly important. So I can't think of a publication right now that, um, especially within the technology sector, that isn't kind of introducing series specifically directed towards COVID. It is on top of mind for a number of editors. And, um, it's just as a rule of thumb, if you're thinking, hey, should I include a COVID angle or not? No, I'd look to— I would look to include a piece of it in there. The second, the H in CHANGE, is have your finger on the pulse. I think it's more important now than ever before to monitor the media and to understand what the conversation is. I think the reality is if you're looking to be be a part of the conversation, you know, what matters first is kind of identifying what people are talking about. You know, if you're looking for kind of— if I had one recommendation about a great place to start, I think LinkedIn, if you ever looked at their top right, the Today's News and Views, I think they've done a great job. It's kind of one place to start there, kind of highlighting a list of topics that are in the news that day. I think the second note is to really be aware of the channels that that journalists are using. So just an example, a number of journalists from TechCrunch use Signal and Telegram for pitches. We've actually seen the highest response rate from Twitter. In many ways with COVID-19, it's almost like the platform that the journalist, the specific journalist prefers, they've doubled down on that specific platform. I think the last thing is media, and this aligns into the next slide, media stories are moving faster than ever before. And going along this line, kind of the A approach with care, because these stories are moving faster than ever before, just, it's so important to be aware of that. So just as an example of this week, with stories about the protests, et cetera, we've had to have conversations with a number of companies basically saying, hey, the announce— what we're— that earlier message that we're announcing, we're gonna pause on that because the reality is this week the stories are focused focused on the protests, and that's what's kind of taking the oxygen in a lot of ways in the room. It is important to differentiate as a founder between media campaigns that are time-sensitive versus non-time-sensitive. So let's say your company's making this press release announcement about something that needs to come online this week. Like, obviously there's certain things you can't push back, but for example, if you're looking to set up an interview about your thoughts about the future of a specific space or industry, that's something that you might be able to send off to wait 2 weeks to send, etc. Second thing is, it's so key to send today, especially where there's so much noise, polite follow-ups with journalists. Just as a general rule, we find we get more responses from the first follow-up to a journalist than we do on the initial pitch itself. So I'm happy in the future to send examples of follow-up to people listening, but it could just say something like, "Hi name, hope all is well. I just want to send a quick follow-up if there's anything I could further send. I'm really happy to. Just something like that. I think the last thing is look to be extra thoughtful in communications. You never know when a journalist being contacted might have a family member impacted due to COVID. And this is actually just one example of an email. You know, a journalist messaging someone that in her family was sick, sent a polite follow-up. You know, the article, nice article was published a few days later. I just think it's so important to be sensitive to in communications right now. Fourth, now is the time for solutions. I think there's so many challenges going on. I think something to keep in mind is that journalists do want to hear about good news and also proposed solutions. I think the reality is COVID-19, it came as a surprise to so many people, and in particular the establishment, right? Like the kind of thought leaders we normally turn to for solutions, in many cases, you know, don't necessarily have these. So the media now more than ever, personally seen, they're looking beyond this for almost these new founders and new group of individuals for ideas, for predictions, etc. So whether it's a pitch about to better provide insight in a specific area or, you know, future prediction that you have, we found journalists are really receptive to these pitches. I do believe this is a great opportunity to basically position yourself and your team in this new paradigm that we're in. And just as an example, so this is an example of a result we've gotten for Business Insider. So I actually redacted the individual's name, but the idea was basically, hey, there's this really promising founder of this health tech company. You know, she'd love to give comments on these kind of whether it's dietary or lifestyle advice for any of your readers. Business Insider responded saying, "Hey, we're looking for some insight on this specific question," etc. And we were able to respond to that. But you can imagine, again, whether it's Business Insider, whether it's VentureBeat or more mainstream publications, they are looking for expert commentary and new ideas for a lot of these different spaces. The fifth, the G in CHANGE, is global mindset. And I mentioned before, we're as close to our neighbors now in many ways as we are to individuals in other countries. And what it means, and I don't think most people recognize this yet, is that your company itself actually has access to a much larger market than you may realize, and also access to more journalists than ever before. So I would actually argue the number of journalists that you have access to might have doubled or tripled in size. And in part, that's because these issues that were once only local are now really global. And I think about the people we've introduced to editors and journalists in Asia, in Australia, in Africa, et cetera. I would argue it's tripled from even a handful of months ago. And just something to kind of keep in mind where— and I think particularly because to me, I actually look at— I think most people don't think about this. I look at PR as a secret weapon for SEO. Again, irregardless of your space, actually search is still going to drive a lot of traffic. I do think it's worth considering, hey, like, actually, am I introducing software, let's say in the US? Well, hey, is that potentially relevant as well now, even in a shorter period of time to a journalist in Australia or Europe, etc.? The last step in the CHANGE acronym is the E, the editorial opportunity. I would argue there's more opportunity for thought leadership than I've ever seen, you know, in my time in this industry. I think as many of you've seen, you know, companies such as Condé Nast, such as Vice, such as BuzzFeed, etc., have made a number of different layoffs to members of the media. And this comes after, keep in mind, roughly half of all U.S. newspaper jobs were removed. And I just want to kind of explain the implications for this. When I'm You know, these news organizations, they still need to produce, you know, a high number of editorial content every single day, every single week. But there are obviously a number fewer people. So what most people don't realize is they actually really like when there are people sending great pieces of articles to be used for their publications. And as entrepreneurs, this is a huge win because, especially from the largest media, you will see a return on investment you know, from, from, you know, my personal experience, uh, you know, on, on doing that. Uh, so again, I just found it to be super effective. I think, as a note, media, they're not just interested in kind of these superhero images, but also, hey, what were the challenges that you faced and overcame and what you learned from that? I think those tend to resonate really well in the media, and I'm happy to answer that more in the Q&A. Um, I just want to say again, thank you. I'm, I've been a fan, supporter, a mentor of Founders Institute for many years now, and can't speak highly enough about the organization. If there's anything I can follow up on, my email's connor@publicize.co. And one of the things I actually really liked that Jonathan mentioned was, hey, these are such hard times right now, but like, if there's any, the people who are best suited to actually face this adversity head on and actually overcome it are entrepreneurs, are founders. And so again, we're facing so much adversity, and I wish the best to everyone here. At the same time, I do believe, you know, the people who, you know, there's so many opportunities ahead of, for all of us as well. So thank you so much again for having me, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Conrad. All right. So why don't we get started on some of these questions? We got a lot of them, and please, anybody else, if you if you have questions, throw them into the chat. I'm also just really quickly gonna point out a couple things. So, you know, you mentioned that news organizations are struggling, right? And this is something too that has a lot of implications, right? So one of the implications you said was obviously like they, news organizations, they will welcome good content, right? So if you wanna provide some value to them and actually create content for them that's not overly promotional about your business, your company or whatever, they will, Generally speaking, they might be interested. What are some other implications there? I know, like, first of all, a lot of times when I tell founders, when they interact with journalists, I'm like, look, it's almost like an investor. Like, they're super busy, like short messages to the point, don't waste their time. I mean, any other implications just in sort of the, you know, just the way that the media industry is sort of hurting right now that entrepreneurs should understand in all their interactions?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I guess to me, when I think about PR, it's, you know, it's interesting. I remember, let's say, go back like 20 years. I think to me PR was all about contacting journalists, right? And like, you know, the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. And then let's say 15 years ago, that kind of actually evolved. It became about contacting journalists and bloggers. And one of my beliefs from a handful of years ago is basically that like PR, especially for a lot of founders, it's not just about contacting journalists anymore or bloggers, but actually increasingly gatekeepers. So to me, I actually look at a lot of the press outreach, it'll be just as much about contacting, you know, somebody from TechCrunch as it is, let's say, a moderator at Product Hunt, or actually, let's say, an executive producer at, you know, the Joe Rogan podcast or one of these popular podcasts. So to me, my hope, and you made a really good point about like, hey, these emails, all the communication should be kind of to the point and be really clear, and because people just don't have a lot of time and are busy. But I think on the bright side, a lot of the principles apply, and I would kind of recommend to people just to continue to look at PR increasingly as, again, a lot of these journalists are kind of gatekeepers to this larger audience, but you can go beyond just traditional media publications as well.

Right. Okay, and then just really quick before I get into some of the questions, and there's a lot of them here, so please everyone keep them coming. But, you know, I know you mentioned a little bit about the process, right? And I think I see a lot of people get this wrong as well. So you were kind of saying like, okay, so number step one is the email pitch, right? And that has a very specific goal. And then step two, after you sort of get somebody hooked, so to speak, on the email pitch, then there's the second step. Like, how would you see sort of that, that kind of one-on-one process that anybody should— to sort of look for?

So to me, with a lot of the, let's say, like founders who are like, hey, I'm working on this idea, we're still maybe 3 months away. The first thing would be, okay, the first announcement to the media to formulate is basically the company launch. So then saying, okay, from that company launch, hey, how do we make, you know, usually you talk to founders and say, hey, what are you, you know, what are you working on? And they're like, hey, we're building this software for this, you know, this enterprise software. And you say like, hey, well, no, but tell me, Like, what's your kind of big mission and goal that you have? And they're like, hey, well, actually we're looking to really revolutionize this huge area. Like, they amplify and make it really interesting. So that would be the second thing. The third would be like the messaging. Okay, take that announcement about the launch and that kind of big mission and put it in a press release and email pitch. So that would be the third one. The fourth would be the outreach. So whether it's, okay, now that email being sent out, whether that's an exclusive or embargo. Choose one of those. And then the fifth one would be, okay, once those articles— let's say VentureBeat decides to cover the launch of your company, look to further the outreach as well to other publications. And then the last step is basically saying, okay, like we got some coverage on VentureBeat and a handful of smaller blogs. Okay, what do we have the next— strategize actually the months ahead. So, okay, well, we also have another announcement we can make in 6 weeks. And then maybe 4 weeks after we're raising a round of funding that we can announce. So that would kind of be the process I would recommend. Okay.

So I'll start here with Ravi's asking, Ravi had a couple questions, but they're sort of centered around the same thing, which is, when do you think is the right time for a startup to do PR? And then the first part of the question also was like, should they be looking to do PR before even launching a product? I know it's pretty general, but what are sort of the, you know, the general advice you can give on when to start it?

Yeah, I would say in general, once you're ready, let's say advertise on Facebook or Google about your product, at that point, to me, you're ready to kind of launch, to announce it to the media as well. Just in general, I would usually say, hey, if you finish a product, almost have like an alpha that you test among your kind of your close friends, et cetera, to work out any bugs. But then, kind of following that, I'm much more of the belief, I think it's, I believe it was Reid Hoffman who says, "Hey, if you're launching and you're not embarrassed about the product, you're launching too late." And I think about it even right now, like you can Google search just TechCrunch Conrad Publicize and you'll see when we launched the product Publicize. And it's actually got this kind of bad photo of me here. And, or anyway, we didn't, yeah, it was just, we took a very quick photo of, And I remember in hindsight, looking back, like, I'm so embarrassed about that, you know. But we actually needed that to happen because once we happened, it's almost like that, you know, we were able to grow and evolve, like, in, you know, a 6-week period of what we would have taken us, you know, 6 months or 12 months. So, you know, and I actually hear that story over and over again. I think one of the mistakes I would try to avoid, which, you know, I do see happen a lot, is You know, the founder that says, hey, we really wanna launch in 2 months and then 2 months come by and they say, no, we're gonna push it back, you know, now 3 months later. And then usually what ends up happening is a year and a half later, you know, they still haven't launched anything. Yep.

Yeah, the forcing function, right? Forcing functions can be super valuable. We tell our founders too, whether it's a pitch event you need to apply to or something, right? You can create these forcing functions. And you were saying like, Literally, F5 started the same way, by the way. Like, we were just throwing around ideas. Dale, my co-founder, kind of tipped off inadvertently Michael Arrington, who was the kind of sole proprietor at the time of TechCrunch. And he was like, "Well, I'm writing the story tomorrow." So we registered the domain name, Founder Institute. We had to do all that stuff very, very quickly. Yeah, we fall into this. I mean, we still would have launched it, but that forced us to like, okay, shit. So Omid and Wes were asking kind of, Omid's question was, is there a good database or resource to find the journalists that you should contact, i.e., a white pages to find journalists? And Wes sort of had a related question, which is, you mentioned Joe Rogan's podcast, Bropra, I think people are calling them these days. You know, like where would you go to find just the right people to contact there?

For sure. I would say actually probably the best starting resource, if you email me at Conrad@publicize.co, it's one that Publicize created and I can send it to you of kind of a starting list of— it has a number of technology journalists and their emails, etc.

Oh yeah, you guys have a free journalist list that you put out there.

I think like there are larger ones that tend to be kind of, you know, pretty expensive. You know, it might be $2,000 every month, etc., to access by Cision, things like that. I would say, so yeah, again, not to be kind of— it's a free resource we created, so I would probably start there.

Yeah, and we'll send out Conrad's contact information. Something that I like to tell people too is, you know, generally speaking, you don't want to like just spam bomb 100 journalists, right? If you think that maybe you want to be on TechCrunch or something like that, you're probably going to want to find the journalists on TechCrunch that are writing about your space, right? And these are all generally like pretty easy Google searches, writing about competitors, related companies, like those are usually the types of people that you wanna reach out to, right? Like you don't generally say like, oh, I wanna get on TechCrunch. Like you don't pitch TechCrunch, you have to pitch a person.

[Speaker] For sure, and that's a really good point. I think the, to me talking to founders, usually they fall on like one of two spectrums. Like spectrum one is like, hey, I'm just gonna collect like, you know, 3,000 emails and just send out like a BCC and like just to everyone. And like, please don't do that.

That's a quick way to piss a lot of people off.

Exactly, exactly. So, and then like the other end of the spectrum is like, hey, for 3 months I'm literally just gonna like follow this journalist like every single day to like find out as much information as I can. And like, and the reality is, is that's probably not the most effective use of your time either. So what I would recommend is, hey, have a pitch, have a list of people you wanna contact, make sure to send out an individual email at a very bare minimum, say like, hi name, just doing that we've tested will dramatically improve the open rate, you know, at a kind of a bare minimum. And you can kind of find almost, that's like kind of an 80/20 of, you know, getting 80% of the results in a relatively short period of time. Anyway, that, yeah, that kind of thought came to mind.

Yeah, and I actually, I see a lot of these emails too, just because we have like a, a blog and this kind of stuff and people just see us like, oh, Founder Institute writes about entrepreneurship, it's a media channel. So I get a lot of these and yeah, it's like a novel attached with the press release, right? Very impersonal and it doesn't make you feel real good, right? It doesn't, it makes you not, there's no personal touch to it at all, right?

Absolutely.

So a bunch of people here were also asking like, okay, so you reach out, you follow up. Like Aaron is asking, and I think I saw Aaron before was saying that their response rate to some of their outreach was somewhere around 5%. So I think we can help you, Aaron, in some way, shape, or form here. But Aaron was, the question was, how many times is it appropriate to reach out? I don't wanna bug them. Is it over to, Is it okay to start over and try again a week later?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say as like a general rule, I wouldn't just for follow-ups, I'd make sure to always follow up at least once. Again, we've had higher response rates on that than the initial pitch. And again, the people that you're contacting are receiving a lot of messages. I would say I wouldn't send more than 2 follow-ups just as kind of a general rule. To me, one way you could kind of test it would be, mentioning, for example, let's say you decide you have an announcement you want to use, um, you use an exclusive and mentioning the subject line, and by doing that you could kind of get a sense of like, hey, this today we want to, you know, send the exclusive to this publication or this journalist at TechCrunch. Okay, if on day, you know, day 4 no one's responded back, you can almost go back to the pitch and say like, okay, well maybe I should revise something, etc. Maybe, you know, maybe the, the information in the pitch is too vague that I can, I can So by doing that, you can kind of get a sense of like, okay, now, as opposed to maybe sending the pitch out to, you know, 50 journalists all at once, and then you can't really kind of iterate on the specific pitch.

Yeah, for sure. And that brings up another question. I know I saw it in here. I can't find the exact name, but people were mentioning sort of like the timing, right? Because obviously if you want to iterate on something, and let's say that, oh, you need to launch next week, Right? Like, that's probably not gonna work. So, you know, is there a specific kind of timing that you would want to start doing some outreach before you actually wanna, you know, relative to when you would want something to get published?

For sure. I mean, probably it's like a rough range. I would say about 2 weeks would be kind of enough advance warning, advance notice, but also give you enough time to contact enough journalists ahead of time. It's just kind of a rough number. I would say as a general rule, avoid the weekends, of course, for any outreach. I would say avoid Friday as well. In general, earlier in the week and in the morning is preferable. Obviously, keeping in mind the time zones for whether you're contacting someone in Europe is obviously very different than New York or California as well.

Okay. So let's see. Just to switch gears here a little bit, so Mark, with was asking, what about like editorial distribution, i.e., paid placement? You know, what are your thoughts on some of those things?

So the reason in general I'm against this is this is what actually typically happens. So, you know, somebody would approach, let's say, like a Harvard Business Review, and they say, hey, I'd love my article that I wrote to be considered. And to be honest, this is what normally happens. If it's a really good article, the editor will be like, hey, this "Looks really good, we'll publish it 2 weeks from now." And if it's not a good article, you get this response, which is basically the advertising, the advertorial team, which is like, "Would you like to pay $10,000?" Whatever, a really large amount, right? And keep in mind, I think it was BuzzFeed, I think it started at, I mean, these of course have changed, but I think it was $25,000. A lot of these cost a lot of money, but also, not only does it cost more money, but also it has this big kind of sponsored, et cetera. So it's less effective as well. So to me, I would say 100% recommend more kind of focusing on high-quality results and doing a great job because if you do it the right way, you'll save a lot of money and you'll get better results, you know, as opposed to the alternative. Yeah.

Right. That sounds to me too in that scenario that somebody read it and was like, okay, this is not editorial, this is an advertisement.

For sure.

And as such, I'm going to give it to my advertising team.

For sure. Yeah. And yeah. And I think unfortunately, I think to me it's kind of counterintuitive, but also I think aligns with Silicon Valley, which to me is like the articles, the aim isn't to be like, this is why our company is great. The aim is to be like, here's just all this free information that we're giving about, you know, where this industry is heading. And then again, the counterintuitive thing is by doing that, it'll obviously include like your name, your, you know, your photo or link back to your website is people, more people will come to you and be like, hey, I read your article. And I learned a lot and that's why, you know, I wanna, you know, hear even more about your company, et cetera.

Yeah, exactly. Don't look at it as an ad, look at it as you're providing value. People are gonna read an article. If they learn something from the article, they will see where the article came from. And then over time that will drive your results, SEO and all that good stuff. Okay, so let's see, keep the questions coming. This is great, everybody. Please. This is awesome. So let's see. Alice is asking specific press release format that you recommend.

I would say honestly, this is what I would do in the very beginning because I remember the very— sometimes when I recommend to friends about a press release, usually what happens is the first document they send to me, it almost sounds like a novel, you know. Which makes sense because that's normally what you write throughout university, et cetera. But the reality is, is a press release, when you first read it for the first time, it actually is kind of uncomfortable to read because it's not meant to be read for the general public. It's meant to be read for specific reporters to pull information from. So if I were actually in somebody's shoes, and maybe this is just myself personally, I would look again, doesn't have to be the resource I mentioned, the link I have, You could just Google search any press release and copy paste in a Word document and follow that structure, but obviously as a template. So usually what happens is, let's say it starts off by explaining the first or second sentence explaining what the announcement actually is. So you can say like, okay, well this, you can talk about your company. And then let's say the second or third paragraph includes a quote from the founding team. So you would know like, okay, well here I should add a quote from your own team talking about the company, et cetera. So let's kind of follow that. As a rough idea. And that, that's something I— that would be the step that I'd recommend is a, you know, for press releases.

Yeah, press releases, it's, it's media writing, right? So it's, it's known as— and I'm going back to my college days here, but I believe it's the inverted pyramid.

For sure, for sure.

Yeah, just means that the most important information at the top, and then basically the further down you go, the less important the information is. It's sort of like, uh, You know, like you said, it's not meant to be read by the general public, and a lot of people write it as an advertisement. The point is to distill as much— all the most important information as quickly as possible so that the journalists could do their job and write a story about what you're trying to tell.

For sure. No, absolutely.

Yeah. Okay, so let's see. Still a lot more questions coming in about like how to find the right, the right people. So Anil is asking "If your strategy is to target local communities, how would you prioritize like which publication, you know, might be the right fit for you to target?" Yeah, I mean, just in the—

one thought that came to mind is, especially if you're entering a space which is fairly crowded, and let's say there are other incumbents, I would actually just take the name of, you know, whichever company that's like, you know, the number one player, you know, et cetera, and just go to Google News and type in that name. And then you could probably see like, Hey, if somebody from TechCrunch or The Verge, et cetera, is gonna write about Slack and I'm also creating a communication, they may be more likely to cover your company as well. So that's one option. I would say in terms of local in general, to me increasingly so, they're kind of a handful of kind of the major players and a lot of news coverage resonates from that. So I'd probably start with looking at that and the specific technology No business reporter there.

Makes sense. Rob asking very tactical question here, like, when should you in a pitch email— so let me just rephrase this question here— in the pitch email, should you be sending along the press release or should you just be sending along kind of the text pitch?

I would, I would definitely include the press release in that, whether it's an attachment or whether it's copy-paste at the bottom. I mean, actually, it's funny, so Some people always ask me like, hey, is there a hack to this? And I always tell them, I actually think the 6 steps, the famous acronym, is kind of a hack. But if you want an additional one, let's say you're like, I have no time for this, okay? What I would say is, okay, well, you should still formulate the announcement amplified and do an email pitch. But in the email pitch, just say like, hey, here's a few sentences about what the announcement is about. If you'd like more information, I'm happy to send you a press release. So then if you get any responses back from any journalists, like, hey, I wanna see the press release, then you could be like, okay, damn, I gotta put the press release together really quickly, right? So anyway, if you're looking for a hack, this being said, I only would recommend that if you're so swamped for time, you literally can't put a press release and you just, you gotta get something out. In general, I'd always recommend including the press release, again, whether it's an attachment or copied in the email.

Okay. Kevin was asking, and this probably relates kind of to the topic before, right, where we were talking about just how media in general is struggling, and it's all of our fault, everybody, because we don't like to pay for stuff. But, you know, so Kevin, you know, I was told by an article writer that my announcement or press release will be more likely to written about if I plan to push traffic to the article. Thoughts on this? Is this something that you see? See, I mean, logically it makes sense to me. I think it's kind of weird that they would tell you that and kind of make that almost a prerequisite.

But yeah, to be honest, my gut tells me that like in terms of like the top tier media, I don't know of anyone, any journalist at one of those who would write that. If I had to guess, it's more of a Hey, maybe there's, you know, a kind of a media entrepreneur who recently founded a blog and hey, they're, you know, they're really looking to drive as much traffic as possible. And the reality is, is part of that is, you know, hey, whoever they cover them, you know, it's helpful as possibly to be proactive. You know, I do think it's important to look to add value in the media as much as possible. And it is something you kind of have to be sensitive about as well. So, you know, one of the things we do, for example, is We send on the holidays some nice homemade— I actually have like, I'll ask my mother to make these homemade things she always used to send out because it can't be like, "Hey, here's a gift certificate because we really appreciate your help." It's just, that would kind of be crossing a line there. So other ways you could add value to the media would be, hey, just making sure that if a popular blogger or journalist writes about you, making sure that to tag them, kind of widely share it. You know, I think, you know, that's kind of, you know, at the very, very least, you know, I'd say other things would be, hey, if you find out there's a neat, like, conference speaker role, for example, that maybe the journalists could moderate, etc., you know, looking for opportunities like that. You know, the reality is, yeah, it's so, you know, most people, once a journalist writes an article, they they don't even get a thank you email from it. So I think any little extra effort you could show just stands out about like, hey, this is like a really nice person. And like, those things in the long run, I think kind of go a long way.

Yeah, if you put yourself in their shoes, they don't exactly have the most glorious profession. They don't get thanked a lot. They probably, sort of, they probably don't get a lot of pats on the back when they do a good job, but if they say something wrong in one of their articles, they get condemned. They're expected to pump out a lot of content. The economics of the whole business are bad. Yeah. So, I mean, and one thing about just providing value, right? And this is something that Conrad does with FI a lot, right? It's not necessarily, you know, he's not pitching FI and saying, you know, like, FI is the greatest. It's just, you know, something's going on in the world, whether maybe it's tensions between the US and China. Or maybe it's the onset of COVID or things like that. And you'll just reach out to different media channels and be like, hey, you know, if you're interested in getting the perspective from entrepreneurs or from VCs and this kind of stuff, like the FI people might be able to help, right? Just throwing it out there. Right. And that really is the kind of thing where you're literally trying to help these people do their jobs. Right. And yeah, like, it's not like they're going to throw in an advertisement for Founder Institute or any organization that's just trying to provide value. But those are things that I'm sure, you know, that those things pay dividends in the future because you're helping the journalists do their job. And also you're helping yourself too, because you can potentially show up in these articles as a thought leader, link backs, all this kind of stuff, right?

Absolutely. And I think one of the things, Jonathan, you do this super well. I think Adil as well, is because you're so helpful, The reality is in the media industry, people don't realize, like, you know, the journalist that you speak to from The Atlantic, you know, in 2 years from now might be at The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, or in 4 years from now will be at The New York Times. So it is, you know, a really interconnected community. So you just, you never know. I mean, again, like, I think in a good way, I think if you build a reputation as being somebody really helpful, looking to kind of add value, that it'll kind of spread over the long run.

Yeah, for sure. Treat journalists like humans.

For sure, for sure.

I tell people that a lot too. They, yeah, they're in a struggling business, so try to help them if you can. A couple other just, so we only got a couple of minutes left here. Last call for questions, all right? Let's just do sort of some rapid fire here, okay? So, Andrea, or Andrea, sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong, and Sam, do you think any of the advice that you're giving right now would be different depending on like geographic location?

You know, I, in general, I think it would be slightly, but I would think 90% of it actually crosses over. And actually one of the things to a friend of mine, when I posted on Facebook and mentioned, hey, would this be kind of applicable to a specific product, even if it's a different industry? One of the things that's great about these principles is we found it to be just as effective on TechCrunch as it is for People Magazine, you know, or Hollywood Reporter, etc. Completely different industry, or whether it's more mainstream like, you know, the Washington Post, etc. I'd say for certain regions of the world, for example, in Latin America, I think, you know, for example, it's much more acceptable to call one another over phone as opposed to, I think, Yeah, Jonathan, you've probably seen in the US, like if somebody calls you and they're making, it just, it won't go to voicemail.

I don't pick up any number, I don't know.

So yeah, there are certain things I think, but I would say that's more, I would think 90% of it would apply here across. And again, there's some smaller changes there.

Okay, couple people ask questions like PR Newswire or Newswire, and there's a lot of—

these services.

I don't know, there's, I think there's been some consolidation in that space, but what are your thoughts on those?

Yeah, I think so. There's kind of misunderstanding about it. I think, let's say going back 20 years, you know, 30 years, a lot of journalists would go to the business wire and that's actually where they'd get the stories from, right? And then they'd write about it. The reality is today, like, I don't know if anyone from, you know, the New York Times or TechCrunch, etc.

would ever do that.

Well, now there's E! Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and that like, And now, I mean, if you want an article to be featured on the front page, which is where viewers are, you're gonna have to email that. You should expect to email that specific journalist. In general, with, you know, I think the misconception with using, let's say, Business Wire is, you know, sometimes you might see a Yahoo Finance, and the reality is, is that's not like when you go to Yahoo Finance on the homepage, that's, you know, 10 pages deep, right? I do think though there are people who say like, "Hey, we're part of a larger company that does for search, want to kind of index this announcement that we're making." I would say in those cases my recommendation would be, "Hey, if you're going to use a kind of a news syndication, look to use one that's less expensive. Don't go for the thousands of dollars that all the extra kind of bells and whistles because..." And just be sure like, "Hey, we're paying this X amount because we're looking to index this announcement." not because we're expecting it to be on the homepage of any, you know, and to get a lot of views, these things.

Yeah, I'll be a little less diplomatic. Conrad's just a really nice guy. I think it's a complete waste of money. It's a pure SEO play. Like, it's not press. Like, you're not gonna get any press from it. It's SEO, right? And for whatever reason, I think Google still gives a lot of those services like a decent amount of SEO, probably just 'cause they have a bunch of syndication partners and stuff. Right. But yeah, it's a pure SEO play in that respect. I have seen like some SaaS companies, B2B companies find it useful, right? Because those have like very specific keywords that were SEO super important. But for consumer, I think it's a total waste of money. And anyway, I think it's, yeah, it's more of an SEO thing. So, all right, let's see. So Thomas has an interesting question, like, does fake it till you make it apply to PR?

I mean, I think, um, yeah, I guess I think, you know, obviously there's certainly extent to that.

It's a little German. It's a little German.

Yeah, you know, the reality is though, even you think about like Twitter when they first launched, I think, wasn't it like Twitter's first product iteration only took like 2 weeks to develop, right? Like it really came, you know, quickly. I think it obviously is really industry specific because like if you're in a health tech, like, you know, obviously it's a different standard than, you know, if you're, you know, in another space. You know, I would say I would lean more towards, you know, focus on specific areas of social proof that allow you to kind of stand out. And I would say, you know, if you're ready to advertise your product, you're probably ready for PR and Again, the saying from Reid, which was, if you launch too late, you're probably— if you're not embarrassed, you're probably launching too late. But probably don't overdo it as well.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a good balance. Because you do it like you were saying before, right? A bunch of your points were, it's not just what you do, right? It's your vision, what you're trying to do.

For sure.

The bigger thing. So in, you know, I guess in some respects you could say, yeah, like you're not doing this bigger thing that you want to do, but that is your plan. And you're a startup. So obviously you can't do everything at once. So I don't know if I necessarily call that fake it till you make it. But yeah, kind of the bigger vision, I think, is pretty important when you're talking to journalists. Right.

Absolutely.

All right. So thank you for joining. I'll just one little final closing tip. So, by the way, we've mentioned a bunch of resources on this webinar and we're going to include, number one, the video. Everybody's going to get it. We're going to include the links to Konrad's site and Konrad's personal email. I'm surprised you really want me to send your Yeah, I mean, okay. Yeah, he sent it to me in an email. All right, that's fine. So you're gonna get Conrad's personal email. But to be honest with you, it's probably not that hard to guess. And by the way, most journalists' emails aren't that hard to guess either. But, but yeah, there's a, there's, there's a ton of free resources available on publicize.co, including including, I think you guys have like a press release template thing on there. You got this free press list. But so we will send that to everybody. But yeah, Conrad, just a lot of the people on the webinar today or tonight are early-stage founders, you know, and as you could see from some of the questions, when can I do it? How many, how many emails should I send? All this kind of stuff. Any kind of like final closing tip or, you know, maybe it's the, maybe it's the biggest misconception that you see people have or just the tip that you think has resonated the most just a closing thought for—

Yeah, I would say, to me, like, I would just really encourage founders to kind of get started. And I say that especially with the media. I think there's this perception that like, hey, I'm gonna reach out to the media and like, you know, I'm gonna get all this negative coverage. And something to keep in mind about like just the news cycle is normally, like, when you're first starting off as a founder, you have to first kind of be built up, right? And if, you know, if a tech reporter then in general, they wouldn't write a negative article story about you. They just won't cover your story. And then obviously you reach a certain point where your organization gets big enough, whether it's a Microsoft, et cetera, where then you're starting to see, hey, you have to be a lot more careful about who you pitch because there might be just as many negative stories as positive. But especially as you're a founder first starting off, it's, I think about it, thousands upon thousands of data points we have. I think the only story I know of, only one instance where the reporter wrote something negative, and they actually wrote the founder ahead of time. They said, "Hey, you're saying like basically this is a location, like there's no tracing, but like there is tracing that you're doing." And actually the founder was still really happy about the story. So keep in mind that's across, you know, maybe, you know, maybe however many, you know, 5,000, 10,000 data points. So, um, I, I would just encourage people to kind of to, to try reaching out to the media, you know, following these principles, looking to use these templates as well. And, uh, yeah, um, also Founder Institute obviously has some fantastic resources as well. And, uh, if— yeah, that's, that's a really great chapters as well.

That's a really great point. Not about FI, but just about— yeah, how— and, uh Aaron was saying here too, as a corollary, if someone is writing something negative about you when you're small, it must be a pretty big story, right? So it's— yeah, for sure. The negative stories that you see about Apple or whatever, or some big executive saying the wrong thing, probably not going to apply to you as a startup, right? That doesn't mean go start, you know, mouthing off, but yeah, it's probably— it's definitely an irrational fear that I've had too, right? Because you sort of look at the the worst possible scenario. But that's usually only going to happen when people really care, which is when you're like famous or some big company, right?

For sure. No, absolutely.

All right. Awesome. So, hey, everybody, thank you so much for joining. Please, as I said, we're going to be sending you all this information. Check out Conrad's company publicize.co. And we got a lot more free online startup events coming up as well. You can find those at fi.co/events. Or onlinestartupevents.com. All right, thank you everybody for joining.

I hope