A founder's media plan needs three things: outreach through exclusives or embargoes (Apple uses embargoes to coordinate release timing), relentless timing that syncs press with Product Hunt and Hacker News, and a steady cadence of announcements over months to keep journalists interested.
The last, the O, U, and S in the famous acronym, outreach, unrelenting, and strategy. I think the, 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, 1:00 PM on Wednesday, as an example. And the reality is, is every single day you experience embargoes. Because sometimes you might notice like a big company like Apple might make an announcement and suddenly at 2 o'clock every single company right after the announcement they publish an article. And you might think like, how is it possible that they all publish 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." I think one of the mistakes I see a lot of companies make is, maybe in 2017 they make an announcement and 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.
