Jason Feifer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Oh, wow. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. And I don't even know where they get it from. But I don't like it. And media people are torn on whether or not DMs by social are an okay way to reach out. I find them kind of annoying. Because, number one, the format doesn't lend itself very well, right? If you write anything wrong in a DM, it just looks like this endless thing that I got. But also, I don't know, my Instagram DMs, I just kind of don't think of as the place to be pitched. But other people don't care. So I don't know, you can roll the dice on that. Email is just the most traditional way. If you know somebody's going to be speaking at a conference, that's great, come up, you can talk to them. But the question of course is, what are you sending them? And here's what you're sending them. You're really sending them the product of the work that you have done in the previous two steps. Because you have now spent some time thinking about your story, and who you're pitching, and the publication, and how they're telling stories to their audience. And then the individual person who you're reaching out to, who you now have some sense of how they write about this. And you're taking all of that, and you're trying to distill it down into a presentation that they're going to find appealing. Which again, to go back to the thing about how press is not that dissimilar to going out and raising money, that's kind of what you're doing when you go and meet an investor too. If you have meetings with 10 investors, the way in which you talk about yourself and the company should not be exactly the same with those 10 investors, because they're all going to have somewhat different approaches and different thesis. And you're not trying to scam anybody, but you're just trying to be as customized as possible by building in your knowledge of what it is that they do, and what their firm does. And the same is true for media. So all of this is really going to take the form, in its most traditional sense, of a short email. A short email pitch. And what does that look like? I mean, look, there is literally no magic answer to that. I wish that there was, but there is not. There's no format. People always ask me, what should the subject line of the email be? That's is a good question. There's not one answer to that. The closest that I can give you to an answer is that, picture me. Picture me at my computer. I have a lot going on, and I'm glancing at my email, and 40 new emails are sitting there. And my instinct is to delete all of them as fast as possible, but I'm going to glance at each one. I'm not going to open each one, but I'm going to glance at it, which means that I see the subject line and I see the preview text, or just the first thing that somebody had written. What you want to do is write something that makes it pretty clear to me that this is targeted to me. That's step number one. Because most of those emails that I got in my inbox are not targeted to me. What you want to do is write something that makes it pretty clear to me that this is targeted to me. That's step number one. Because most of those emails that I got in my inbox are not targeted to me. They're mass blasts, and I'm delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. So which is the one that actually is reaching me? And sometimes you can do that by referencing something that I wrote in the past. I see people do that a lot. Don't fake it. People fake it all the time. People email me and they tell me they're fans of my work, they've never read my work. It's very obvious, right? Don't do that. But if you've read something, or if you're familiar with something, if you're familiar with the publication in some way, any signals of that are good. Because again, what you're trying to do is just separate yourself from noise to, this is customized to you. Because If you think about it, this is really an efficiency question. What I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to spend my time on the things that have the highest percentage chance of being relevant to me. And I'm filtering out the things that seem not relevant to me, who are wasting my time. So if I see something where somebody's writing me and they have a sense of the publication and they have a sense of me, there's a higher percentage chance that the next things that they're going to tell me are going to be relevant to me. Maybe even turn into a story. Which is great. I like when that happens. Because it saves me time, frankly, right? It's one less story I have to find myself. So I'm happy for it, but it's got to be right. So you want to structure ... And then the email that you're writing is don't go on forever, like three paragraphs max. And you are telling the version, you're not writing an article, but you're telling me the thing that you are pretty sure I'm going to be interested in. It's the difference between, going back to the butter dish example, woman sending me a three paragraph email about the butter dish itself, and opening up, telling me a little bit about the butter dish, and then immediately moving into this very clever story about the product market testing survey. That's the difference. She told me the story that was going to be relevant to my audience. She got there quickly, and it felt like, to me, this is a interesting human being with an interesting entrepreneurial story to tell, and that's why I'm going to engage.…

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