Press, explained

If you’re in consumer-tech, you know how crucial public relations (PR) is for your success. As we enter a new year, I took the opportunity and the free time to share my observations throughout my career as an entrepreneur, listing the best methods to draw people’s attention to your start-up:

Tailgating

This method is ideal for small start-ups lacking financial resources for hiring a professional PR firm. The strategy is simple:

1. Pick a fast-growing company with offerings most similar to yours.
2. Modify the product strategy accordingly to position yourself as a competitor.
3. Produce reactionary press releases in response to the news from your competitor.
4. Profit! — because journalists and bloggers will find you relevant to the hot topic du jour, while the heavy lifting of educating — and spoiling — is still on the so-called “competitor.”

The question is, is this a good viable strategy? The short answer is “depends.”

For example, Lyft did certainly take advantage of Uber’s PR blitz in their early days. Although, depending on the market, it may be a failing one too, as proven by the likes of LivingSocial vs. Groupon. All in all, the strategy will give you some market share, and if you’re desperate otherwise, this may be your only option.

At Grou.ps, this was precisely what we did too. We had a “social groupware” product with a rich feature set including a forum, profiles, wiki, messaging, calendar, and more in one box. At a time when I was about to give up due to lack of user engagement after three years of bootstrapping, a Marc Andreessen funded company, Ning, stormed the headlines with its $100MM+ funding. It didn’t take me long to discover our products were actually very similar, and they could be positioned as “competitors” had we have implemented the follow/subscribe model. We added that in just two or three sleepless nights, and boom, we were there — in the game. Then we started sending out press releases presenting ourselves as a do-it-yourself social network similar to Ning. Over the course of the following 18 months, the result was more than 12 coverages by top tech blogs such as TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, Washington Post — all with zero marketing and consequently 8 million monthly actives in 2010!

But beware! The company you are going after should be (a) rightly sized so that you don’t look like Don Quixote fighting the windmills and (b) controversial enough so it attracts the press’ attention. For example, today, a B2B offering going head-to-head against Twilio would unquestionably fail. Needless to say, your product’s quality should be on par with theirs, or you’ll miss repeat coverages — this is crucial for success.

Own Press

Getting press isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Owning the press.

It may sound controversial and unethical, but it’s happening. Bitcoin is a good example with digital channels like CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, and NewsBTC. With such enormous wealth in question, the Bitcoin ecosystem has all the resources to build a media empire. As a matter of fact, I know — firsthand — many domain names bought anonymously from ordinary people, at crazy amounts, just as brand candidates for their upcoming blogs and publications.

Of course, in Bitcoin’s case, these anonymous buyers were not the Bitcoin shareholders — because there’s no such thing — but its wealthy stakeholders, who were no longer able to avoid tax in offshore jurisdictions due to new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) rules and regulations.

But the same applies to any hockey stick growth start-up, indeed. In the 2000s, Danny Sullivan founded Search Engine Land, which eventually became an authority on all things Google; this was followed by many other blogs and personalities like Matt Cutts on SEO (search engine optimization) who later joined Google officially, and the industry veteran John Battelle. Similarly, after the big announcement of the Facebook Platform, several blogs were founded and/or centered around the social media giant, including Pete Cashmore’s Mashable and Nick O’Neill’s Social Times. Last but not least, Apple is notorious for having a bunch of blogs almost dedicated to breaking its next iPhone photo leaks, such as Gizmodo. These may have popped out all organically, but still, for me at least, they count as owning the media.

Please note, owning the media is different from your good old corporate blog — because corporate blogs are not neutral; thus, they’re only interesting to your employees, at best.

Owning the media, on the other hand, gives you a chance to create a systematic method to pump interesting news in a way that it looks genuine, authentic — while giving you a chance to shape the narrative given your influence.

On this note, it is important to stress how vital crowdfunding is, not because it’s a financing avenue only, but also the fact that it’s a growth strategy to create an ecosystem of stakeholders, who may help you build such an empire. But the timing must be right! Can’t be too early (no outsider interest,) or too late (no room for crowdfunding stage equity.)

Buzzword Seeding

Months or a year before Twitter came into existence, there was a constant buzz around new terms like “attention span” and “curation” in the web 2.0 media. Eventually, Twitter came in and replaced all RSS and long-form content products such as blogs. Was it a deliberate, pre-seeded marketing campaign, or merely a product of the day’s needs? I don’t know the answer. But whatever it was, it surely worked in Twitter’s favor, and the former is undoubtedly possible.

Whether it’s decentralized finance (DeFi), initial coin offerings (ICO), or tokens, I see a similar pattern in action today in the blockchain market, particularly with Ethereum. Before Ethereum’s new features (aka BIPs) merge into the mainstream, there is always constant talk around these concepts in crypto circles and on Reddit.

This is yet another costly but effective PR strategy to consider — not so expensive to operate, but it requires smart, dedicated executors.

Scandals

If Paris Hilton can become an overnight celebrity with her leaked bedroom videos, why shouldn’t your start-up do the same with its exposed flaws and scandals, and become an overnight unicorn?

If it sounds far-fetched, just remember the meteoric growth of Twitter; their downtimes and blue whales were all over the press. Who would want to be remembered like that? Definitely not Friendster! But apparently, it worked for Twitter.

So, next time you’re on life support of some sort — getting desperate for your “bridge” financing, having fired all your employees, being sued by a co-founder for sexual harassment — don’t be shy; share it with the media. I know it’s not the easiest thing to do, and you won’t feel comfortable, but it’s better to be up front than to have skeletons in the closet on your way into the eternal abyss of irrelevance.

At one time in 2011, I remember being asked by a reporter about Grou.ps’ running out of cash. We had literally let go of essentially all of our employees. My response to the reporter was more than frank; I told him everything that was going on with the company because I considered him a friend. But then, I asked him not to share it with his audience, and he didn’t. In retrospect, I guess we were both being amateurs. First, I shouldn’t have talked in the first place if I didn’t want it to be shared. He’s press! Second, he shouldn’t have listened to me, and shared it regardless, because it was his job to do so (since the consequences for me wouldn’t be mortal!). Last but not least, he did end up gossiping about it with everyone else in the ecosystem in his private meetings, which ruined our reputation without the benefit of PR!

Ecosystem

Create an ecosystem and you won’t have to sell your product; others will. For example:

Ethereum is not going to the press, but their copycats and the companies built around them do.

Facebook was not going to the press, but the social applications created on the now-dead Facebook Platform did.

In each case, it was the ecosystem creator benefiting indirectly from the PR requests.

This actually brings me back to my initial point of tailgating, because ecosystem participants are, as a matter of fact, tailgating too. It’s called a symbiotic relationship.

Book

If you have a story to tell, do tell.

The 4-Hour Workweek is a best-selling book authored by Tim Ferris. In a nutshell, the book is a step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the shackles of a corporate job, create a business to fund the lifestyle of your dreams, and live life like a millionaire, without actually having to be one.

Tim happens to be an investor/advisor to many outsourcing companies including TaskRabbit and Elance. The merger of Elance and oDesk gave birth to Upwork, which is, today, a successful public company listed on NASDAQ.

Similarly, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, partners of the productivity software company Basecamp, are known for their books: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Rework, Remote: Office Not Required which all collectively contribute to the success of their company.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is another well-known figure and best-selling author. With his books tailored to the C-suite executives, he not only inspires many, but also elicits awe and hooks people emotionally to use his company’s CRM software rather a competitor’s in a commodity market.

At the end of the day, the PR comes down to: (in the weighted order)

1. Persistence
2. Great connections (network!)
3. Great product

Persistence is at the top of the list because great connections come from persistence. At Grou.ps, I would attend all the events you can think of, talk to the authors, and blog as much as I could. This curiosity and persistence of mine led to great connections.

Second is connections, because writers do tend to cover only the people they know, and for a good reason. Especially in the start-up world — no one wants to cover a start-up that’s going to disappear in months. Consider a writer’s coverage of your start-up as their seal of approval, or their green lighting of your Series A. Thus, the only way to earn it is by earning their trust.

Third, great product — of course! Today, it’s a super crowded market, and you gotta stand out of the noise — differentiate. And that can be achieved only by way of great design as well user experience (UX). Thankfully, with tools like Sketch, Principle, Adobe XD, Drama, Figma, and Framer, you can craft great experiences from day one, and put them to the test before coding.

Happy 2020, everyone! If you can think of any other methods, please share them in the comments.

Thanks Cem Sertoglu, Richard MacManus, Firat Demirel, Chris Messina for reading drafts of this post.

The original was published at https://www.emresokullu.com/#Press,_explained-5e37955583ebcb14b05bff8547f82df2-GJS