RFP: Request for Press
The process for getting press is broken.
I created Noon Pacific in late 2012 and have ran it as a side-project for over 2 years. It has received numerous press mentions, with 99% of them coming from people who loved the service and wanted to share it with the world, not via cold emails to writers who I had no relationship with.
When it came time to launch our new version of the mobile app two weeks ago, it came time for me to follow the typical startup routine (for those who don’t have PR firms): create a spreadsheet of everyone who wrote article about similar services, either use a paid tool or manually scrape the author’s email and other relevant information, then badger the author with emails/tweets/etc with hopes they respond and like what I have to offer.
We were featured in Lifehacker (thanks to a longtime relationship with the author), Gizmodo UK (as one of the top apps of the week), and numerous smaller publications internationally — but we still didn’t feel like the people in the industry took notice or were aware of the new version. As an app that already had 50,000 downloads in it’s first week of becoming free (previously $1.99) and 57 of the 59 reviews were 5-stars in the App Store, we struggled to find people to write about it.
Now this isn’t a complaint for why we didn’t get more press, or why more writer’s didn’t take notice or respond to our emails — maybe a new release of Noon Pacific is not newsworthy or we didn’t tell a compelling enough story, but what I do know is that the process is broken and it should be fixed.
Newsworthy articles these days seem to only contain pre-release hype and funding announcements for a company that will probably fail in the next year. Why aren’t companies/apps that are top in the app store for the best design and user experience getting talked about?
I’m imagining a centralized platform (along the lines of Angellist talent) for the writers, publications, and companies to join — where social traction, quality of pitches, previous mentions, and other relevant factors all come together. Writers can accept or deny pitches and let founders move on to the next writer without holding their breath for a returned email. Let’s stop spamming writer’s inboxes and using outdated spreadsheet once and for all.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this process could be improved.
P.S. We’d love any feedback on the new version of the app!
