Task: Media/Celebrity Coverage

Action

Submit your startup to relevant blogs to get them to cover your story.

This is a difficult stunt to pull off. Usually these top blogs won't want to cover you unless if you are super super novel (which is very seldom nowadays), if you are funded, or if you already have traction. Therefore, don't feel bad if you submit a bunch but didn't get any response back.

Also, remember that if you are put under the spot light before you have a great product, people will come try out your product, leave, and spread negative feedback on it. Therefore, it's important to hold out on mass coverage until you are 100% sure your product delivers exactly as promised.

Tips:

1. Pitch 1 feature at a time. This feature needs to be the main feature that is the game changer.

Bad example: We've build a step-by-step startup guide with a community to get people to answer your questions. It also has a guide collaboration feature to allow users to contribute to the guides.

Good example: We've created a virtual incubator to help startups build, grow, and get funded.

 

2. Tell a good story. Tell them why people need this.

Example: (mention the problem first) I have a lot of friends who are working dead end jobs, or have just got out of college who want to do something. We scripted up a guide and had them test it. (mention benefit) Most of our friends had their MVPs build, and had gotten at least 300 users in the first few weeks after launching!

 

3. Find bloggers that have written about your competitors or topic. Since they already wrote something about that same segment, it's much likely that they will cover your story as a follow up.

 

However, before you go out pitching to people, you will need to know how to find the editors' emails. To find out how to find anyone's email, install rapportive.

Good examples of cold emails: Two cold emailed Techcrunch pitches that worked


Also, it doesn't have to be medias. If you can get celebrities in your field to write or mention you, that would give you an explosive growth as well.

Good Email Example:

Hi John,

I am Edward, and I have been following your articles for a few years now. I am shooting you an email today to tell you about my startup, StartitUp.co, to see if you'd find this a fit for a story.

Quick background: StartitUp is a step-by-step startup guide with action items to help entrepreneurs take their startups from idea, to MVP, to traction, and to funding. We wanted to build this platform because this is something that we need. My team and I have been building startups, not only did it take us a few failures to fully learn what we should do and what we shouldn't do, and the most frustrating thing for us is having to keep up with all the latest tricks to build and grow our startup. Startup knowledge is always getting outdated, and we think a constantly updated startup guide would be a pretty awesome tool for entrepreneurs. 

So far we've been covered here xxx.com, xxxx.com, and xxxxx.com. We have about 4000 active users as of today. I've always wanted to see our story covered on johnsblog.com because I think your story on competitorwebsite.com was quite insightful and interesting.

I know you are busy, but please let me know if you'd be interested.


Thanks,

Ed