Ask HN: No-names, tell your story on how you got PR coverage

[kineticac]

To all HN who aren't in YC: how did you go about getting PR coverage without the help of YCombinator's massive influence on PR firms? Did you get massive exposure in a different way? What tricks / advantages did you have?

And in the subject I mentioned no-names, people who have yet to have any coverage on anything they've ever built, how are you doing it?

For our site http://browseology.com, it's unclear if the idea is just not clear and understandable enough for PR to write about, or if they just don't care about our request emails because we're nobody yet.

Just wanted to see how the HN community is addressing this issue.

[systemtrigger]

> For our site http://browseology.com, it's unclear if the idea is just not clear and understandable enough for PR to write about...

Before you solicit more PR for Browseology I would tighten the story focusing on the homepage. You have a pleasant, simple aesthetic but IMHO the homepage contains too many words and options. The result is an unnecessarily confusing first impression. My notes: http://idea.s3.amazonaws.com/browseology.png

You might want to gear Browseology more toward women. Women love shopping and they're more social about it than men. I can imagine your app serving their sensibilities better with a little wordsmithing. This might make PR easier for you because it would focus your messaging on benefits rather than features.

[joepestro]

It's awesome how much you understand our situation when this is the first time you've seen what we're working on. This was exactly what we've been struggling with, and having another perspective on it is extremely helpful.

And, you went through the trouble of mocking something up and sharing it with us. We'll definitely take a close look at your ideas. Thanks.

[kingsley_20]

In that vein, show some product. What does "collaborative shopping" look like on a screen? Bonus points if you show non-clipart people using your product in a way that makes sense to your users. Would they also be on a phone call w/ each other, for instance?

I find that videos are becoming a popular way to tell that story - if you choose to go that route, keep it under ~ 3 mins.

[kineticac]

woah! cool! It's always amazing when people give feedback using images like this. Really clarifies what you're trying to say.

Thank you for that, and your suggestions.

[telegraph]

Gearing the site towards women is all well and good, but I can tell you right now that your suggestion of using "she" and "her" on the front page will offend. If you want to cater to women, do it by changing your aesthetic and emphasizing the women's clothing/accessories/etc shopping options your site offers -- NOT by assuming that the user is a woman.

[pg]

"Y Combinator's massive influence on PR firms"

I assume this was sort of a typo, but YC doesn't have any particular influence on PR firms. I think you mean influence on the press.

To understand how to do without connections, it's probably helpful to understand what value connections have. The point of connections is authentication. If I recommend a startup to a reporter or an investor, they know I have to tell the truth, because if I start to be a source of bum leads they'll stop listening to me.

The value of authentication is that it makes judging you easier. If you come highly recommended, a reporter or investor will at least talk to you. (The joke is that the YC name can get you rejected by any VC in the valley.) If you don't, they have to judge you for themselves, and that's hard, because they get tons of inbound requests and don't usually have technical backgrounds.

There are two possible solutions: (1) get authentication by some other means than personal recommendations, and (2) get publicity through venues that don't require so much authentication.

The best strategy for (1) is to get lots of users. If your traffic graph (or better still, revenue graph) is going up sharply, reporters and investors will pay attention to you. In effect, users are recommending you.

You may say: how can we get lots of users without publicity? The same way Facebook did: make something so good that users tell one another about it. When you have exponential growth, you can start with a very small seed-- just your friends and friends' friends-- and you'll still win.

A good example of (2) is to talk about your startup on venues like HN, where many readers understand technology well and are capable of judging whether something is good or not without any external seal of approval. Being on HN is not the same kind of traffic boost as TechCrunch, obviously, but it's a start. Literally, sometimes: sometimes TC gets leads here.

[kineticac]

Sorry Paul, I definitely meant the press. I think I'm lumping PR in general with press incorrectly. Thanks for clarifying.

Your points on authentication is very interesting. It seems that the press definitely cares about names.

Our feedback from Hackernews is good, but in terms of getting people psyched about it, not so much, I think it's mainly because the target audience is not exactly the best one. The feedback we ARE getting is awesome, technical feedback, and experience driven feedback... but we haven't touched on the users who actually want to USE it. We will probably attack the other communities that are 1) people who love to shop, 2) people who do a ton of research on products. That probably also includes a ton of women in that as well.

Can't forget to build a good app either, so those improvements will come as well. It's hard to know what direction to go in and what to focus on without ample feedback. We have plenty of ideas of what could work, speculation, but validation of these ideas, or even new ideas is what we're fishing for now.

[anigbrowl]

I'll tell you two things that are wrong with your site for free. You allow people to shop together. In general, men compete to display their technical knowledge about things in which they are interested, but don't shop socially. I like sharing my knowledge with friends, but not with strangers or I'd pursue a career in retail. I tend to note things and hunt for them later. Mrs Browl likes to know what her favorite suppliers have on offer and forages about until she finds something that interests her. They're equally valid but quite different selection strategies.

Women love shopping together (frequently without any impulse to buy) because they learn about their friends by seeing what they are interested in. So I think your business model is much more interesting to women shopping for clothes than men shopping for digital cameras. If you buy into this idea, then your target market is female friends separated by geography, not men who would be equally happy working at Best Buy.

Now, your 'big elephant leading little elephant' logo reinforces your site title 'browseology', which is presumably the study of how to successfully browse Amazon for shopping purposes. For men, you're putting them in an inferior position, implying they have less knowledge and bruising tender egos by suggesting they lack browseology skills. For women, you're suggesting that they are elephant friends. Women like elephants, but they don't want to identify with them.

The idea and the technology both have merit. But the social contract you present to potential customers is a double fail. So: rebrand. You could do worse than grab a few co-workers, load up on weed and beer, and lock yourselves in a room for the weekend with a TV that tunes only to Bravo and TLC, to immerse yourselves in gender stereotypes.

[kineticac]

Men do a lot of research before purchasing some expensive gadget, they goto discussions, review sites, and talk about it in forums. The way it's geared now is sort of the way teenagers goto the store to show each other the coolest things they can buy. So I see your point as being very valid here.

Haha @ "Women like elephants, but they don't want to identify with them."

[kbrower]

Submit to HN, reddit, digg, etc.

Contact relevant and/or popular blogs/news outlets with non-form emails as to how and why they should write about your site. Getting on Lifehacker was a huge boost for one of my side projects.

If you can afford it buy the keywords on google, yahoo, msn that are extremely relevant.

Post to various web application directories(this was probably the least effective use of time)

[pierrefar]

Don't forget Twitter and Friendfeed. There are lots of very nice and approachable influencers on there too. Surely you must have had a conversation with one or more of them at some point.

By the way, as with all kinds of approaches like this: Do NOT abuse the relationship. Be kind, thankful, and don't pressure/harrass them.

[zeedotme]

sounds about perfect..the only thing i'd add is actually try and contact individual bloggers wherever possible. In an ideal world, you have already established some form of relationship with a few of them.

[thorax]

We've actually had a lot of luck, but it's still really hard. We've been working on a site to help small startups to track/manage their interactions/promotions with the media (or at least help us do it, but we like to externalize our own tools).

For our successes, sometimes you luck out:

* We created bug.gd and the day we uploaded the logo to a random "Web 2.0" site, one of the moderators posted it on Digg, made the front page, and from there it scattered throughout the world.

* We mentioned bug.gd to TC a couple of weeks later (since the Digg storm imploded our site) and it was picked up by TC, Mashable, Lifehacker, etc.

* As people ran into us and heard about us, they spread the word around, and now it grows on its own, getting covered in PC World, and even local news coverage in random cities: http://blog.bug.gd/2008/11/08/buggd-coverage-on-wivb-buffalo...

* At Pycon last year, we did a lot of spreading the word by mouth and lightning talk. As an experiment, we released error_help() from the Python interpreter so that you could get help for your most recent exception from the rest of the world who may have run into it. Very few people used it, but we got a lot of interest from people who heard more than a few words about it all.

* For yumbunny.com (a dating site experiment) we mentioned it to TC the week before Valentine's day and they covered it. We issued press releases about it, though, and no one cared one bit.

* For tinyarro.ws, it spread through Twitter like wildfire because it was so odd (and shorteners are inherently viral) and it ended up with coverage on Mashable, Lifehacker, and zillions of blogs.

The only advice I can give is to make something either: (a) Useful enough that people want to talk about it, (b) Interesting/quirky enough that people want to talk about , or (c) be lucky sometimes (i.e. keep rolling the dice and trying until the die roll hits).

My best advice to you is:

* Try new APIs or new fads to get attention for yourself

* Seek partnerships that are mutually beneficial for popular sites

* Send not-too-uptight emails about your service to people you want to cover you. Try not to do form letters.

* Advertise on niche blogs or sites. While they may not give preferential treatment to advertisers, they will have heard of you so you don't end up in the spam folder automatically and you get their ear enough to say a few words.

[kineticac]

awesome stuff thorax! Seems like you guys have some good ideas that lend themselves to being talked about naturally.

Getting new APIs or new fads is good, but they have to be fitting. Getting buried in all of the trends going on might be harder than standing out in the crowd as something totally different. But then nobody will find you with searches and other trend word searches. I'll definitely keep looking into hooking into trends when/if it makes sense.

[webwright]

So, we are in YC, but we'd gotten onto TechCrunch etc multiple times before we were, so I'll respond anyways. You don't have to be "somebody" to get PR coverage.

YC espouses building something people want. To get coverage, you need to build something people want to talk about. You can substitute connections, bulldog PR folks, or hurl money at the problem, but IMO you should never attempt PR until you're pretty sure you have something to talk about that makes a reporter say, "Holy crap-- that'll make a good story".

The common response is that it's really hard to be worth talking about with a boring product, right? Because no one wants to talk about shoe companies (except Zappos) or project management software (except 37Signals), right? If your product isn't inherently interesting, you need to craft a different story. About customer service mania or simplicity. Or how the idea came to you. Or how your founders are living cheap to avoid funding (TicketStumbler has done a killer job here).

Seriously, read "Made to Stick", or at very least read the summary. http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

[kineticac]

thank you, that is really good advice =) We need to figure out what is that "made to stick" story. Collaborative web surfing in real-time with zero-setup for shopping doesn't seem to cut it =) hehe

[ramit]

Here's an interview I did about how I got into the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc: http://blog.mixergy.com/wsj-press/

I also wrote more about getting press for blogs/companies here: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/getting-traffic-fo...

Btw, I now write for Lifehacker occasionally, so if you ever have interesting startups, send me an email.

[jamesk2]

Ramit's stuff is cool. Also on mixergy is the interview with Tim Ferriss who got his book "Four Hour Work Week" written about by tons of bloggers.

http://blog.mixergy.com/tim-ferriss/

[kineticac]

Awesome publications. I will take some time to read them after I get some work done today.

[callmeed]

Blog often and comment on other blogs as well

Sponsor events or workshops relevant to your industry

Give something away for free (we created a free WordPress theme and are releasing some open source projects)

Give your product away for free to influential/VIP customers. This helps a lot if you get the right people. Developing a couple relationships like this can really help you early on.

Submit your app/site to magazines for review.

Check out HARO. I made some connections there ... to early to tell if its valuable though http://www.helpareporter.com/

[kineticac]

thank you for the suggestion of HARO. I will definitely check it out.

[smakz]

First rule of PR: Know your audience. IMO you are marketing your site all wrong if you go after the HN/Digg/Reddit crowds, which generally tend to be more techy.

You should be hitting the websites which would want to use this service, deal sites, shopping forums, price comparing forums, etc. Attack the forums/discussion areas in those sites, which are very large. If the shoppers from those sites aren't interested in your service, then you may have a problem with execution/the idea behind your website.

Again, HN/tech crunch/digg/reddit is the wrong audience for your idea.

[joepestro]

For sure, and we agree.

We're not looking to convert on this audience (HN/techcrunch/digg/reddit etc) - we just launched and we think feedback like this from really smart people is super useful. We're still gathering information before we feel like we can present an easy-to-use package for consumers.

It's harder on price comparison forums to ask our customers what they want and get a conversation started when they're looking to discuss the best deals on digital cameras. We tell them about the product, and hope they try it out. If they don't reach out to submit feedback, it doesn't help us as much in improving.

[kineticac]

Yeah, our feedback hopes for HN is technical / development of a product kind of feedback. It's totally true that our audience is different then that of HN. We are definitely going to target the correct audience soon. We've done a bit, but still working on squeezing as much out of HN as we can first ;)

[alain94040]

I have been on both sides: having a startup to pitch, but also being a journalist who needs new news to talk about.

Mass e-mailing journalists and issuing formal press releases is obsolete, that's for sure.

You need to build a relationship with a few key influencers. The problem is that they tend to behave like deaf people and typically won't answer your e-mails. And being obnoxious is not the way to go past that hurdle.

So it takes months of being smart, showing smart, getting to know other people like you, or slightly ahead of you, maybe piggy-backing from other events, etc. If you persevere, eventually you'll get the connections and the coverage.

[jlees]

Find a flavour of the month or trend and surf it. Develop a Wave gadget, develop a Twitter app, use $BUZZWORD, whatever.

It's not obvious from an immediate glance at your site exactly what it is and why it's special. I have to read lots of text. Journos love pictures.

[kineticac]

Yeah, I feel you on the text. We need some nice mini screenshots of the different ways this works. It's hard to show with static images in a dynamic real time app. Maybe we need to talk to a designer.

[raffi]

With Feedback Army, I subscribed to "usability testing" blog keywords via Google alerts, and then occasionally taking some time to ping bloggers about my service. Ditto to giving away something to the bloggers. Make it as frictionless as possible for them to try your stuff.

By as frictionless as possible--make it so they can click a link and immediately without doing anything--see what your product does.

I also found having a media kit is useful and point them to it. In the media kit try to have a short/non-markety summary of your service, logos/graphics for their use, relevant links, the bios of your team, and direct contact information.

[kineticac]

Ah a media kit is a good suggestion, but I feel like it might be yet another page that's full of text... maybe if the product is slightly hard to understand, that would be good.

[tjdziuba]

I started a blog called uncov.com. Talked a lot of shit on a lot of people, built a personal brand.

Product ended up failing, but I made enough connections along the way that I landed on my feet.

By the by. If you're counting on PR as your primary distribution strategy, you've already failed.

[kineticac]

good point about PR being the primary distribution. Ideally nobody wants that. If you can ever glance at the whiteboard at the YC office, it shows a dominating spike in traffic for techcrunch coverage, and then a sharp dropoff... after that it's all up to your product. So initially, good exposure, but you need a product that counts.

[tptacek]

Pick a fight.

[joepestro]

We tried this recently with Browseology. It backfired.

[martinkallstrom]

For great ideas about how to do PR, look at what Pingdom does. They are extremely good at getting their name thrown around by releasing reports about interesting stuff noone else cares to measure.

[aschobel]

Hard work, email bloggers & reports, but sometimes you get lucky.

A CNet reporter quoted me for a front page Google Wave story and linked our site. Instant traffic spike.

[kineticac]

I see a lot of suggestions and ideas, also looking for real stories of how you did it, and what came out of it. Just out of curiosity ;)

[dbul]

"Build something people want."

[kineticac]

and "Build something people want to talk about"

[j0ncc]

Make something awesome.

[jmtulloss]

You mean people can just detect awesomeness out of the blue and flock to it?

[jimboyoungblood]

Bingo. That's what I did.