Yet another startup PR story

I’ve always been a huge fan of detailed, pages-long articles about a specific startup experience. Especially those concerning “getting your first users” (like Front’s) and “getting media visibility” (like Crayon’s). Both matters concern my job, and also in both cases, they are seriously tricky.

There are a sh*t load of “theory” articles that tell you “how to do it” or “10 things to avoid when”. Although (some of) these articles are useful, I find nothing is more helpful than someone who tells you, in full details, about his own experience.

As I work in a startup studio, I do PR for several startups (sometimes at the same time) — I insist on the verb “do” because I don’t “help” or “advise”. A startup studio is not an investor nor an accelerator, we are co-founders of our startups; as a consequence, I never act as a “PR agency” person.

I’ve recently handled two PR blasts announcing fundraisings, from which I gathered some experience I found worth sharing.

In this (very long) article you’ll find: our PR thinking process, emails we wrote, press material we wrote, tools we used, results and lessons learned.

Why we did PR

Weighing the pros and cons beforehand

eFounders is a startup studio specialized in SaaS. Aircall is a cloud phone system. B2B products tend to be less of a “press darling” than B2C products or services. I knew for a fact that I would struggle a lot to get attention from medias aiming the general public, and a little less to get attention from tech / B2B medias. Which is actually a good thing, because I want to reach out to this specific audience!

Both Aircall & eFounders needed:

• better recruitments: being featured in the press, especially quality press, is supposed to increase your pipe of talents but will also help convincing high profiles to join
• investors’ attention: Term sheets are not all you need — 1. Investors are hunting you too and 2. it’s basic psychology: people are impressed by the press

Aircall particularly needed:

• trust: leads tend to be more keen to try out a product when it’s mentioned in their website that they’ve been covered by Techcrunch.
• signups: I’m pretty sure that user acquisition can’t be driven by traditional press coverage. Although Slack proved it’s a very important channel. But it’s always good to get some new users, right?

eFounders particularly needed:

• evangelization: the “startup studio” model is fairly recent and unknown. PR was a part of our “thought leadership” strategy.

… all that in France, Belgium and the US.

People say “It’s easy to get press attention when you announce a fundraising”. So, when I learned we raised funds, in both cases, it seemed that getting covered by the press was a good idea to achieve the goals aforementioned.

First, it’s a lie. It’s not “easy”. Saying ‘hey we’ve just got a million bucks’ is not a story, it doesn’t say anything about your company’s potential, results, vision etc. Medias won’t cover you automatically because you raised money.

I was also skeptical for several reasons: once an info is out, you don’t have any control over how it’s going to perceived by the ecosystem. As I am extra cautious when communicating (some say I’m paranoid) I was afraid that:

• Aircall’s round was too small: they “only” raised 800k, which could be perceived as not capable of fighting against its giant competitors (Talkdesk had announced a $15M fundraising a few weeks before).
• Aircall’s product wasn’t ready to handle a huge flow of new users. There were many audio bugs that were actually the reason that hold us back to “launch” for so long.
• eFounders did not follow the “traditional path” of fundraisings — being “seed round, then series A, B, C etc.” It was self-financed for 4 years and then raised a medium-size round of $6 million with a unique business angel. I was expecting a tornado of questions.
• eFounders got a “bad press” on a blog the year before, mainly pointing at the fact that employee turnover was high. I was afraid journalists would bring that up again.

We only decided to go on with the blasts because they were part of a long-term PR strategy.

In order to communicate on a new feature or an important milestone, you need to have communicated on your launch before. Pure logic. Our #1 priority was to build long-term relationships with journalists, not just getting featured.

It has impacted our timing, our messages, the way we reached out to people (more on that below).

Beware, though, with great power comes great responsibility. If you get press coverage once, then you’re on journalists’ radar. If you forget about them or get overwhelmed with tasks, they will notice only that your company has nothing to announce (synonym to: is in bad shape.)

Straight to the results:

Here’s the peak in traffic on eFounders’ website we got (spotted, my Google Analytics is in French)

We also got a few hundred signups for our products in beta (often mentioned and linked in the articles): illustrio and Hivy.

The graph below shows the progression of candidates flow — from eFounders’ Workable:

That’s the peak in Aircall’s traffic:

Weighing the pros and cons afterward

Here is how much time and energy all that took me:

• Aircall’s fundraising (writing, preparing the campaign, contacting everyone, follow up)

≈ 8 days

• eFounders’s fundraising

≈ 8 days in total (writing, preparing the campaign, contacting everyone, follow up)

In both cases, finding the angle and writing the press material was very time-consuming. Once you have the right tools and a good database of contacts, the rest takes less time, you just need to be thorough.

It’s hard to calculate an actual ROI. 16 days of work is a long time, but on the long-term, it was definitely worth it.

6 months, 2 startup PR blasts, 3 steps

1. We announced Aircall’s fundraising on June 2nd, 2015
2. We announced eFounders’ fundraising on June 23rd, 2015
3. … Oh, but we started contacting journalists 4 months before!

[A little bit about myself: I used to be a journalist. I briefly worked for a tech blog and even though I only stayed there a few months, I used to receive tons and tons of press releases. And I didn’t read ⅔ of them. I know technically it was my job to do so, but it’s just not happening. So, if you needed me to write an article on your news (under embargo until like 2 min later) — you’d better be my friend.

Now that I went through the looking glass, I’m trying to be friends with journalists. That’s all that matters.]

First step: reaching out to journalists about a new concept

We contacted around 20 journalists (in France & Belgium because eFounders is a Belgian company located in Paris — and the US) telling them about our model and how it’s a growing trend. To support that it was worth taking a look, we joined a database of all startup studios in the world.

COPY:

Here is the email we mainly used:

and we also tried this one, which pretty much didn’t work:

No press release, just email / phone conversations.

3 important lessons here:

• the co-founder ALWAYS sends the email. Technically, I wrote them and I sent them using my boss’ email inbox. If you don’t have the pleasure to have a “PR-ghost writer” like me, you need to do it yourself. I, as the PR Manager, got in touch with them eventually, to answer questions and thank them for articles.

❤ Polanski

• brag before. Thibaud has sold a company before, it has nothing to do with the rest of the email, but the response rate was much higher when mentioned first.
• write figures in your email: most journalists in the tech / business industry are truly data-driven. Figures might catch their attention.

TOOL:

Since we were only reaching out to 20 people, a simple Excel sheet was sufficient. The real pain in the *** was all the copy-pasting, and the fact that I had to add my boss’ Gmail account as a sender and wasn’t able to track responses in real time (he would forward me the emails). So we built something to make that easy :) (see step 3)

SPOTTING JOURNALISTS:

Here is how I spotted journalists:

• Friends:

OK, I’m actually not friends with tons of journalists — like I imagine good PR people are. I only have a few people I ran into at tech conferences. But it’s still something.

When it’s friends, email subject can be something like “I have a news for you!”

my dream

• Friends of friends

Inside a startup studio, there are a lot of people who know a lot of people. I just sucked up all the “ecosystem juice” I could. Intros everywhere!

When it’s friends, email subject can be something like “contact Name-of-your-introductor — news announcement”

• Spot who wrote on other startup studios:

There’s a great tool to search webpages called Google. I used that. I also typed the same keywords in Twitter. If you want to be super fast in finding the email addresses, you can use Email Hunter’s Chrome extension.

When it’s someone you don’t know, email subject can be something like “news pitch — announcement-in-4-words”

• Spot journalists from a specific media on Twitter

If you don’t know anyone at a specific media you don’t want to miss out on, focus on Twitter. Reaching out on Twitter really does work.

(Thibaud wrote the tweet himself. Come on, I’m no ghost-twitter!)

RESULTS

Although we genuinely only expected to get the conversation going with journalists, it still got us covered in Tech.eu, Les Echos (one of the main business medias in France) and Le Journal du Net & Maddyness.

A great deal of them answered what seemed to be the holy grail:

“Please let me know if you have any news in the future”

Second step: announcing Aircall’s fundraising

When you’re announcing a small fundraising, it better be a good story. Like, you did it while bringing up a baby whale family or surviving a volcano eruption. Or that you actually already earn millions in revenue. Nothing like that happened to Aircall. They just struggled, like 99% of startups.

We focused on the announcement of a launch + fundraising after a fairly large beta (11 months, beta users in 25 countries) and the potential of the market. We also implied that the product was working perfectly, hence the launch, which was a sugar-coated version of the truth (but who hasn’t faced a bug on Skype? Web RTC is just hard).

COPY

Once again, there was a lot of copy-pasting… and between journalists contacted by me, eFounders, Aircall’s CEO Olivier directly, it was pretty hard to keep track.

We wrote a press release & also a longer press “kit” (8 pages), because a press release doesn’t say much about the startup’s team, vision, facts and figures etc.

You can read the press kit here.

You can find the press release here at the very end of the press kit

I have no idea if any journalists actually read it :)

You might be contacting journalists who are specialized in telecom or startups or business. I made sure to be clear enough so that non-startup-experts would understand and detailed enough so that even if journalists couldn’t find time to run an interview, they had all they need in the press kit:

SPOTTING JOURNALISTS:

• Journalists who replied to our first campaign, back in March — they were mainly tech/business to, they fell into our scope. I reached out to them directly because I had a personal relationship with them thanks to the previous campaign.
• Journalists who wrote about competitors
• Journalists who wrote about startups and the telecom industry

(same tactics as in press campaign #1)

2 lessons learned there:

• Embargos are still a thing. Journalists do respect them, and it is important, when you launch a product, that all the attention is concentrated in a few hours (we also pushed Aircall on Product Hunt that same day — pretty big deal). Some journalists like to know stuff 2 weeks in advance, some only write their pieces the day before. I guess a safe bet is to get in touch around 10 days before, organize some interviews, and remind everyone the previous day.
• This time, I tried sending “bulk emails” without really making the effort to personalize them nor making sure I targeted the journalists well — in addition to all the personalized emails. This is pure useless. Don’t send bulk emails. Just don’t. 0% response rate.

TOOL

Airtable

Because the amount of journalists we needed to contact was higher, and I started to think that a basic Excel sheet was not a very long-term tool to keep track of all contacts and PR campaigns, I tried Airtable.

It’s basically an improved, more visual version of Excel.

Pr.co

I didn’t search for long but it seems to me it’s the only tool where you can:

• upload a PDF version of a press kit
• AND display an online version of your press release.
• You can also set an embargo date and make your press release “secret” so that it’s only for the eyes of the journalists you selected
• all that in several languages

There are other features which I didn’t use.

RESULTS

Besides being actually featured in 10 major medias and blogs (including TechCrunch, Frenchweb, Journal du Net… both articles and video), the whole team was psyched, and the other launch-actions (Product Hunt, email blasts etc) were a success.

Now they’ve joined the amazing 500 startups accelerator and they show a 10% weekly growth. I’m not saying it’s because of the PR blast: it’s because they have an amazing product and the team is working its *ss off. But I like to think I brought my little stone to the edifice :)

my dream #2

3rd Step: announcing eFounders’ round of funding

Only a few days after I finished surviving my Aircall-celebration hangover, I had to go back to work and start eFounders’ announcement. I had already done an important part of the job: building relationships with journalists.

COPY

As I said before, I had some trouble wrapping my head around this news. 6 millions is a “medium sized” round of funding for a startup studio. And it is pretty original to have a single participant: Oleg — who happens to be Thibaud’s former partner at Fotolia.

I had very long talks with my bosses on why we raised this amount, why with him, why now, why, oh why. And then I figured: if I’m asking myself that, journalists will probably do so. Therefore, I just needed to tell them: we focused the announcement on what we’re going to achieve with this fundraising.

Here is our press release

and a longer “press kit” with more info on our vision, team, facts & figures.

Here are some details on how we’ve built the press release:

And here is the email we sent out. Such a pleasure to start them with “Hey, we’ve been in touch!”.

Full disclosure: we didn’t get covered by The Next Web, I’ve done too much email digging and screenshotting for this article already, it’s the first I could find :)

TOOLS

ContactY

Because we like to build tools every time we stumble upon a pain point, our team built a tool to manage shared contacts. It’s an internal tool (for now) that we call ContactY. Thanks to ContactY, I basically did very little copy-pastes.

I was able to :

• import all journalists contacts I / my teammates had
• qualify each of them with cute little stars
• create a campaign
• create email templates
• prepare emails for me and Thibaud
• let Thibaud personalise each email easily and send them in a click
• send everything out and check who replied / ignored the email

If you want the same for your own PR-ghost emailing tasks, I might be able to help out, shoot me an email: rachel@efounders.co

We didn’t use pr.co again because Dropbox files were enough — I also wanted to build our own press page (which never happened, but I’m working on it!)

Mention

In order to track results, I used Mention (one of eFounders’ products!) to:

• never miss an article
• see which articles were the most retweeted,
• thank people for doing so and
• answer the questions that might occur
• enjoy seeing the feed filling up :)

RESULTS

Although we focused the announcement on “what we’re gonna achieve with the fundraising”, some journalists rather opted for a “what is a startup studio” approach. No problem here, it’s absolutely in accordance with our need for evangelization.

We contacted 31 journalists, among whom 26 were “medium/hot” leads and got 15 publications covering us in 5 different countries (France, Belgium, the US, Israel and Turkey). There are 5 remaining with whom we’re going to work on stories after the summer.

Last but not least, I pinned all eFounders’ articles on our offices’ wall. That’s good for cheering up the whole team (+ my bosses think I’m actually doing work).

(the box in the corner is because we’ve moved out. So, yea, I had to un-pin the whole thing. Fun times.)

Very important lesson learned there

When you work at the core of an ecosystem like a startup studio, everything you do is interconnected. It is because we overviewed all PR campaigns as a whole, and thought of each of them as part of a global path toward success, that we made it. And it’s only the beginning :)

Bonus step: Textmaster announcing another round of funding the same week

Textmaster is the first company eFounders co-founded. It is now fully independent and managed its PR blast all by itself, with its usual PR person.

So, I have nothing to do with their well-managed PR campaign, but it was pretty cool to get another (!) cool announcement from our “galaxy” in the news. We could have better managed the timing: they announced it only 2 days later because they wouldn’t risk a leak and wouldn’t risk falling into the summer-of-despair (seriously, are all journalists on vacation for 2 months? I sure wasn’t! Must have missed something there).

Important lesson learned:

One journalist I contacted for eFounders was pissed because I didn’t warn her about Textmaster. She read about it in Techcrunch. It was my responsibility to make sure all “my” contacts received the info they were supposed to. Now I’ll know: it’s not because a PR campaign is “closed” that you shouldn’t follow up with journalists.

I hope it was useful. I know this PR story is pretty specific because of the startup studio model. But I’m sure there are lessons to learn for everybody.

WOW — you read it this far? I’m impressed.

Now you can jump in and write: what do you think of my approach to PR? What would you have done differently? What should I improve? How about your own experience?

(Yes I like to get free PR advice).

Useful resources:

• An extended article by Sujan Patel (you ought to know who he is!) about “receiving 3,751 PR pitches” -> I’d— humbly- like to see this article as the “other side of the mirror” from my post.
• Mentioned in the intro, this very detailed post by Crayon’s team: it’s about their launch, so the angle of the strategy is actually different from announcing a fundraising. Really good stuff.
• I never mention Newsjacking in this article, but it’s a very smart way to do PR. To learn more, watch these slides by @clementdelangue