How to Hack PR for Your Startup

Hello everyone, my name is Adeo Ressi, I'm CEO of the Founder Institute. We have an exciting topic today and we anticipate a pretty big turnout too, so it will be a lot of fun. We'll be talking about how to hack PR for your startup. While we wait for some of our esteemed peers to join in, I'll just give you a little introduction of myself, the Founder Institute, and the topic, and then we'll jump right in. So I'm a serial entrepreneur with about 22 years of experience building technology startups. I've had some success with about $2 billion of shareholder value created, and you know, running companies is a tough thing, as I'm sure many of you know. So what we do at the Founder Institute is we try and make the journey of building a high-growth, high-value tech startup easier. If you're looking to create a company or you're in the early stages of creating a company, we're enrolling in over 50 cities all around the world right now, from Egypt to America, from various cities in Asia to various cities in Europe. You can join or apply to join the program by going to fi.co/join, and our goal is to help you be more successful building your business. The program lasts 3.5 months and will cover all the things that, uh, you need to do to build your business and make it successful. If you're running a startup community and there isn't a Founder Institute chapter in your city, You can join the family of directors by going to fi.co/lead and you'll learn about everything that you need to know to become a director and launch the Founder Institute in your city. Okay, so let's talk about the topic today. Numbers are streaming in, we're already over 700, I bet we'll break over 800. PR is one of the most effective ways that you can grow your startup. It's getting more complicated in this day and age because you have social media, PR, and everything. So PR in a vacuum is effective, but PR in combination with social media is even more effective. The Founder Institute itself has spent less than $20,000 in the first 5 years of our company's history in advertising. And so most of our growth to become one of the— well, the largest seed accelerator in the world was through PR. And, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs view PR as potentially fluffy, or it could be expensive if you hire a vendor. Doing PR the right way can be one of the most effective ways for you to drive down your cost of customer acquisition, whether it's business to business or business to consumer, to the point where your economic model makes sense. A good friend of mine, Aaron Patzer, had created a company called Mint.com. Mint is the personal finance site. And, excuse me, his cost of customer acquisition was under $2, primarily because he used PR. Alright, now let's jump on, we're going to invite a very special guest to help us talk about the topic today, Conrad Agusa, he's founder and CEO of Publicize. It's a startup that really helps companies like new companies and more established companies approach PR in a super affordable way. We use this service at the Founder Institute and it's been super successful for us. Many of our grads use it and they're all happy. And, uh, Conrad's a former writer with VentureBeat, been a TechCrunch contributor. He's also a mentor at 500 Startups and the Founder Institute. So big round of applause for Conrad. Welcome.

Thanks so much for having me, and I think Adel really embodies kind of Silicon Valley ethos of adding value, and my hope today is to try to take everything I've learned about the media and to try to give that knowledge to each of you. So thanks so much for having me.

Well, you know a lot about the media, more than most, and I got to tell you, the service you've built is truly amazing. Is there anything else you'd want to add that I tried to keep it brief so you could intro yourself, and then we'll jump into 3 main topics, which are biggest misconceptions, 6 steps, and establishing thought leadership. But anything you want to add that we might have overlooked?

Well, I think the idea for Publicize was historically a lot of PR companies would charge $10,000 a month, 6-month retainers. And when I was writing at VentureBeat, I saw that it didn't have to be that expensive, and the thought was to try to launch a PR service as low as $300 or $400 a month, like month to month, up to 100% money-back guarantee, and kind of try to add value in this industry where historically I think people tended to take more value. And now we work with a lot of startups, bigger companies like Microsoft as well, but I think trying to stay true to the ethos, and like example, like people, organizations like the Founder Institute set, which is like, you know, how do you continue to add more value.

Great, well we will cover all that in a moment. Now for everyone listening, and I'm very happy to say we did break 800 and we'll probably break 900, if something comes up and you would like to ask Conrad or I a question, type it in the chat and my team will review it, and they're going to pop it into the agenda so that we can all contribute to this dialogue. We certainly want to make sure that your questions about the topic of how to hack some great PR get answered. Now, the first thing we're going to cover today, I said there are 3 things, so it's biggest misconception with PR, 6 steps to get more media, and establishing thought leadership. Let's start with the biggest misconception. In your view, obviously you have a view on this, and you can ask questions in the audience as well. What do you think the— or what is the biggest misconception in PR today?

I think definitely the two biggest misconceptions, I would say the first is that you have to pay a lot of money for PR. I think everything that I'm going to walk people through is something that each person can do themselves. You don't need to pay any PR company, you certainly don't need to pay Publicize. You can do each of these things yourself and get great media results. I think the second thing is that you need this prior relationship with a journalist to get a lot of media coverage. And you hear it over and over, "Hey, I can only get in New York Times or TechCrunch if I'm friends with the writer." And I've seen thousands of data points of people who have no prior connection getting these great results. And if it's okay, Adel, would you mind if I tell a specific story?

Oh yeah, I mean great, so I mean it's related, right?

Yeah.

So anyone can do it is the misconception is you can't do it, but the reality is you can, and so that's the framing for this story, right?

Absolutely. Great. When I first left VentureBeat, I'd help a lot of my friends with media, and a lot of people they'd say, well Conrad, of course you helped your friends on TechCrunch, etc., because you know these writers from VentureBeat. The very first company, one of the first companies that I helped was called Safely Filed. I told the founder, he's from Chicago, he's 60 years old, didn't have any network with the media, I said, "You know what, I'm happy to help you, but there's one thing. If I help you, I'm going to email as you." What he did was he created this email account, I think it was mark.s. I think it was agnew@safelypilot.com. And I would email as him. I'd say, "Hi, my name is Mark," etc. No one knew I was involved. And what I did was I followed the exact process, 6-step process that I'm hopefully going to explain to each of you guys in this webinar. And I remember on day 1, I sent out all these emails to the media. and I was very nervous the next day to see like, hey, is this about the process? Am I going to be right, or is it about the relationship? And I check my email, and I don't get any responses, and I'm very disappointed. I'm kind of depressed, like, hey, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it's about the relationship. And I said, give me one more day. I sent out all these emails, and the next day passes, and we still haven't gotten any email results from the media. I thought, damn, you know what, maybe I was wrong when I told Mark this. Maybe it's not about the process. And I get this call from Mark, the founder, and he says, Conrad, you've done an amazing job. We've gotten all these media results from what you're doing. And I thought, well, how is this possible? And I realized I'd been emailing as him on this. I'd forgotten it was his kind of fake email. So I go and log in and we've gotten all these great results from VentureBeat, The Next Web, etc. And his company got a lot of great results. And a lot of people would come to me and they would say, well, Conrad, of course you got them on these companies, on these media publications, you know those writers. And I said, no, you don't understand, no one knows that I was involved. And I've seen this and I've actually tested this with different data points to show that if you follow the right process Regardless of whether we emailed as the client or myself or a random member of my team, the results were almost the same regardless.

So that's great. I mean, and I would say, I mean, let me ask you somewhat of a related question. Again, if you have questions in the audience, type it in the chat about misconceptions. So you're saying you can do it yourself. I completely agree with that. We got a first question coming in as well. My question for you is from what I, at least in my experience, and to be honest, I used to get media every day, now less so, but I'm also busy. It's almost better if the founder is actively involved. Certainly it's bad if the founder is passive with media, and I would say it's okay if the founder is somewhat active, but there's a team. But the best thing is if the founder is really active, right? Would you concur with that statement, or do you have a slightly different view?

Well, I think one of the things I push for is that I think most founders, especially when they're starting off, they presume that it's almost required that you know the journalist in order to get media coverage, and so there's almost like this mental block that they won't even contact the media. So that's why I always emphasize to people, hey, if you get some great media coverage, like, you know, whatever you can to improve that relationship is great, whether it's sending like a thank you letter. Just saying that you really appreciate it, but that you should make sure to not presume that it's kind of a requirement. And I think a lot of it too about the process and why I think it works is how the media landscape is today.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm happy to talk about it now, but I have a feeling—

No, let's get some of these other questions. So just to concise your answer, so yes, it is good when the founder is involved, and the founder doesn't have to be afraid to take a first step. Gap not knowing someone is okay. Is that accurate?

Absolutely.

Alright, so Akbar asks, what are the factors to be considered when hiring a PR agency? And there are sort of two questions to this second part of the question, and like what stage is it good to consider PR for your startup, right? So again, What factors for hiring a PR agency, and when should you even think about PR in general? Why don't we take the when do you think about PR in general first. So I'm a startup, do I think about it pre-product, post-product, post-traction, what do you recommend?

I would say in general to me, startup marketing and growth, it's all about kind of cost-effective growth. And to me, even as a founder, if I can spend $1 and get $1.10, it doesn't matter if it's PR or whether it's paid advertising or social media, I'm going to put as much money in that channel as I can. So I would say, you know—

So it's a customer acquisition vehicle. So if you don't have a product yet, or it's not ready for prime time, wait until you have a product that's ready for prime time.

Absolutely, I agree completely.

Okay, and then what about a PR firm? What factors would you consider, or when would you consider doing that?

Yeah, I would say in terms of choosing which ones to hire, I'd go off— I'd say referrals, I think, are super important. I think their experience in the specific space, so if you have a sports app, what experience do they have and what kind of coverage do they have to show? I think anything you can do to minimize risk— a lot of times there's kind of a 6-month retainer. If you could try to reduce that, even something monthly, etc. I think that's really important as well.

So you said in the opening that you think PR firms are so-so. We broke 900, by the way, we're cruising towards 1,000. So, I mean, you know, or unnecessary. You didn't say they were so-so, they were unnecessary. So obviously, if you do think you need it, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. Get away from the long retainers, reduce the monthly. Burn, but do you think companies even need them?

I would say it depends on the company stage because each founder and executive's time is really valuable. So if you could pay a PR company to spend 20 hours, etc., doing all this outreach to the media so the founder only needs to spend 20 minutes on a phone call, like that's valuable because otherwise you'd have to You'd have to pay someone even if it's on your own team to do that. So that's why I do think there is a role for it, but to me again it all comes back to maybe at your stage of company it makes sense to spend $500 because you're going to get $2,000 worth of value, but it wouldn't make sense to spend $20,000 a month, etc. So to me it's all about what's the return.

Right, so generally speaking from my experiences, and correct me if I'm wrong, when I see companies So iFi, they make the hardware cards and they make some that take your DSLR and transmit it to the computer via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. And what I found is that when they started getting real sales into Best Buy, etc., they went out and got PR and that helped them with channel sales, it helped them They were way later on, and so they were paying $20,000 a month for a PR agency just to be constantly milking some specialized channels that help them with their sales channel and sales funnel. So I tend to see PR agencies come at a relatively mature stage, you know, late Series A, Series B, if you will, on the funding front. Certainly, you know, a decent amount of traction. Is that similar to your view?

I think historically I would see that happening just because a company would have to be pretty large to pay $10,000 or $20,000 a month for PR. But I think increasingly you're seeing it from the earlier stage to late stage as well.

Fair enough. Right, and that's because it goes back to your cost of customer acquisition. If you can actually find it as an effective marketing channel early on and you pay $10,000 a month but you get 10,000 users, that's a dollar a user, right? So, okay, and then there was another question from Sachin, how do I make sure that my company is PR friendly? Right, and I can kind of get that because there are some companies like, well, you know, the ultimate non-PR-friendly company, Theranos, right? They are super secretive, never talked about anything, and then all of a sudden it was discovered, the shenanigans blew up in their face because they were kind of super secretive. How do you make your company PR-friendly from the beginning?

Well, I would say the biggest thing, the first thing that came to mind is really investing in a great design, because there is a lot of thin slicing that goes on. I think a lot of companies you talk to, they say, "You know, I want to sit down for 30 minutes with a journalist and tell them my story from when I was 10 years old and had the inspiration for this." And you think, like, wow, if we email TechCrunch or the New York Times, they really have 10 seconds, getting 1,000 emails a day or more, to decide whether they're interested in your story. So it's kind of like, what's the initial social proof, which I'll talk about, and hey, what does your design look like to make sure to kind of grab their initial interest. And I think the beauty of this is like everything that you do, I think, for PR also helps when you're raising funding, also helps when you're getting partners and clients, all these different things.

Okay, so let's go into this. We're all eager to hear your 6-step formula. It's called, ironically or non-ironically, FAMOUS, so I presume it's an acronym. I actually know it's an acronym. Why don't you walk us through that 6-step process that you say works every time, and remember it's FAMOUS, so F-A-M-O-U-S.

I wanted to create an acronym that people would remember.

Amen.

But the idea is that it's a really actionable process that you can follow when you have to get media coverage. And I guess I'll start. The first step is formulate. And I want to tell everyone another story. When I was writing for VentureBeat in New York, I'd have friends come up to me and they would say, "Connor, can you write about my company?" And I would say, "Sure, what do you have to announce?" And they would say, "We don't have anything to announce." And I would say, "Well, if you don't have anything to announce, then I can't write anything because there's no news there." And a lot of people would ask me, "What makes for good announcements?" And in general, for new founders, you're going to follow a set of announcements. Usually your first one is a company launch. Maybe 10 weeks later you announce an angel round of funding. 10 weeks later there's a product launch, a mobile app. Maybe after there's a milestone or venture capital funding. But basically when you contact the media, you should contact them not saying, uh, Conrad or TechCrunch, can you write about my company? What you should say is, "TechCrunch, my company is about to launch a new product. Would you like to cover the launch of this product?" And what you'll find is if you actually read the titles of a lot of these articles, they include the announcement in it. So they'll say something like, uh, like, "Espacio Coworking Space launches," and you can tell that, hey, the founder, when they pitched that story, it was about the announcement about the launch. So the first step is to formulate these announcements. So for each of you, I hope you keep in mind, hey, in the next 2 or 3 months, what announcement can I make to the media?

And you brought— so let's review some of the logical categories: launching, funding, milestones, and possibly acquisitions or a sale or other, you know, going public, I guess, obviously. Milestones of those— launching is obvious, funding is obvious, acquisitions are obvious. What are milestones?

So let's say for example your company hits— you have a mobile app that hits 20,000 users. When you contact a publication, you can say, hey, my company just reached 20,000 users, would you be interested in covering this? So that would be an example of a milestone.

Okay, now putting your set— right, so you hit something. Okay, just to play devil's advocate, 20,000 users, I guess there's probably a publication somewhere that would be interested in that, but yeah, isn't the biggest milestone. And so if an entrepreneur says, well, you know, I did launch but I didn't announce it, I don't have any funding, and I'm not being acquired, so I don't have any news. Are there other stories, like, you know, is it all going to just then be milestones, like what is the milestone? Are there other ways that a founder can think about getting news for this formula?

Yeah, there are always ways you can be creative about it. So as an example, we launched, I think it was publicized version 2.0, that was kind of my launch of a new platform, and we got on Forbes, etc., and there are things you can be really creative about it. Maybe you launched a new some kind of new study, etc. So another example—

I like that, I like that. Package up your data.

And you know what, a company we help is called Vivaldi, it's this browser. And if you actually go back on TechCrunch, it was like, Vivaldi launches alpha version. Then like, Vivaldi launches like 1.5, and another article 2 months later. Vivaldi launches, you know, beta version. TechCrunch article. So by creatively coming up with these new announcements, you can continue to get great coverage.

Great. Alright, so what's the A stand for? Let's move to the next one. So again, F is formulate, and this is in famous.

And A is actually really important, Adeo, to one of the things you mentioned. It stands for amplify. And it's important, most startups when they when they are starting aren't particularly exciting. And that's true with even the big companies today. And the reason is you have limited resources, you have limited kind of money that you can spend to this. But what is interesting is where you as a founder want to take the company in the next 3 or 5 years. So what I like to tell people is, um, do you know when you're in the gym or you're about to go to bed and you're daydreaming about how, um, how big your company is going to be in like 3 years, right? You're going to have like 200 employees, you're going to be taking over the world, right? Whatever vision you see there, like that's what you should express to the media. So an example I like to say is, I started a coworking space several years ago. Coworking spaces are actually really boring businesses, right? You rent office, there are many started every month, like why— we should not—

Like a hotel.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we should not have been on BBC, TechCrunch, Financial Times. We shouldn't have been. The reason why we were is the story that we pitched wasn't, "Hey, we're going to launch this to rent space." The story, the big mission was, "We want to turn this city into the Silicon Valley of Latin America." That's the big mission that we amplified, and because of that, a lot of people decided to cover the story. So I see a lot of founders, they launch a product and they say, "Hey, this is what my product does today." and I think, well, a journalist can visit your website and see that, but what I want to know is like, what do you dream about at night? Like, where is it going to end up in 3 years? And then usually they talk about how like, hey, this is actually the big mission is to like help really make an impact in this area, and this is really kind of the first step. And I think if you effectively amplify it, you're going to dramatically improve the amount of coverage you get.

Alright, I got a great story there too, sorry to interject, but so we launched a, it was now a couple years ago, a new funding vehicle called convertible equity. So everyone was doing convertible debt, so we launched convertible equity. Now, like new financing docs, whatever, like it's not that big of a deal, but we amplified it, right? By saying, look, investors are like slathering debt on companies at a high rate. That actually hurts the companies for this, and it provides a structural weakness to the entire startup community. So we're going to fix the structural weakness of startups with this convertible debt vehicle, and it went nuts. It became the basis of the safe note. Everyone started using it. The document itself, whatever, but when we amplified it with we're fixing a structural weakness in startups, they were like, whoa, that's a big story. Okay, so amplify. Is there any other, like, because this is a tricky thing for people to do. Maybe if there's someone in the audience, we'll get some more questions in later, but is there another example of an amplification? Then we'll go on to your next one, M in famous. But any other examples of an amplification?

I mean, I would say probably the most famous one right now is something like SpaceX, for example. From the very start, even though it didn't have that much to do, like, you know, the whole mission was we want to bring people to Mars. Even though it didn't have very much to do with Mars in the very beginning, right, as a business. But that kind of captured people's imaginations. And I think that Dale, your example is perfect, and you serve as a great example for people just because I think everything you do, like, to me, like, you're thinking 5 years out and like have that big mission in mind. So yeah, those would be a few examples of that.

Yeah, well, Elon and I hatched the Mars stuff together actually in a car ride God, it was like 16 years ago. Yeah, 16 years ago. We're like, why isn't anyone going to Mars? Like, we should be going to Mars. We looked around and no one was going to Mars. NASA, no one. They were all like, we're not going to launch. Somehow then he actually did it, so hey, amen to that. All right, so let's go on to the M. F-A-M-O-U-S. What does the M stand for?

The M stands for messaging. So once you formulate the announcement and you amplify it, how do you basically get that idea in your mind to a journalist? And you basically need 2 documents, and I want to break down each. You need an email pitch and you need a press release. Now the goal, the goal of the email pitch is basically to sell a journalist on why they should cover your announcement.

The goal of the announcement is the press release, right?

Yeah, the announcement, exactly. And the announcement, the press release, the role of it is not to sell a journalist, but rather once a journalist has decided to cover a story, to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. And I want to explain why. So a lot of times I ask people, hey, if you think about some of the big tech publications, How much do you think people get paid per article? And a lot of people, they say— I don't know if you have a guess.

I'll take a guess. Under $5?

No, no, no. This is like the largest ones.

Oh, oh, oh, no, no. The big ones?

Yeah.

I was thinking more like read, write, whatever, like the crappier ones. I don't know. What would be the—

A lot of people think like, hey, a journalist gets $100 to write one of these articles. There are full-time writers, but the majority are contracted. Oh, really? Yeah. In many cases, these writers get $20 per article, and they're living in places like New York, San Francisco, whatever. Is it flat? Is it flat? There is a bonus if the article goes viral, but again, you really can't factor that in as a writer. I really want to let that sink in of what that means. So if you're living in New York or San Francisco, what that means is you have to produce a ton of articles just to kind of get there, right? So—

Yeah, you probably need to do at least an article an hour.

I mean, it's a very large amount, and it's important because when I was writing at VentureBeat, for example, I knew, hey, if you pitch me a story, is that going to take me 20 minutes to write, or is it going to take me 5 hours to write? And there's a natural incentive to kind of COVID the one that takes less. So you as the founder, if you know this, what you should say is, hey, I know— let's say I'm launching a sports app. I'm going to do the research ahead of time to make it as easy as possible for you to write that article. So hey, here's a link to a study showing how big the industry is, all these different data points. And that's why the press release is so important.

Okay, so let's go through some of these things. You got the email pitch, you got the press release. The email pitch is the sell, the press release is the make it easy for them to write. So what are some of the tactics and what are some of the— to get that email pitch, let's start with the email pitch, to get that email pitch just right. I mean, I would guess it can't be very long, right? Short.

Absolutely, they tend to be shorter, let's say Ideally no more than 200 words. One of the things I do with Founder Institute graduates, and I'm happy to be able to share it with FI, is to send email templates, like exact ones that I've seen work. Like, hey, this is the email that I sent to TechCrunch, and here's the article, so you can kind of follow a similar structure. But there are a couple of things I like to highlight. The first is to lead with social proof. So what social proof means is, If you don't know a writer, it's information about yourself that they can infer information from. So as an example, maybe I've never met Adil before, but hey, he's the CEO of the Founder Institute, which is so well known. Hey, he's probably influential, all these different things. And what I call Type Social one-proof is let's say you worked at a specific company, so you used to work at Google. Or you attended a certain university, or you went through an accelerator, etc., to lead with this so people can infer information from that. Let's say you don't have anything about yourself that people would find impressive. I call that Type 2 social proof, which means let's say you're a 60-year-old founder, or you're a 15-year-old developer, or you used to be a sports star, something that's kind of interesting about yourself, to include that, which adds to an interesting story. So the other day this 15-year-old Australian wrote me and he said, "Conrad, TechCrunch would never write about me, I'm only a 15-year-old developer." And I said, "You don't understand, that's why they will write about you. There are not many 15-year-olds writing TechCrunch every day." So you can use these to stand out about yourself.

So type 1 is like, "Hey, I was the lead engineer at Google Maps." Type 2 is like, "Hey, I'm in a nursing home and I launched an app." for nursing home patients, right? So it's like, type 2 is more like, well, I don't have some direct social proof, but I can use my environment, maybe my demographics, something about me personally to prove it out. What are some other tips for that sell email?

Yeah, the other thing is the two biggest concerns that a journalist would have is first, that the story will end up being fake, which actually does happen a fair amount. Which is why I always recommend including your LinkedIn or Twitter profile. So I would say something like, "Hi, my name is Conor D'Agusta," a link to my LinkedIn. And I like doing that because you're basically saying, "Hey, you know, we might not know each other, but you can see who my connections are, where I used to work." I'm putting my name behind this story, this pitch, which is really important. I think the second—

When you say fake, what do you— sorry, well, finish the second thing now, or do you want to cover the—

No, no, no, that's— Well, for example— Is it all like bullshit?

That's like total lie?

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. They'll write a story about how, let's say, an app has made $2 million over the past 3 months, and then it's like, hey, well, that's actually impossible for it to have done that. So the whole pitch will be fake.

OK. Sorry, what was the second thing you were about to say?

The second big concern from reporters is basically spam. So I still get emails. I joke with— reporter friends that the 3 words people hate the most is "for immediate release." So it's a BCC to probably 10,000 people, capital letters, "for immediate release." I'm not going to— I don't care if that's from Mark Zuckerberg, you know, I'm not going to cover that story. So what I always recommend is just include in the subject, in the first line, the name of the journalist. So maybe it's "Hi Anthony" or "Hi Sarah," and by just doing that, you're going to dramatically improve the open rate.

Anthony Ha and Sarah Lacy, I'm presuming you're referring to. So Yana was asking, how many emails should one send to a journalist before leaving them alone?

This is a really, really good question. I say 100% of the time, always send at least one follow-up. Now I'm going to give an example. I recently— we launched something a little while back called the Reporter in Residence. I remember we got on TechCrunch, I emailed maybe let's say 30 publications. We got maybe 2 other responses back. I sent 1 follow-up and I think like 25 of them responded. Like an extremely high amount. And I joke about it with my team actually that people tend to respond to the second email, not the first. So always at least 1. I would say any bit more than that, and I would say a case-by-case basis, but you probably should be a little more careful at that point. You know, you don't want to—

No more than 2.

Yeah, I would say that's a good rule.

Okay, great. And then let's just cover some tips in the press release. You said don't sell. Basically, sounds like you were saying you almost want to write the story for them and keep it as factual as possible. We're going to paste the guide into the chat, but do you have any high-level tips there before we go on to the O in FAMOUS?

Yeah, I mean, I think they follow a very specific template. I would say the biggest thing is that sometimes really presume that people aren't going to read past, let's say, like the first 2 paragraphs, even if they do, but presume, take the most interesting things and kind of add it to the top. The other thing that's really important is to use data. So that was a great point where a lot of people, they'll say something like, hey, this is such a big market. and you're like, I don't even know what that means, right? Is that like $500 billion, is it $10 million? And if you use data points like, hey, according to this study, this market is going to be XYZ in these few years, like that's— those are things that reporters like to include in articles.

Okay, so we've covered the F, formulate. We've covered the A, amplify. We covered the M with the e-messaging, with the email and the press release, and those are two things that you need. Now we're on the O. Oh, actually Helen has a question, sorry. Do you always have to build a personal story into the pitch, or would it be possible just to talk about the product, you know, leaving out any sort of personal story? Would it be an inferior pitch by leaving that stuff out?

What I like to say is, especially for startups, about half half of your story is going to be about the product and half is potentially about the team. So I remember, if let's say you don't want to, you know, you found, hey, your product is just so interesting, it speaks for itself, you can focus more on that. I think the reverse is true. I remember at VentureBeat, my editor said, hey, will you cover this company? And I said, hey, sure, like, what does it do? And he says, hey, it doesn't even matter. This was Bill Gates' old assistant. It's interesting just because the founder is so interesting in his story. I think it's important to keep that in mind because maybe you have a startup that isn't that kind of— the story's not super sexy or interesting, but you have a really interesting background, then try to focus more on that, and the reverse being true.

Okay, let's jump on to O. What does O stand for?

O stands for outreach. It's important to contact the media via email. Some reporters don't mind phone calls, but some really mind, so I don't recommend it. Just as another secret, I remember about half our stories that we covered every day at VentureBeat were sent to tips@venturebeat.com. So most people— Yeah, but most people don't think that those are even read, but the open rate's shockingly high. When you are looking to get your announcement, your press release or email pitch on these sites, you basically have two ways to contact the media. You can offer an exclusive, you can offer an embargo. And I want to explain both. With the exclusive, you're basically—

And this is related to the outreach point, right?

Exactly, exactly. You're saying, hey, we have this announcement about our product, our product launch. Would you like the exclusive so you have first right to cover the story? Let's say you give that to TechCrunch, and then once they publish the story, you can email others, but TechCrunch gets to cover the story. And that's important because reporters want to break new stories. That's kind of historically how these publications gain prestige.

And by the way, they hate it when, like, if you want to piss a reporter off, if they supposedly have an exclusive and it appears somewhere else, they get pissed.

That's a very important point. I mean, if you want to get blacklisted, offer— that's a great point, because if you offer TechCrunch and VentureBeat an exclusive at the same time and they both say yes, then you have to choose one to give it to, and you could blacklist yourself from the other one. So it's important— what I always recommend is, in the email, mention how long the exclusive is available for. And send one follow-up and basically go kind of day by day.

So you got to do it in serial, not in parallel.

Exactly, exactly.

Alright, so talk about the embargo. So exclusive is like, dear TechCrunch, you have this exclusive. If you want it, let me know within— by Wednesday, let's say. And what's the embargo?

The embargo is, let's say you email 40 publications and say, you know, my company is announcing its product launch Next Wednesday at 1 PM East Coast time. Would you like to cover this announcement? If you would, I ask that you not publish it before that time and date. So ideally at that time, you know, a lot of articles come online and it's a big win for your company. And people often ask, well, should I use an exclusive or embargo? And it's really risk-reward because with the embargo maybe a lot of people cover it, but at the same time maybe people aren't that interested and they pass on the story. In which case it's kind of a missed opportunity for you essentially.

Right, and as you probably know, people break embargoes all the time, and when you break an embargo, you screw everyone. But oftentimes people don't blame the journalist, they blame the company. Absolutely. So if some journalist is like, screw it, I'm going to write it right now, boom, boom, boom, hit publish. then you piss off everyone else because the embargo is broken, and oftentimes they blame the company, not the other journalist.

That's a really good point. One of the things I mentioned is you might— the audience, you might not even realize it, but you see embargoes every single day. Like sometimes, if you ever notice, the president or a big company makes an announcement, and then like at exactly 1 o'clock, like all these news publications cover it at the same time. And it's like, how is it possible that they were able to do that so quickly? And the answer is they were given the information ahead of time. They just waited. They agreed to not publish it until that time. Right.

They may be given the speech or whatever, right?

Absolutely.

So which would you choose, embargo or exclusive, or you really think it's whichever?

In general, what I like to say is if it's larger than a seed round of funding, to go with the embargo. And if it's smaller, to go with an exclusive. And when I say smaller, let's say you announce a milestone, like that happens very often. You know, every single week there are many milestones. So like, it's not as newsworthy, but if you announce like $10 million in funding, that doesn't happen that often. So it's much more newsworthy and it'd make more sense for an embargo.

So the bigger the news embargo, sort of milestones and other things, Ah, exclusives. Okay, so now we're F-A-M-O, I can spell, what is the U?

The U is unrelenting, and the idea being, um, you know, to contact as many media publications as possible to generate coverage. And you should almost presume in your mind that no one will write about you unless you contact them with the story. And for each of you, if you have let's say a sports app, it's not just TechCrunch and tech sites that have your audience. It's also these enormous sports publications. There are many verticals, so it's important to contact those as well. I actually— there are a number of other platforms such as Product Hunt as well and Reddit, which are really popular that you can then publish on to try to generate media coverage. Maybe can I talk a little bit about Product Hunt?

Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a very— yeah, I agree. I mean, it's sort of a media platform these days.

Product Hunt, from my experience and data points, drives about as much traffic as a TechCrunch article. Posiblement more. Yeah, my experience is slightly more, I'd say revenue-wise slightly less, or a fair amount less. But yeah, and a lot of people, what's most important about Product Hunt is that you're on the homepage. And there are basically 3 types of users. So I would say about 90% of people who visit Product Hunt, you can't even submit a product. It just won't, you don't have access to. Then there's a percentage, let's say 7 or 8%, like myself, where we could submit a product, but then it basically goes into this random kind of abyss. Where if we get enough upvotes to that product, then it hits the homepage. So what— and then there are very, very small select few people who are moderators, and they are allowed to submit a product and it directly hits the homepage. But the reason that's important is if you're looking to submit a product to Product Hunt, you should likely not do it yourself. What you should do is write a moderator, ask them to submit it so it'll directly hit the homepage. So that would be my advice for product hunt.

Awesome, that's part of being unrelenting, so contact as many people as possible. Now can I ask, with respect to the— because in the unrelenting, in the O, we're talking about hey, it's exclusive versus embargo. Embargo, unrelenting, going for as many as possible makes sense, with the Exclusive, that could take a month, right? Because if you hit 20 publications, you give them a couple days each, that's 40 days, right? So how do you balance the unrelenting and an exclusive?

Yeah, with the exclusive, you should give yourself a little bit more time. What I usually recommend doing is contacting, I would say, 2 to 3 writers at each publication and giving each publication about 24 hours. And the reason why is I found like TechCrunch and VentureBeat will really mind if you give one an exclusive, but if you contact two writers at the same publication, they don't kind of mind if someone else gets the specific story. And, um—

Do you write each writer individually or do you CC— do you write like one and CC the other?

Usually we will contact each one individually. And if for any reason both of them respond, we let them know right away.

Right, now they, I know that a lot of these tech blogs have like Slack or Yammer and they would be like, I'm writing this story and then like the other writers see it and know okay, that's being covered by so-and-so. So even if you hit two writers, the likelihood that they would overlap is low.

Yeah, I think absolutely, and the big thing is usually what I'm If someone's interested, you'll get kind of a few-word response like, "Hey, this sounds interesting," like, "Send me more info," or "Let's set up a call." So right when you hear that, you'd be able to notify them immediately to say like, "Hey," you know, if by chance another reporter at that publication responded, to let them know.

Oh, okay, so you let them know, "I also emailed Sally, so just let her know that," okay, perfect. What's the S, last but not least, because we're getting up there and I want to make—

Yeah, the S, what's most important is to strategize. And I found that the strongest companies make announcements every 8 to 12 weeks. And what you see often is a startup in 2009 raises $5 million in funding, and then 5 years— and they get media coverage, and then you don't hear anything from them. And then 5 years later they raise funding again and they get a lot of media coverage. But there are all these opportunities in the meantime that they missed out from. They're not optimizing for PR. So I like to almost use PR as a force function to say, "Hey, in 2 months we want to make another PR announcement. Is there something we could do to add new features, etc., or hit a milestone, or announce funding raised to generate more media?" Okay, so let's go over the—

Letters: F, formulate. A, amplify. So that's where you take something and make it seem more meaningful by implying your vision. O, outreach. Again, talking about the— did I miss the M? Yes, M, message. Excuse me, that's the email and the press release. O is outreach. That is, you know, the exclusive versus embargo decision. U, unrelenting. That is this, you know, go after as many people as possible. En serio in the case of the exclusive. And then last is S, strategize. That's thinking about how to get a release every 8 to 12 weeks. Now, on the 8 to 12 week thing, I've been certain— so when you said it, and then I was thinking, like, if you're doing a series of exclusives, it might take you 4 of those 8 weeks to get the story out. So it seems like you're going to be doing these releases frequently.

Absolutely. I mean, it does seem like 8 to 12 weeks seems like a long time, but when you think about about putting everything together, yeah, that's kind of the hope is that it will continue to provide this kind of positive ROI for your company.

So it's a perpetual motion machine.

Yeah, I think, and the goal is that it will compound over time. So, you know, a lot of people with PR, they think about the short-term benefits, so which is traffic, revenue, which is super important. But what I like to tell people is in the short run, I actually think PR underperforms other marketing channels. So you'll make more money if let's say, or drive more traffic if you pay for advertising, etc. But in the long run, PR to me greatly outperforms. I think for two reasons. One is I do think of PR as a secret weapon for SEO. But I think that the second thing is that your goal with PR is to own share of mind of a specific space. So when I, for example, think of kind of thought leaders in entrepreneurship, etc., like I think of like a Dale, like if I was going to write an article, I'd include a Dale in that even if he didn't contact me because you own that share of mind. So the hope is for each of your own companies is that once you own a share of mind, you'll start getting media coverage even when you don't do outreach just because when people write about related areas, they'll include you and your company. In those pieces.

Okay, Julian has asked— let me get some questions in here, but then we'll do some thought leadership. I'm sensitive to time. When a startup launch strategy is focused on one city, what— is there something I should do differently? So let's say I'm in Germany and I'm focusing on Berlin, or I'm in America and I'm focusing on Atlanta.

Yeah, do I—

is my PR strategy different TechCrunch is sort of a global tech resource, right?

Absolutely. I mean, from my personal experience, and this is more in South America, when we got a lot of media coverage in the US on TechCrunch, etc., I literally just translated that into, in this case, the local language of being Spanish, reached out to the largest Colombian news publications, and we're featured on essentially all the largest newspapers. And all we did was literally translate it. I didn't have any prior relationships, you know, it's the same exact process.

So you can translate— well, so that brings up an interesting other point, and then there's another question from Hiren, which I've discovered to be true as well. So this idea that the tech media almost leads traditional news, other traditional media in thought leadership, which is the next subject. So if you get a story in TechCrunch, you know, a lot of times, sometimes it's directly syndicated into some newspapers, but it makes it easier to go to local media sources and say, I was in TechCrunch, you should cover this.

Right? Absolutely, and the thing about local media is that they don't compete with the TechCrunches, so it actually helps when you get on TechCrunch for them. And also they tend to be less time sensitive. So I'd actually meant to mention this for Unrelenting. When you do get media coverage, it's important to contact other publications in a very short period of time because the news cycle moves on. And you should email the most time sensitive to the least time sensitive. So if you get in TechCrunch—

That's your ordering. Okay, that's a great question. Everyone— sorry, that wasn't asked. Email the most time-sensitive organizations first and the least time-sensitive ones last. So like TechCrunch, VentureBeat are very time-sensitive. What would be some not— traditional newspapers are not time-sensitive. What are some other examples?

Yeah, the most being the tech sites, then publications for example Forbes or Entrepreneur Magazine, these were historically monthly magazines, are less time-sensitive. You can usually email them a few days later and they'll still cover it. And then local media and kind of publications in your own vertical tend to be the least time sensitive. So you can email the local newspaper, you know, several weeks after and they'd still cover your company launch even if, you know, several weeks had gone by.

So, uh, Aaron's question is, how do we find emails to mail these organizations? Now, you brought up that half the stories of VentureBeat came from tips@venturebeat.com, so you presume tips@techcrunch.com are the same. So a lot of these sites publish tips@, but what are some other tags? Address a reporter by name. On that, before we get off that, do you like, for example, let's say you wanted to get on Pando, which is run by Sarah Lacy, do you write tips@pando.com and say Sarah, Or is that presumptuous?

What I would normally do is email, let's say, Sarah's individual email, and then if no responses, then I'd email the tips as kind of a last resort. Okay. And in terms of—

So how do you find out who to email?

Well, they tend to be pretty public with emails actually. In almost all cases, you can search the person's name and email on Google, and you'll be able to find it, or you'll be able to find out kind of roughly what their email should be.

Right, Sarah at Pando. Now a lot of them also have secret emails like S. Lacey at Pando. Yeah, okay, so Google, you'll find it. Okay, last few minutes, thought leadership. What is thought leadership, why is it important? Let's go through.

What I found is to me these two 2 pillars of PR would be making these announcements every 8 to 12 weeks, and when there's down period, you could author thought leadership articles on related subjects. So as an example, if you had an accounting startup—

The down period between TechCrunch post 1 and TechCrunch article 2.

Exactly.

Is that what you mean? So between those 2? Okay, great.

Exactly. So fill the void. Exactly. And let's say you have an accounting startup. Well, you can't write a guest article on why your startup is just great because that's too self-promotional. What you could say is, hey, this is where, for example, I see technology disrupting the accounting industry. And in that article, it'll include a backlink to your site, and you'll basically be positioning yourself as a thought leader in that space, in kind of accounting and startups. And one of the things I share with Founder Institute grads is the exact email I sent to TechCrunch. Doing these— so in my case for the coworking space, I wrote an article on Columbia's tech scene, which kind of related to coworking and tech and innovation. And I think increasingly publications are going to be looking for editorial and information like that, and it's a way that every time you do that, even though you're not being compensated, I found you get an ROI from that.

Well, you don't necessarily need to write your guest post on TechCrunch, right? You could write your guest post on Medium, and you know, because one of the things that I'm seeing right now is Medium as a platform is taking off with, you know, I've seen Medium stories generate as much traffic and volume as a TechCrunch TechCrunch article. Right? It's like a blogging platform, essentially.

What I would recommend is, at least people who don't have a lot of business success to stand on, the thing is, Adil, you're like a Silicon Valley legend, so you're kind of— my thought is, what do you do when you're first starting off and you don't necessarily have an audience? And the reason why I like TechCrunch is it provides this platform, and then right after you can kind of then post it on Medium or on your own blog or LinkedIn, etc., as opposed to— I do know a lot of people who've gone directly to Medium and it's like, you know, hey, you get 3 or 4 views because they don't have kind of a built-in audience to start off with.

So that's why— Do the TechCrunch or VentureBeat or whatever guest editorial to start building your audience.

Exactly.

And then do— so let's think about— so we need some examples of thought leadership. We got people writing in. Joyce has a video production company. What would be an example thought leadership guest editorial that Joyce could write for video editing or video production?

Excuse me. I think a good template that anyone can use is say something like, 3 things that I've learned building a company in this industry. So 3 things that you've learned building a video production company, and what you'll probably think is like, wow, I learned that For example, it takes a lot longer to start than what I expected, etc. By the time you've added all of this and written it down, it becomes a really interesting article.

Interesting. Okay, Roxy, sorry if I mispronounce your name, a healthcare networking company. I don't even know what that is, but let's assume that it's in healthcare and it's providing networking opportunities for healthcare professionals. It's kind of B2B. What would be an interesting—

Yeah, I think a couple of things. One you could say is, "Where do I see this industry heading in 3 or 5 years?" But the other thing is maybe the government recently changed some regulation around that. So you could say, "Hey, what the president's recent regulation change, how that impacted this space?" So you can kind of use current news in your industry to come up with an article. I did see a great question about this being related to tech, and I want to mention everything that I'm saying here applies just as much to the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Variety Magazine or Hollywood Reporter as it does— I've seen the same strategies used there as I have with TechCrunch. So I hope people keep in mind it's not just related to startups.

Yeah, we're talking tech because we're tech-oriented, but the media strategies are, I would agree, universal. One last, and then, like, Kristin's got a technical recruiting company. You know, that's a services business. That might be tricky, but interested in your— how do you make a great guest editorial there? I have some ideas too.

Yeah, for technical recruiting, maybe something like, you know, 3 or 4 things that we look for in a great technical recruit. As an example, that we found to be really successful in our recruits.

Right.

One example.

That's great, yeah. Or you could say, you know, getting a job in technology is harder than ever. So being contrarian to popular logic in a guest post, as long as it's a sensible and rational argument, is very, very good. And what are some of the biggest mistakes people make when they do these thought leadership articles?

I mean, I think that the two biggest ones would be they make it too self-promotional and they include themselves in the article, and it really has to be about— I am the best. Exactly. And the second one too is it shouldn't have been posted anywhere else online. So the reason I mentioned first publishing it on, let's say, Offer Magazine and then Medium is because you can do that, but you can't do the reverse. Like, if you post on Medium, in general you can't then publish it on one of these big publications.

Okay, so we've run out of time, but I want to just say, is there like a last thought you want to throw out to just say, boom, if you want to hack your way into startup PR, um, or you know, general, what is it that— what would be the sage piece of advice you want to leave people with?

I hope the best thing would be just to reiterate that PR, the beauty of it is that it is inherently free. It's something that I think if you do follow the right process, you can get these great results, and it isn't required that you have this great relationship. And I just wanted to mention just quickly about the Founder Institute, just what a fan and supporter I am. I think I spend a lot of time internationally as well as in the US. Well, and one of the things I love about Founder Institute is that there are very few organizations that have a great reputation locally, but also in Silicon Valley and New York. And I see a lot of foreign entrepreneurs coming to Silicon Valley and New York, and they've been a part of these great programs, but a lot of the investors and partners they know haven't heard of them. But when you say that you're a Founder Institute grad, that really means something. You know, I see that coming from Back in the day when I was writing on VentureBeat and someone said they're a Founder Institute grad, I thought, wow, that means something to me. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of Dale and Founder Institute, Jonathan as well, and thanks so much for having me.

Thank you. This was one of our favorite webinars. I got to tell you, we killed it. Huge turnout. Thank you, Conrad. Publicize, also a product we use, a lot of our grads use. Check it out. Founder Institute, if you're thinking of starting a company, fi.co/join. This is one of our bigger webinars overall, so welcome everyone to our next one. Thank you, Konrad, for this one. Big round of applause, and maybe we'll do it again talking about some more thought leadership stuff. Thank you, Konrad.

Thanks so much.

Bye, everyone.