Startup Founders: Is your product Newsworthy?
If Yes, you are already on track to make it big
When you startup you would not have a PR connection to cover you ground up and bring you and your product the 360* exposure. You are not Google or Apple or Amazon or even a Flipboard for that matter to gain attention with just any news release. No investor is looking for updates about your company to make her funding decision. Web users are not waiting to embrace the new feature you have in place to hack their productivity, within seconds of feature release.
You will feel like shooting in the dark every time you write a blog, prepare a product release note or schedule a tweet or FB post. You never know who will read it or like it and how to get your news viral. The likes of TechCrunch, Mashable, Hacker News, VentureBeat, Gizmodo etc. are busy writing about the brands and ideas that people love to read about and share about. After all they are more concerned about their site visit and read count, end of the day.
Is it end of the road?
Not really!
You just need to keep doing two things to make your product newsworthy:
- Build your audience with engaging conversations
- Continue to differentiate yourself from your comparable-s, through your product and content
The Engagement
You might have an idea that would create another Instagram or Pinterest or Dropbox but no one is going to know your product or read about you unless you are engaging. Sharing your roadmap, vision, in a way that goes with reader’s perception about a problem and its solution, would generate the enough interest in the reader’s mind.
The engagement which happens through exchange of questions and answers — through direct conversations, product positioning, website content, simplicity in on-boarding, user interface, feature workflow, and overall the pleasure she derives by being in touch with your brand would make you NEWSWORTHY.
The Differentiation
Positive differentiation is that one thing which makes every step taken by your user a delightful encounter, which in turn could make your brand go viral. Beyond drafting a “Blue Ocean Strategy” or being a “Purple Cow”, it is imperative to maintain this attitude to differentiate as you design each of your interactions with your end user.
Simply make every piece of information you publish, useful; Make every inch of your product a delight that solves your user’s problem and saves user’s time and money;
Even a company like Amazon approaches its product development in context of its ability to build a great story for customers. They begin new features and ideas by building press releases for their end customers, centered around their problems, in comparison to other existing solutions, and they work backwards to build the idea.
Thus, nothing else is as delightful as a customer centric product, to your audience and if you can make a person happy that way you simply have motivated her to share what she has just found. Now you cannot resist her from talking about you because you have just become NEWSWORTHY.
