Review this before you pitch journalists

Startup press is easy. It’s also super easy to trick journalists into writing press for your startup. Here’s how.

First, your pitch. Write ten, maybe fifteen paragraphs about your product. Go in to the granular, inner-workings of your technology. Try to use as many buzzwords as possible like “synergy” and “disrupt”. Especially “disrupt”. Dedicate at least one paragraph of your pitch to esoteric, industry jargon.

Dedicate at least one paragraph of your pitch to esoteric, industry jargon. (click to tweet)

Then, attach several screenshots, a PDF case study, and ideally, an Excel file of last year’s financials.

Now the good part. Mass email. Download a huge list of journalist emails. It can be a random list. Create a mail merge, and send. After an hour or so, I would recommend sending a followup email to “circle back” and “check in”. This has been my proven method for years and it just WORKS.

Ha!

No, seriously. Ha! No one does that right? Wrong. When I first started Startuplister I had ZERO CLUES (none!) about how to talk to journalists, what they liked and didn’t like, little spoon or big spoon, boxers or briefs, Tapatio or Cholulua… the important stuff.

I finally got a clue that my approach wasn’t working when I started to do this novel thing called research. And, after several day and hundreds of tabs, I assembled a massive bullet point list of the Do’s, Don’ts, and “Remembers” of pitching journalists.

So, a few years later and I’ve finally assembled it into one big list so that founders don’t make the same mistakes I made.

The Do’s

1. Remember, public relations is, well… all about the relationships
2. Pitch the right journalist. Do they cover your space? Are they writing for the publication?
3. Be succinct
4. Be helpful
5. Be genuine
6. Be quotable — ” “Include suggested quotes in the material you send them.” — Wayne Gretzky ” — Michael Scott
7. Write an email that you would want to receive.
8. Specify the type of coverage you want (Launch, Funding, New Feature?)
9. Make sure your product is ready & usable. Journalists want to test it out.
10. Get the right time to pitch (Mondays are bad, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday before 10am is better)
11. Give away shit! (discounts only for them, etcetera).
12. Make your subject line read like a recent post the Journalist wrote.
13. Make sure your headline is readable — use this tool to preview an email subject line in an email
14. Make it easy to dive in. Do you have a blog? A video? Twitter profiles. Keep your pitch short, but lead the path for them with links if/when they want to dive deeper
15. Be persistent in your followups, but don’t be overbearing. Use your own reference, have you ever received a followup email that was nice to get? What was special about that email. Incorporate those lessons.
16. Use an active voice.
17. Segment your publisher list (if you’re building a motherhood app, you’d target tech blog for funding and a mom blog for customers/influencers). Both are important, both will have a different pitch
18. Use bullet points
19. Provide context (why now, why this journalist, why does this matter)
20. Get straight to the facts
21. End the email pitch with an action item (let’s chat, what else can I send you?)
22. Tell why this story works for the publication, and then provide 5 bullet points for context.
23. Answer the question: Why today? Why is this important to me (the journalist) today?
24. Followup on your email. Note: this one can be debated. Journalists either hate or don’t mind followups.
25. Build a relationship with the editor (twitter, blog posts, newsletters, absorb everything they do).
26. Step back from your startup, and pitch your story from higher angle. Tie into the competitive/political drama, gossip, insight, evolution/confluence, success, failure. Give it some meat!
27. Do not pitch a product or your startup, pitch a story
28. Give a taste of the future

The Don’ts

1. Don’t use buzzwords like “Disrupt”
2. Don’t use hyperbole
3. Don’t use overly complex tech jargon (unless it’s appropriate)
4. Don’t send an email at an odd hour (Saturday at 4am or during the middle of Game of Thrones).
5. Don’t pitch us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
6. Don’t call the journalist
7. Don’t include attachments
8. Don’t exceed 200 characters
9. Don’t hve typos (jk on the typoe).
10. Don’t be a jerk
11. Don’t lie.
12. Don’t ask to pitch. As Robert Scoble says, “The answer is ALWAYS no. Instead, ask something like “I have an iPad app that is 10x better than Microsoft Office, what do you need to verify that what I’m telling you is true?””
13. Don’t make it obvious that you want press (journalists know that already).
14. Don’t pitch without looking at Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
15. Don’t go past two follow-ups. Three or four is egregious.

The Remember’s

1. Journalists are not a mere throat box for your product
2. The story is about the blogs audience, not about your product.
3. The more you help reporters, the more they’ll help you
4. Pitching is a an act of empathy. What motivates theM?
5. The relationship between a journalist and startups is symbiotic. They need things to write about, you have the thing.
6. Practical information beats buzzwords every time
7. Step back from the keyboard, and remember that you’re the only one that has been immersed in the product for the past 6 months. This is the first time the journalist has ever heard of you. Provide the context for your product, and make it easy to understand.
8. What is already covered, gets covered again and again.

Further reading/quotes:

• Read about the Drafting Technique from Social Triggers
• “With anything you do in life, expect to have a 25% success rate.” — Auren Hoffman, CEO Rapleaf
• “If you need TechCrunch, you’re doing something wrong.” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3932163)
• The Press Release is Dead by Mike Butcher
• Slides: 500+ Editors & Journalists Reveal What They Look For in a Pitch (https://growthhackers.com/slides/500-editors-journalists-reveal/)
• “I narrow-mindedly outlawed the word ‘unique’. Practically every press release contains it. Practically nothing ever is.” — Fred M. Hechinger,

What do you think? Did I miss anything? What have you learned from pitching journalists and getting press?

Learn more about Startuplister and how we help startups connect with journalists.