dmitrydragilev

There is this hilarious video by Vooza making fun of startups wanting to get funding and be featured on TechCrunch, in it they they say mocklingly "Just look at the success rate of startups being featured on Techcrunch!": http://vooza.com/videos/funding/ I thought to myself, what is the fail rate of Techcrunch featured startups?

Found this newsletter not too long ago, tried it out, some actionable stuff in these short emails, wanted to share.

I'll be honest, I've never done this before...I've never really talked about my failures. I recently noticed that everyone writes about successes which I personally have done a bunch of, I've written articles such as "How I grew a startup from 0 to 40M and got it acquired by Google", etc, tons of these, not going to talk about them.

All these articles suck! I think by talking about successes entrepreneurs paint an inaccurate picture that gives other entrepreneurs a false hope that they can also get lucky and become successful without too many setbacks. This is 100% not true.

So I sat down and wrote down a personal account of the biggest failures, setbacks, struggles which actually happened to me and my friends during my 10 years of growth hacking. To give you an idea I talk about:

Getting the product market fit wrong and almost losing an entire app then taking a year to turn it around to 40M pageviews and getting acquired by Google Running out of money because of outsourcing and losing $1M and firing 100 employees and then having to turn the company around. *Focusing on traffic vs. conversion which cost me a fortune

Not lying. Formulating a highly tailored email to the reporter's interests and getting up to date verifiable contact information for every reporter who wrote about "Paleo" will take you MUCH more time and effort if you do it on your own vs clicking a button and using a tool for it. We made this tool because I myself do this every day. It's doable, but it will take more time.

Sure. The idea is that you will reach out to them about similar articles to your topic but not exactly about you, you will spark their interest. They might not write about you right away but you will develop a relationship with them.

You will be creating connections of reporters instead of your PR firm, and you will maintain those connections.

Shoot us a note through contact link, be happy to explain more.

We help you construct your email pitch and give you the contact information to reach out to the reporters. We make sure your pitch is a very relevant fit to the reporter's interests.

the way we work is very different, but the end result is the same. We focus on relevant timely trending stories reporters are writing on the topic you might have interesting facts about. We help you connect with these reporters over the timely article they wrote. We also help you think though your pitch and give you the contact information to reach out. We make sure it's a very relevant fit for both your pitch and the reporter's interests.

I'm not familiar with PressFriendly, but it looks like they look through entire archives of what reporters have written and curate lists of reporters based on their past articles and their fit with your topic. Again, I'm not 100% sure.

Two different approaches, both helping people with the same issue. I think it's great to see companies such as PressFriendly around. There should be more of them around, this is a painful problem for companies and PR Firms is a bad solution.

hit the contact link, shoot me a note, would love to hear your feedback.

i know, you scared? wakes you up a little doesn't it? :)

we sure do. ping us through contact form with deets, will send beer!

Would love to hear any feedback you have.

Can you try again?

Always open for suggestions and feedback. Hit the contact email link. Curious to hear your feedback.

It takes much more effort and time if you do it on your own, but agree it's doable in theory. In practice, takes too much time vs. JRO. Our service helps people find relevant reporters, tailor their pitches and make sure they are truly relevant, and then it gives you the contact information for the reporters.

We want to make sure you are reaching out to highly relevant reporters with tailored pitches.

Weird, which browser are you on? Just ping at hi@justreachout.io if contact form is giving you trouble for some reason.

sorry for the delays, lots of traffic coming in, ping us, we'll send you beer: hi@justreachout.io

If contact form is not working for you, try: hi@justreachout.io

Sounds like you're not signed up, so you'll never see reporter's email address. Once you properly register and sign up you'll see their email address.

But good suggestion, will give that a try.

will send you beer. Ping us: hi@justreachout.io

We are having some issues, overwhelmed with traffic at the moment. Shoot us an email through contact form? Will notify you when we're back up and send you a beer.

We are looking for the best most relevant articles from the last 24 hours, so most timely and most relevant on the given topic. Agree with you that beefing up a search would be nice, working on that now. This is a private beta limited to 10 people. Will make it better before we let more in.

Hmm, that's odd. We are using a lot of APIs. Tell me what is taking a long time specifically?

we are not selling emails here, we are trying to have you reach out with very tailored highly relevant emails to relevant reporters, Think quiality vs quantity. Its free for 14 days, so give it a try, nothing to loose.

try it and you'll see. its free for 14 days. i can answer questions you have, done this for 7 years.

Mturk is great, but takes too long..

So we want you to fill in answers to all those questions, it's crucial for us to help you formulate a good looking email pitch. That is why we don't want you to go on. Will work on a better solution for this so it's not that annoying.

Got ya... will make that look more elegant. Going to make changes now. For now type in something in there and hit next if you'd like to see what's next...

Crap, never seen it take that long. Really 60 sec? You have good internet connection?

Where are you at? Send a note through contact form. Will do my best to send a beer your way.

Really appreciate you taking the time to leave detailed feedback. I read your post, actually emailed you about it, really liked your approach. Let me try to address your concerns:

1. Your concern that the questions do not produce a short enough pitch: We try to ask as many questions as we can to help people think through why they are reaching out to this reporter and what specifically about this reporter makes them interested/relevant to what is being pitched. The final draft is not set in stone, people can edit that draft and change it any way they'd like.

2. Pricing - all plans come with a 14 day free trial. So anybody can try this for 14 days and see if it's valuable enough for them to keep using. Would love to have you and other just try for free and see. If pricing is really too steep, we can think about making this change.

3. You got 10 results - so we are trying to do only very recent articles, we are not looking at old articles since in some cases the reporter is not interested in topics they wrote about a year ago.

4. Email address - we have a LOT of work we have put into the app to make sure we get you the email address. We are shooting to do this for 100% of reporters. That said - we are in private beta, limiting to just 10 people right now and testing to make sure this is the case.

Shoot us a note through contact page, would love to chat further.

That is exactly what we are trying to avoid. We do not want you to spam 1000 reporters at once with a generic email. We want you to formulate very highly tailored emails to very relevant reporters. That is why we are look at articles from just last 24 hours. We are still improving the news search results.

Again - 14 day free trial with all the plans, and we just launched private beta, so not much to loose here.

No gurantee of reply. You do all the reaching yourself. We help you find a relevant story, relevant reporter, create tailored pitch, and then we give you the email address.