Much ado about PR (Pt. 1)

There is an established pattern for African startups that break out of the valley of death:

Start company > Establish demand > Raise $1m+ (usually with some validation from international accelerators) > Announce to the world via TechCrunch or Forbes that you exist and that the work you are doing matters.

This has created two extreme positions; the people who see press coverage as the ultimate validation (forget the customers), and the people who hide from it, in fear that engaging with the public means you’re really not doing the work. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in between.

In the coming weeks, we will ask and answer many questions about PR: how to think about it, when (not) to think about it, how to pick the right reporters, how to get them interested in your story, etc.

But first, we think it’s important to introduce a framework that shows how journalists decide what to cover. It’s a simple formula:

Interestingness = Who? x What? x So, what?

“Who?” here is obviously you, the startup founder. “What?” is whatever you are building. “So, what?” is the broader context or any additional information that makes it important. For any startup, the value of each variable will be different. But all that matters is the total score once all factors are multiplied. For example:

1. Logistics or on-demand delivery startups in Nigeria [What?] may not be interesting on their own to a reporter. The space is crowded, and there is little differentiation between each player. But if Jason Njoku, founder of Iroko [Who?] left his company to start one today, that would automatically make it noteworthy.

2. Kangpe/RelianceHMO, a VP portfolio company, offers a brilliant solution to a problem felt by the 97% of Nigerians [link] who don’t have access to health insurance [What?; So, what?]. That guarantees coverage for anybody credible who offers cheap cover to consumers.

3. A business reporter may just not find cryptocurrencies interesting [What?], and the founder of an African crypto-exchange [Who?] may not have enough clout to guarantee coverage …until they show them this graph [So, what?]:

Understanding this process allows founders and even investors to position their companies in the best-possible light, and increase the chances that a respected reporter will tell their story. But what is this story, and how does one come up with it?

Next week, we will take a step back and talk about when press/PR is valuable, when it’s not, and how to approach it. Watch this space and share this newsletter, if you found this useful. ^_^

Links from the Internets

• Nigeria’s telco/ISP industry in charts and tweets. [Link]
• Conservation of Invent: The hidden reason why A/B tests aren’t as effective as they look [Link]
• Asch’s Conformity Experiment — CEOs and Investors might want to pay attention to this one [Link]
• A History of Currency in Kenya, as told by the Central Bank [Link]

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