How To Get PR For Your Startup With Heidi Zak, the founder of ThirdLove - Hustle Con 2015

Hey guys, I'm happy to be here. So I'm Heidi Zak, the founder of ThirdLove. And a little bit about my background, I started my career in investment banking working with retail companies. Went from there to MIT for business school. I was president of the retail club. Went from there to Aeropostale in New York. I was a director. I launched and ran their international business. And then went from there to Google. And I was at Google a few years, and I left Google 2 years ago to start ThirdLove. So we're backed by some really great VCs, raised $5.5 million 2 years ago. A little bit about ThirdLove before I get into press and how to get it. So at ThirdLove, we're revolutionizing the lingerie industry. It's a $35 billion industry worldwide. It's huge. ThirdLove came out of my frustration at buying a bra. For any— there's some women in the audience. For men in the audience who don't really understand how it usually works, you go to a fitting room, and an old lady comes in, and you're half naked, and she measures you with a measuring tape, and then she yells at you and says, "You've been wearing the wrong size." That's usually how it goes. It's not cool. It's not fun. And that's why women don't like to get fit for a bra. So basically I said, there's got to be a better way. And what we've done over the past few years is build an app and patented smartphone technology that lets a woman size herself for a bra from home. I know it sounds crazy. It actually works. So the way it works is a woman puts on a tight-fitting tank top and takes two photos into a mirror, a front photo and a side photo. And we're able to calculate the size of her body in relationship to the iPhone. So we tell her her size, her measurements, and then she can shop. We also use that data at an aggregate level from all these women who use our sizing technology to create more sizes. So we have 30% more sizes than any other brand on the market. Just a little background. Um, over the past year since we've launched, we've spent virtually no money on paid customer acquisition. Um, we've spent under $20,000. We've really, really focused on press and telling the customer our story and building word-of-mouth referrals. This is just a few examples of the press we've gotten. Good Morning America is probably the biggest success, that they have a viewership of 5.5 million every morning, so that was huge for us. So everyone out in the audience, if you're gonna start a company, whether it's B2B, B2C, or you are a founder, we all face the exact same issue, right? And it's how do you get your brand noticed? It's such a noisy world. And how do you acquire new customers? And at some point in time, it may be early on or later in your company, you're gonna rely on press and perhaps a PR firm to help you do that. So I've talked to probably every founder I meet about their PR firm and I always ask them, "Do you like them?" And literally 80 to 90% will be like, Mm, not so much. So people generally are not happy with their PR firms. You hear this over and over again. It's not easy to find one, to pick one, or to manage one. So I'd like to save you all some hassle in your lives and tell you a bit about what I've learned along the way. So when we launched, we were actually pre-launch, so we didn't have an open website. It was really a closed beta. This was a year and a half ago. I was looking for a PR firm that could do all of these things, right? That could do tech and consumer press and fashion, right? right? And I was talking to these firms and they sold me that they could. This is a lie. So you need to understand that every PR firm, they're good at one thing. It's either tech press or fashion press or whatever, design, it doesn't matter. They're good at one thing. So as the founder of the company, take a step back, figure out what your main goal is. What are you trying to get across? What's the press that matters for you? Are you raising money? Do you need to get tech press? Are you a company like ours with product where you need fashion press. Figure out who your audience is and then pick a firm that focuses on that area. So now that you have your list of your top firms, how do you figure out which firm to work with? It's called the backchannel reference, right? We all know what the backchannel reference is. We use it for hiring all the time. That's how you find out whether this employee who you supposedly think is gonna be awesome joining your team is gonna be a great fit. It's really about what somebody says, who they didn't put on their reference list. So you have this list of PR firms. Look at their clients and then go find founders who've worked with that PR firm and reach out. I mean, through your network, right? You probably know a lot of founders. Or just reach out, LinkedIn, short little note. Just tell me in 3 words, how were they? Were they terrible, were they good, or were they amazing? That's all you need to know. They'll get back to you. So this is an example of a founder I reached out to, and you can see what she writes back. "Hi there, terrible, fire them." Okay, moving on. Here's another one. He gives a bit more detail about 3 firms he's worked with. And you can see one, he really raves about. He says they're amazing. One he kind of says is good, and the other one, again, you see the same word used, and I've heard it a lot in verbal conversations too. Founders will be like, they're terrible. Terrible. So just an indication, don't spend your time talking to these PR firms at the beginning. Backchannel reference them before. Don't waste your time. And then last, here's a pretty decent reference on a PR firm that we ended up using where the founder says, "Good, not amazing, better than most." So this was pretty good for me. I was like, "Alright, I'll actually talk to this PR firm." Alright, so you have your PR firm. Now you're gonna pay them some money and you need them to do something for you, right? This headline here is for ThirdLove when we announced our fundraising. We announced our fundraising, and again, we were pre-launch, so we didn't have an open site or app yet. And you can see there's two messages here, right? There's a message about our technology, and then there's a message about our fit. And what I learned from this is a lot of things. Two things, two main points. One is when you have too many messages, the press will pick up on whatever they want to pick up on. So in this case, They really picked up on the app and the sizing technology, and that was really great. But it kind of lost the message about our product quality, size, and kind of that consumer point of view. The second point I want to make is about timing. Okay, timing's everything. When we launched, we launched in the tech press, and then Good Morning America called. And when Good Morning America calls and asks you to go on TV with your product, What do you say? Right, you say, "Of course, this is awesome! Yes, I wanna be on Good Morning America." It doesn't even really cross your mind as a new founder to take a step back and say, "Is this the right time for me? Is this the right time for Good Morning America?" I really wish if I could do anything over again, this is one of my top things. I wish I had said no. We're not live yet. We'll be live in 2 months. "Let me come back to you and you can have an exclusive on our launch when we actually have the website open." So I didn't do that. Good Morning America covered us. It was awesome, but I think the timing was off a little bit. Back to the messaging. When we launched our new product line about 8 months ago, we stayed very focused. You can see this message is really tight. It's specifically about the product and everything in the press release was really, really tight around this one message. So the results of that were that we got press that talked about fit, that talked about comfort, that talked about how amazing our product was in all the publications that we wanted to hit. This was really the best type of PR we'd had. And then lastly, this is really important. So whether you're reaching out to press on your own, if you don't have a have a PR firm or whether you have a PR firm. Seed your product, right? The best kind of reporter is one who loves what you're doing. They love that product or they love that experience. So get your product out there and make them love it because then they're gonna wanna write about it. So Dana Cohen here is the senior fashion editor at InStyle. We sent her our 24/7 bra before it launched and then She tweeted this, right? Okay @thirdloveimsold, your bra's perfection. Awesome. And then below that is the email that she sent me. And she says, there's a frenzy, in all caps, over this bra in the office. And you can read the whole thing. And then at the end she says, this will be my call-out bra, right? This is huge. So what ended up happening from seeding the product and her loving it is that we got an in-print feature for this bra in InStyle. This was amazing for— brand recognition, customer acquisition, everything we could have possibly wanted. So I'll just leave you with one additional point, and that is when you're thinking about building relationships with reporters, think about it in the same way you think about building your network with VCs, for example, right? You need to do it over time, develop a network, develop an authentic friendship with them, so that when you're raising money, you have people to talk to. It's the same thing with the press. You want to build an authentic relationship because as reporters move from one publication to another, or as you move from one startup to another, you'll still have that relationship and be able to leverage it over time.

Hi, Heidi. Thanks. My name is Ramon with Smart Hustle Magazine. And can you talk to those who are out there? I work with a lot of Main Street small businesses who don't have a sexy product, no pun intended, a hot product, something that's interesting but the boring, you know, accounting firm or law firm. I have a manure business. How do they get press? Because I think yours is a good job but unfair advantage. Everybody wants it. It's interesting. Talk to those who are boring.

I think even a boring business has interesting components. So I think it's coming up with something newsworthy, and stats tend to work really, really well with reporters. So say like a local business. It may be like the amount of pizza people consume or hot days of the month for buying X, Y, XYZ, and really try to get the reporter focused on like a tidbit, because then they'll create a story around it. And then a second idea is also to combine businesses together to make more of a story. So it's not just pitching— I'm pitching ThirdLove, but maybe I'm going to go out and pitch really cool direct-to-consumer businesses. So it's not just ThirdLove, but it's a bunch of other ones. So I think that also works. Thank you. Yeah. Great. Thank you.