Notes: How to Hack PR for Your Startup

Just attended a free webinar (replay) from Founder Institute: “How to Hack PR for Your Startup”. Here are some of their (Adeo Ressi (FI) and Conrad Egusa (Publicize.co)) main takeaways:

• Make sure you have a great design, no-one needs to tell you that
• FAMOUS
  1. Formulate the announcement: Make sure you’ve got news when you approach TechCrunch etc;
  2. Amplify your dreams; Let’s go to Mars!
  3. Messaging: the press release; make sure to make it as easy as possible: $20 /article; E-mail pitch (sell), press release is the make it easy to write. Make sure you use social proof, interesting stuff that adds to an interesting tool. Link your LinkedIn, Twitter etc. “Hi I’m Maarten (LinedIn, @murb”.
     1. Make sure you follow up, but don’t spam
     2. Don’t sell!
     3. Own: Make it your own
  4. Outreach. Create exclusives; embargo, don’t publish it before that date. The bigger the news; embargo;
  5. Unrelenting: write journalists individually. if you’re going for an exclusive, do 2 journalists from the same journal (not too bad for the image
  6. Strategize. Make announcements every 8-12 weeks. Optimize for PR.
• TechCrunch/VentureBeat is global, for local/niche basically same process.
• Email the most time sensitive organization first, local media the least time sensitive.
• Thought leadership: to fill the void. But you could write as if you’re writing about … “3 things I’ve learned starting up this company”. Healthcare Networking Technology: “Where is this industry heading to”; “What regulations are new and how does it relate to “. Technical Recruiting Company: “¾ we look for in a technical recruit”, “Getting a job in technology is harder than ever”. Make it original. Don’t push your own name.

It was an interesting talk filled with good advice, I will try and follow up on them. Sure more advice is to be found at Founder Institute. Definitely good hints for improving our PR work at HeerlijkZoeken (a Dutch search engine for cook books & blogs).