Arielle Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'd say early on, yeah, before the launch. Sure. So the first one is to get your story straight. So, so many times I have founders come to me and they're like, hey, we need help with this announcement. I'm like, cool. What's the announcement? And back to the 30 minutes until I understand what the company is, so if you can't describe it to me in a sentence, your reporter is certainly not going to understand in a sentence and they won't be able to describe it to their audience in a sentence. And so really getting your story straight, all the stuff we talked about specifically around product positioning is so key. Almost always when someone comes to me and says, I'm ready to announce, we go back to positioning first. Also make sure that your website is ready for the traffic you're going to drive to it, that you're not driving traffic to a name that you're going to later scrap. Are you really ready for this? So go back to all the other things we discussed first and then having realistic expectations about the outlets that will cover you and the time it will take to get them. So a lot of people will be like, I'm launching next week. And it's like, well, cool that you're doing that, but no reporters going to cover you next week. It just doesn't work like that anymore. Five years ago, eight years ago, founders could really dictate the date of a launch announcement, they could brief three to five outlets under embargo, which means like you all can't tell our secret news until we tell you at this time you can publish. And at that time, three of the five would all file a story and write, and it just doesn't work like that anymore. These days for early stage startups, we're almost always running the launch announcement as an exclusive, which means you give the news to a single outlet. And they're the only ones who get to write about it. You can obviously still do all your owned and operated stuff, your blog, your social, your investors, your friends and family, but they're the only like news outlet who gets to write about it. So having an expectation that this is probably going to be an exclusive, it's harder than ever to secure funding for a seed stage company and funding in and of itself is not that interesting anymore. There's so many bad companies getting funding. There's so many good companies getting funding too just more than ever. And the number of reporters and the number of outlets that are covering it is just less than it used to be. So really just thinking about like, well, who writes about this space? Do they write about company's at my stage? That's another really big one is, hey, we want the New York Times. It's like, cool, no one's at the New York Times has ever covered a seed stage startup unless it's crazy for the last five years. Who do you think is going to write about you? But there are still outlets that do. The other one is don't do a straight funding announcement. A lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, let's announce. think is going to write about you? But there are still outlets that do. The other one is don't do a straight funding announcement. A lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, let's announce. It's like, no, we'll use that funding announcement as a news hook to tell a larger story and a larger story might be your products available. You have reference customers, you have momentum, you have some great partnership that you're announcing. There's something else going on, not just your funding and using your funding as part of that initial launch is great, but what else are you announcing? The last thing is really about making what you do interesting and relevant so that it's not just interesting and relevant to you and the three other people who worked there at the time, but interesting to all the readers of whatever outlet you're trying to target. And so an example of that is I worked on this company, Vitable Health and the founder, Joseph, he created a product for hourly workers that their employer would buy and it costs like $50 per person per month. And what it does is it provides urgent care and primary care. So these hourly workers who make too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to pay their health insurance premiums, and so primary and urgent care for hourly workers. And we tied it into this idea of the great resignation and small businesses not being able to hire hourly workers, which was like a big trend end of 2021, and the company operates in Philadelphia and Delaware, and we were actually able to get him the Sunday after Christmas, Philadelphia Inquirer story. But it was all about making this daycare and this restaurant in Philadelphia into heroes because they offered this cool benefit to their hourly workers. And so the headline was perfect for them, but it wasn't like here's Vitable and here's what they announced and here's, it was like, hey, look at this cool new thing that local businesses are doing to attract hourly workers. And so think about your company in a way to make it interesting and relevant and don't sleep on local preps. If you have a local business or a local story or local customers, this was a huge thing at Square. We turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press. Most PR firms that service the tech community aren't experts in local press, but if you have a way to make some connections with some local press, they are the ones hungry for these stories more than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.…

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