Tech reporters’ inboxes are filled with garbage pitches from misguided founders who assume that the smallest milestone warrants a write-up.
Founders dream of seeing their company’s name in headlines without knowing how that might help or hurt them. But with the proper intentions, strategy and timing, they can score press that makes their imagined future look inevitable.
Step one: accept the fact that you don’t get to decide what’s newsworthy.
Inside your company, you may have total control, but working with reporters requires abdicating that iron grip. They can’t be intimidated or paid off, but you can collaborate with them — take their success into account alongside your own, recognize their duty to serve the public, and you’ll learn to pitch like a pro.
Here we’ll discuss different reasons why you might want press, why maybe you shouldn’t, and how to understand what reporters consider newsworthy. You’ll learn about the three big benefits of coverage, what’s changed about readership over the past decade, the most common mistake in startup PR and how to combine your milestones into a compelling story.
In part two of this ExtraCrunch guide, I’ll explore how to pick specific publications and reporters to work with. Future posts will examine how to hire help with PR, formulate a pitch, deliver it to reporters, prepare for interviews and conduct an announcement. If you have more questions or ideas for ExtraCrunch posts, feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or elsewhere.
Why should you believe me? I’m editor-at-large for TechCrunch, where I’ve written 4,000 articles about early-stage startups and tech giants. For a decade, I’ve reviewed startup pitches via email and Twitter, at demo days for accelerators like Y Combinator and on stage as a judge of startup competitions. From warm introductions to cold calls, I’ve seen what gets reporters’ attention, why some pitches are immediately rejected and how stories become enduring narratives supporting companies as they grow.
Let’s start with why you should want startup press in the first place.
Three realistic goals for press coverage
What’s your objective? It won’t matter to the reporters or the readers, and it won’t get you written about. But you need goals to work towards even if you never speak them aloud in an interview.
First, you should know what you’re giving up. To run an effective PR process, you’ll be distracted from building product and running your business. An agency can help, but founders and key employees must still put in time to meet with the PR team to define and refine positioning and messaging, offer product updates and set priorities.
Talking to the public will expose your secrets to potential competitors who could use the info to copy what’s working, learn from your mistakes and exploit the markets and opportunities you’re not. It can also bring in new users or customers before you’re ready, or before there’s enough adoption around them to make your product work. If press exposes you to a scattered cadre of early adopters around the world who have no one to use your app with, they might never give you a second chance, so you have to grow thoughtfully.
There are three big benefits you can get from startup press, but perhaps not in the ranking you’d assume.
The biggest thing good press delivers is help with recruiting: if you convey your vision for why you’ll be successful, put forth smart teammates to learn from and are building something exciting, you can boost inbound interest from job candidates. You’ll also have a signal of legitimacy you can point to throughout the hiring process to show that it’s not just you who believes in your company. Press can reach a wide swath of the tech community that might have never heard of you and wouldn’t have gone looking.
The second biggest benefit of press is investor interest. While it’d be nice to think investors evaluate companies objectively from their own perspectives, many lack conviction and look to the herd for guidance. An article that highlights your traction, team and potential for growth can trigger calls for meetings to pitch angels and venture capital firms. There are a ton of startups out there, so your ability to rise above the noise and earn strong coverage shows your company has the grit to fuel progress despite hurdles.
Finally, there is still an opportunity to gain user, partner, or customer growth from press — but not in the same way that happened a decade ago. Startups as a concept are no longer novel; tons launch or announce funding each day. The audience has been fragmented across publishers, exhausted by the constant news cycle, overloaded with products, swamped with partnership requests and distracted by scandals with the tech giants.
Press can be of more assistance with securing business-to-business deal meetings for otherwise unknown startups. But unless you’re some explosively helpful consumer startup with a brand-new concept at an accessible price, you shouldn’t count on press as a massive user growth vector. Virality requires you to be both high in utility and fun to talk about.
What’s newsworthy?
With those opportunities in mind, you should probably wait to seek press coverage until you need it, and until you have something truly newsworthy to share.
One of the most common mistakes in startup PR is made by companies that misinterpret a product breakthrough or a business announcement as something important to the public, and therefore to journalists. It doesn’t matter if a product took your employees two years to build, or that it’s going to improve your margins. It only matters if it changes how people live their lives, alters the competitive landscape for other major businesses or makes readers say “wow,” “whoa,” or “what’s going to happen next?”
The best pitches are custom-tuned to pair well with a publication and its audience. Different outlets care more about finance, product, societal impact or personal interest stories. Regardless of what you pitch, you must craft and contextualize it for the recipient.
If you have a few nuggets of news, you might be better rolling them together and aiming for a bigger story than trickling them out without any making a big splash. A new feature, hire, partner, stat, or study might be too small by itself, but could combine to qualify you for coverage. Oh, and unless a reporter is already working on some cross-industry trend piece or is desperate for quotes for a related piece, your offer of “insights” from or a “deskside” interview with one of your founders will usually receive an instant rejection.
If you don’t have a famous founder (like one with a huge previous exit or household name) the pure formation of your startup probably doesn’t warrant an article. Ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is everything, so until you’ve actually built what you’re promising, you’re only trumpeting intentions, not accomplishments. Meanwhile, you’re eliminating any headstart you have on others considering a play in the same market space. They’ll combine your best ideas with their own secrets to leapfrog you.
Depending on how novel and useful your product is, your initial launch (even in beta) might be the right moment to announce your existence. Product-only launch stories typically that demand a startup exhibit what I call “exponential innovation” that makes them massively better than the alternatives, compared to “linear innovation,” which only slightly improves on what already exists. Linear innovation still produces profitable businesses, but they’re unlikely to be viral and might not sustain the growth that justifies lots of venture capital investment.
Before you have something for people to sign up for, coverage can be premature as you can waste your first shot at converting them. Be sure your infrastructure and team can withstand an initial spike in usage or you could succumb to embarrassing outages or delays. You don’t need to have every feature, bell, and whistle ready, but the flow of your core value add and growth mechanics should be polished.
Fundraises used to be always be news events, though now there’s too many startups scoring too much money too frequently for all rounds to get write-ups. If you’re raising over $10 million, can reveal a valuation in the hundreds of millions or have prestigious or celebrity investors in your round, that will help you secure coverage. The overwhelming number of startups seeking funding coverage means the dollars enough are rarely enough to carry a story unless the financial figures are jaw-dropping. You should expect to need another news hook to anchor these kinds of stories until you’re in the rarefied later stages.
For early-stage companies with prestige or early traction, a combo fundraise and product launch is often the best bet for a story. If they survive long enough to be raising big Series B or later rounds, those might trigger articles. Along the way and in the years in between, you’ll need to deftly stitch together major feature launches, growth milestones, colorful executive interviews and jabs at the tech giants to score coverage. And once you’re massive, you’ll have more sway in dictating the narrative of stories you grant, but meanwhile will find investigative reporters digging into your problems and publishing stories you can’t control.
The most important part of recognizing what’s newsworthy about your startup is empathizing with reporters and audiences. What would they be excited to read and share? What would they be passionate to write and be known for? It’s not about you ego, or what fulfills your key performance indicators. It’s about what informs, entertains and inspires.