Interview: Nimb Startup Co-Founder on International PR 📣

Katya Kermlin has long been working as a PR manager in Russia. She was the author of the famous in Russia Twitter account @KermlinRussia. Later on, she became a co-founder of Nimb, the American startup, which raised almost $300,000 (instead of the needed $50,000) with the help of PR via Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Nowadays Katya lives in the USA and exclusively for FinPR Agency, she answered a couple of application questions on international PR.

— How to pitch news to journalists to get organic publications?

The news should be worthy, interesting. For example, we had one educational project. We managed to find the contacts of 200 cool journalists on the topic and sent them our news. However, the response was insignificant, just because they didn’t see the story interesting.

There is some news that journalists treat with skepticism in advance. For example, among them are cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I know a case when a startup with headquarters in New York and a pretty good investment issued tokens. However, the news about it barely resonated in publications that write about the cryptocurrency market. Because everyone is exhausted, no one understands what will happen to regulation. One day crypto was glorious, but now hard times for it have come.

— You are from Russia, as well as I am. So, a professional question: should a native speaker necessarily read the pitch before sending it to reporters in the U.S. or Europe?

It’s a must. Its the first thing that momentarily turns journalists away from you. If you have some super hot news, they will still write. Besides, it’s OK if, for example, your business owner who is the speaker doesn’t speak English fluently. There is no problem even with interviewing him because everyone will understand him.

However, if you send a letter or a piece of text, it is better to proofread it.

— What if you use the Grammarly service with a fee-based subscription?

I live in the USA for three years and still send the text for proofreading. Imagine that you receive a letter from a stranger and he has to look through some stupid mistakes to understand what is the text about. Now imagine that a person opens a letter from a stranger, it‘s a well-written letter, a correct one. A person will immediately get the point of it, and he will have a different attitude.

— Do you use the newsletter service to send pitches to reporters?

No, I guess that Gmail is enough. Not many people may know, but professional Gmail accounts provide you with the opportunity to see who exactly opened the incoming letter. It’s not necessary to have some outside service to see the opening and reading conversion.

— Nutcall is the most popular contact database of journalists in Russia. Is there a similar analog in Europe or the United States?

I use Meltwater. They have a broad base of journalists, and besides, they monitor media and social networks, which is important to us when every day a report on brand mentions comes. It’s possible to use the services if you have a budget and you want to do everything faster and more effectively.

If your budget is not that big, but you have time and your own hands, then you can create the base yourself. Nowadays, almost all publications contain contacts of journalists. If you visit Bloomberg, WSJ, BuzzFeed, New York Times, you can find the Twitter and email of journalist right on the media site under the author’s page or in the author’s profile. Even if there are no contacts, you can easily find them on Twitter, which journalists love very much, by using the name.

Having worthless news is another kind of problem. This way, people may not respond to you. Finding a contact is not a problem, the biggest challenge is to think up a good pitch so that it will reach up to the journalists’ hearts. ❤️

Interview made by Kir Bezverhi, Founder of FinPR Agency.

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