Geoff Ralston:
Now we have Kat, with Craig later, to talk about PR and content for growth. Thanks.
Kat Manalac:
Thank you, Jeff.
Geoff Ralston:
I already introduced you.
Kat Manalac:
Okay, cool. Hi, everyone, I'm Kat Mañalac. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. During my time at YC I've helped hundreds of companies with their launches, with their pitches, with their initial interactions with press. I'm going to be joined Craig Cannon who creates a lot of the content for YC. We're going to be giving you a framework for thinking about content marketing and press as an early stage founder. Before we jump in let's define some terms. When we talk about content we're talking about anything that you create and distribute on your own channels to attract a specific audience or user, so that means anything you make for your blog, YouTube, podcasts, anything that you create and distribute yourself. When we talk about PR or press we're referring to an early stage start-up pitching and independent third party publication, so if it's news, blogs, anything that's external to your channels. As a founder it's one of your primary jobs to tell the story of your start-up. You'll need to tell that story to investors, to press, to users, to potential employees, and you'll need to tell that story throughout the entire lifetime of your company so it's best to start practicing early. You will need to tell it clearly and succinctly because the goal is to tell it in a way where it makes it easy for other people to repeat that story for you and help you spread the word. That's how anything becomes viral. Making good content lets you shape that story and put it out into the world yourself, and then pitching it to press helps you put that story in front of a potentially much larger audience. The combination of the two can be really powerful, but making good content and setting up a press practice is a lot of work, so you have to decide and hopefully I'll help you go through that decision tree whether it's worth doing at the stage where you're at right now. We will cover when and why to start thinking about doing content marketing, how to think about content like a product and how to measure it, how to DIY your own PR, and then we'll open it up to questions. A couple things before we get started. First, for the majority of you, before you focus too much time and energy getting the word out about what you're building, make sure that you're making something people want. Make sure you're focusing on the right things. It all comes back to this, writing code, and talking to users. No amount of press or content marketing is going to help you if you don't have something people want. How do you know that you have something people want? You talk to your users. Additionally, talking to your users will make it easier for you to create better content, and do press that will target them. Second, press is not a scalable user acquisition strategy, it can help you get some early inbound, it can help get you in front of early adopters, but it's not something you can rely on long term for growth. It's not something you can really control, and it's not even the best way to talk to your earliest users, which is why we're gonna talk about content, and content marketing first, and I will let Craig kick it off here.
Craig Cannon:
All right, hey. Hey everyone, I'm Craig, I work with Kat at YC, do a podcast and all that kinda stuff. All right, so I ... Before working at YC I worked at a place called The Onion. We made fake news before it was cool. I did the Photoshop ... So, putting Joe Biden's head on a fat guys body in front of the White House, that kind of thing. Then after working at The Onion I co-founded a company and we made a thing called Comedy Hack Day where developers and comedians work together to make funny apps, and then we had these big events. Alexis judged a bunch of them. Now, I work at YC, so hopefully that's the least logical connection of things in this deck. Today I'm gonna talk about content, content marketing. Some people call it content marketing, some people call it editorial, some other people call it brand publishing, some people call it social content, and them some other people call it a word I don't know, but like Kat said, this is just basically everything you make. So, it's gonna be your podcast, YouTube, blog, video, social stuff, whatever. We can get more specific and granular about each of those channels if you want to talk one on one, but this is gonna be kind of broad, across the board advice, that hopefully you can use. So, the number one question I get is, when to start? Really, the thing is, just like Kat said, and just like Gustav said last week about applying growth tactics, you really want to be doing this after you've made something people want, and you're confident that their not churning, 'cause if they're churning, you're just wasting a ton of energy, and a ton of money. So, assuming you've hit that point, you can start thinking about content marketing. A lot of people do this in the beginning because they can't afford paid acquisition. The way I think about it is the content as product. Hopefully you can just apply all the learnings from the lectures earlier on about product, and just throw them right at content. So, when you think about content as product the only thing you have to change from the YC advice of make something people want, is make something your customers want. You're no longer bounded by nothing. You have this very clear market that you're going after, and you want to make something that they're interested in. I was talking with Wade Foster from Zapier, they do a ton of content marketing, it's really good, and they write about it on their blog, you can check it out ... Oh sweet, all right cool, thanks man. What he was saying was that in the early days what they were doing was making things that Hacker News wanted, but it turns out that Hacker News and their customers was not a 100% overlap, so they were spending all of this energy generating this content to get people through the door, but those weren't actually the customers that they were looking for. So, just keep that in mind. Now that you've committed to doing content marketing you're going to do this. What you need to do is pick a goal. So, there are basically two things that early stage companies want. Engagement. If you're a social company ... That's like Instagram, whatever, those time on site ... Anyone else, it's gonna be conversions. There's this third thing called "brand", which is kind of like this vague misty thing about how people perceive you, you really don't need to worry about this early on. I mean, obviously you don't want to do evil things and have people hate you, but it's much harder to comprehend and work towards. So, engagement or conversions. Now that you're going, you want to just set up analytics. Sue Hale talked about this, but really it's super basic stuff. The first thing I would do is set up Mixpanel, not Google Analytics, but something similar to Mixpanel will get the job done. You're just tracking where people are coming in, what they're doing, what they're clicking on, how long they're on the site, all that stuff. Then the next thing you want to do is install a Facebook pixel, again, this might not be super valuable to you in the beginning, but a lot of YC companies launch without a Facebook pixel, and what this is gonna do is capture who's hitting your site who's logged into Facebook, so that you can later re-market at them. This is gonna be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create. So, you want to do this, because if you launch on Hacker News and have 10,000 people hit your site, and you don't have it installed, you won't know who it is afterward. All right, so the next most common question I get is, what platform? This one's actually not that difficult. You just want to find your customers. So, you just talk to them, be like, "Where do you hang out? Do you hang out on Reddit, Instagram, whatever?" You can look at your referred data, but this is really all you have to do, because your objective is to find people like them, and then once you're hanging out there long enough you're gonna be able to figure out what does well there. For instance, essays ... Like, Paul Grahams essays, they do well on Hacker News. Make-up tutorials do well on YouTube, vlogging, all that kind of stuff, because you're gonna want to make the stuff that does well on those platforms. This is for two reasons. Distribution is really hard even for huge companies. A lot of companies just rely on paid acquisitions, like boosted posts on Facebook, that kind of thing, and you have no money. So, assuming these two things are true you have to figure out where your customers are, and you have to figure out what does well there. Two examples. So, Scentbird, they're a YC company. They do perfume and make-up subscription box, they do Instagram influencer marketing, you can read all about this online, they blogged about it a bunch. Another example is YC. So YC, although PG, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor might not say this, has been doing content marketing since the very beginning, even before, so with Paul's essays, and then Hacker News was built, and then those essays do really well, and that's the exact kind of audience that would create a start-up. They just kinda rinse and repeat. All right, so now that you found out where you're gonna go and generally what you want to be making, I think not enough people spend enough time brainstorming. Sounds kinda silly, but most content, because people don't spend enough time brainstorming, ends up being derivative of the average of all the other stuff people see, so it doesn't stand out, and it looks like all the other stuff, because you got the ideas from the other people whose blogs you're reading, or your competitors, whatever. My example of this is going back to The Onion. The Onion's been around for 30 years, maybe more at this point, and they've had hundreds of people work there. This is how The Onion picks headlines, and I think it's particularity important, because it's allowed them to create consistently good stuff with a lot of different people over a long period of time. The way The Onion picks headlines, is they have say 10 writers, each writer is responsible for 10 to 15 headlines a week, and then they email those headlines to an editor, the editor removes everyone's name, and then they just pick their favorite as a group. So, the objective is to have only 5% to 10% roughly survive. What this is really good at is, first of all, it removes biases for like who's the CEO, who's the new guy or girl, whatever, and it also gets you past the point of those first three ideas, which are kind of the same from everyone. This is a huge problem, and if you go on just any average company blog they're all writing about the same stuff. So, it's a huge mistake, I think The Onion got it right. There's This American Life about it if you want to learn more. That's how you get this. This is one of my favorite ever. It's before my time, but it's so good. Oh, man. All right. Can we just stay here for the rest of this? No, I'm just kidding. All right, so now you want to make something good. Again, this is dumb stuff that should be self evident, but I don't know it doesn't seem to be based on the internet. What does that mean? That means dedicating real time. So, to break down what I talked about before, maybe that's an hour a week, or every two weeks brainstorming, and then ... It could take you a whole day, it could take you two days, it could take you three days to write a blog post. Maybe in the early days you can't do that, but you should let that amount of time dictate how often you can put stuff out, rather than go the other way, and be like, shit I have to get a thing out every week, and then you write a post in 10 minutes, and it's garbage. So, you're just wasting your time. You also want to dedicate good people.Thats not to say that you're hiring bad people, but what it's saying is that you want to dedicate the people who have actual domain expertise, and can lend something that's interesting to the rest of the world. That means usually a co-founder, a lead developer, that kind of things. Just two other little things from the media world, you need to be prepared to edit all the time. Just really be precise about your language, 'cause people don't spend that much time on your site, or your video, or whatever. You need to be prepared to kill a lot of your work, and that really sucks, but you have to do it. Like I said, at The Onion, most headlines, by definition, would not make it through. I think for a company that's really hard to do, but you can easily kill 25% of your stuff. This is ... I want to illustrate why this is important. Most people think that they're competing with people that make the same stuff that they make. That is 100% not true. You are competing with this. Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast. I haven't checked the views, but I think it's probably like 10 million now, and this was like a two or three hour podcast. This is the internet. You're competing with this guy. You're competing with porn. You're competing with everything else on the internet, and once you really let that sink into your brain, you will have the motivation to make something that's both valuable, and engaging. Oh man, that was a good podcast too. All right, then the next thing, this is the part that's really hard for me, is promotion. Promotion is both incredibly boring, and totally necessary. This means sharing articles out over and over on your Twitter feed, figuring out new different creative ways to do it. A lot of people will tell you to make a version for each platform. You can do this, but again, you're gonna be optimizing for one place where your customers are. YC, so now I clip up the podcast and put it on Instagram, and that's cool, but we're still get way more podcast downloads than we are getting Instagram views. That's just how it goes. Not everything's gonna work everywhere. I'm putting this slide in here twice, because if I were watching this talk this would be the thing that id be like, "Oh yeah man, I got it don't worry about it.", and then I would skip over it, and then I would have played myself because I'm dumb and lazy, and I would not promote it enough ... And Ice-T is awesome. All right, so just really quickly I'm gonna rip through a couple examples. So, Gustav talked about this one last week. SEO, Airbnb made a bunch of city guides, so these are both super useful, they get you on the site, you can hit someone with a Facebook pixel, you can get your brand in there, and then you can convert. This is such a dream for them. Influencer. Scentbird. Influencer marketing. If you Google those two words you'll read a bunch blog posts about that. Customer profiles. So, Zapier who I mentioned earlier, they help non-technical people work with API's by doing all these integrations for them. What's particularly cool about this is that they are always finding new and creative ways to link stuff together. The customers want to talk about themselves, and they do it over text. Text interviews are a total cheat code for young companies, because they require way less production than video or audio, the internet really likes it for SEO, for scraping, and it makes the person look really smart. We've done some of these at YC, time over time the person wants to promote more than they do than when they see themselves in a video, and they feel weird. So, that's an easy thing to do. Industry advice is another great one. So, Triplebyte helps companies hire engineers, Intercom is that little chat widget you've probably seen before, Des Traynor at Intercom writes about product and content marketing, those are great essays. Triplebyte Hardge who used to be at YC writes about hiring engineers. These are all great posts with the one caveat being that you have to really know what you're talking about or this just won't ring true. Next thing, tools. Front, this is a YC company, they made a website called Good Email Copy, or something like that where Matil just pulled together her favorite lines from emails, and then tagged things, so like, "Onboarding, we're shutting the company down." All kinds of fairly templated emails, and you can go on there and check them all out. If you have extra engineering time, these can be super effective. Community. Both Hacker News and Product Hunt were built out from YC entities, but just getting good at engaging with your community on HN in Product Hunt is really undervalued. If you're someone who is known as a good actor on these sites, and engages with people, and is cool, that's worth your time. Not saying just lurk and comment on everything, but just know how it works, if that's where your customers are. The last thing, and this is not exhaustive at all, but these are just some examples, publishing. So, Stripe is now making books. 37 Signals, Base Camp, they make books too. This is super powerful in terms of your influencer status, but really, really hard to track. So, this would be later down the road, but it is effective, and because it's hard most people aren't gonna do it, so you can really stand out. So, that's it. Kat's gonna up to talk about press.
Kat Manalac:
All right, so let's jump back into press. So, why? As I mentioned it's not a scalable user acquisition, but it can get you some early adopting users, it can give you your investors, or potential employees a heads up that you exist, and it can help with SEO. A lot of people ask when do ... When should I start thinking about press? So, ideally you will have a sense that you're making something people want, as we said, so for most startups it's worth waiting to pitch until there's a call to action for your intended audience. So, is there a product that they can try, or buy, or something they can sign up for. Most companies who go through YC wait until they have a launched product and some very early users before they bother pitching to press. There are some exceptions. There are companies that do press pre-product if there's something particularly novel about the ... Or notable about the company. This is especially true if you're working on a bio company, or something in the hard sciences that will take you a long time before you get to product, and there are other companies that wait years before they do press. One thing to note is that most media outlets don't cover very early stage startups anymore. You shouldn't waste their time with a non-story. Think about what you're pitching objectively. Why should they care about this, and why now? That's one reason why a lot of startups will, the first time they pitch press will be to announce a fundraising round, because that's timely news, and that's why you see a lot of those fundraising announcements. It's just an opportunity, a timely opportunity to pitch. We'll talk about ... I'll go through a check list of things that you should prepare when you are pitching press, and the mechanics of how to do it, but first a quick word on PR firms. Don't hire them. At the stage that you're at PR firms are way too expensive. Typically you have to keep them on a monthly retainer, and most companies even through seeds Series A they don't have the budget for that. So, the thing is that your relationships that you build now with press will hopefully, it's similar to investors, last throughout the entire life cycle of your company, so you want to do that work early. You shouldn't bother thinking about hiring a firm or someone in house until you have more funding, and so much inbound that the founders can't deal with it themselves. One thing that PR people ... So, PR people, a lot of people think, "Oh, if I hire someone to do PR they'll magically think of all the most interesting stories that I can pitch." Well, that's not the case. The most interesting stories are gonna come from you, the founders. You know your company better than anyone else. So, what PR firms do have is connections to reporters, but you can build those yourself, and here's how we think about it. We treat PR like business development. So, like BD or sales, which you wouldn't outsource early in your company's life, you shouldn't outsource pitching to press in the very early stages of your company. As I said, these are relationships that you should build now, and will hopefully have for years to come. When you think about how to do this, we can talk about what you need to do to DIY your own PR essentially. So, we will walk through that now. A couple things that I recommend any company do is ... And people ask me, how much time should I be spending on this? Here's some recommended prep work. I think you can spend at least 30 minutes per week reading about the news in your industry. Keep a list of publications that cover your space, a list of media outlets that your users read, and a list of specific reporters who are interested in your vertical. If you don't know which outlets to track or to read talk to your users, and ask them what they read, and what they're interested in. Then I think that if you decide you want to try pitching to press, I think about it in three to six month increments of time. So, you can build a calendar. You can spend half an hour once a month thinking about what milestones are coming up that you're gonna hit, what announcements you might have, and map them out. So, here's an example using a start up school company in this batch. They're called Orby. Orby is building flying robots that help retail with inventory tracking and surveillance. For example, in January assuming they raise a seed fund they might want to announce their seed fundraising with the intended audience of being engineers. Then in March, or example, they may want to pitch a trend data story targeted at CTO's that talks about how AI is lifting up brick and mortar retail sales. So, it's just good to do these brainstorming exercises similar to what Craig talked about in the content space for potential stories that you can pitch externally to press. Once you've decided you want to pitch a story, the first thing to do is to define your goals and your audience. That will help you determine everything else. Who you want to pitch, the exact story you want to pitch, and how to measure its success. Once you know who your audience is you have to draft three things. A one sentence pitch, a three to five sentence pitch, and answers to frequently asked questions. So, questions that are frequently asked by reporters to early stage startup. Let's dig into each one of these things. A one sentence pitch should go over two things, what you're building, and who you're building it for. You should be able to say this in jargon free terms that anyone can understand and repeat. Here are a couple of examples of startup school companies who I think had pretty strong one sentence pitches coming in. So, Orby who I mentioned before, flying robots that help businesses monitor inventory and do surveillance. It's so clear and straight forward that I remembered it just off the top of my head when I was describing them earlier. You want anyone to be able to do that for your company. The second one is another startup school company, The Box Company. They're building smart eco friendly boxes for food delivery. So, you know what they're building, and who they're building it for. For both of these examples, and for probably all of your companies, a one sentence pitch isn't going to capture everything that you're doing, but you don't have to communicate that in a one sentence pitch. Just make it really clear and compelling enough that people followup with questions, and you want them to ask you questions that will let you give them more context. Next is the three sentence pitch. With a three to five sentence pitch you can give us that context, you can give us more of the story. You should talk not only about what your company does, and who the customer is, but why it's better than what's currently in the market. Also, if there's anything really notable about the founders, or the story, or the market, make sure to put that in there. Usually when we are pitching companies at YC, when we're pitching to press about their launches or fundraising, this is the pitch that we send to reporters. Let's go through two examples for Orby, and The Box Company. "Orby is building flying robots that help businesses monitor inventory, and do surveillance. The robots were designed with safety in mind, and are outfitted with lightweight vision sensors that let them navigate autonomously alongside retail or warehouse employees. Orby can save employees hours of manual work per shift so they can spend more time doing things that matter, like serving and helping customers. The company's currently in pilot talks with major U.S. Retailers." So, we covered what they do, who they're building it for, and why they're better than what's currently in the market. When I talked to the Orby founders they said what makes us special is these are very lightweight, and they're very safe so that they can fly around indoors, alongside humans and really help them. We also tease the fact that they are in talks with big retailers, so that's something that might pique someones interest, or a reporters interest. Second is The Box Company. "They are building smart eco friendly boxes for food delivery.", and then you can talk a little bit about the market. "The food delivery market is on the rise. It's predicted to grow 79% by 2020.", and then you can talk about the problem, "but it's still difficult to order food, to order delivery and get the same quality you would get in a restaurant. Additionally, packaging is often non-recyclable, and non-compostable which creates an enormous waste problem." Then you talk about their solution. "The Box Company is solving these issues with a patented box that improves the entire delivery process." Then you can talk a little bit about the units, that "they're stackable, easy to assemble, they solve the soggy, sloppy food problem," and then if you have specific ... So, say they have a customer they might want to put that in. Talk a little bit about their progress, but here again, you have a little bit more context, you can show how big of a problem it is, and how they're solving it. So now you have this. I think it's best for you and your co-founders to draft the answers to frequently asked questions that reporters ask. I talked to many reporters, and one of them sent me this list, and while she was at ... Laura Kolodny, while she was at the Wall Street Journal she said, "These are the questions that I ask all early stage startups and expect them to know how to answer." I won't go through every single one of these now, but you can take a photo of it, or reference it later. These are ... It's best to draft really succinct answers to these. One piece of advice I have is that it's great to practice. It's great to practice your succinct answers, but I wouldn't over-rehearse, because you don't want to sound like a marketing robot with everything memorized, you don't want to have these memorized answers that you use in every context. What I typically tell founders to do is have answers to all those questions, then what I recommend doing before talking to press is bullet pointing the three to five points that you want to make sure to talk about in an interview, and then let the rest of the answers to questions flow organically. It's good to practice, but don't over-rehearse. Let's talk now about how to pitch to press, what the mechanics are. Now that you've done this prep work, now that you're ready, I will dig into each one of these. So, picking your moment. The big question is, why now? Tech Crunch back when they first started covered pretty much every single company that launched because there were like, one startup every two weeks would launch in the early 2000s, but now they get 10's if not 100's of pitches per day. So, you have to think about what's your news hook? If you have news like a fundraising round that sort of makes it easy, or if you can show that you're part of a trend or a current news story that might be what makes it easier for you to get a response. The example for Orby, they can say, "Orby, we're a flying robot company, and we're giving brick and mortar retails a fighting chance against Amazon." So, everyone's talking about it's all retail against Amazon these days, so if you can plug yourself into a trend piece like that, that makes it easier. Another thing to think about around timing is that if there's a big news event happening that week, don't pitch your story. So, if you're reaching out to Tech Crunch during Tech Crunch disrupt you'd be crazy lucky to get a response from them, or if you're pitching a report who covers Apple, don't hit them up during WWDC. Your chances of getting a response decrease immensely. So now after you are picking your moment, you have your news hook, you know what you want to pitch, you can pick your target. This is easy because you think who is your audience, what are my goals, think about what they read. I would stack rank a list of your top three choices. So, have ... These are the three publications that I would most like to cover my news. Be realistic. Realistically the New York Times isn't going to cover a newly born company, as much as I would love them to. I would look at who is actually covering startups at your stage and in your vertical, and add those as your first three choices. Then, basically I would recommend giving an exclusive to your first choice. An exclusive is when you pitch your story to just one reporter, and if they agree to pick it up you don't give anyone else a briefing, or a heads up until that reporter publishes their story. A lot of people ask why an exclusive versus giving a lot of different reporters a heads up on the news. So, the reason is, a reporter is more likely to pick up your story and write it if they can get an exclusive, if they can break the news, if they can get that scoop. So, I recommend offering that one publication an exclusive, and once you're a bigger company, and more of a household name, or you're bigger, let's say fundraising Series A+ news, or huge hires, then you can think more about briefing multiple reporters at once, but early stage for the vast majority of YC companies, and anyone pre YC I always recommend exclusives first. So, now that you know who your target is, that you want to offer them an exclusive, how do you get in touch with that reporter? The best way to get in touch with reporters is through warm introductions, just like business development. The best way to get an answer from someone is to get a personal introduction to that reporter. Cold emailing will get you, maybe if you're lucky, a one in 10 response, and warm introductions will get at least half the time you'll get someone to respond to you. What I would do is create that stack rank list, here are the top three choices, reporters you'd want to reach out to. If I were Orby, for example, I might want to hit up Laura Kolodny at CNBC, she covers drones and flying industrial robots. I would then ask my network, everyone I know on Facebook, any other founders I knew, would you be willing to ... Does anyone know Laura? Has she covered anyone in my network? Would you be willing to give me a warm introduction? I see founders often ask each other for warm introductions to press, and so that's for them, the easiest way, and often. Assuming you find that person to give you an intro make it as easy as possible for them to introduce you. I would draft the email for them. This is what a draft email might look like. They should be no longer than this. Anything longer than two short paragraphs, a reporter, anyone really, their eyes will glaze over. Draft that warm intro email for your friend, and hopefully you have a better chance of getting a response from that reporter. Finally, I would say give it time. I often get requests from founders saying, "Oh, can you help me out? I need this to be done tomorrow. I want to launch on Wednesday." That just isn't going to happen. Ideally work your way back. Say, you want to announce something two or three weeks from now. Give it at the very least two weeks for the whole process of warm introductions, then making ... Meeting with that reporter, and then having the piece come out. Two weeks is the absolutely minimum time I would give it. And then ... What things ... What not to do once you are in touch with a reporter, and some of these sound pretty obvious, and I don't believe any of you would ever do these things. One is, don't lie. Don't fudge your numbers. Don't say you can do things that you can't. We've seen some very public instances in the press of things like that happening. Those stories will always come back and haunt you. I've seen it time and again. Second, don't act like you're entitled to a story. If you get in touch with a reporter feel free to followup if they go silent, followup once or twice very politely, but don't ... I've seem some founders who followup every single day for weeks, and it's just ... That's crazy. Don't do that, because then that reporter will write you off, and you won't have that relationship long term. Don't suggest headlines, or copy. This is the reporters job to do, and they see it ... I've seen people get offended by founders suggesting specific headlines. Don't ask to see a draft. We've worked with a lot of folks that come from the life sciences, and bio and they're surprised by this one, because they're used to peer review journals, but the thing is, reporters get incredibly offended. They think you're questioning their journalistic integrity if you ask to see what they're writing before they publish it. So, don't ask to see a draft. I mean, there are certain cases where sometimes they need to fact check something so they'll show you something ahead of time, but let them make that ask of you. Finally, as I mentioned, don't speak like a marketing robot, just talk like a human, know your numbers, know the answers to the questions, but don't worry about having everything super memorized, and so if everything goes well, and you have a piece that is published, as Craig says don't be lazy, take the time to promote it. You have social media channels, promote it on all your own channels, and if you have an email list of investors, or friends, shoot them a note saying, "Hey, good news, we were in Tech Crunch.", and I would draft a Tweet for them. When folks draft Tweets for me to send out I'm much more likely to just copy and paste and help them promote it. Promote the story, don't be afraid to ask friends and family, put it on all the socials, and then plan B, if it turns out no one wants to run your story, it's not a big deal. It's not gonna make or break you, so post it on your own channels, and put it through the whole content process. I think it's a reasonably good practice to do that, and then think about after you go through this whole process, was it worth it? Did it help ... Did the piece that came out in Tech Crunch, or Wall Street journal, or Bloomberg, actually help you achieve the goal that you set for it? Did you get new users on your platform? Did you get potential investors inbound? Did it actually help you achieve what you set out to achieve? So, that is the entire process, and we'll just open it up to Q&A if anyone has any questions. Craig, you want to come back up here? All right, yeah.
Male 1:
If journalists are already reaching out to you, and you don't really have a product market [fit] and you're really focused on product at the moment, should we spend any time engaging with them, or should you just focus on the product market fit of it?
Kat Manalac:
So, the question, if journalists are proactively reaching out to you and are interested in writing about, but you don't have ... You're really early, and don't have product market fit, what can you ... Should you spend any time engaging them? You know frankly, I ... It can ... It does help to have that relationship, and if there's a way you can be helpful, you're like ... Reasonably quickly, "Oh you have a question about this vertical, or this industry, I'm happy to answer, but I wouldn't then spend a huge amount of time pitching your story, but just say, "I'd love to keep you posted on our progress.", and then check in with them regularly, or when you have news, but I think it is good to be helpful early on.
Male 2:
If your first content marketing approach is [inaudible] blog, would you recommend for anything as a personal blog, or as a [inaudible] link to your company product, or would you straight up [inaudible] ?
Craig Cannon:
Well, what are you gonna write about?
Kat Manalac:
Repeat the question.
Craig Cannon:
Oh, right yeah sorry. If you are just starting out in content marketing, you're debating whether to do a personal blog or a company blog. My question to you would be, are you writing just about company stuff?
Male 2:
Well, I would be targeting [inaudible] long, target software engineers [inaudible] .
Craig Cannon:
Okay, so one thing that's really effective, is doing it like "title of blog, by so and so." You see this with a lot of podcasts, it's like whatever the podcast name ... I mean, Joe Rogan is a good example, but that's not a company thing. People connect with other humans so having that little extra touch is nice, but I would say overall you're gonna want it on your own site for SEO. Yeah, I kinda disagree with people putting stuff on medium and stuff early on.
Kat Manalac:
Yeah, I've seen it works really well when you have a company blog like Stripe has their company blog, but then they have specific authors for each blog post, and people really like connecting with that human.
Male 3:
How do you feel about working with influencers who don't necessarily, or don't have a need for your product at the time. Our company is based around moving, so if an influencer is not currently moving, how would you feel about working with them to promote your company?
Kat Manalac:
The question is how do you feel about working with influencers who don't need your product at the time? I haven't seen cases like that that have worked out really well, especially for each stage, and I think a big problem is that influencers often charge you, and are expensive. If you get some huge influencer who just loves what you're doing and wants to Tweet about you, and that's great, but more often than not they're gonna charge you, and it's not worth ... The conversion's not gonna be worth it, especially if they're just generally talking about you versus answering a real need for themselves.
Craig Cannon:
But this is totally something you can test, kinda like what Kat's saying, I wouldn't bet the farm on something like this, be like, "Oh man, for $100,000 we can get in on this thing." I would skip that, but I mean, at scale it ends up working. I heard Casey Neistat, this vlogger, is responsible for an insane amount of Boosted Board sales, and I'm pretty sure they don't pay him anything. So, it does work.
Kat Manalac:
I've seen folks often ... Folks with hardware, like physical product, will send samples or demo pieces to press or influencers, and that's sometimes enough. Like, Casey Neistat loves Boosted Boards so he organically talks about it, and that's great, but having to pay those influencers is not usually worth it early on.
Woman 1:
With the three to five sentence examples that you gave for Orby, and the other company, how much of that is what they're actually doing today versus what they want to be growing toward? Somewhere in that fuzzy line between promotion and lying ... How do you draw that balance?
Kat Manalac:
So, the question is, with the three to five sentence example how much of it is vision for the future, and what they hope to do, versus what they're doing today? I think it's ... I think you can sort of ... There is a fine line, as you said, I think it's possible to communicate both, you can say this is the vision, and today they're doing X, and so for Orby, in Orby's case I think they have prototypes they have pieces that can do that theoretically, but they ... Or at this point when they would be pitching, but they can add a line in there about if there is a bigger vision for the company that they hope to achieve, you can definitely drop it in there, but I think it's best for people to know where you're at right now.
Male 4:
This one's for Craig, I think the click bait versus authenticity, so that example of Elon Musk is great, because the headline was Elon Musk Smokes Weed, that was really awesome stuff in their podcast, and it was authentic, but how do you ... We've got a lot of great content that's really expert level, and we're at that level of what ... Do we want to do some catchy titles, 'cause that's gonna bringing in the audience. What's your view on this? How do you ... How should we balance this, because you can't get the order if you don't have some sort of headline?
Craig Cannon:
I would say ... So, the question is like, make click bait, the assumption is we have good content, we're not getting a lot of traffic, we're debating whether to title it something straight, or give it some click bait headline to hopefully get people in, right?
Male 4:
Right.
Craig Cannon:
So, I'm generally not for that. The thing that bothers me more than click bait headlines, are really shitty stock photos. I think that's a red flag more than anything on a blog, so definitely skip those. This is something you can test, but back to that Zapier point, if you know where your customers are, and know what they really want, you should be able to title it in a way that will get them to respond. If you're going for giant mass appeal, you might have to do that, but I've never had success doing click bait stuff, and getting good results.
Male 4:
The Onion?
Craig Cannon:
The Onion, yeah-
Kat Manalac:
Depends on what the product is.
Craig Cannon:
That's the objective right? It's not click bait, technically-
Male 4:
Well, it's ... Yeah, I know, it's ... Yeah.
Craig Cannon:
If the question is, should you make a good headline or a shitty headline? You should make a good headline.
Male 5:
Hi, during the product marketing fit, the early stage, how often should the founders publish content? Every week? Every two weeks?
Kat Manalac:
How often should founders publish content during the phase where you're trying to hit product market fit still?
Craig Cannon:
Before product market fit.
Kat Manalac:
But prior to it.
Male 5:
During that stage, that [inaudible] stage basically, you are talking to your customers, [inaudible] something?
Kat Manalac:
That's tough, I mean, as you were saying it does take time to create good content, so I don't want to say you should do something every week, because then that's putting that might be unrealistic for a team of two, but-
Craig Cannon:
I mean, I would say if you could make something actually good every month, you're doing great.
Kat Manalac:
Yeah, and I mean, I think a lot of ... It takes companies a good amount of time to really find product market fits. You can start earlier than ... prior to hitting product market fit.
Craig Cannon:
Yeah, it's ... Just to keep going, it's all relative to also the amount of value that you give with the piece. A lot of these decks, like the Mary Meeker deck, that happens once a year, and then tons of people, like millions of people will download this thing, but if you're gonna just write a four paragraph blog post, you probably have to publish a little bit more frequently.
Male 6:
[inaudible] , if you don't have product market fit should you just not write content unless it's [inaudible] ?
Craig Cannon:
Oh, yeah ... So, if you don't have product market fit should you not write anything? I mean, it can be helpful to build your own brand, but I think yeah, in general, like I said in the talk, you're just funneling traffic towards something that's not gonna convert.
Male 7:
I was wondering, can you go over some of the dangers of celebrity endorsements and star powers, basically if you've got somebody that's really gung ho about boosting your product, and they have a huge audience, what are things you should avoid with that?
Kat Manalac:
So, the question is, if you have a celebrity that's really gung ho about your product, and wants to boost and talk about it, what are the potential downsides? You know, if the alt right or something decides they want ... You know, that's happened, right, so it's like, I mean there are definite downsides, I don't think that ... it's not something I would worry too much about. I think the vast majority of companies don't have this problem. I mean, it's sort of like ... But yeah, I think ... He's like, in general it's a good problem if you have people who are so excited about what you're building. I mean, if in the case of, I think it was New Balance or something where the alt right was like, "We love New Balance.", New Balance had to come out and say, "We don't endorse what they're saying." So, I think ... But this is such an uncommon problem that I don't think you have to worry about it early on.
Male 7:
So it's more like if there's a catastrophe just exploit the PR out of it?
Kat Manalac:
Yeah, I mean, it's like, if there's a catastrophe then have ... I would say your founding team should be ready with a response for that, and get out there.
Craig Cannon:
And also, I agree 100% with Kat, but if you're getting a celebrity on board just because they are inflammatory, like if you thought Alex Jones was the best representation of your brand, and you weren't prepared for the shit show that was gonna come, that's kind of on you.
Kat Manalac:
Yes.
Male 8:
[inaudible] ... Just curious, I mean, how often should we send updates, or should we send updates to the press if we have their contacts or and they have reached out, should we regularly communicate on the developments on the product?
Kat Manalac:
Typically ... For the vast majority, once ... Sorry, oh yes. Repeating the question, how often should you send updates to reporters about your product and the progress that you're making? So, I would say that they don't generally want to hear every update you have about your product, or that kind of progress. If you have news they certainly want to hear that. If there's something you want to announce, and even ... I would give them the chance to say no, that they're not interested. It's worth it if you have news reaching out. There are some cases where for example YC at this point because we've been around a while, a lot of reporters ask to be added to our email list, or a press list, and in those cases you can send things out more regularly, but I wouldn't blast reporters every month with your company updates.
Geoff Ralston:
Okay you guys we'll take 1 more question.
Speaker 13:
I actually have a comment. I work in marketing, so I just wanted to share some tips that I've learned. One is-
Kat Manalac:
Here wait, let me give this to you.
Speaker 13:
Thank you. Hi. So, what I've learned over the years is one, journalists live on Twitter, so that's the perfect place, I mean if you're building your product, you should look at which journalist, which publication you want to cover you later, and Twitter is the right place for you to engage with them. They're super responsive, it works amazingly well. Apart from that, there's this tool call HeRo, which is Helper Reporter, it's just ... That's where journalists send out ... If they're writing a story, and they need help, and it could be anything from bio tech, to machine learning, to healthcare, to anything, and they send out these emails about what they're looking for, so if that's your passion, if you're an expert in any of those things, you can just ... you don't have to pitch your product, you can just say, "Okay, I'm an expert in XYZ, this is what I think about this topic.", and that reporter is going to be grateful, and you can build relationships like that.
Kat Manalac:
Yeah, thank you. That's great.
Craig Cannon:
It's good advice.
Kat Manalac:
All right.
Craig Cannon:
Thank you.
Kat Manalac:
Thank you so much. If you have any questions for us, we're just Kat, K-A-T at Y Combinator-
Craig Cannon:
And Craig, C-R-A-I-G at ycombinator.com ... We're reading this on a video right now, craig@ycombinator.com.
Kat Manalac:
Woops.
Craig Cannon:
All right.
Kat Manalac:
Bye.
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