How to get noticed by press
For an early stage startup, it is very important to be recognized by the press. Word of mouth is a neat way of spreading but it works well only after you have reached a critical mass. In a country like India, people trust newspapers and magazines a lot. Once you are on a newspaper, your brand’s credibility goes up. In case of Muziboo we have seen that everytime we are on newspaper, we get a lot of new signups and our traffic generally goes up. We have been covered by Economic Times, Times of India, Mid-Day, Bangalore Mirror amogst few others outside Bangalore.
Last few months, I have talked to a lot of journalists and I thought of writing about how you can try to get noticed by the them. The sad reality is that it is not possible to get noticed by them. If you approach them, they would certainly not write about you. Also if you are a self funded company, the chances of getting on a national daily drops significantly. In general anything that a funded company does (right from closing the first round of funding) is news and everything you do is at best a cheap publicity stunt. Therefore writing to someone is by definition a bad idea. Don’t do it. Its not worth the time and the disappointment.
Now one way to get noticed by the press is to get noticed by a lot of other people. People who are in the game (other startup founders, people higher up in the career path) who would probably know the press. Most of our press mentions have come from such relationships. Our users (yeah!) and friends happened to talk about us to some reporter and they covered us. More often than not, a very big newspaper would not cover you exclusively but thats ok. You would get there (so would we some day)
Now since most of your friends would not really know the press, you need to make sure you attend Open Coffee Club meetings, Barcamps and any other meetup that you can and talk about your startup to every guy you can. Yes .. every guy you can because you don’t know how the universe will conspire to get you a press mention.
Now that you know whom to talk to and where to find these people, it also helps to be prepared with a story. A story thats romantic, believable and easy to communicate. I think you should have a 30 sec pitch (one line about what you do and why you do it) and a 2 min pitch (why its insanely great). I am not telling you to make things up, but if you are not prepared, you will not be able to make the best use of your time. I remember talking to some 100+ people in Barcamp 5 and it was fun. It really helped me refine my pitch.
If you can call what I wrote above techniques, then they have worked very well for us. Like everything else about a startup, its important to be persistent at it. In general, you cannot build contacts when you need them.
Best of luck getting press’d :)
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Comments
Links for the NCR crowd:
OCC: http://occnoida.wordpress.com
BarCamp: http://www.barcampdelhi.com
cheers
nilesh
Interesting post Prateek. You very rightly made it come to the whole game of networking with others. After all, human beings are supposed to be social animals ;)
Cheers
Vaibhav