From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 8
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- “Before you think about press, one of the things you really want to think about is who you want to reach and what’s your actual goal.”
- “With press, if you just aimlessly want to be covered, it’s not really going to do anything for your startup.”
- “When you start a startup you think that everything you’re doing is interesting, but that’s not true for other people.”
- “What you need to think about objectively is, if I wasn’t the founder of this company, would I want to read a story about what I’m pitching”
- “Your press and news doesn’t have to be very original, it just has to be what I call original enough.”
- “Getting press — think of it like a sales funnel. You’re going to talk to a lot of people and not all of them are going to convert.”
- “You want to get introduced to a reporter or multiple reporters who are going to write about your thing.”
- “It’s much much easier, like any sort of biz dev. to actually get in touch with them through someone rather than cold emailing them.”
- “Set up some sort of meeting. You really want to get the reporter to invest time and effort in you.”
- On reporters — “The more time they spend with you, the more likely they are to actually write something.”
- “What I usually do is write out the story I would want to see published in bullet points. I’ll write out the ideal story and memorize it.”
- On PR Firms — “It’s kind of like everything else at a startup: you want to do it yourself before you hire someone else to do it.”
- “Firms can only help you with the contacts and the logistics, but they can’t help you know what’s interesting about your company.”
- On using PR Firms — “It’s generally not good use of money I would say, especially in the early days.”
- “Getting press is a lot of work, so you should really make sure it’s worth it.”
- “Getting press is like a vanity metric. It feels like you’re being successful.”
- “Sometimes it’s a really good strategy for getting your first 100, 200 or 1000 customers, but its not a scalable user acquisition strategy.”
- “It’s a relationships business. Once someone writes about you, you should really go back to them for writing about you in the future.”
- “I would try and establish good relationships with reporters over time that you can go to, to break news and it will come in handy later…”
- “A pay it forward applies here: you should help your fellow entrepreneurs get coverage.”
Image Credit: DEMO-Mobile-2013-Remote-Controls-0113 — By The DEMO Conference
