Reporter Hermione Way argues founders should build products good enough to spread by word-of-mouth and cultivate real relationships with journalists by taking them out for beer instead of blasting duplicate pitches. Offer exclusives, not mass emails.
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So build awesome products, and they will sell themselves. This is pretty obvious, but don't build another bloody iPhone photo-sharing app. Build something awesome, and the product will sell itself. Uber has spread like wildfire. They haven't actually spent that much on marketing. They do it through personal recommendations. People just fall in love with Uber's service. They love the Uber UX. I'm sure you've all taken Uber. So build awesome products. And you'd be surprised at the amount of really bad products that people pitch me all the time. People are pitching me social media dashboard after social media dashboard after photo sharing app after photo sharing app. And it gets kind of boring, actually. So if you're going to change the world, change the world, you know? Right. Do have a beer with the press. At the end of the day, bloggers, most bloggers and journalists like beer, and they're just human beings. They want to have fun, right? We all work really hard, but often, if you find a blogger or a tech journalist at a tech event and you can grab them aside and, you know, buy them a beer or have a beer with them, often when they're in this social situation, they've got their guards down. Because rather than pitching your startup, it's going to be the best, I'm going to change the world, it's like, hey, dude, let's have a beer together. Let's actually talk as human beings and one-on-one. So, yeah, up here is Robert Scoble, very drunk in London with the pink wig. He likes to have fun. He travels around the world. He gets pitched so many ideas all the time that he does like to let off steam, and if you can find him at this point and make a connection that isn't work, then do it. This is me hanging out with Richard Branson. Name drop. This is a trip, a Silicon Valley trip to his island in the Caribbean. But we were just having fun. And I think sometimes in Silicon Valley— how am I going to phrase this? The thing I like about Richard Branson is he is at the intersection between business and fun. So he, yes, he's a multimillionaire. Yes, he's done extremely well in business. Yes, he gets pictured in hot tubs with random people and skydives naked into his launch events. So I think sometimes in Silicon Valley, people are very serious about business, and that's great, but I think you don't necessarily need to be. You can actually have fun and Be a human being. Do offer an exclusive. If we get sent a press release and we Google the startup and TechCrunch has already written about it, we're not going to write about you. Sorry, it's already been covered. Same, you know, if you've promised Next Web an exclusive, then we find out that TechCrunch already has the story, sorry, we're not going to write about you. So do make sure that you target the press beforehand. Try and make good relationships with bloggers. And, you know, an exclusive— if you offer them an exclusive, it's kind of like a mini marriage. You know, you're binded to them, and you know that they're going to write a really in-depth, good review of your product because you're giving them the exclusive. They get to write about it first. Thanks, Tim.
