Royston G. King explains the first step to getting press coverage: you need a concrete, newsworthy announcement. Journalists write about startups when there's a clear story like a product launch, funding round, or milestone. Pitch the specific announcement, not a vague request for coverage.
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, Connor, 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 because there's no story there. So a lot of founders would say, hey, what, what announcements do startups make? In 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, an 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, etc. 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'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.
