The Daily Dose

Own your story

Before I started working on my startup, I actually went through a short stint in journalism. Alas, it was fashion journalism – as remote from the tech world as possible.

So when we first tried to get some press for our initial launch, I had my doubts about my ability to generate substantial PR. However, I did believe that I can write and I knew for a fact that I had no money to pay a PR firm, so I started to learn how to tell our story.

My first foray into PR was a bit naive. My co-founders told me their dream is to get covered on this large tech blog. First, I needed to identify the reporter that would be interested in our launch.

This part is easy – a simple Google search for your competitors’ names and the desired tech blog should yield relevant results. I then double checked it by looking into the reporter’s Pinterest account and verified that she was interested in what we were focused on back then: fashion.

Now comes the interesting part: the pitch. How do you rise above the noise of all the startups and their news and the busy lives of reporters, in order to get on their radar? I have never met this reporter, and to make things more complex – she was in NYC and I was in Tel-Aviv, a mere seven hours time zone difference.

I decided to use one of the features of our then product (which later became its very center) to create a photo collage from HER fashion Pinterest pins. I waited till it was 9 AM EST, tweeted it to her, and lo and behold she tweeted back that she liked it!

The tweet that got us major tech blog coverage.

The ground was then set for sending her my pitch email, while promising her an exclusive. She answered positively. It was personal, it was pretty, and it worked – a few days later we got our first major tech blog coverage. It was shared and replicated in many other blogs. Oh, and it cost us absolutely nothing.

For a great guide on how to approach bloggers, I recommend this post by Iris Shoor. Another an excellent resource was this beginner’s guide to PR by Brownstein and Egusa. The key is to save the reporter’s time as much as possible.

In addition, I had set Google alerts for various keywords pertaining to our domain, and every time I found a relevant article I added the reporter’s contact to my PR mailing list. It quickly grew to 200+ emails and I was able to get coverage on multiple blogs for each one of our press releases.

After a while, we pivoted and launched our new app. This time I was more prepared and experienced. I decided not to give any reporter an exclusive, but go for an embargo. About a week before our launch date I started contacting reporters, offering a test drive of the new app before it goes live on the AppStore.

This time I had more success and a few reporters were interested in the story. They tried the app, interviewed us, and on launch day, I knew that we had several major blog articles coming. Sweet!

It turns out that the major tech blogs are not great in terms of generating downloads, but they are trendsetters and have a social credo, so their content gets replicated on many other blogs. The best results, in terms of downloads, were achieved from posts on blogs in countries like Brazil, Italy, and so on.

In addition, I compiled a list of app review sites relevant to our app (here’s a good resource to start yours) and on the day the embargo was lifted, i.e. our launch day, I sent hundreds of emails and submitted our app to many app review websites, which generated more press, one that people specifically read in order to find and download new apps.

Not everything worked. Lots of reporters never answered me. People who said they would write about us never did. I did not succeed in getting us coverage on the mainstream press even though I tried many times. That’s just how it is, don’t be deterred by it.

All in all, our launch PR campaign got us on 50 blogs and news websites, not to mention the related social media buzz. People started asking me who our PR company is, which was kind of cool. But, most importantly, it allowed my company to grow from 0 to 500K downloads, on a shoestring.

We hope this was helpful and if you have more tips to share, feel free to comment below!

Image credit: Shutterstock/Brian A Jackson