Ask HN: Best practices when pitching your startup to Techcrunch, Mashable etc?

Step 2: blogs like Mashable and TC see popular post and pick it up

Step 3: mainstream media see it spreading through blogosphere and pick it up.

This is an empathy exercise. What's THEIR motivation? Turns out it's pageviews, retweets, likes, comments, and FAVORS (more on favors in a minute). So your goal is to hand them a gift-wrapped story that will perform above average on their site. Do you have that story? It's certainly not "ditilbio is ready for top rate criticism!". What's the STORY? PR and social media marketing is a storytelling exercise. Some businesses lend themselves well to that... Some don't. But you can do it with ANY business (37Signals and Zappos had epic PR with fairly mundane markets). Again: hand a blogger a story that will make them look like a hero (by the metrics they care about) and you win.

The only exception here is if you can get someone important to ask them to cover it. If one of your investors is Ron Conway, you can almost certainly get covered if he makes the ask.

Related: Don't pitch it yourself. Get your most famous friend/advisor/investor to pitch it.

I did well when I was running an iPhone analytics startup not by pitching our boring software but by talking about what we knew about the iPhone app ecosystem as a whole.

Cold emailing with a short pitch of what you are and do (hitting the 5 Ws), and short description with useful press material like logos would go a long ways to getting coverage with Biology and search related blogs. Good luck!

http://youtu.be/HbUnatPfSgg

This was essential reading for me on a couple of launches.

As to Mashable in particular, they have a startup coverage series 'Spark Of Genius.' Was a dead simple pitch (it is a form) and coverage for me there really got the ball rolling.

For other bloggers find someone how covers your niche and pitch them --- never pitch the general email address of the publication.

And one last thing - it might be worth it to pick one primary target of the big tech news sites. Once one covers you they usually all jump to follow (ie weeks old emails suddenly returned requesting interview ASAP)

That is a pretty great article for this topic from the cofounder of Buffer who is really good at gaming the tech media.

Here is the condensed version I emailed to a friend who had just raised a big funding round:

Target writers themselves, not the publications they work for. Reach out to them on Twitter, ask if you can contact them about your story (so your email gets opened). Don't go after famous bloggers/writers (they are super busy). Choose timing carefully (friday > monday).

1) Gave the exclusive to the author we thought had the most influence in our target demo. (Sarah Lacy + Erin Griffith at Pandodaily).

2) Leveraged that story into a blog post, that got retweeted by Eric Ries. (http://blog.meeteor.com/18-days-from-sxsw-mvp-to-launch-our-...)

3) Leveraged that momentum into stories at other outlets.

You should find the writer that most appropriately fits what you want to do. We all have different styles and interests. Josh does a lot of FB-related stuff, I do a lot of mobile & finance-related stuff, Leena does some more enterprise, Alexia does culture, Sarah Perez does mobile stuff.

Establish a relationship with them for future coverage. Many of our e-mails are just our first name followed by @techcrunch.com

In terms of explaining what you do, we basically ask the same questions that PG or any investor would.

1) Who are you? Tell us about your team and why they are interesting or uniquely positioned to build this.

2) What is the idea? How did you pick this problem?

3) Why is your solution better executed than everyone else in the space? Eg, tell us about your product. Why is it built this way and what does it let you do? Where do you think your competitors fall short and who are they?

4) What is the market opportunity?

5) How does the revenue model work if you have one? If you don't, what do you think it could be?

6) How do you acquire users? Most people do not have a thoughtful answer to this and it makes me very sad. Especially people who want to "launch this cool app" or whatever. The world does not work like this.

7) Do you have evidence of traction? If you provide arbitrary vanity metrics, I will go crazy (unless you have a really good explanation) for why you need to deviate from the standard engagement metrics like DAU/MAU/uniques/# of transactions/monthly or annual revenue, etc. In your case, sheer DAU or MAU may not really be that relevant since you have a very specific target market.

8) Do you have investors or advisors? How much did you raise and why did you take money from these people?

made a page/webapp that

  a) offers an iteration on an existing popular product
  b) pitched every good damn techblog out there
 

and

b) it's all about distribution

most of the time i got covered by the big guns, after some other tech blog picked me up. (http://www.makeuseof.com/ and http://www.freewaregenius.com/ are good starting points)

so basically: do not pitch a product or your startup, pitch a story, distribute widely.

said that: every time i pitched a company i was consulting, the success was not as easily as with my private (weekend project) approaches, most products/companies aren't a good story.

The page does not load on my android phone (2.2).

You do not really explain what you do in simple words. I honestly feel dumb after reading it.

Before going after some PR, please fix that.

Good luck.