Yury Molodtsov

The State of Media 2026

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN.

The Decline in Numbers

News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now?

Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while struggling to contain costs, which directly shapes their editorial policies. Practically all of them have put up paywalls to compensate for falling ad revenue, which means most people just can’t read what they publish easily. Just recently, both X and Threads were filled with stories from people who were saying they no longer read The Verge because of its paywall.

Growtika reviewed the traffic to the largest news media websites. Most major tech publications like Wired, CNET and Tom’s Guide lost 58% of their monthly visits since their peaks. This is only organic search traffic — nobody else has other figures. It might be a long-standing industry trend that publications started compensating long ago through apps, email newsletters and other methods. But it’s undeniable they’re losing relevance to new visitors. And social media has been dead as a traffic source for many years, even before Elon bought Twitter.

The numbers are even more dramatic at the individual level: Digital Trends lost 97%, The Verge lost 85%, ZDNet lost 90%. I want to stress that this is an external estimate of the search traffic alone and news publications could be adjusting their strategy and focusing on managed channels like newsletters (more on that later). We have data from the Reuters Institute that says Google’s organic search traffic to 2,500+ publisher sites went down by 33% between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and publishers expect an additional 43% decline over the next three years. Only 38% of media leaders say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in 2026, down from 60% in 2022.

Josh Constine, formerly of TechCrunch, diagnosed the industry: tech blogs collapsed by under-rewarding star writers, chasing social over owned audiences, paywalling bland content, and adopting a relentlessly pessimistic tone. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue concentration among the top 10 tech companies reached 80.8%. Infinite personalized feeds are a far better ad medium than a news website, so this is where the money goes.

What’s Different This Time

The main problem for the media is that there are exactly two scenarios for information consumption in 2026.

First: specific requests. You go to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and get your answer there. In 2020, I wrote that the product that will dethrone Google Search won’t be a search engine — instead of links, it will simply provide you with answers. LLMs are exactly that. Even when they show sources, few people go in there. Several of our clients are now getting up to 50% of their leads from ChatGPT while their search visits are falling — but what they care about is sales. This doesn’t work for the media, which are getting far fewer visits from people they can monetize.

Even when you Google things today, what you see at the top of the page is an AI Overview. They’re known to be laughably wrong sometimes because the LLM they use is small and cheap to run, but they will only improve — just look at AI Mode as a reference, which is built by the same people. The steepest traffic decline in H2 2025 correlates directly with AI Overviews expanding to more queries. The media isn’t just losing to new competitors but also to its biggest existing traffic source. The fact that they’re this bad and still killing traffic is even scarier.

Second: curiosity. You have hobbies and interests, and you’re a professional in some specific area. Then you go directly to the sources. You have YouTube and TikTok, which are extremely engaging, and most professional media organizations struggle to get views there. If you’re in growth or product management, you subscribe to Lenny Rachitsky because the interviews he produces are much deeper and more interesting for you than anything the legacy media can produce. There are people like him for most industries. And most importantly, he and his fellow creators have a vastly different cost structure and either operate alone or with extremely lean teams while earning comparable advertising and subscription revenue.

There’s a third mode of passive consumption we have to acknowledge: scrolling through short-form videos, but for our purposes, it’s the extension of the second one. The best bits from interviews and product videos get clipped and shared as short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Social, along with search and aggregators, is now the primary online source of news. And although we still ultimately consume content from news outlets, we do not do so directly. Which is understandable, since reading their websites directly is often an atrocious experience, especially without an ad blocker.

The Rise of the Alternative Media Ecosystem

A giant alternative media ecosystem emerged, comprising newsletters, Substacks, and podcasts. This isn’t new per se but we’re at the point where many of them have larger audiences and more clout than most online news media outlets.

This is why founders want to go on TBPN. It’s the clout and recognition that were previously only accessible through the media. Plus, it’s a unique opportunity to control the message, which is why Travis Kalanick’s Atoms gave an exclusive to TBPN even though they could have gone anywhere. This enabled a great interview that became a single source of truth for other publications that reported on the quotes. And this is a complete inversion of how it worked five years ago. Then you’d pitch the WSJ exclusive, and podcasters would discuss it afterward.

There’s a range of top-tier individual authors like Lenny Rachinsky, Gergely Orosz, Eric Newcomer, Alex Konrad, all of whom started as one-person blogs and many have grown into mini-media companies with multiple writers and other staff members. But unlike the publications they left, these have radically lower cost structures yet deeper audience loyalty. And this is a very profitable combination. The IAB says U.S. creator ad spend hit $37B in 2025, growing 4x faster than total media, and WPP’s mid-2025 analysis found that creator-generated content ad revenue surpassed professional media for the first time.

Nothing exemplifies that better than The Free Press, which started in 2021 as Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter “Common Sense,” launched after her resignation from the New York Times. It quickly grew into one of Substack’s top paid publications, raised outside capital, and was ultimately acquired by CBS News for $150 million.

In total, Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform. They boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Another new format that went mainstream in the past year is live video. TBPN, a daily live show on technology hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, reaches 50k unique live viewers across platforms. Their podcast version is #2 in the US Technology chart. They were profiled by NYT/Vanity Fair/New Yorker/The Information, sold out ad inventory for the year and signed with CAA. They basically invented the format that is now being adopted by alternatives from both traditional media like The Information’s TITV and creators in other regions and verticals such as ETN. The best part of the live TV format for comms is that it expands the medium for brands and companies: there’s a place to get both in the traditional press and on the same day’s live show.

Podcasts are valuable since 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the type of influencer who matters most to them, nearly triple the share who say the same about social media influencers, and 67% of global podcast listeners have made a purchase because of a podcaster. This is what brings these authors power.

But here’s the kicker. Getting on these newsletters and podcasts is often far harder than TechCrunch. The creators are naturally more selective because their audience trust is their entire business model (and apart from TBPN, they produce much less content than a news reporter). A bad guest damages them more than a bad article damages TechCrunch.

How Legacy Media Is Adapting

To compensate for losing star talent and to rebuild their direct connection with the audience, media publications are now growing writers internally and launching their own newsletters. The Verge with Notepad, Optimizer, Installer and others. Business Insider, in addition to being the owner of Morning Brew, recently launched their own lists Vibe Mode, Work Shift, Side Hustles, etc. 76% of media leaders plan to encourage staff to behave more like creators in 2026; half want to partner with creators to distribute content.

Publications always had star writers who attracted the most readers, but it wasn’t as transparent then. Now, authors can get a good benchmark on their actual star power and potential income if they break away. I’ve been told that Substack’s guaranteed offers and examples of authors are being widely used in media salary negotiations. Single writers now get so much power that they can partner with entire news organizations on their own — like Joanna Stern launching her newsletter in partnership with NBC News.

And by launching newsletters, media outlets also partially get around the atrocious website experience problem: reading their emails is a much better experience.

One potential direction the media is looking at is partnering with AI labs to license their ongoing content. Meta secured a multi‑year licensing agreement paying News Corp up to about $50 million annually to train its models and power Meta AI responses, and also partnering with CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today Co . OpenAI has expanded its network to nearly 160 news outlets, including News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, Prisa Media, and Axios, typically combining content licensing with access to OpenAI tools for newsroom product development. Google has a pilot program with the Associated Press. Perplexity signed revenue‑sharing or licensing deals with TIME, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, and a long tail of digital outlets. But it’s unclear if these payments would be sufficient, and while ChatGPT leads are growing, it’s not enough to offset the search declines.

Squeezing the Middle

Each wave of disruption squeezes the middle. The top survives on institutional authority — the NYT, the FT, the WSJ aren’t going anywhere, they can charge premium subscription prices and amortize their fixed costs most effectively. The bottom has radical cost efficiency: most of their costs are their own salaries (or profits).

The middle has neither advantage, as they have large editorial teams, office space, and infrastructure, but they don’t have the brand gravity and are stuck paying legacy costs while competing for an audience that’s leaving in both directions.

Yet the middle is where most tech media lives, specifically the kind of outlets that used to cover products and launches by startups from Seed to Series B. TechCrunch, The Verge, Wired, Business Insider — these are the publications the tech industry grew up reading, and they’re the ones most exposed right now.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Before the Internet, every city had a few major news publications. They were excited about serving not just their city but everyone on the internet. But this also meant competing with everyone on the Internet and turns out most people would rather read The New York Times, which turned them into a juggernaut with $800 million in digital subscription revenue alone.

Local media have also been reimagined through newsletters and influencer accounts with radically smaller cost structures. People still care about places where they live, but the supply side has changed. 6AM City, The Mill, and Inbox Scoop are good examples of modern, newsletter-first local media companies. 6AM City reaches millions across 30+ US markets with hyper-local daily emails and has over $10M in annual revenue.

With AI, we will see this supply-side transformation on a far larger scale.

Internet killed local papers → survivors consolidated → social media killed mid-tier blogs → survivors consolidated → AI is now killing the mid-tier publications that survived social.

The Trust Economy

There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust and personal trust. The only publications that will hold attention will be those that can build trusted relationships with their audience.

But here’s the thing — it’s far easier to build a parasocial relationship with a personality rather than a faceless news organization. And by promoting a specific face, the media always risks those people leaving to launch their own Substack or a YouTube channel.

It’s not like the media publications lost all relevance. Of course, they didn’t. There’s a reason some of the largest startups like Cursor announce their funding rounds on Forbes and The New York Times, and not just post on X. There’s brand value in there, recognition among enterprise buyers, and another source of truth you leave for your next campaigns.

What changes is the composition of the media space. There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust (NYT, Forbes, FT) that you tap for the stamp of legitimacy, especially for enterprise and investor audiences, and personal trust (Lenny Rachitsky, Eric Newcomer, TBPN) for depth, audience access, and authenticity. Brands and companies need both, but for different things.

Let’s get back to the Atoms launch we discussed earlier. If TBPN is good enough for an exclusive launch for Travis Kalanick, are you sure traditional media would deliver the best results for your brand? As a founder or a comms professional, you need to be open to a wider spectrum of possibilities.

Trust is the only durable currency. Especially right now, when AI-generated slop content is flooding every channel and raising the noise floor. This environment is making both creators and the media even more powerful.

What This Means for Comms

The era where comms meant “news media relations” is over. Most comms agencies still primarily do media pitching. The ones that survive will be the ones that can produce content, manage creator relationships, run a founder’s LinkedIn, and also pitch journalists when that makes sense.

The goal is the same as it ever was — tell your story to the world, and “we got a TechCrunch article” is no longer sufficient. What did that article drive? We live in a world where a top-tier podcast appearance might generate a more qualified pipeline than a Bloomberg feature. When one of our clients went on Joe Rogan’s Experience a few years ago, people started recognizing him in airports.

When we work on a major funding announcement these days, we still care about where it lands, of course. We plan for an extensive, exclusive profile in a top-tier outlet and pitch secondary targets afterward. But we dedicate as much attention to building out the messaging, preparing graphics and content, blogs, X and LinkedIn posts, securing a live show for the same day, as well as various newsletters and podcasts we can tap into in the next few weeks to build a strong, sustaining presence.

The question is: what should you do when you’re an early-stage company with little to show? Maybe you raised $1-2M in Seed funding, but you don’t come from the team that was building Claude Code, you don’t have many customers yet, and you have no celebrity investors or some other crazy story to share. What then? You could try local publications, such as Built in SF or Tech.eu, but honestly, the answer might be to focus on your own channels. Launch a newsletter, keep sharing the exciting updates on the company and your product, and interact with key experts and influencers in the space. I have a guide for this.

Comms people now need to think like content strategists, not just media relations specialists. You need to produce, not just pitch. You need to understand distribution and communities, not just publications. You need to be a master of everything.

Founders’ Guide to Comms

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:00:00 +0000

If you’re a founder, neglecting public communications is a drag on your business. It’s not something you should focus on primarily (that’s what rage baiters do), but you should use this channel just like any other, because it will help you find customers, win candidates, secure partnerships and raise funding.

Now, what are comms? We used to call this public relations when it was mostly about print and TV media, even when they’ve moved online. New categories have emerged with the rise of social media and influencers, and now individual authors are building full-scale media outlets on platforms like Substack and YouTube. To me, comms is all of this. WSJ reported that the industry is trying to rebrand this combined approach as “storytelling” but I don’t agree much; it’s still just comms.

I get many requests from founders who make the same mistake: “we launched our product a while ago, how can we get it on TechCrunch or Bloomberg? Unfortunately, “here’s my great company” isn’t a story. You need to share something new, either a fact or a piece of knowledge, something that wasn’t known yesterday. This mostly applies to the news media but they’re just the most gated and demanding. You’d be wise to apply the same criteria to what you post on X or LinkedIn.

If you have already launched your startup publicly, you can’t just come to the media and ask them to tell the same story. And while you can technically post it on X or LinkedIn, it’s unlikely to go viral.

Let’s go over this exact scenario: you launched a while ago, didn’t have much publicity, and want to switch it up now. What do you do? First, we will figure out how to give it another shot. Then, what you should do afterward.

Restart

First, you must come up with a newsworthy event. It could be a major feature launch, a unique partnership with a larger brand, a unique report on the industry you prepared, or something else. That’s why launch and funding announcements work so well; there’s a clear before and after. Look at your roadmap, think about what kind of data you have access to or can gather.

But this is a hook. Now you need the arc. What is actually your story? What are you building and why is it important? Why is it objectively good for humanity? With some products, this comes naturally. The best case is when you have the “enemy”, the Goliath that you, the David, want to kill, because it’s archaic, expensive, or harmful. Arc/Dia wants to replace Chrome. Perplexity wants to replace Google. Linear wants to replace Jira. Sometimes, it can be the faceless industry you’re fightning, slow and inefficient.

Ultimately, you need people to root for you. Lulu Cheng Meservey said that people root for you when they think you deserve more than you’ve got. For this to happen, they must find what you’re building to be objectively good and important. However, while people like rooting for the underdog, nobody wants to root for the loser. You can’t be the loser. You must have something to show for. Not just a radically better product, because this is often subjective — all founders say their product is the best one.

There are exactly two ways to “prove” this. First is hard data, like “our AI coding agent makes 30% fewer mistakes than Claude Code”. Second is anecdotes, like “this guy on Twitter used our product to create a viral app with 2M users”. The best is if you can combine all of this.

We are building a SaaS that makes customer data instantly queryable for non-technical teams. Our product is 10x faster than traditional BI tools and is already used by teams at Notion, Figma, and Linear.

What if you have none of this? Look deeper into the product, talk to you team, figure out what you can actually gather if you start tracking: improvements, time spent, PMF scores, etc. Still nothing? Then you don’t have a story and probably don’t have a good product yet. Focus on the fundamentals before you proceed with comms.

Tactics for Pitching

You’ve identified an upcoming interesting feature in your roadmap that you want to announce. How?

First, draft a one-page document about the announcement. Combine your overall story with this feature and show how they’re connected. Add all the validation you currently have, including traction figures, growth rates, and customer names. If you want an example, I believe Stripe has the best corporate communications: no buzzwords, straight to the point, validated by numbers where necessary. Find a similar announcement from them and write one for your company. We can call this document a “press release”. If you have any stakeholders for this announcement, such as co-founders, partners, or investors, this is the ideal moment to get their approval.

It’s time for pitching! In 2026 and beyond, you have a rich array of options, including news media, newsletters and podcasts. The first option is the classic one, with publications like TechCrunch, Axios, Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Sifted, and many others. Use search, find articles similar to the story you have, and study their authors. For instance, TechCrunch has around four people covering AI now. If you’re building in this space, these are the people to target.

When you see someone relevant, pitch them and offer your story as an exclusive. You pitch authors similarly to how you pitch investors. Here’s an example of a pitch that landed our client on TechCrunch.

But don’t disregard the alternatives. TBPN, Alex Konrad’s Upstarts or Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer are probably more influential than most of the classic outlets for select audiences. In fact, more people would likely read about you there. Few outlets disclose the readers of individual stories, but Forbes still does, and it can be as low as a few thousand (see here). Meanwhile, most other founders and executives I talk to listen religiously to Lenny’s Podcast. New media are extremely powerful, even if brands haven’t reached mainstream awareness yet.

Chances are, you might be a bit too small for them as well. New media authors are picky: they have to be, as they tend to produce fewer stories than a TechCrunch authors would do per week. I recommend you trying them anyway, because the profiles they produce are often longer and have more details, like Konrad’s story on Granola. Even big orgs that could have gotten a top-tier media now go to newsletters instead, like this $190M fund announcement from Root Ventures.

But there are many more options out there. Look beyond top-3, find the authors who are also rising and grow with them. I’ve gathered almost 100 relevant and often underrated new media platforms that I will share in the next email blast, so subscribe if you want to get access.

Whether to go with a traditinal media outlet or a new one depends on your goals. With the former you get a logo you can put on your website and a link you can share with a wide array of customers and less sophisticated investors. Meanwhile, new media can often provide you with a much larger and detailed profile and people in this business often value them just as much or even more.

When an author takes an interest in your pitch, share the full release and offer to jump on a call or have a meeting. Continue selling until the very end and ask them to confirm if they’re planning to cover you.

Now, it’s time to take that press release and create a blog post and social media posts. A blog post is a more reader-facing version of the same document. Again, Stripe has both press releases and blog posts for each announcement; use them as a reference.

As for social media, for most projects, it’s just LinkedIn and X (many live just fine without the latter). Repurpose the ideas from the press release to write native posts for them. Even more human, conversational, a longer post for LinkedIn, and a thread for X. Don’t use the native article formats; few people bother to read them. Here’s a great example of such a thread.

Social media is valuable because you will be able to capture and onboard any incoming interested people while also sharing your ideas in your own voice.

Continuing Activities

You probably don’t have an announcement every two weeks. Maybe not even every month. So what’s important is to spend the rest building up your presence.

Write down 15-20 reporters, newsletter authors and podcasters covering the same area you’re in and follow them everywhere. Respond if you have interesting context to add to their thoughts and stories. The best option is not to pitch yourself into a podcast, but be invited instead because you look like someone who has interesting things to day.

If you’re in the same city, you can ask them for a coffee and offer to share anything about the tech industry without pushing your own startup too much. This is how you build relationships that can be converted into coverage later.

Your best long-term option is to “go direct” and “build in public”. It doesn’t mean you should ignore the media, on the contrary, your goal is to build up a profile that makes you unavoidable for them. Because when lightning strucks, they can be extremely valuable.

Lovable built their entire social media strategy on posting photos from the office and bragging about the speed at which they delivered features. But doing this from a corporate account is much harder. People want to follow people, and the current X’s algorithm discourages underperformance by a lot.

Your best bet is running comms for the company from your personal account. I often recommend early-stage founders to avoid using a corporate account at all initially, just create it to take the name.

At the end of each day, look at what you and your team built and find something to post. You can post this every day on X and 2-3 times a week on LinkedIn (I wouldn’t recommend more there). Here are some examples of founders who do this best (by no means an exhaustive list):

What unites them is they are always running founder-led comms. They speak as operators, not as brand accounts, and teach and share knowledge while selling their product in the meantime. They feel like fighers in the ring and not random white-collar workers, so bystanders root and cheer as if it was their own company. These founders pre-announce features, educate about their product and the industry, share screenshots or vides and charts with metrics, post exciting user stories, hype up employees, and are always running customer support (here’s a great guide for this).

Great founders aren’t posting solely about their company. They also show their personal interests and their human side, because this is what helps other content resonate. That’s why people want to follow them. Tobi Lutke posted about vibe-coding a viewer app for his MRI and got 7 million views. Now we know a bit more about him and he only looks cooler. But when Shopify has an actually big announcement, he posts relentlessly about it.

Founders have a lot on their plate. Many are working days, nights and weekends. Comms are rarely a priority — you have lots of stuff to do, so you can always postpone and post it tomorrow, right? Or maybe you feel it’s pure vanity irrelevant to the business. But the founders above didn’t suddenly get more free time than you. They just realized that 15 minutes dedicated to posting daily is marketing, so they look for ideas and get all the benefits in the end.

IMAX is a Superbrand

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:30:00 +0000

How many companies building cinema projectors do you know?

I bet you know at least one, and it’s called IMAX. You’ve heard the name when you watched “Dune“, “Avatar“, or something from Christopher Nolan. If you paid more to get an IMAX experience, they weren’t too shy to add a dedicated intro promoting themselves — quite obnoxious if you ask me.

Do you get how weird it is? I mean, do you know any other projectors? Yet IMAX has become entangled with the film industry and a sign of prestige. There are 1,772 IMAX theaters across 90 countries. A huge scandal played out when Tom Cruise couldn’t secure extended IMAX viewings for his previous Mission Impossible film.

Lately, I’ve become exceedingly interested in companies with brands so powerful that they break common laws. This is my first post in this new series, and I have a few others in the pipeline.

Companies are egoists by nature. They don’t want to share the spotlight, and they don’t want any other brand alongside their own. So when they do, it’s a beautiful exception worth exploring.

Like other Superbrands, IMAX has conquered its dominant place by inventing and controlling a unique technology that enabled the industry to go beyond what was possible. It became a symbol of quality, which meant partners benefited by advertising their films as IMAX.

In this story, I want to answer several questions:

What is IMAX
How did it emerge
And what enabled it to secure this supreme position

What is IMAX

IMAX is a cinema format that combines specialized cameras, a specific post-production pipeline and purpose-built cinemas to deliver a superior viewing experience.

The standard film format was 35mm. In addition to doubling it and using 70mm, IMAX also changed the orientation. Instead of feeding the film vertically like in standard projectors, IMAX runs the film sideways (horizontally) and makes each frame much taller.

In regular 70mm film, a frame is usually 5 perforations tall and runs vertically through the projector. But with IMAX’s 70mm, each frame is 15 perforations wide (the official name is 15/70). This lets each frame stretch across more of the film’s width, making it about 10 times bigger in area than standard 35mm film. While top digital cameras can reach the 8K resolution, IMAX film achieves roughly 16K.

(And while I’m already scared of confusing you, it’s important to remember that 70mm is the projection film, while IMAX is actually shot on 65mm film, as 5mm is used for the soundtrack)

This is what gives IMAX its square-ish 1.43:1 ratio — when you get to a cinema, you see a much taller screen that can occupy your entire area of vision.

You can find many comparisons of shots in famous movies at IMAX and other carriers. Every other format is cut and pales in comparison. You simply cannot experience the original IMAX cut at home. Even if the movie was shot with IMAX 15/70 cameras (like Dunkirk or Oppenheimer), you’re most likely seeing 1.78:1 or 2.20:1 (closer, still cropped) or even just 2.39:1 (Cinemascope ratio), with IMAX framing lost entirely.

Great, so it’s just a larger film? Not so easy.

The movie industry has been trying to switch from the traditional 35mm to a larger format for decades. Fox introduced Fox Grandeur in 1929, and Walt Disney came up with the Fantasound system for the original “Fantasia” film in 1940. In 1953, CinemaScope was introduced, which brought the now commonly ratio of 2.35:1 (later expanded 2.39:1), much wider than the previously used 1.37:1. It used special anamorphic lenses that compress a wide image onto standard 35mm film, then expand it during projection. All these technologies were targeting the 35mm, and they still tried to keep it. The Techniscope film format was invented and became popular precisely because it used half as much 35mm film for the same number of shots, even at loss of quality.

The Origin Story

In 1967, the International and Universal Exposition was held in Montreal. Two people came there with the same dream of making movies bigger. Making the picture bigger, to be exact.

There, Graeme Ferguson presented his film “Man and the Polar Regions” while Roman Kroitor showcased his production “In the Labyrinth”. Both utilized complex multi-projector and multi-screen systems, which were impressive but challenging. Recognizing each other’s experience, they later decided to pool their expertise and were joined by Robert Kerr, a businessman, and William C. Shaw, an engineer, to form Multiscreen Corporation, Ltd. That company would later change its name to IMAX (Image MAXimum).

Soon, they realized that using multiple film reels and projectors was a dead end and instead decided to focus on one big screen and one big film. In three years, they filed a patent for the “Rolling Loop” film transport system, which allowed for the smooth, high-speed movement of large-format film through a projector.

The Rolling Loop is what enabled the use of 70mm film running horizontally, creating much larger and sharper images than conventional vertical 70mm or 35mm film projectors. The first movie IMAX Corporation produced using this new technology was Tiger Child. To do this, IMAX had to create basically every piece of equipment from scratch, including cameras, lenses, lighting, and sound devices to support their 6-story high screen and giant film frames required for it. The first permanent IMAX theater was established in 1971 in Toronto, Canada.

However, IMAX didn’t become a part of Hollywood for decades after. Throughout the 1980s, IMAX was primarily used for science and nature documentaries as the company expanded across science centers, museums, and planetariums. In 1984, NASA even brought IMAX cameras to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. The audiences were amazed by the picture, but it wasn’t going to conquer cinemas just yet.

IMAX had a chicken-and-egg problem. The 70mm film was expensive, heavy and difficult to operate; the same applied to cameras, which were so loud that you would have to re-record all the actors’ dialogues. And since nobody was shooting movies in IMAX, cinemas weren’t interested in investing in it.

The Fateful Acquisition

In 1994, investment bankers Richard Gelfond and Bradley Wechsler acquired IMAX Corporation, and the same year, they took IMAX public by listing it on the NASDAQ stock exchange. They were fascinated by the technology and believed it could have been used for Hollywood. But first, they had to make it better and figure out how to “sell” it.

One of my best sources for this was the interview that Richard Gelfond, who took the role of the CEO, gave to Harvard Business Review and I will be quoting it extensively. The funniest part is that he and his partner merely wanted to flip the company but he ended up making it his life’s work.

Their first challenge was going around the chicken-and-egg problem.

Studios didn’t want to film a movie in our format (which required bulky, expensive cameras and lots of film) unless thousands of theaters were equipped to show IMAX films. Theater owners wouldn’t convert to IMAX until many more IMAX films were available.

Building IMAX was indeed very expensive. For starters, IMAX used to charge cinema multiplexes $1.2 million for the privilege of using their technology. Meanwhile, studios back then had to send individual prints of the movie to each cinema. While a regular set of 35mm would cost about $1,000, each IMAX print would take $30,000 and require a forklift just to get it over to the projection room.

IMAX had to change basically everything about how it operated and the technology itself to make it work. But in the process, they stumbled upon an extremely profitable model that the company continues to use to this day.

First, they started covering the IMAX installations at cinemas themselves at no up-front charge. But in exchange, they took 20% of the box office on that screen, which proved very wise in the long run, albeit a risky endeavor.

But also, as Richard said:

The huge up-front cost was an obstacle, but not the only one. Very few movies were being offered in the IMAX format.

So, in 2001 they figured out how existing movies could be converted to IMAX, which removed the risks for movie studios. IMAX would even cover the costs of the conversion in return for 12.5% of the box office of the IMAX rerun.

Finally, the shift to digital removed the price barriers of both film and film projection systems: $30,000 in film prints were replaced with $150 reusable hard drives. In 2008, IMAX introduced its first digital projection system, which used dual 2K or 4K projectors, making it easier to install IMAX systems in cinemas. This led to a radical expansion of IMAX theaters globally.

They found a win-win-win scenario that incentivized all the parties to participate:

If it costs $10.50 or $11 to see a new release in a theater, a ticket to the IMAX version will cost about $15 or $16. That means that even if the studio pays us 12.5% and the theater owner pays us 20%, they still wind up with more revenue than if the moviegoer had bought a regular ticket.

The main challenge that they had to work around was that:

The Hollywood movie industry is an interconnected system of studios, directors, and theaters that has evolved over 100 years, and it has a traditional way of doing things.

IMAX had to become a part of that system.

The Industry

In 1998, “Everest”, a documentary film about the struggles involved in climbing the mountain, became the first IMAX film to make it to the box-office top ten. But it was still a documentary and IMAX was trying to enter fiction films.

The turning point was when Disney decided to make “Fantasia 2000”, a sequel to the 1940 movie “Fantasia” and play it exclusively at IMAX theaters. It became the first feature-length animated film to be released in the format across 75 theaters.

Christopher Nolan became the first major director to use IMAX in narrative cinema, shooting parts of “The Dark Knight“ (2008) with IMAX cameras. Although the film only had 28 minutes of IMAX footage, that was enough to turn the tide. Then Brad Bird followed with “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol”, which legitimized IMAX as a format for blockbusters.

Visionary directors like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, and Denis Villeneuve started integrating IMAX technology into their process. IMAX co-opted the best minds of the industry to become their promoters and ambassadors.

Richard Gelfond:

We used to have to beg studios to make films in the IMAX format, but now a lot of Hollywood people say you can’t really make a blockbuster except in IMAX. As a result, we’ve become much more profitable.

And it’s not surprising. When James Cameron’s “Avatar” was released in IMAX theaters in 2009, it became a sensation. The film heavily relied on 3D and IMAX’s immersive format, which provided a unique cinematic experience. “Avatar” grossed over $2.7 billion, and a lot of it came from IMAX.

Christopher Nolan has become explicitly associated with IMAX. He started with “The Dark Knight”, and continued using it more and more for his future movies, so over 70% of ‘Dunkirk’ was shot in it. For “Oppenheimer”, Nolan even ordered a brand-new film stock to be made because IMAX wasn’t available in black-and-white before (but he really wanted it).

There are still some mountains left unconquered. No feature movie to date has been shot entirely on IMAX film (only digitally) due to technical and logistical challenges. Nolan’s “Odyssey“ will be the first.

Lessons

So, what enabled IMAX to become so dominant? Quality, both real and perceived.

Richard says:

Our commitment to quality and providing a cutting-edge entertainment experience, combined with the differentiation we’re able to create by working closely with these key partners, has enabled us to build IMAX into a globally recognized and sought-after brand.

Imagine the giant screen covering your entire field of view and throbbing sound. IMAX has become synonymous with premium cinema. Directors and studios boast how much of their movie is shot in IMAX because this seems to attract the viewers. But all this time, they’re promoting the company that built the cameras and the projectors.

IMAX enabled higher ticket prices, so even with their cut, studios and theaters make more money. But even more importantly, it helps turn movie releases into events, something that every studio wants to achieve.

Combined with effective marketing, IMAX’s technical features have established it as the go-to brand for high-quality, immersive movie experiences. You can expect a certain quality when going to IMAX (I don’t go to any other theaters anymore).

IMAX’s success is due to its execution. The company took an enormous risk by absorbing all of the primary costs from the cinemas and studios to kickstart this network. They have been rewarded handsomely for this, receiving about 20% of the box office from every IMAX film. IMAX became indispensable to the industry and an integral part of it.

That was a very risky strategy that forced them to incur practically all of the costs. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and delisting multiple times:

At one point in 2001, our stock traded for 55 cents a share, and some of our bondholders began buying equity and trying to force us into bankruptcy. In 2006, we actively tried to sell the company, but our future was so uncertain that no one was willing to pay a reasonable price.

But they managed to succeed, and the payoff was dramatic.

This is the first post in the series. My next article will be about GORE-TEX, which pushed Nike and Arcteryx to put its brand alongside their own, and the company behind it.

Sources

If you would love to learn more about IMAX, here are the best sources I found while researching materials for this article.

Extras

Editors usually force you to cut stories, and this makes sense. The shorter they are, the better, as long as you deliver your core idea. But I still wanted to clarify a few more complex things and add asterisks to give you a complete picture.

First of all, it’s important to understand the definitions, as it can be a bit murky. There are different flavors of IMAX, namely “Filmed for IMAX” and “Shot with IMAX”, which often used interchangeably in marketing, but they mean different things technically and artistically.

“Filmed for IMAX” means the movie was shot with an expanded aspect ratio (1.90:1) that fills more of the IMAX screen. The “F1” 2025 movie, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a good example. This means the filmmakers used traditional digital cameras and worked closely with the company to optimize the movie visually and sonically for IMAX theaters. Examples include “Dune: Part One”, “The Batman” (2022), “Fast X” (2023).

“Shot with IMAX” means a movie or scene was filmed using special large, high-resolution film or digital cameras built by IMAX itself. Scenes shot this way use a taller aspect ratio (1.43:1 ratio), which fills the entire IMAX screen. Examples would include “Interstellar“, “Dunkirk“, “Oppenheimer“, and many others.

Why People Leak to the Media

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 11:57:11 +0000

Meta recently fired 20 employees for leaking confidential information. The company has become notorious for employees spilling details from all-hands meetings—a problem Google also faces. Apple, by contrast, keeps a tighter lid on things, though it’s not immune: a year ago, a former iOS engineer was sued for leaking to The Wall Street Journal and The Information.

So why do people—especially those with cushy, high-paying tech jobs—risk it all to leak to the media? It comes down to three main motives: ego, disagreement with company decisions, and controlled leaks orchestrated by the company itself.

The first is about the feeing of empowerement. Working inside a company you know much more about its plans, performance and problems. Sometimes people simply want to leverage this position and feel that power. It’s almost gossip, except that they’re not just talking to their friends, but also to people whose job is reporting such things.

The second motive kicks in when someone’s unhappy with a company decision and wants to shine a spotlight on it. For obvious reasons, this specifically affects Big Tech companies with wide societal implications (so Meta and Google). What can you leak from Nvidia, how expensive their next GPU is going to be?

At early Google, Brin and Page used to run actual Q&A sessions and answer unfiltered questions from their employees. But with scale, they discovered that everything they said becomes public almost immediately. Naturally, they stopped saying things that were meant to be private and soon stopped visiting all-hands meeting altogether.

Apple is almost unique in their capacity to contain information. We see all kinds of the “next iPhone” leaks discussed in the media, but this comes mostly from their supply chain, not the company itself. So when an Apple leak does slip out—like the rise and fall of their electric car project—it’s revealing. I can almost guarantee, that one frustrated Apple employee found the reporter’s email or Signal and tipped them off. It’s easy to understand why: they spent years working on this and probably believed they were on a path to a great product–right before it was killed from the top.

And you can’t even put it on your CV! Oh, maybe know you can, because NDAs usually don’t cover things that have become public knowledge (pretty sure theirs is iron clad anyway). So even if you couldn’t push this electric car to market, you can now discuss what you were actually doing all those years.

Most of the time, leaks don’t happen just because. They appear specific people are unhappy with their company’s decision. A project gets killed, a department shuffled, or the CEO picks someone else’s strategy—and the leaker wants the world to know who’s to blame when it all goes south.

Now, we finally get to the third option: companies consciously leaking the information they want to make public but can’t do through the official channels. The story of the United Kingdom forcing Apple to add backdoor to their end-to-end encryption is the best example. A new law lets the government issue secret orders for data access, with no public appeal allowed. Companies have to comply silently or face consequences. Then, suddenly, the story breaks. My bet? Apple leaked this through the media so it can’t be traced back to them. Another classic: rumors that the original iPad would cost $1,000. When Steve Jobs unveiled it at $499, jaws dropped—partly because the leak set the stage for a dramatic reveal. Controlled leaks can shape narratives or test the waters, all while keeping the company’s hands clean.

This is why you have to be very careful when reading stories based on leaked info. Think who might have done this and why, question their motives.

Meta employs nearly 80,000 people—do 20 leakers represent the majority? Probably not. And what about the stuff that doesn’t leak? We’re blind to the full picture. Sometimes a leak fits a juicy narrative so well that reporters don’t dig deeper or seek counterpoints. Case in point: an anonymous “X employee” fed Fortune a story that turned out to be bogus. It ran anyway.

Going Direct In Communications

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:20:39 +0000

If you spend too much time on Twitter (like I do), you might have heard about the idea of Going Direct. It started with a growing chasm between the tech and media industries and eventually turned into the idea that founders and companies should build their own audience instead of going to the media. This is what “Going Direct” is.

What’s the motivation here? They say that news websites aren’t your friends, so you should focus on content marketing through blogs, social media and friendly podcasts. This way, you grow your own audience you can leverage it for your goals.

There’s a lot of truth to this idea, and you can follow Lulu Cheng Meservey, who previously led PR for Substack and Activision/Blizzard and is one of the most active speakers on the topic (it’s a good follow, she’s great).

Nobody will broadcast your vision better than you because nobody will care about it more than you do.

However, I have a problem with the level of radicalism of some of the proponents of this idea. Cristiano Ronaldo just launched his YouTube channel and broke the world record in the process. He was able to do this because of his brilliant career and enormous pre-existing audience. Do you think this is a good reference for everyone though?

Lesson #10: Become one of the world’s most recognized athletes. This one little move will be a game-changer when you do finally start your journey in content creation. @nick_auf

If you follow the people who have become the biggest advocates for going direct, you might notice that they tend to have enormous audiences. Often because they become famous through their previous endeavors.

You don’t have to do PR if you’re Elon Musk. And even if you have a much smaller number of relevant followers on Twitter (say, 25,000), you can still get your message out quite easily. Twitter’s algorithm needs to test your content by putting it through people, so the more followers you have, the better chances it will give you. Not everything is a banger, but you won’t be screaming in an empty forest.

But unless you’re already famous, you might not have that audience to begin with. And growing it from zero is incredibly difficult and takes time. This is the biggest difference between running communications for startups and large corporations.

When you’re a startup, what you need is a couple of tentpole stories in major media publications. TechCrunch, FastCompany if you have a great story, Fortune in certain cases (the exact list depends on what your business is about). There’s no need to be omnipresent. You need to get external validation for your potential customers, employees, investors, or partners.

When you’re a corporation, you care about your share of voice – how often people write stories about you vs your competitors, and the exact message you’re associated with: “powerful", “affordable”, “professional tool”, etc. At this stage, sometimes you can create a news event with a single tweet. You might not even have to announce anything, you can write a manifest and see it spreading across the media publications startups would die for. Instead of quantity you go for quality. Your goal is to control the narrative.

Going direct is a privilege. It’s something you have to proactively work toward. Be active on social platforms, and launch a blog or a newsletter. Do all these things! But in the process, ensure that you’re pushing your announcements to news media. As a startup, you can’t waste shots. Grow your audience through the media. Secure great media pieces thanks to your audience, which serves as social proof of your importance.

Another idea I heard is that your audience will be yours forever while the media can turn on you in an instant. This is a gross oversimplification. Remember Fast? It was a one-click checkout startup that appeared out of nowhere and raised a $102Bn Series B led by Stripe. Their founder was very active on Twitter and amassed a huge audience. Then somebody digged their actual financial metrics and everything crumbled. The founder still has 32,000 followers. But he’s barely getting any engagement while promoting his current company.

The audience can turn on you if they feel betrayed. At the same time, if you manage to build trust and people believe you’re getting attacked unjustly, they can become your greatest asset that can melt mountains and make corrections in the New York Times story (personal experience).

***

A curious anecdote about Fast. I talked to Domm when I worked at Day One Ventures. It was very early in their journey, the product still rocked green and white, not their final black tones. The website and their deck didn’t look too great at the time, and they didn’t have much traction but he was talking about the deals they’re about to do.

One thing I couldn’t understand was how they were planning to grow this. Any checkout platform is a two-sided marketplace, where you need both sellers and buyers to participate, otherwise there’s no incentive to join for each party. It seemed Google or Shopify was in a much better position to take this (I now use Shop Pay on most ecommerce websites).

I decided to pass on this and then watched Fast going viral on Twitter and raising giant rounds from notable investors. I thought this company would end up in my anti-portfolio, right until I saw the first report from The Information. The company shut down later the same year.

Another one-click checkout Bolt has been in turmoil for many months.

How to Fight a Crisis with PR

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 13:34:23 +0000

Just listened to a podcast with Nikita Bier by Lenny Rachitsky that explained the power of communications very nicely.

Nikita is famous on Twitter for selling the same company twice (not really). He sold tbh to Facebook, left, built Gas to earn money, and ended up selling it to Discord. He is a master of growth hacking and building viral products.

With Gas, he and his team faced a grave danger. Somebody put out a hoax that the app was facilitating human trafficking. How an anonymous app where users can’t send arbitrary messages could have done, it is irrelevant because the hoax spread faster than the app. They rebranded the app and started with the other coast, and the same hoax resurfaced.

Then Nikita decided to fight it on all fronts. PR became one of them. He went to reporters because he had a bait and a message. The bait was simple: his app led the Social category in the US AppStore. But he used their interest to spread his own message and agreed to talk to the Washington Post only if they used the right headline, which ended up “How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax”.

The Washington Post's profile

Nikita spread and amplified the message he needed by planting it into trusted media publications with good SEO. And that’s exactly how you fight a crisis like this. In his case, the media weren’t the original culprit; the hoax spread on social media, messaging apps, and even the app’s AppStore reviews.

Their own website or any blog wouldn’t have good enough SEO to put this at the top of Google Search results. Even more important is that the story in the Washington Post resulted in multiple secondary pieces that spread the story further.

Ultimately, people still trust top-tier media publications with a good brand. You can use this to your advantage, but you have to catch their attention first. Find a cause, use it to broadcast your message.

The Unsettling Battle Between Media and Technology

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:50:00 +0000

Balaji started a discussion on Twitter that finally pushed me to put down my thoughts on the matter.

Some time ago, around the early 2010s, a tectonic shift happened in the media industry. Before this, it was a darling. Small and quirky companies improving our lives. Blogs like TechCrunch emerged to cover it exclusively and grew in tandem with tech. TechCrunch is now a prominent media outlet that is visited by 10 million unique people each month.

But something changed. The tech industry was taking over everything, and its champions started becoming more and more prominent in our lives. With scale came scrutiny. Journalism is the fourth power, a system of checks and balances that is supposed to question everything by design. This is a handy property. Financial Times was the one that uncovered all the fraud behind Wirecard, Germany’s favorite unicorn. Coindesk published the materials that triggered the collapse of FTX so we could learn the other side of Sam Bankam-Fried.

When tech became a celebrity itself, it joined a circle of politics and big businesses. Small startups don’t affect the world much at first. Then, they grow into big corporations, and sometimes, their road ahead is filled with unintended consequences. Although, sometimes, they know perfectly well what they were doing.

Journalists don’t hate tech people. They talk to them and write stories all the time. They are definitely more critical than they were, though. But only because the industry itself has grown.

A good interviewer isn’t supposed to be your friend. People read the press, and people work to appear in the press with one specific goal: to get exposure and credibility for themselves and their businesses. There would be no value in this if reporters weren’t diligent. And often we want them to be diligent and uncover people who attack their employees, fraud their partners, and commit unspeakable things. The media is the only neutral party incentivized to spend resources investigating such things and bringing them to light.

That doesn’t mean all interviews and press interactions should be a battleground. Nobody needs a confrontational interview when an actor goes on either a late-night show or “Hot Ones”. But two close people interview each other, and most often, it leads to a very dull puff piece that nobody reads.

There’s a particular movement of people who believe you should go direct, produce content, and go on your friends’ podcasts instead of working with the media. I actually agree that you should do those things, they’re extremely helpful. But too often, they come from people who already have tens of thousands of followers (if not millions). Their advice isn’t exactly actionable for most founders.

Of course, you don’t need to do PR in the traditional sense when you’re Elon Musk or Garry Tan. But even they use the media, they just don’t need to send out pitches because of their mass of followers. Recently, for the first time, Tesla started doing traditional press tours in Europe for the updated Model 3.

Not all coverage is good coverage, of course. I personally helped some of our clients defend against negative pieces that had no basis in reality. Sometimes this happens, just like sometimes a tech company fumbles to the point where people suffer. But it’s important not to let yourself get in a bubble when confirmation bias kicks in. Most people are good.

Communicating with Numbers

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 11:06:48 +0000

One of the strongest moves in communications is pushing slightly wrong numbers out so that many people start quoting them and associate with your business (or your competitors) forever.

Two of my favorite examples are Stripe and Apple Music. Let’s dig in.

Stripe famously charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Well, on average, they charge more. This pricing only applies at the base level and for bank cards issued in the United States. Any foreign card adds 1%. There are charges related to addon products you might use, from Stripe Subscription to something more specific.

But many people quote the advertised figure, which acts as an anchor. I know Stripe alternatives for some local markets that heavily promote the fact they’re a bit cheaper once you include all these charges.

Now to Apple Music. When you read news about the streaming business, you might often see the “price per stream” figure. This is how much each of the streaming services, including Apple Music, Spotify, and all others, pay the right holders (labels, musicians, producers, and everyone else collectively) for each separate stream of their track.

The figures change over the months and years, but Apple Music consistently looks better than Spotify. Look, they pay more! It means they care about artists! Right?

The “price per stream” doesn’t really make much sense. This isn’t how streaming platforms pay. Nobody is instituting a specific payout price each month.

If we simplify, it looks like this. Spotify earned X billion dollars last month through subscriptions and ads. During this month, users collectively consumed Y billion streams. If you divide X by Y, you get the price per stream, but it’s not set, it varies each month. Each particular artist is getting more money from Spotify than Apple Music. Spotify simply has more users. It’s also a bit more aggressive in adjusting its pricing to local markets, and unlike Apple Music, it has an ad-supported tier, which brings less revenue per user.

If you look at Spotify’s quarterly results, there’s a Cost of Revenue line, which is consistently around 74% – this is the share of the total revenue they pay out to artists and rights holders. The company itself has been unprofitable until very recently. If you still want to claim that Spotify underpays artists, it largely comes down to their relationships with labels and music just isn’t a very big industry (and it never was).

But if you look at “price per stream”, Apple Music looks better.

***

The key rule of communication is that the larger your audience, the simpler your message should be. This is one of the reasons politics inevitably turns into populism since you have to condense your entire program into a slogan, whether it’s “Make America Great Again” or “Break up Big Tech’“.

And it’s hard to find something simpler than a number. If you can find a figure that makes your business more appealing than competitors, you should run with it. The best case, of course, is when your business structure allows you to make your competitor’s primary revenue line a free addon. A good example here would be the launch of R2 by Cloudflare. Amazon Web Services charge developers a lot of money if they want to move data out of the network. They call it egress fees. Cloudflare just made it free.

The PR Flywheel: What It Can And Can’t Do For Your Business

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:32:07 +0000

People often think that PR and communications alone can help them achieve their goals and end up surprised when it doesn’t move the needle as much as they wanted.

It’s because they think of communications like this. As if it’s something that can single-handedly drive awareness, attract customers, and bring money right away.

In my experience, it’s a bit more complicated. PR is only a part of the virtuous circle. To secure an article in a good media publication, we need to convince journalists that your business will interest their readers. So we craft a compelling story by using everything at our disposal: from the founders’ journey and unique aspects of the product to the best metrics as validation from your customers and users.

Journalists like great stories. And exciting numbers, along with the intangible public perception, are part of that story. They love to catch trends early and predict the next big thing. They also don’t want to be wrong, so they’re unlikely to over-inflate something unless they truly believe in it.

If your competitor is ten times larger than you, you shouldn’t expect the quantity and quality of your media coverage to be the same. If Twitter, Reddit, and Discord servers are buzzing with invites to their product, and you can’t say the same for yourself, it’s natural for reporters to give more attention to them. You move past this by building something truly novel and communicating it better.

Your startup’s success translates into good media coverage. These articles might help you with solving specific business objectives, such as pre-warming your relationships with customers and partners through word of mouth, finding the next investors, and convincing a developer to join your startup. You grow, and then this growth by itself validates your story and makes the company even more interesting.

This is the flywheel of communications.

You just need to keep going*.

I’m not saying that if you aren’t getting the results, you just need to keep paying someone, an in-house head of communications, or a hired agency. Some companies are naturally more predisposed to PR because of their industries, founders, products, etc.

Good communications allow you to jump a little over your head. People notice you when a top-tier media publication posts a nice article about your startup. It creates buzz. It inflicts a bit of FOMO in investors looking for the most exciting deal. It instills confidence in potential candidates. It might even help you convince some partners.

But a single news article won’t make your startup a unicorn. Communications are about realizing the inherent potential. The story with all the substance is already there, all we do is shape it to deliver the idea in the most succinct way possible.

The paths of Stripe and Adyen are probably the best example. Both do very similar things: they help businesses accept payments on the Internet. Even though Adyen is older, it stayed in the shadow (comparatively speaking) for most of its existence. Then, in 2022 Adyen suddenly surpassed Stripe in payments volume, turned out to be more profitable, and didn’t have to do layoffs afterward. But they were quite comparable even earlier.

One of the reasons Stripe was more notable and well-known is because it was much better at communications. Their “increasing the GDP of the Internet” tagline presents an exciting and ambitious vision. Sounds much better than a “card processing company” or a “payments acquirer”.

Remember, you can’t jump too high. There’s a cautionary tale of Fast, whose founder was a great communicator, built an image of a successful, thriving company, and raised $100 million from Stripe. He was loved by the media for a little while, but then the same industry crushed him when they got access to the actual state of finances in the company.

Take what you’re and think of the most exciting way to present this story. Look at what your peers are doing as a reference, but focus on what makes you unique. Distill your pitch to highlight your mission and validate it with anything you might have, including the founders’ expertise, the rapid growth of your user base, or anything else.

Remember, that most of the time, journalists write news. Something that happened. The fact of your company’s existence is unlikely to be newsworthy by itself. Look at your product roadmap as well as anything you’ve already achieved. Also, think if there’s anything you deeply know and truly believe yet nobody talks about it yet, as it could become a good contributed story or an angle for something bigger.

***

This was first posted on our blog at MA Family.

How to Get Media to Cover Your Fundraising

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Five years ago announcing your funding round was quite a reliable option to get coverage in the press but it all changed. We ran dozens of announcements in recent months, so I wanted to give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to secure placements for your fundraising in the media.

First, why do it in the first place? Coverage in the media helps with:

Investors
Talent
(rarely) Customers

The media lend you their authority and give validation in the eyes of the public.

Founders also often forget to think through what they want to achieve with the press release/funding announcement.

It *probably* won't get you any customers (and definitely not in a sustainable way).

It might be useful for collateral materials (whether hiring, sales, etc).
— Yuri Sagalov (@yuris) September 29, 2021

Easy to say you should go direct but that only works if you already have an audience. Of course, Elon Musk doesn’t need PR when he can just tweet to 90 million of his followers. Most people don’t have that.

Now back to the tips. The funding is just a reason to think about covering your company. Are there any other good reasons? What makes your startup interesting & unique?

Reporters will cover a $1M Seed and drop a $50M Series B because they focus on the company and its story instead of the financing.

Examples:

Crazy growth
Your personal story that explains why you care about this problem
The social/environmental aspect of your business (most don’t really have one)
You’re bringing something known to a different vertical or even a different region

Also:

Unique team composition and background, maybe you could position yourself as a champion of a country
How does your company resonate with what’s going on in the industry or in the world right now? (WFH services in 2020, how did you manage to raise a Series C right now)

(can’t believe I have to say this)

Close your round before going to the media. An investor might drop out, the figures might change. Most funding round announcements happen months after the round is closed, just don’t wait a year.

The sure way to figure out if it’s reasonable to expect coverage for your news is to check what has been written before. Look for similar stories, if there is not a lot of these you might be in trouble.

Unique stories take a mountain of effort to secure. Find reporters who might be interested in your company and announcement. Have to be very relevant.

There are not many major outlets that often cover funding rounds in dedicated stories these days: TechCrunch, Forbes, Business Insider, VentureBeat, etc. Read through their latest funding stories, look for those which are similar in terms of industry/amount, and research them thoroughly.

A PR person looked at the cloud infrastructure, AI and developer tools stories tend to write and thought: yep, he’d be the right person to pitch this baby food startup to. Frederic Lardinois

The best way to contact reporters is via email unless they offer another option themselves. It’s usually easy to find contact details either on their profile somewhere on the website of the publication or in their Twitter bio.

Don’t try calling even if you somehow got a number. Draft a great pitch email. If you managed to raise a round – you know how to. Imagine that nobody cares. Don’t use buzzwords, instead focus on facts and reasonable projections. Build a narrative, and explain the place of your company in the world and how it relates to bigger trends.

You should include all the basics: the funding amount, investors, what are your plans for this money, etc. Use quotes to get your or the investor’s words into to the story unaltered (potentially).

Just me screaming into the void: I will not report on your startup's acquisition or partnership deal if there is no dollar figure attached.
— Katie Jennings (@katiedjennings) February 2, 2022

Use public stats to prove there’s a large opportunity or show your math. Say who your competitors are and what makes you better. Disclose the figures that prove you’re on the right path. $ revenue and valuation rather than relative MoM user growth.

With deals happening every day, PR people are struggling to place funding stories. Well, I’m working on two for next week! Here’s why their pitches worked for me.

1. Offered as exclusives
2. Disclosed valuations
3. Hit on a fundraising trend
4. Told an interesting company story
— Melia Russell (@meliarobin) January 5, 2022

The most reliable option is to offer an “exclusive”, where you only pitch one reporter at a time. You can say that right in the subject line: “EXCLUSIVE: …”. Forbes and most outlets you know like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are likely to cover exclusives only.

There’s an “old” but still helpful guide to pitches from Mike Butcher (TechCrunch) that you should read.

It’s OK to follow up with a reporter one or two times in case they haven’t replied, but certainly not more than that. Silence means they’re passing. You can try another one now, but ensure they’re also relevant and might get interested in what you’re offering.

Remember, they might be getting hundreds of pitches a week. Be respectful. All you can do is offer them a story and pitch it in the best possible way. But if they’re passing, then they’re passing.

as a ref pt for PR people, during the 2 PM hour I received around a half dozen funding pitches (amongst lots of other stuff) of which four were exclusives

it's busy out there
— alex 🏴‍☠️🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@alex) June 21, 2021

If a reporter accepts the story, they will likely get back with questions. Most will ask for an audio interview since that allows them to communicate directly and get the info they need. If you get to that stage, it’s usually a very good sign, although they still might pass.

The alternative option is to pitch under embargo. You choose the date & time, you send a much shorter pitch (omit key details) and ask if they’re accepting the embargo (put it in bold). If they reply “yes”, share the full details. You can pitch multiple outlets this way.

Very important things to remember:

Still pitch only one reporter at a media publication at a time.
Give everyone the same embargo time.
You’re decreasing your chances by going the embargo route but might get more stories. It’s a trade-off.

Couple of friendly tips to PR professionals:

1) Just because a reporter agrees to review an embargoed release does not mean we are agreeing to coverage. We are agreeing to look with the potential for coverage.

2) Always be honest. Trust is key.
— Mary Ann Azevedo (@bayareawriter) February 22, 2021

Reporters aren’t your content marketers, they might still pass, drop the story due to the timing conflict, or something else. If they actually like it, the exclusive option allows you to work together and find a date that works. With an embargo, you have exactly one shot.

Prepare images you can offer as illustrations. That could be photos of the founders, of the entire team, and screenshots of the product. The images shouldn’t be too marketing-y, otherwise, nobody will take them. Shared them in advance, maybe with the pitch itself.

I recommend drafting a blog post explaining the vision behind the company and where you are seeing it in the near future to post after the publication goes live. Turn it into a Twitter thread where you can also integrate the story. Warn your investors and ask them to share.

Basically, it’s on you to augment the announcement and leverage the buzz for your goals down the road.

How to Write Helpful Investor Updates

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 21:43:31 +0000

Almost every tech startup that raised funding from venture capital funds periodically sends them an investor update to showcase the latest numbers, trends and just generally keep them aligned with the direction the company took. When I was working at Day One Ventures I’ve seen hundreds of these emails of various quality. Since my primary job right now is helping startups and VC firms communicate better internally and externally I’d love to give my own perspective on writing investor updates that help both you and your investors.

Investor updates allow to build a sense of connection and show your momentum to your current and prospective investors. As a founder you often want your current investors to participate in further funding rounds (right up until the point Andreessen Horowitz steps in and want the entire round for themselves). You also might be talking with some prospective investors who aren’t ready to make the move yet. It’s quite customary to include the warmest of these investors onto your mailing list as well. It’s much easier to make an investment decision based on a few data points you were able to witness yourself and not just placed on a chart.

All the best updates I saw had these things in common:

Had a simple format
Came on a regular cadence
Pushed the ever-changing startup’s narrative
Showed both absolute and relative numbers
Engaged the investors to keep them closer
Gave enough information without being too long

Let’s dig into all of these aspects. Or feel free to jump to an example in the end.

Also, let’s define the applicability before it’s not too late. I’d suppose it might be helpful to very early-stage companies until their Series B tops. Also, some of the most successful investments we made haven’t ever had a regular update. Of course you can live without it, it’s up to you.

Format

An investor update isn’t a board meeting. You don’t need to have a deck nor you want to create a custom complicated formatting for your emails.

Always remember that in the majority of the cases your investors will be reading that on their phone sitting in an Uber. I admit, this particular piece of advice might not be that true in 2020 with the pandemic going on – but it’s generally applicable whenever you do something for busy people to review.

Use a plain text email. You can add a few visuals, like photos or charts, but nothing excessive. If you have a very small & loyal group of investors you might just cc all of them and let them engage in a conversation. Anything more and you can put them in a bcc. It’s primitive but it does the job, and believe me, the investors are much more interested in the numbers and facts than the technical means you used. They certainly don’t want you to spend too much time.

The best option is to use a basic newsletter service that would allow you to track the open rate and put the first name of each investor right in the greeting. Make it personal without making it too complicated.

Cadence

You want to keep investors updated but you don’t want to turn it into a full-time job. Especially at the beginning, that’s not the part that you can simply outsource.

I’ve seen companies sending weekly updates but I doubt it helps except maybe for very early-stage companies with inexperienced founders. Monthly is the best option for most startups probably until around Series A/B. The amount of information that needs to be processed for a proper update rises a lot and your shareholders already believe that the company won’t suddenly die.

It’s okay to be slightly off your scheduled time, especially in the early days, but it might cause you to decide to drop some updates altogether – there are always better things to do, aren’t there? And then it’s just like going to a gym where missing it a few times might lead to you visiting it three times a month.

Everyone knows you’re busy. Find a length/complexity level that works for you and stick with it.

Story

I’ve seen founders put their complete roadmaps in an update, copying their spreadsheets or taking screens from some project management software. Your job isn’t to dump your Asana and JIRA on people. Your job is to process all that information and build a narrative around it, presenting the most important things in the way that helps you.

Investors put money in a startup because of its story. Even if you had crazy charts of WoW growth, everyone understands that it might die out or end up being not enough. You’re selling a vision of some distant future.

Early-stage companies often change their product and their business as they learn more about the market. Use every opportunity to remind investors about your potential and explain each current iteration of your vision that comes around.

Figures & Numbers

One of the most common mistakes I saw was omitting the real numbers behind the business. If you do that you either show that you are hiding them or look unprofessional.

Each company has a set of key numbers that would describe its performance. Some are standard: revenue, burn rate, the number of customers. Some depend on the industry: # of supply providers, cities/states covered, followers, couriers, etc.

Show both the absolute and relative figures, for instance, how much revenue you had this month and how that relates to the previous month. If you have enough data and in a seasonal business it might be more useful to show how it relates to the previous year or your initial plan.

Engage!

Each investor update is an opportunity to talk to your current and prospective investors. First, have a clear ask in the end highlighting the things your investors can help you with. It should only be a few things, don’t lose the focus by listing everything you have issues with.

For example, you can say that you’re looking to hire a full-stack developer with experience building fintech applications and looking for introductions to a specific type of people at US banks.

Create FOMO. Mention and thank the people who helped you earlier. By doing that you’re creating an incentive for others to materially help you. All of us are vain..

Structure & Length

Here’s the structure I’d suggest you follow.

Greet the investor(s)
Remind what you’re building
Tell about the most notable things that happened since the last update
Have a short list of bullet points with the most important numbers about your business
Thank people who helped you the most by their names
Ask to help you with one or two things where your networked investors might be useful

It’s natural to feel the need to hide the bad things that happened – or good things that didn’t. Don’t do that, it’s quite easy to grasp after a few emails from you. People understand how startups work and that there will be setbacks. That’s where your input is required. Build a narrative around that. Write about that with high energy, explain what your hypothesis was, what really happened, and what you’re going to do. The best investor updates I’ve seen didn’t shy away from problems.

Example

I’d love to share a few real examples of great investor updates but I understand why the founders I talked to weren’t particularly happy about that. Unfortunately, that leads to a clear lack of good templates online. It’s easier to find examples of great startup decks.

As an alternative, I drafted this update for an imaginary company utilizing the best practices I saw.

Hi Marc,

Wanted to share an update for September. It was a roller coaster of a month!

Over the past three years we’ve built Redd into the most powerful personalization engine for news content. We now have over 25,000 paid subscribers, double of what we had just 6 months ago!

Redd’s mission is to build the only news digest people would have to read. We help busy professionals stay on top of their field without consuming too much of their time – as if a dedicated analyst was crawling the Internet for them. Right now our PMF score is at 36% and we hope to drastically increase it with the new features we’ve been brewing.

Stats

MRR: $126k (+9% MoM)

Paid Subscribers: 51,203 (+11% MoM)

Burn: $174k (+14% MoM)

Headcount: 16 (+2)

Runway: 11 months

Highlights

We’re about to launch our B2B offering for employees at large organizations and expect it to significantly increase the number of subscribers and diversify our acquisition channels.

We’ve revamped large parts of the recommendation engine under the hood and seeing higher satisfaction from its results.

The referral program we launched four months ago is now bringing at least 40% of new sign-ups.

Setbacks

We’re still seeing lower quality of subscribers from our paid acquisition efforts and we believe that in order to scale faster we’d have to crack this.

We’ve spent a bit too much time on the idea of running multiple focused digests and will be focusing on one per day with separate topics-related sections.

Special thanks to Phil Dunphy, who helped us hire two amazing designers, and Gloria Delgado for all the enterprise sales advice she gave us.

Asks

We’re still looking for data scientists with experience in recommendation engines. Feel free to share our job description with relevant people.

We’d love to talk to editors at major news organizations to learn more on how they build their main page.

There's No Such Thing As Crisis PR

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 15:37:48 +0000

Somebody at your company fucked up. As a result, millions of rows from the customer database are roaming the Internet. It turned out the results you were promising to your customers aren’t that guaranteed. Maybe they lost their files in your cloud. Or maybe people learned that an executive in your trendy tech company is a sexist who would bee “too much” in 1850s. Now journalists are writing about pieces about your company questioning any credibility you might have.

Often the first reaction in such cases is to hire someone to kickstart what’s known as a crisis PR campaign. There are agencies marketing specifically on that term. Companies try to generate any kind of “positive” coverage to break the trend and ensure the catastrophe will soon be forgotten.

Yet journalists are smart and won’t fall for your attempts to change the subject.

Just like a lot of other areas, external communications shouldn’t exist on their own. PR is a part of the overall firm’s strategy and vision. The only way to be properly heard is to be authentic. You can’t just create an imaginary world where everything is OK and distort reality to get everyone on board.

The only option is to own the problem and publicly document the way you’re dealing with it causes and its aftermath.

Sometimes these crises are rather small one-offs. But often they’re signs of the problems you had all along: crumbling culture, lack of attention to security or privacy, technical debt, or even inaccuracies in your own communications.

You should get everyone on a call and figure out the following:

What happened.
What is the harm to the affected customers.
What you can do to alleviate it.
How to ensure that won’t happen in the future.

Usually the last part is the most difficult. A strategy like that is unlikely to be devised in a single Zoom call. But you should start thinking about that and set in stone the exact steps to proceed along that path.

Prepare an announcement and communicate it to all customers. Unless this thing is extremely small (and we aren’t talking about that) you shouldn’t just focus on the affected customers, even if there’s a line to draw. If people are writing about that, your current and potential customers will read that and remember forever. They should hear your words.

The Art of Storytelling

Sun, 10 May 2020 12:00:00 +0000

Storytelling is largely underrated especially among techy people who often look down at it. I’ve met a lot of people, especially outside of the United States, who had a firm belief that all you need to do is to build something notable and your work would speak for itself.

Well, I’ve been a computer nerd with a degree in applied math and physics and I disagree. All my experience of running events, doing PR for companies, and working as a VC showed me the value of storytelling.

“The art of storytelling is incredibly important. Learning to tell a story is critically important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the story. A venture capitalist gets to see all kinds of storytellers". Don Valentine, Founder of Sequoia

Art of storytelling applies to any area. Telling an investor about your idea? They listen to the story. Want to hire a great candidate for your fresh scrappy startup? It’s about the story. Trying to get hired at a company you like? The same. Pitching a reporter? You guess.

While an investor would certainly look at your numbers, they would still be buying the story. The question is whether you narrate it or let it goes sideways.

“I think my background has helped me learn to think well conceptually. Investing is not just about numbers. It’s also about imagination and structure and narrative and characters — the types of things we liberal-arts majors should know something about.” John Burbank, Founder of Passport Capital

How To Build It

Ok, great, so what should I do?

Some people can tell a great story when they don’t actually have anything to show. Others spend years building something and then can’t properly present it to the world. You want both a foundation to rely on and a story to tell.

Look deeper

Everyone has a story. You might think yours is boring and unnecessary but you need to realize that people are way too different. You might be reading someone’s interview on how they had been working since 15 years old and how it got them to where they are right now. You think: “Shame, I didn’t do anything noticeable”. Well, you probably did, you just don’t consider that important enough while they doubled down on it.

Honestly, unless they are Bill Gates or Roald Amundsen it probably wasn’t that exciting. You might be used to being humble or understand that past achievements aren’t that notable in the grand scheme of things, but you shouldn’t write them off.

Don’t be afraid to tell who you’re and how did you get to this moment: creating a small utility, applying for a PM role or announcing a $1Bn acquisition.

The same goes for what you create. You might have built a browser extension on a weekend and less than a thousand people use it now. But you can choose how you tell about it.

Assume nothing

Start from the assumption that nobody knows anything about you, your field, or your product. Then you’d have to make the story convincing to anyone. What that means is:

Use facts, not thoughts
Thought-out hypothesis, not blind guesses
Explain things clearly with no buzz words or industry jargon

Yes, on certain occasions you might need to drop names and jargon because that’s how new people accept you into their circle – by understanding that you’re one of them. That’s not all cases.

Too often people hide a lack of understanding behind some hyped terms. If your story (idea, product, etc) makes sense to a 12-year-old, then it’s good for anyone.

Find references

When you don’t know how to do something you either have to talk to someone who can or find a lot of examples of the finished result. Maybe you need to write a job description for the new role at your two-person startup.

Go online and look through dozens and hundreds of examples. Most will likely be bad because people turned it into a cargo cult and think they have to repeat the same words, phrases, and require N years of experience. But the structure itself is helpful. And you might stumble upon things you haven’t even considered.

The same goes for anything: writing your own bio or CV, drafting a pitch to a reporter, or inviting your friends to a party.

Practice

As you tell your story to more and more people you’ll begin noticing some patterns. What they’re interested in. What works and what doesn’t. What words come easily out of your mouth and which ones you always forget.

In order not to waste precious contacts on polishing, start telling about it to people around you. If your friends don’t want to listen to you, why do you think an extremely busy person whose time or resources you need would want?

After some time you don’t even have to think about it. Words just start flying.

Not really convinced

Look, I could say that human beings have been telling each other stories since the earliest times: from gatherings around a fire to books, pamphlets, movies, video games – all of those have been nothing but a medium for our stories. The stories we tell have started religions and empires and created the driving forces of history. From wedding vows to investment decks, everything is enabled by a story behind it.

Maybe this particular story isn’t up to the task of convincing you. Well, I’m still learning.

How to Work With Reporters and Get Publications in Media

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:00:00 +0000

First of all, who am I to tell you about that? I work at Day One Ventures where we invest in startups and help them stand out by leading their communications. I’m on the investment team now but before venture capital, I was doing PR and secured publications on TechCrunch, VentureBeat, CNET and so on. I have a weird background coming from applied science to marketing and communication and then to VC, so I believe I have a more estranged approach that could be helpful to people unfamiliar with PR.

Absurd.design

What is PR

People have a lot of misconceptions about what PR is and isn’t, and it also depends a lot of your own company. If Apple has a new phone to show their approach would be very different. Most companies aren’t Apple and might find this useful.

Basically, you have a news announcement and you pitch it to the relevant reporters so they might write about it on their media websites and more people would learn about it. Almost everything is sales, from hiring an employee to securing investors, and PR isn’t an exception but it has some unique aspects.

In the US market there is far more news happening than there are reporters who can cover them. Every journalist is bombarded by emails from founders and their PR teams – most of those are really low quality but there’s just too many to process. If you’re reaching out to a reporter you’re competing with every single email in their inbox.

Think about what they want and what they need. Their job is to write engaging news and ideally be the first to do it. You can help them sometimes but you need to be thoughtful, not annoying. Have some empathy.

When Do You Need PR

A desire to have your name in a Forbes article or something similar is understandable but is hardly a good reason.

Most companies use PR to attract three specific audiences.

Customers or partners
Venture Capital investors
Prospective candidates

Any pieces you generate might affect all of them but it’s important to start from your existing business goals.

You might get a spike in users from a good article in a relevant media outlet but don’t believe it would become a sustainable growth channel for you. There are exceptions, of course, certain consumer companies rely a lot on a never-ending stream of articles on LifeHacker and similar outlets and benefit a lot from SEO when people have specific problems. Or you might get some B2B leads if you’re working in a niche and got published on some trade publication.

If you want to raise funding, media will likely help you, as long as you get mentioned on Tier-1 outlets: let’s say TechCrunch, Wired, The Verge, Entrepreneur, Fortune, Washington Post, Business Insider – and some others, this list isn’t exhaustive by any means and depends a lot on what you do. Investors might read it, got interested and would try to reach out either cold or through someone in their network. And if they already knew about you, articles might help generate some FOMO to your benefit.

Finally, candidates. It might not be very reasonable, but media publications act as a good validator that you’re a legit company and have enough funds to pay them at least for some time. It also helps when people can show the article to their close people when they explain why they hell are they leaving a good job for your unknown startup.

What is News

First, you need to figure out if you really have news to share. New companies have an advantage as it can be your launch story, maybe even coupled with the funding announcement if you had any. This is a very good foundation but something you can only do once (or say you had a “soft launch” and not you’re open to everyone, well, it’s becoming more of a stretch).

There are other options. The funding announcement on itself is usually pretty strong, ideally if you have at least more than $1M of funding and some more well-known investors. With proper execution you will almost definitely get some publications, the real challenge is getting Tier-1 media and deeper articles.

Other easier options include:

Product launch or updates – but it needs to be quite significant and people tend to overestimate their accomplishments here.
Partnerships with bigger companies – if you can convince them you’d manage it yourself.

But what if you don’t have anything like that? Think about something you can offer to the reporter. You’re building an entire company from the ground up. Are you in expert in some industry? While you were figuring all this out, have you collected some unique data nobody in the industry has? What’s your unique view on it? Even in the US, there aren’t many good reports on multiple industry categories and the situation is much worse in other countries. Maybe you have a self-driving startup and almost accidentally collected data on the road quality throughout the United States.

One option I haven’t mentioned earlier is bylined articles. I won’t dive too much in this, but if you’re an acclaimed expert in some field you might be writing articles for the media that’d be published under your own name. You won’t be able to mention your own company, at least too often, and you will be working with an editor to tune them. It might be helpful on certain occasions, especially when you need to promote your expertise. It’s also different from a ‘Contributor’ status.

Embargo

Let’s say it’s the first time you want to tell the world about your company.

You can either do an embargoed outreach or try to nail an exclusive piece. What is the difference?

An embargo is a verbal agreement to not publish the news until a certain deadline. It allows you to pitch multiple reporters and hopefully get a stream of publications at a certain time. Again, if Apple wants to give reporters the next iPhone to review they can sign an NDA. Your arrangements would be on a handshake at best. Usually, they aren’t breached and you should trust them.

The added sense of urgency and competition between the reporters might help you as they don’t want to spend all that time in vain. The problem is that by default none of the reporters would be that invested into you. The ones working for top media can easily choose what they write about and find a more compelling and unique piece. Another huge issue is that you have to raise interest without sharing the details. If it’s a funding announcement you can’t say how much and what VCs were involved. If it’s about a product you can’t say the specifics.

If you tell the reporter it’s an exclusive piece they might feel motivated to dig deeper and maybe even have a more detailed profile of the company instead. Especially since they don’t have to accept any embargo to understand what the news is about. Of course, they want to write unique articles and not compete in a rat race.

Both strategies are valid and you have to choose wisely. Do you want a single big piece or a set of possible smaller ones on multiple outlets? There’s a real chance you’d miss some you wanted unless you go exclusive. And sometimes you might rely too much on a single person and they might lose interest at the last moment.

How to Prepare

You need to find the relevant reporters. PR firms utilize their existing connections and also have a Cision or Muckrack subscription – databases of reporters, their contacts and interests. But these tools are way too expensive for what they provide and unless you’re a professional PR manager you don’t need them.

You need to find reporters who are potentially interested in your announcement and then you need to find a way to connect with them.

Here are a few simple ways to locate them:

Check the coverage of your competitors or any companies in that particular industry category. Who covered them? Google News is completely up to that task.
Most media websites have a category of staff. Look at their titles and stated interests, open the pages of the ones that might seem relevant and read what they write about.
If your business is around a particular niche look for smaller trade publications with a more narrow focus.

You need to study the journalists:

Ensure they are really relevant to your news. What are their interests and views on the industry?
Check the dates of their last articles. Are they still working there? They might be on a vacation or they might have left this job. In most cases, publishers don’t change anything on their personal pages to highlight it, but if they haven’t written for a couple of months you’d better check their Twitter or LinkedIn to be sure.
What is their role? Sometimes you might find a contributor instead of a staff member. Note that their post aren’t usually promoted on the main page of the publisher’s website by default, also most of them don’t really cover the news. Being a contributor is often like having a personal blog on a nice domain. Try to focus on staff journalists.

When you found the people you believe should be interested you need to write down their contacts. Most journalists prefer to be pitched via email (their professional and not personal email). Usually, they have it listed either on the publisher’s website, likely on their personal page or the staff directory or have it in their Twitter bio. Some are OK with being pitched with DM but you’d be treading on thin ice here. Sometimes there’s a contact form to reach out to them but in my practice, those haven’t been useful at all. P.S. Never call reporters unless you’re asked to by them.

Almost any publisher has a general editorial email like editors@news.all but I’d suggest to only use it in case of some minor or niche websites who are in fact might be handled by just a couple of editors. In all other cases find the people to pitch directly.

There are other services for finding people’s emails except for Cision and Muckrack. I found RocketReach to be nice at times and a much cheaper alternative. At least you can try it without talking over the phone and signing a 12-month contract for $5000 and more.

For an embargoed outreach I’d suggest having at least 40-50 names on the list, preferably up to 100. You might have a backup journalist for each outlet but it wouldn’t be nice to write them simultaneously. Reach out to the backup only if your primary contact passed.

You can use a spreadsheet like this to keep your media list and track the status of each outlet.

How to Pitch

The common knowledge is that you need to write a press release. Not really. This format is only useful in some specific instances and it’s definitely not the best way to pitch a reporter. By the way, pieces like these from real journalists explaining the best method to pitch them are a goldmine.

A press release can be a nice way to formulate your thoughts, approve the necessary parts with the stakeholders (like partners or investors) and then provide to the reporter who is already interested as a text framework.

You need to write a short and engaging pitch.

Don’t use buzzwords. Use data instead or say nothing.
Explain what the news is about, what your company is doing and provide some benchmark so journalists would understand your scale.
Tell how are you different from other solutions and what are your key differentiators. Some people like to say they have no competitors but most of the time this is just stupid. Also, positioning yourself against someone big doesn’t take anything away from you, on the contrary.
Be nice, or the only publication you’d get would be screenshots of the crazy thing you wrote legitimately posted on Twitter.

If the announcement is embargoed you don’t want to give out all the details before the journalist accepted the embargo – yet you still need to provide enough background so they could assess if it’s interesting.

I presume you aren’t a PR person (what are you doing here then?) and pitching your own startup. That actually gives you an advantage. You aren’t just hired to pitch something you know nothing about, this is the company you’re building.

It’s quite difficult to list all the tips, instead please find this imaginary pitch I wrote. I wouldn’t claim it’s perfect but it can give you a structure to use.

Hi Alex,

I enjoyed your coverage on Apple News and its effects on publishers and wanted to ask if you might be interested in the upcoming announcement of the new product from Redd, a news aggregation app that combines open RSS with advanced machine learning to personalize your content.

The announcement is embargoed until January 23, 10am ET. I can share the press release under embargo and answer any questions you may have.

I founded Redd two years ago because Google News wouldn’t add and surface the blogs I cared about while ordinary RSS readers required me to go through every title to feel caught up on news. Now we have over 500,000 active users and are still growing over 10% MoM. The new product offering we are launching is aimed to help busy professionals who have to be informed for their work.

Please let me know if you’d like to set up a call, or if I can answer any questions. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best, Yury

Prepare some images to go along with the announcement: your product’s screenshots and a photo of your team – also have you personal headshot ready just in case. Recall how almost every news piece has one or several images and simplify the work for the reporter that is willing to write about you.

If the reporter writes back and says he or she accepts the embargo, send back a short email with the details you haven’t shared before and maybe add a press release at the bottom. Mention the embargo date and time right in the press release again so it’d be easy for them to avoid any mistakes. Embargoes are often broken due to human error and not malice. But never send the materials if the journalist hasn’t accepted it – then they are in their right to write about it.

You will likely need to follow-up with the most if not all of your contacts. It’s a sensitive topic – journalists get dozens of pitches a day and might get annoyed. But sometimes they truly miss your email. My first TechCrunch publication happened very quickly after the third follow-up I sent. But you probably shouldn’t follow-up more than three times. And wait a few days between these reminders. If you haven’t used all your opportunities to follow-up fill free to send all the materials even to the reporters who haven’t replied at the moment of the embargo. Somebody may get interested in the last minute.

Sometimes you’d get “Passed” emails. Since reporters are very busy, most might not even reply to you, so it’s hard to understand if they passed or just missed it. I presume you’d be using mail tracking (won’t dive into that) so if you see they saw the message – stop bugging them.

A few items that should be obvious but sometimes aren’t:

If you’re pitching the launch of a brand new product ensure that it’s not out there in the wild along with the post in your company’s blog. The same goes for practically any other announcement.
Check that all the links are good and your website won’t be down during the pitching. If people can’t check it out right away it’s very easy for them to move on.

Hopefully, you’ll get some interested journalists. They might reach out to ask additional questions, request a unique quote or even set up a 30-60 minutes call to talk to you directly. Respond as soon as you can. If they come through a personal interview the chances they’ll write are usually quite high unless they got noticeably uninspired during your call. In some cases, they’d need to pitch the story to their editor who might be the one to pass on it as well.

Set up a Google News alert and hope for the best. Again, there are specialized tools that could catch more mentions if you end up having a big announcement but Google will have the core ones you need to care about.