How to Get Press Coverage For Your Startup
So you’ve raised some cash to change the world and you want to get everyone excited about your big idea. Here’s how you do it.
This is a repost from an old article I wrote. Think of this as the Taylor’s Version while I reclaim my IP from Medium. So read this and imagine it’s 2022…
Congratulations, you’ve raised some cash to change the world. And now you want to use this story to get everyone excited about your big idea. Here’s how you do it.
I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while now, and it was only thanks to a post I saw from Graham Paterson, who has a knack for writing incredibly useful stuff on the internet, that jogged my memory. Graham’s post is a really nice overview, so I’ll try and be more specific. If I were you, I’d just go ahead and read both. Cover your bases.
If you haven’t, read my post about launching a fintech startup before you read this. It’ll give you more context around how press fits within a marketing strategy and help you understand if you’re even ready for press coverage, and what kind of coverage you need.
How we secured 50+ pieces of coverage for our seed fundraise
Yonder is a premium rewards credit card for Londoners that launched earlier this year.
We announced our seed fundraise back in March and were blown away by the response. We received a crazy amount of coverage delivering the exact message we wanted to land to our ideal target audience.
Here are some highlights:
An exclusive interview and article with Sifted
Coverage in TechCrunch, BusinessInsider, CityAm, AltFi
~50 pieces of syndicated coverage
1000+ qualified waitlist sign-ups in just a few days
Heaps (sorry, that’ll have to do) of backlinks
I’m not some press oracle and I didn’t have any pre-existing relationships with any tech media. But with a bit of common sense and a lot of guidance from people much smarter than me we made it work. While it’s important to understand that a huge part of press coverage is luck and timing, there are many things you can do to give yourself the best chance of securing the kind of coverage you want. I’ll try and distill these below so you can repeat them for your startup.
A few things to know before we dive in
This is not your media list
I won’t name any of the journalists we worked with directly because their focus may have changed or their publications may have other priorities. So you’ll need to find the right people to reach out to when the time comes. Everyone we worked with was brilliant and I feel really fortunate to have had our story treated with such respect by the journalists we spoke to. The ones who couldn’t write about us because of timelines or competing priorities were all so pleasant and thoughtful in their responses when I know how busy there were.
This is not your ego-stroking moment
It’s important to understand the role of press coverage within a broader marketing plan. If you treat it like an ego-stroking exercise then you’ll look like an idiot and, more importantly, you’ll miss a golden opportunity to drive home the positive impact you’ll make on potential customers. Done correctly, press coverage can showcase your brand, build trust and integrity, and have countless other positive impacts on things like hiring and employee morale. Don’t make this about you.
You can’t control the media
Press coverage is not a marketing channel you can just turn on or off, and you can’t tell journalists what to say. They will, by default, not care about your business or that you are launching. Having a relationship with a journalist might help get your pitch read, but it won’t get your story published.
Right here we go.
1. Find a freelancer (or a small agency)
I’d had plenty of exposure to how the comms world worked in previous roles at Wise and Monzo. But in each of those roles I was supported by brilliant in-house teams that helped me distill my ideas into something that was useful, valuable and newsworthy. Sure, you might be able to write a press release. But there’s a big difference between writing a passable press release and being the one story a journalist writes about that day.
Some tech journalists receive over 200 stories a day. So do us both a favour and give yourself the best chance by bringing in someone who knows how this world works. A good PR can tell you what is and isn’t newsworthy, what could be misinterpreted one way or another, and where the real nuggets of value are in your story.
I started 2022 by interviewing around 30 PR agencies. I had a watertight brief and knew exactly what I needed. But Yonder was just so small at the time and many of the proposals that came back just didn’t suit our business. Agencies will look to secure a 6-month retainer for £8–10k a month which was more than double what I wanted to spend. I had an inkling we might need something more nimble as we were hurtling towards our launch date. Typically, senior partners will pitch you for your business but the work will be done by a more junior team, so it makes more sense to bring on an experienced freelancer who will do the work themselves.
I ended up bringing in a freelancer who joined us in the office for 2–3 weeks. They met with everyone, especially with Tim (CEO) and I for several hours to really distill what Yonder was about, and helped us to work out what the opportunity was for us from a press perspective. Freelancers might not be right for your team, but for very early stage companies (pre-seed to seed) I would suggest you at least give them a go before opting to go the agency route.
2. Find your story
Graham made this point beautifully — you existing is not news. I think I said it less tactfully as “no one gives a shit about you”. Unless you’re Apple, “Launching today” and “now available” is not a story. Are you Apple?
What is newsworthy is fundraising. So don’t go and stick your fundraise news on your LinkedIn as soon as the money is in the bank. Save the story and announce your fundraise as you’re launching your new product or making a hiring push. Readers can read the story and then take whatever action you’d like them to if they’re impressed by what you’re doing. You can’t hold onto the story forever, but a few months within closing your round feels reasonable.
Your story doesn’t need to be fundraising, but for a small startup it makes the most sense. Other interesting stories might be hiring a C-Level executive from another successful fintech in London or a when a well-known board member has been appointed. Have a click around on your favourite tech publications and just see what they’re writing about.
3. Write your press release
A press release is the source of truth for everything you’ll be communicating to journalists. It should be written in a way that if a journalist wanted to, they could copy and paste it into an article and it would read like an article and not just a massive ad for your product. A press release should include:
Top-line statement
Something like: Credit card challenger Yonder emerges from stealth with £20M seed funding
Summary paragraph
Something like: Yonder, a new credit card startup from ClearScore alumni, today announced a £20M seed round ahead of its launch in the UK. The round was co-led by Northzone and LocalGlobe, with Seedcamp participating alongside a host of angels, including Sharmadean Reid, Marshmallow founders Oliver and Alex Kent-Braham, and Rio Ferdinand.
The founder’s journey and their big vision
The big vision stuff is important, because it’s sort of the only time you can really dream big as a startup without needing to back it up with actual performance. It’s your chance to paint the world the colour you think it should be. At Yonder we wanted to communicate our vision for our world with an entirely different relationship to credit, and even though we have absolutely no track record for it, it’s what gets people excited about your potential.
Some market trend and why your product is useful now
Timing is just as important as your product. Why are you important now?
A few quotes
2–3 quotes from your CEO, partner at your lead investor and maybe an angel investor if that angel’s last name is Hinrikus, Blomfield, Branson, or any celebrity or footballer who played for England in the last fifteen years.
Call to action
Here’s your chance. What do you want people to do? Apply for open roles? Join your waitlist?
A Notes to Editors section
A paragraph summary about your business and your lead investor and any contact information a journalist might need if they have follow-up questions.
I’ve made you a template to get started:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/163tnHJ_4puoWdah-Tlhvocc_8Igyv9VPosoEJX47YfI/edit?usp=sharing
You really can’t spend enough time on this. I think we worked on this one 1–2 page document for almost six weeks, making minute changes to better reflect our product, mission, team, investors, vision, brand in ways we thought might better set us up for success. Every word counts, you can’t undercook this one.
4. Get media ready
Executive media training
We organised media training for our founding team. Not because we wanted to churn out a bunch of politicians that make an art of never answering questions, but because it gave them more confidence to speak to someone about their big idea in a clear, concise and consistent way. It helped us to clear up our messaging which we then funnelled into our press release to make it even better. We even made videos of the mock interviews and, my word, they are good. I’ll be rolling those out at the IPO.
Build an FAQ document
You’ll also want an FAQ document with all the questions you think a good journalist might ask you about your business. Yonder is a credit card, an industry that has long been considered ‘unfair’ to consumers thanks to decades of malicious practices by legacy banks and credit providers. So we were prepared to talk about how we were going to change that through our values and product. Be hard on yourself and get comfortable answering those kind of questions. I think if your product has anything to do with artificial intelligence, drones, climate change etc. then I’d spend a lot of time here because these are pretty meaty subjects that you’ll need to be able to speak to.
Get your key marketing assets in order
Have great founder photos. There’s a million good examples on Sifted and TechCrunch so pay a good photographer to capture them wearing your brand on some t-shirts.
Have a Dropbox/Drive folder with all of your brand assets, product screenshots or photography and any other media you think might be useful for an article. Stick your founder photos in there too.
We decided to publish our new website early, and it turns out that a journalist stumbled across it and liked the look of Yonder which helped us to get some traction. If they saw the old website I built it would have been a different story lol.
5. Pitching
Pre-pitching
Pre-pitching is an informal way to test the waters with your story by running it past some journalists. This could be in Twitter DMs or an email, but nothing more formal than “Hey, we’ve got this sort of story coming, would you like to hear more?”. It gave us enough time to gauge general interest from the publications we liked and decide if our timing was right.
Exclusives
If you’re lucky, and your story is something worth covering, they’ll potentially want to secure what’s called an exclusive — meaning you can’t pitch the story out to anyone else until they’ve written about it. It’s great because it means one publication is committed to publishing your story, but could come at the cost of other publications if it isn’t newsworthy by the time they get it.
It ultimately comes down to how good the publication is that wants the exclusive. With our launch, we set out to not offer an exclusive, but after chatting with a few of the team at Sifted, we decided that a really thoughtful write up (which included an interview with our CEO) would be worth 4–5 pieces of coverage we might get from other publications.
Don’t stress if things aren’t lined up for you right away, it takes time to get into the right inbox at the right time. Our freelance PR had been building a good relationship with the team at Sifted so that when we came back to them with our agreement to do an exclusive they were really happy to move forward. It pays to be genuinely friendly, helpful and thoughtful when speaking to journalists. Same goes to anyone in life, while you’re at it.
Pitching your media list
Have a list of media contacts you want to pitch your story to. Your freelance PR will likely have a list ready to go. If you’re a fintech business in the UK or Europe, then I’ll do you a favour and let you know that you should be aiming to get coverage from Sifted and TechCrunch. Sifted don’t do a great deal of fundraise announcement stuff anymore, but I see that they still do it for the right story. TechCrunch are more synonymous with fundraising news and might have more availability to cover your story. These are the insights that a good PR will help you understand before you start blasting emails out to everyone.
Don’t go above a journalist to another one at the same publication. Sifted released a “How to pitch us” post that I recommend reading. Don’t beg. Don’t bully. Don’t push. Don’t email their boss and ask them to ask their reporter to write about you. I’d stick with one thoughtful follow up email and MAYBE one final one the day before your launch.
Embargo
If you’ve agreed an exclusive with someone then you should hold off pitching the story out to anyone else, even if it’s under embargo. An embargo is a request that your story not be published until a certain date, but they’re often broken and TechCrunch even said they’ll break them.
Once the Sifted article had gone live on the day we agreed, we then sent the press release out to everyone else. They either read our email and wrote about us, read the Sifted article and then wrote about us, or didn’t write about us at all. We sent a couple follow ups to everyone and made Tim available to chat with anyone that might want to hear from him directly.
Amplify your moment
Coverage alone isn’t what’s going to see you achieve your goals. So make sure you post the link of your favourite piece of coverage on your company’s LinkedIn page and then send that link to everyone you know (literally) and ask them kindly to have a read and support your big moment. Most people will say yes and the ones who don’t you can delete from your phone.
Create some Google Search Ads
Most publications won’t link back to your website, so what readers will do is read your article then open up a new tab and search “company + fundraise”, “company + launching today” or something like that. Having a targeted Google Ad that pops up when they go looking for you will cover your bases when you don’t get the direct link to your website. Here’s what ours looked like:
6. Second wave coverage
Following your big news you might have the chance to get coverage at dozens of smaller publications with more nuanced readerships. If you’re a London-based company then all of the London finance and tech publications and newsletters and blogs and podcasts might want to write about you too. So don’t go on holiday straight away after your launch. Hang around for a week or so to make sure you get as much from your moment as possible.
Good luck!
Fundraising is bloody hard and I’m thrilled for you and your team if you’ve managed to get it done. Now go and share it with the world and build something cool. Let me know how you go and I look forward to reading about your big idea online soon.
Any questions? You can find me on LinkedIn.