What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both at their companies and
in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
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In today's episode, I sat down with Dmitry Dragulev of JustReachOut.io. Dmitry was on
the show a few months back to talk about how he grew his PR business at $30,000 a month
in revenue, working just five hours a day, 25 hours a week. It's a pretty inspiring story.
I recommend you to listen to it. But in this conversation, I wanted to take a different
approach. Dmitry has learned so much helping IndieHackers on his platform get traffic to
their websites and their businesses by pitching the press. And I wanted to just extract as
much information from him as I possibly could about how the rest of us could go about doing
the same thing. How do you pitch the press? How do you send a cold email to a journalist
and get them to read it? How do you come up with a story? And if all of this works out,
how do you actually capitalize on the traffic that you get from being published in the press?
Dmitry has a lot of information to share on the subject. And even if you aren't a founder
yourself, it's just educational and interesting to hear about how it all works. Enjoy the
episode.
What are some of the most successful PR campaigns you've seen? What does it look like if you
actually do PR well?
Yeah, so one of the most successful ones and I, I'm not going to go and talk about huge
brands because people who are listening to this, they don't have a huge brand, right?
They're trying to get their brand well known. A company out there called Fractal and they
sort of do PR for many different brands was a study that they ran for mathematics kind
of like statistician firm. They essentially were trying to figure out it. So it's a little
company, right? And all they do is they crunch numbers. How can they get PR? It's just a
consulting firm. Like it's so boring. And so what they did is they pick something very
specific, which was, Hey, we're going to go out and we're going to find and subways. We're
going to find how dirty is a subway car. And so it's pretty funny actually, they went in
and they looked at the clean in this index of different cities in their subways and they
created a map of all that. And what they did is they pitched the map to all the places
that were mentioned on the actual study. And so all the local press like, um, Oregon and
San Francisco and Arizona and all the little press are, they started picking it up. And
I thought that was just genius in a way where we're not going after like, and I can tell
you stories of like, we have a customer hours who got on CNN by, by pure, pure luck. You
know, I don't want to talk about those stories because it's like, it's literally like luck
of the draw. Like nobody can actually learn anything from luck in PR, but I've seen tons
of these, you know, one offs. But what I'm talking about this version of, you know, local
study, they basically baked it out of nothing. They were like, all right, well, we're going
to go look at clean in this of subway cars around different cities. And what they did
is they actually sent in people they hired in different cities. So they didn't actually
fly themselves. And then, you know, they created a map and then they pitched this map to all
the local press. We have another customer who does the same thing with spam calls. Like,
you know, you guys get telemarketing calls all the time. They have an app that tracked
what type of spam calls were going to which states and they published on their website,
sort of each area code and how many different spam calls they get. And again, something
harder to track, but they use the crowdsource the data and they use people sort of collected
for them. And then they went out to all the local press. What I love about those examples
is it's not one of these like, let's think of this crazy story and do a PR stunt like
Grasshopper, you know, Grasshopper is a company that allows you to have a voice over IPs or
like a virtual voice box. They did a thing where they sent chocolate covered Grasshoppers
to a bunch of press to a bunch of journalists and people journalists open this map these
up and they're like, Oh my God, that's crazy. And they covered them everywhere. I don't
like stories like that, right? I don't like stories when somebody is like, Oh, I just
pitched a local media outlet and I got picked up on local Fox channel and that got picked
up on CNN. And now I'm like a celebrity in PR because a they're one and done. And B there's
nothing to really learn too much from that. It's hard to replicate those types of things,
but what's easier to replicate is these like local studies or the local pressing of this
local press is starved for content usually, and we don't think about them too much. And
so creating like little data studies for local press is usually in my mind, some of the cool
ways to do so to get press.
So what's the result? Let's say you run one of these local campaigns, you know, you're
doing studies on how dirty the subway is and the local press is like, cool, we need a story
like this. We need something to run for our viewers to watch or to read about. What can
you expect to get as a founder who put time into doing a study like that and pitching
press?
So as you start doing PR, you start to think, all right, what is my ROI out of PR? Why do
I actually want to do PR? And my study with in my case, whenever I tell people to think
about this, I'm like, it's customers, it's revenue and customers, how many people actually
get to sign up in there in both of the cases when it's a sort of a dirty subway study.
The idea there was, hey, we want people who read the study and they want data and numbers
crunched about their firms, whatever they're doing. So we're going to target publications
that are interested in data and insights that they have readers from the same demographic
that would eventually come in and convert.
And so you throw away some throw up some numbers, but you try and think, all right, the most
successful, you know, we're a local shop in Oregon. Let's say we get covered by Oregon
Live, we get covered by these three other publications. And let's say we get on a local
news station and we'll get 500 people to come to our site, 300 people come to our site.
Can we convert three of them and how much money will we make from it? And that's how
you kind of want to start thinking about it is not so much like, can I get press? It's
like how are they going to convert into paying customers?
And so with the telemarketing case, the company ended up getting acquired, they ended up getting
so many downloads of their app. And it's such a repetitive task of creating reports on telemarketing
calls in different area codes and getting published over and over and over again, that
it keeps feeding them more and more leads. But yeah, I would try and sum up your effort
in that fashion where it's like, all right, I've done this much outreach, I got this much
press, I've got this much paying clients from that press and kind of separate that out,
you know, that effort.
I think from where I sit, and I talked to a lot of brand new indie hackers who are just
not getting into this, one of the biggest issues that they deal with is that they don't
really know what challenges are in front of them. Like they can't accurately identify
what they should be worried about. So they spend a lot of time worrying about things
that don't matter that much. They spend a ton of time trying to figure out what their
idea is going to be or how they're going to build a product. And it's not even on their
radar that even if you have a good idea and a good product, it's kind of hard to get people
to find it, because there's just so much competition, you know, if you build it, they will come
like doesn't really work.
And I think brand new founders don't understand that. And I think for a little bit more experienced
founders, you know, they've built lots of stuff, and they've realized that it's actually
hard to get customers and users in the door. But that doesn't necessarily mean they know
how to do it. And it doesn't necessarily mean they have a good strategy for doing it. And
when you're talking about these stories, it's pretty clear that these companies have sort
of figured out a lot of this different stuff, right? They've realized that, hey, just because
you get a lot of people in the door, doesn't mean that they're going to stay. Or just because
you get one big press hit, doesn't mean that you're going to keep getting press hits. So
you know, from your perspective, what do you see as some of the bigger problems that founders
have with getting PR? What are some of the things that are unintuitive? And what are
some of the things that should just be on founders radar when they're trying to figure
out how to grow their company?
Yeah, so 99% of people come to us and try to sign up for just reach out, actually don't
have a story. That's the main reason why they don't know what to do. So you are building
a tool, you have a side hustle, you build something, you have an ebook, a lot of them
have like a course, a blog, and they don't know how to pitch press, like they can't pitch
press and just tell them that they're awesome, because nobody does that. They don't have
a study or an insight to do so they could create it, but they don't know how to start
what would be successful. That's the biggest hurdle for people. And I always say, figure
out what journalists are asking for and just start answering them. You can see my screen
up here. And this has a bunch of questions, right? A bunch of questions from journalists
asking about specific entrepreneurship kind of like questions, right? I can pull up one
of them, but it's essentially like I put an entrepreneur into search and I'm like, what
do journalists want to know from like entrepreneurs? Like now, like what do you want to do? And
you know, like I'm reading one, it says, hey, I'm looking for five things you need to know
to succeed in the beauty industry as an entrepreneur. It's like, all right, well, that's very specific.
If I'm in that industry, I know a bit about beauty industry, I go ahead and I answer this
and I get featured and, you know, BuzzFeed, for example, that's a journalist from BuzzFeed
that's looking for this. So these queries, I call them, they come out on Twitter. They
come out on newsletters, free newsletters like Harrow. You can go on Twitter and type
in hashtag journal request or hashtag PR request and you'll find all of them. And what you
would want to do is you'd essentially answer them, right? And start recording like, all
right, well, it seems to me that New York Times is always asking about productivity
and entrepreneurs or productivity and remote work. Maybe there's a trend there so that
maybe I should come up with something right around that. So using these questions from
journalists, whether they're expired or current, to really dial into what they want and essentially
become their assistant. That's where I would do for most people listening to this, I think
because most people don't have that story baked. And that's what you want to do to build
relationships with journalists to understand what they want, that kind of thing.
I think a lot of being a founder is, it's kind of just an exercise in psychology and
really understanding what other people want. And sort of the default way that people go
through life is they think, what do I want? You know, I want this, how do I get this thing?
But if you're a founder, you got to flip it around. If you're building a product, you
have to think about what do my customers want? You have to give them what they want, understand
their perspective and what they need. If you're trying to get PR, what you're saying is you
have to do the same thing with the press. You can't think about the fact that, hey,
I just want traffic and press, I want to hit, let me just send you my product. You have
to think about what the journalists want to get their job done. How can I make that easier?
And what you're saying is what journalists want is some sort of story. And not only do
they want a story, but they need stories so bad, they're actually putting out requests
in these newsletters and these websites saying, hey, I really need help putting together the
story. If you're an expert, you know, respond to me and I'll help, you know, you can help
me write the story and maybe I'll include a link to your product. Is that the only way
to come up with the story? Do you need to go and read what journalists are requesting
or is this something that you can kind of just magic up by yourself?
So I would default to what they're asking first because most people and I deal with
people who don't have experience in PR. And so because they don't have experience in PR,
whatever they dream up in the room there, along with their team members or their co-founders
is usually not a good fit for a journalist. They need a little bit more education and
priming to start looking at these questions, answering them and seeing a little bit of
a trend so they can use the questions to base their story from.
So the real life example of this is, you know, we had a customer that came in, they find
fraud in construction equipment loans. Very boring topic, right? But it's a consulting
company that can analyze and tell you if when you rent construction equipment like for builders
and such contractors and when they rent their equipment, if there's been fraud involved,
right? Very boring. And so they thought between the three guys there that, hey, they're going
to just have the most kickass blog about construction equipment and finding fraud in it. It turns
out like most people who are contractors are not looking for blog articles about this stuff.
And what really works, three sort of magazines, a lot of them sort of kind of gravitate to
where publishing in these magazines is probably the best way. And there's a few podcasts.
And so what they started doing is not building up their own blog or pitching sort of fraud
stories, but actually just taking examples of previous fraud in any industry, not just
construction. So you're going after financial and so forth, computer equipment and debunking
these and publishing them on other guest publications. And they've been doing this for like two years
now. They've been one of our best customers in terms of ROI, right, for them. But they
did that by looking, they typed in fraud into our search and they found, oh, like a lot
of like financial publications are actually interested in fraud. That's not financial
fraud in terms of like bank fraud, but actual physical goods fraud. That's the people are
doing the renting equipment and sort of like, oh, we have that parallel. Maybe we should
start responding to these questions. Queries from journalists started doing so got pulled
in and then these journalists are like, listen, you seem to know a lot about this fraud stuff.
You only know construction stuff, but this actually applies to all these other verticals.
Can you work with us in terms of ROI and just press? They ended up changing their direction
a lot. So I would start there. I would really start there. Don't try to make up your own
stories. You can, but use that to inform yourself, you know?
Yeah, it sounds like even if you want to make up your own stories, it's much better to start
by doing what you're saying and reading all these journalists requests, because that gives
you so much practice and insight as to what journalists actually want. And then maybe
later if you want to come up with your own story, now you actually kind of know what
journalists want. You've had experience, you've read all this stuff and you're not just sort
of operating from a place of no knowledge and no experience.
Yes, exactly. You want to be informed. You want to read these and say, oh, Shafir from
New York Times wants to know what's your best way to stay productive during pandemic. She
needs this by 8 a.m. in the next three days. I have one way. Maybe I can let her know.
Maybe she doesn't use my tip, but at least I know that she's asking about it and she's
from New York Times. Great for me to know that. Maybe I can use that in the future pitch.
Maybe I can continue monitoring. Maybe more people are asking about that.
I like talking to you about PR because one of the things that you always do is you kind
of highlight the stories of people who have really boring businesses. I'm like, hey, Dimitri,
how do you get PR? You're like, well, this construction company is just so boring, but
they are able to get PR. This other guy is running this company. It's just like no one
wants to read about it, but he was able to get PR. What about if you have an interesting
company? I guess, how much time should you spend thinking about how to make your company
interesting?
An example that comes to mind is I talked to this friend of mine, Greg Eisenberg, who
has this website. You probably need a haircut.com. He was able to just really crush it with the
press a few months ago because COVID-19 is this trending topic. Obviously, everybody cares
about it. Lots of people are complaining about the fact that they can't get their haircut
because all the barbershops were closed. He really just sat down for a day or two and
just thought about what's a really good name for this? How do I tie this into current events
and make it something that people are going to care about?
I think he had a really interesting business from the get-go. Do you think it's important
to try to make your business interesting or do you think it doesn't really matter what
you do? Even if you're boring, you can get press in it. You shouldn't think about it
that way.
Plenty of people have capitalized on what happened with COVID. First of all, we have
a company that bought, flattened the curve. That whole URL put up some random, not some
random, but some regular data on there like how to do this and that. Their traffic just
skyrocketed. They got into ABC News and all these crazy publications and acquired the
whole thing really fast. This data shop is running it.
There's plenty of people who see an opportunity. They built something to capitalize on it.
They think it's going to work really well in terms of PR and it does. I'm all for testing
stuff out. Before you even build something like that, I would send pitches out and see
if people are going to respond to it. If you're a friend, the haircut thing, before even sitting
down for a day, I would start sending out pitches saying, hey, are journalists going
to be interested in the pitch around it? If I get some data back saying, hey, I want to
see more about this. What is this? I want to see more about this. I'm like, all right,
well, maybe I should go build it, that kind of thing.
I think about it that way because I think of studies and insights and even blog posts
of case studies or whatever. Before investing time into something like that, you want to
know if people would be interested in it. I would do what you're most passionate about.
I wouldn't try and equate it with if it's going to be successful in the PR. It's kind
of like, where are your expertise and what are you most passionate about and whether
you get pleasure out of day after day after day? If you were not going to make any money
from it, would you still do it today? That's how I would judge about what you should sink
your time into. I'd say boring business or not, you have a possibility of getting press.
It's just figuring out how. Something like your friend might be a little easier. It's
very topical. I don't know if he tested or not before he even launched the site, but
a couple of days worth of work is also fine. Don't worry about it too much about how the
press is going to react to it. If you are able to make your passion a very topical kind
of term, then great.
Let's talk about that idea of testing. This is so important if you're an anti-hacker.
You don't have a ton of money. You don't have a ton of time. You don't want to spend six
months building something that no one's going to care about. I think traditionally the way
that most anti-hackers test stuff is they put up a landing page. It's kind of a fake
website before they build the product. They're like, hey, let's see how many people sign
up for this. Let's see how many emails I can collect. They post it on Product Hunt or they
tweet it out or something. If it doesn't get a good reception, they're like, okay, I'm
not going to build this.
I haven't heard anyone do what you're suggesting, which is pitch the press. Send out emails
to your journalist and ask them, I guess tell them about what you're doing and ask if they're
interested in hearing more. What does that look like? What would you actually say? How
would you find the right journalist to pitch? If you don't have anything actually built,
how do you do this in an honest way?
I'm going to do the old school turnaround. This is a pitch from Brian Dean, which a lot
of people have seen before, at least his blog. As you can see, it says, hey, I just read
your story on health benefits of keto diet. I've got a good one for you. A new survey
of 2000 keto followers that found 87% of keto dieters report that they cheat on the diet.
Ready to provide more context and findings. That's actually pretty interesting. This is
essentially a skeleton for a pitch I would do without any data. This is me just guessing
something like that. If you wanted to, after you have the data, you can add a little, thanks,
Brian. P.S., if you want to quickly scan some of the key findings, here's the link. This
is if you actually have the data. If you don't, you can take a stab and think, oh, 2000 keto
followers that found 87% keto followers cheat on the diet. Now, I'm just going to take a
wild stab at it. Hey, if they question it, I'm going to say, hey, I'm still gathering
the data. The idea here being is, hey, I want to test whether this is going to be a cool
article down the line. I'm just going to take a wild stab and say, hey, I'm going to do
a study that's going to say a majority of them, like 87% just cheat on their diet. We'll
see what people bite. If people bite, I'll be like, oh, let me compile the data and then
I'll let you know. If that data is a little bit different, then okay, it's a little different.
If you don't want to cover it, fine. At least I have validated that I got five responses
saying I want to see data on this. I'm like, all right, well, if you want to see data on
this, I'm going to run this little study. I'm going to create a little poll and I'm
going to find people that are keto and promote it. I'm a huge fan of doing that.
Just before I invest any time into that haircut thing or this keto study, just send it out
to journalists. The worst thing that can happen, nobody will respond to you and you probably
won't do it, but that won't cost you a day or two. It will cost you 10 emails, five emails
to journalists just to see. If somebody responds, then it's like, oh, an exciting time. When
you get a response from a journalist, it's like, awesome. It's a good feeling. Whether
it's a negative or a positive, you're like, somebody read my thing. Anyway, I would do
something like that.
Let's dive into that a little bit more. Earlier, we were talking about how you need a story
for journalists. There's all these websites and newsletters and there's tools. Just reach
out to IO. You can easily find and search all the things that journalists are requesting
help with for their stories. If you're trying to send out a little minimum viable product
like this, a little survey you put together is some information to see if journalists
bite and test your idea. Should you go the same route of searching for things that journalists
are asking for? Or do you just find some other way to compile a list of journalists to email
with this information?
Two ways. I'll put keto into the press opportunity search and I'll put keto into the journalist
search. The press opportunity search tells me what they asked about this term. The journalist
search tells me what they've written about this term. I need to know one of two things.
A, did they ask about keto in the last six months? B, did they write about keto in the
last six months? If one of those is true, then probably the right person to chat with.
If they're asking about keto, then they're interested in it. If they're written about
keto, chances are they might be interested in it again, depending upon what they've written
about keto. If they're written about keto in the last three articles or four articles,
then they are really interested in it. Then my chances of getting a response is even higher.
So I want to be targeted, basically. I want to target the right people with my message.
I don't want to spam a list. That's the number one mistake that most people do, is people
think quantity. Even though I tell people quality and I teach people quality in my courses
and in my software, people are still thinking quantity. How many can I email that can respond
to this? Loosely speaking, all these people are in diet world, in fitness, they should
be interested in keto, not the case. If they didn't cover keto in the last four or five
articles, if they didn't ask about it in the last six months, I don't care if they covered
it a year ago, or they did one article seven months ago, or even if they did one article
four months ago, they're not the go-to person on keto. They're not really, really interested
in it. And so you want those data points to really target. This way, most of our customers,
they get 70% open rate and they get about 30% to 40% response rate on all their email
pitches. They send quality over quantity. So they'll send 10 emails, 20 emails a week,
but most of those will get opens and close to half will get responses this way.
What are some tips for writing good emails? Besides targeting the right journalist, is
there a certain length of email you should be targeting? Is there a certain thing you
should open with? Should you be following up if people don't respond?
Yeah, so our software kind of doesn't let you send emails if they're not kosher based
on our standards. But we have this check which pops up all the time. I'm not going to turn
around the laptop, but I'll just read it off to you. So there's all these things that it
checks for you. And then if something is wrong, it's like, well, got to fix the email. So
the subject line should be between 45 to 65 characters long. So we don't want to go too,
too long. And the subject line really needs to be more of an actual headline of the article
you want them to write. So and a good example is 75% of toilet owners fix their own toilets,
something that's like pops. And it's like, what I need to know. So you're essentially
kind of like writing the headline for them. It needs to have some kind of like informational
gap for them to kind of open the email. So an example is like, which states have the most
handy homeowners? So it makes sense for them to kind of open that up. So it's like study
which states blah, blah, blah. And these are all study driven. So I mean, you don't have
to only do studies, but I'm just saying like, your number one focus is that subject line.
And we harp on it in the tool and in the actual course, subject line is your key to them opening
that email. So when it arrives in that inbox, that's the did by design, you got to learn
them in by that one subject line. And you only have up to 65 characters. Usually, we
recommend to learn them in. So that's why it's the most important part. And then the
next part is really the pitch itself. It's more of a teaser around 200 words maximum,
short and sweet, no huge bios about what you do. The very first part of the pitch usually
addresses something they wrote or something they asked about. The second part is really
what you have to say about what you're doing that's relevant to what they wrote what they
asked about. And really to ask, do you want to hear more? That's the very first you got
to gauge them, right? Read it out loud to yourself before sending it twice, then send
it out. Do not send anything to journalists that you haven't read outside out loud to
yourself. But yeah, those are like some tips I can send them to you after too. So people
have them in like little bullet bullet list. We have a tool on our site that's free, that
literally you start typing your pitch and it'll start correcting you and it'll start
changing up all these suggestions for you.
Yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And I like the call to action at the
end where it's kind of like, do you want to hear more? Are you interested in this? Well,
you're not just immediately asking, will you write an article about this? You're kind of
going one step at a time and you're like, well, let's start a relationship. And if they
are interested, then we'll get deeper into this relationship and all the bigger asks
and the follow-up emails, but not immediately right off the bat.
No, totally. It's like talking to a person, right? You never walk up to them and just
try and like ask them to cover you. It sounds off if you're at a mixer or social mixer or
something. So you'd never want to do it over email. For some reason, people think they
want to.
There's something about the internet. You know, we all kind of know how to deal people
in real life. Well, maybe not all of us, but most people do. But the second, like you don't
see a person in front of you and you're sending an email or you're tweeting at someone, suddenly
people just do all sorts of stuff they would never do in real life.
They spam communities, they send impersonal spam emails with these huge asks, ask people
for like way too much of their time or their attention. So crazy. I don't know why people
do that. It's hard, like, I guess for people to visualize themselves standing in front
of that person. I always do that.
Yeah, it's smart to sort of have a check in your brain to remember like, this is a real
person. I got to treat them like a real person. They're not just an email address. We were
talking earlier about kind of these big, lucky PR hits that people get. And just in my experience
talking to founders, that's kind of the thing that everyone's chasing. Everybody wants to
be at the top of product hunt. Everybody wants to be written about by Forbes. Everybody wants
to get on like a talk show or something where they're just going to get tons of traffic
all at once. I don't think it really works out that well. It's hard to do. And I think
even if it does happen, often the results aren't what you wanted. So a good post on
Nandy Hackers that someone posted yesterday was actually Rob Fitz, the author of The Mom
Test. He posted about how in his first startup, he basically had this huge PR win where he
got onto the Rachel ratio, which is like the second biggest talk show in America at the
time. It was on primetime TV. He got like, you know, the hosts were gushing about his
product in front of 7 million viewers, and their traffic to the website was crazy. And
then like, of course, you know what happens after that. You know, a week later, their
traffic is back to what it was. It was just a flash in the pan. It didn't matter at all.
That he got that huge push. How do you avoid that as a founder? You know, if you're doing
all this good stuff, if you're getting PR, and it's working, how do you avoid the problem
where all your traffic is probably just going to go away if you haven't, you know, done
the right things to make sure that doesn't happen.
So A, I always caution people to think that way. Like people come are like, I want tons
of traffic so I can get tons of sales. And I think, well, what can you do consistently
to get sales over and over and over again, and not just get tons of sales at once. And
the second thing is going after big media going after, you know, you want to be in the
spotlight, right? And you don't want to be in the spotlight. That's the whole mistake
that people usually make is, like, if you are on homepage or TechCrunch or New York
Times or something like that affords you get tons of people flooding your site. But let's
think like, realistically, like how many people that are your ideal customer actually come
to your site? It's probably a small percentage, right? And the rest of the people that come
and they check out your site and they give you questions and they they're clicking all
over the place. It's just noise. It's noise you don't want. They pollute your whole funnel,
your metrics or whatever. And so to go after that tiny percentage of a huge audience, there's
better ways to do so with PR and content and not do this huge splash unless be on CNN,
right? Because everybody and their mother focuses CNN. So if you're on CNN, only sliver those
people would be interested in you. And so it's so short lived, right? So I avoid those.
And that's why when you ask me, like, can you name some great PR stunts, BPR hits, like,
I'm not going to go into like these crazy stories of people getting on these talk shows
because it's not worthwhile for anybody to listen to, to aspire to, to even think that
way, right? What you want to do is you want to go after the places where your audience
are hanging out and do it steadily one at a time and get those small bumps, right? And
you want to use PR to help you rank on Google organically. And so as an example of some
like this, say you're like a furniture design company, again, a very boring niche where
you can't really create anything sexy, you might like some crazy desk or something. But
you know, it's very hard to innovate, we have a couple customers in that space. So you're
not going to go and try and pitch like CNN for like, oh, we're helping all these offices
with free furniture, right? You're going to look at where my audience hang out, my audience
are googling around like cheap stand up desk for my home office, they're googling around
like how to construct my own cheap, a DIY desk, right? And the idea being is that you
eventually want to rank for these keywords, because even though that alternative to sitting
desk or something like that, you want to rank for these keywords, because that's where your
audience are hanging out, it might be that there's only three people a month that come
in from a page like that that you put up. But it's three people that are very interested
in your product, it would buy it warrants more daily weekly compounding effect with
that traffic constant than you getting on TechCrunch or something like that on CNN.
Now in order to rank for these keywords, you do need to contribute and you need to get
press mentions here in different publications. But the publications you go after are going
to be in the furniture design space, maybe in the architectural digest, maybe you're
going to go after specific publications where it's your industry, and maybe even lower smaller
blogs in the design industry in the interior design industry, where you're going to go
contribute to these publications, you're going to be mentioning some of these pages you want
to rank on Google for, and then eventually you're going to start ranking on Google. And
that's how I've built just reach out is I've never run ads, and we do a little bit of partnerships,
but we don't do too much of it. It's literally ranking for the term you Google media pitch
I ranked number one you Google PR outreach I ranked number one. They're not huge terms.
There's maybe I don't know, like 1000 people a month that would search for one of them.
But you know, we get people who convert over to an actual customer because they're looking
for the best media pitch to use or the best PR outreach tactic, the very specific things.
And so that when I do podcast interviews, or I go on and write for other publications,
I'll always reference these resources that I've written, because I get links to them,
they start ranking, and then month over month, they pull in traffic from Google. And that's
how I built the business. It's not the actual PR hit that PR head will never continuously
give you more and more and more and more leads. It's like, how does that PR hit rank or link
to your ranking pages? And how does it help you rank over time from Google?
This is so smart, and there's so much good stuff here. I think kind of the theme is you're
always thinking one step ahead. You're not just like, hey, I really want to get a lot
of traffic from this, you know, this press hit, and then you have no idea what comes
next, you're always asking what comes next. And if you realize that search engine optimization
ranking high in Google is a good source of consistent traffic, you know, if you're the
number one Google result for some popular search term that corresponds with what you
do, people are going to search that daily, weekly, monthly, and you're going to get a
lot of traffic indefinitely. And PR isn't like the end goal PR is just one step you
use to help you rank that page highly. I think that's super smart. And not a lot of founders
think that way, especially if they're if they're early on.
And one thing that this realizes that it doesn't have to be that big of a popularity for the
term. So it could be 70 searches a month, could be 100 searches a month, it doesn't
need to be thousands, right? When you're starting out, it's very hard to go after these terms
that are very popular. People listening to this, they'll be like, Oh, I feel the best
email marketing software, I want to rank for that. No, don't start out there. Start out
with like, best alternatives for active campaign, or something like that, where the person looking
for that is very specific, they are not satisfied with active campaign, and you have something
better, or something very specific business email template for cold email outreach leads
or something like that, there were it's like, it's a little we call it an SEO, we call it
long tail, you know?
Yeah. So I think that's the other smart thing, which is that you're not trying to go big
right from the beginning, you realize that it's better to take it one step at a time,
get the easy wins going, and then eventually build your way up to something big, or maybe
you never do. And I think what's cool about that is not only is it easier, and it's kind
of good for your morale as a founder, it sucks if you're always trying to go for like the
biggest possible win, and you just never get there, you're probably just going to quit.
But if you have these easy small wins, or you can like, get one every week or two, then
you feel pretty good about yourself. But also, I think if you have a brand new app or website
you're building, and you're not sure people like it, and you're not sure people, you know,
come in mass, they're even going to stick around, you want to get like small numbers
of people into your app, you know, a week or two at a time, so you can kind of test
things and fix things and talk to your customers. I think this is where a lot of people struggle,
they're kind of like, you know, zero or one, you know, either get to the top of tech crunch
or the top of product hunt, or I don't. And this PR strategy seems like a good way to
just like get kind of some small wins in the door, you know, maybe you get featured on
like a small blog or a small local news station or something, and you get a few hundred people
to your app. And that's a good way to test.
I'm much more of a small wins type of a person, right? And so we have thousands of people
have used our platform and are using it. And most of them, it's a psychological game when
they sign up, they want homepage of New York Times, we tell them no, they start going for
it anyway, they fall down, you fall down pretty quick, because most people won't get there,
right? And as you fall down, you get so disappointed with yourself that you just stop all activity
to all together, because it's just, you think you're a failure, because these journalists
don't see you as a success, or you try and go volume, and you're trying to hit up and
spam everybody out there, because you know, what you got is the best thing. What I usually
say is getting two, three small wins, then getting two, three more, and then two, three
more, and then going after medium tier, and then doing three and three and three of medium
tier, and then trying to get to the higher tier is where most people succeed, right?
One step at a time to try and build up, respond and do a few podcast interviews that makes
you feel good, you get some confidence, you put that out on your site as some validation
that hey, I've been somewhere, I've gotten two or three interviews, then maybe you go
and you do a few more and a few more, and then eventually you have maybe 16 of them
there, you know, and then you're like, Oh, well, I've got 16 really tiny small podcast
interviews, maybe I should go after a middle tier podcast. And so you feel good by doing
this. And you have more confidence in yourself. And it just moves you in the right direction,
because you just get burnt quick by these huge kind of like initiatives that don't give
you results right away. And people are very much last minute thinkers, there's like, if
you and I have the best day of our lives today, and then something really crappy happens towards
the end of the day, you're going to think of that day is just the worst, like you're
gonna, you're gonna go, and it's usually not the case, like you just were having a really
good day, maybe you had a really bad fight with somebody, right? But overall, the day
was pretty good. And if you went back to all the good things, and the bad things you brought,
but you'd only harp on that last bad thing that happened. And so same with PR, it's kind
of like, if you're gonna go and you're gonna go after huge fish, throw in some like smaller
ones in there, just so you have some successes. So it's like, I didn't get TechCrunch, but
you know, I got on these three podcasts, and it was awesome. It was fun.
Yeah, I think you want practice too. You know, if you're going to be on stage for something,
let's say you know, you've learned how to sing, you're going to be on a stage for singing.
Do you really want your first time on the stage to be in front of a national audience
of millions of people? Probably not, you probably want some practice on smaller stages. So when
you get to the big time, you're actually ready. Like, do you really want your product in front
of like everybody who visits the New York Times? Probably not. Probably there's a lot
of bugs and issues and features you haven't thought about. And if you can get some practice
on smaller audiences first, then by the time you hit the prime time, it's not just going
to be a waste or an embarrassment. Like it's actually going to work. And people are going
to like what you built.
No, totally. I've screwed that up so many times myself, like getting just getting on
like stuff that I wasn't even supposed to really be on and getting tons of promotion.
And then it's like, I see these stories all the time, like even in myself, like some of
the first startups I launched, like we would get pressed. And it's like, we didn't even
have like an email capture form on our homepage, or we hadn't set up Google Analytics, just
like basic stuff that we would have figured out if we hadn't like gone for the goal right
off the bat. And it was just in hindsight, so dumb.
There's a guy named James Sinka, and he runs the sleep labs startup, and he was on the
New York Times, and he got a ton and ton. It was like a focus on him. And he does something
called dopamine fasting, where like you basically don't engage with anybody and you don't look
at devices and your dopamine levels go way down because your dopamine gets really high
whenever you're looking at screens. And so he said something to a founder saying, Hey,
I can't talk to you right now at a big event. I'm dopamine fasting and that founder tweeted
it and some New York Times reporter picked it up and it's like, I want to fly across
country to interview. And he's like, what does crazy I just said that to somebody. And
so this New York Times writer did a whole day with them. They dopamine fast together.
And the story was going to come out and he called me right before the story is coming
out. And he's like, dude, like it's going to come out in like 24 hours. Like what should
I do? I like I have a site that's got like my contact info. What would I do? I'm like,
well, first you want to like capture people's emails. Second, you want to mention people
that you want to get friends like neuro y'all, maybe Tim Ferriss, maybe some other people
in your space, right? You want to mention them in the interview so that when the interview
is live, you can ping them and be like, Hey, Tim, I just mentioned you in this New York
Times article, interview, so forth. And so, you know, you want to make sure you have a
recapture method. So when people are visiting your site and they leave, you can run ads
at them, right? We target them, right? So you want to put those pixels up and he's
like, Oh, okay, okay, okay. So he started putting some of that stuff up there. Those
are just some of the basics, kind of like after the fact before the actual sort of story
comes out. But I mean, before that, he hired some, some people to kind of prep him on how
to spend that day with the journalists, but he's never had press before. So it was a huge
kind of like learning curve. And had he not gotten a lot of this help, probably missed
out most of that traffic, just you know, like that email capture thing, or just even pixeling
everybody who's come to your site and making sure you can retarget them. But people just
miss that all the time.
Yeah, it just comes back to this theme again of like, think one step ahead, something good
happens to you, you got to be preparing in advance or how you're going to take that energy
and use it to get some other really great thing. In this case, becoming friends with
these influencers or people you look up to, or you know, building an email list, or building
a list of people you can retarget with ads, etc. What are some of the other other things
that you can do if you're going to get a lot of press that you can really take advantage
of?
Well, I think like when you know that a story is coming out, that's probably one of the
easiest, most privileged kind of positions you can be at. And so a lot of times, what
I would do to prepare for it is to really analyze how many of that press is noise versus
signal, right? Majority of it is just going to be noise, it's people just reacting, they're
kind of interested, kind of not. And so I'm going to think, how can I qualify people on
the email form intake on my site? So I'm definitely going to have some kind of like book a demo,
try out this thing, right? But on there, I'm going to ask maybe three, four or five questions.
And over the years, I've gotten very specific on kind of customer I like to have a just
reach out, I want customers who, you know, have a content marketer on their team, I want
customers who have gotten some press, or at least have been on one podcast episode or
something like that. Those are all indicators that they're serious about content, they know
what they're doing, that they have a live product out there, that's another crawler
fire. So I literally on my book demo request, I ask them those questions. And if they say
yes to all those three, then I'll actually show them my calendar and I'll let them book
a time with me to do a demo call. But if they say no to either one of them, they'll just
get a generic form, they'll give me their contact information. So I'm already thinking
and pre qualifying that traffic that comes my way to specific qualified leads and self
qualifying, I'm making sure that they're self qualifying as they're coming to my site. So
it's important to think that way, because a lot of times, you're going to get a bunch
of people come in, everybody's going to fill out the contact form or whatever. And then
you're never going to know like, who are the best leads? What do I do with them? And your
best leads get kind of lost in all the noise, it'll take you a while to respond to somebody
to most of these people. So I would kind of make sure making sure people are self qualifying
when they're coming in. And then you can analyze and see maybe you can push more traffic to
that page to that article later on, if it's actually bringing in good leads. So we have
a customer and a good friend of mine, Yesware. Yesware is a company that allows you you know,
to do a bunch of like cold emailing and stuff and check your emails to see if they've been
opened and all that stuff. When in the early days, they were covered by Forbes, they got
a bunch of leads and they actually converted these leads pretty much right away, right?
Sometimes your product doesn't need a physical demo. So you can literally just point them
to a pricing page and say, convert, convert, convert, they got a bunch of people who converted
off that one article, it was just really well positioned articles. So they actually ran
ads to that article, they ran it through Google's display network, they ran it on Facebook.
And the more ads they ran to that article, the more leads they got out of it. And eventually
they ran so much ads that it became one of the best articles of the year in terms of
number of likes and number of sort of comments on it because they ran so much ads on it.
So if Forbes actually featured that as top 10 articles, and they got even more press
on it. But I always think that way. It's like the traffic coming in, how can I convert it
the best? Will I be pushing traffic towards it later on? That kind of stuff.
So yeah, you're thinking about the entire funnel. How do you do PR for just reach out?
I mean, the entire point of your business is you're helping all of these indie hackers
and smaller companies get affordable PR, which I think is a brilliant business model, really.
Because anything where you're helping other companies make more money, people are going
to pay you for. How do you get attention? You're on this podcast, is this your primary
way of getting people to sign up for your product? What's your PR strategy like?
So like I was mentioning, so I rank for all the major like how to write a press release.
I'm number one media pitch. I'm number one PR outreach. I'm number one email pitch. I'm
number one. And so like different types of keywords that are relevant to my audience,
I try and rank for on Google. And the way I do that is by podcasts and guest posting
and my blog. So I write up an article about PR outreach. I make sure that it's the best
thing that I can bake up on my own here, right? Then I go and I do a bunch of podcast appearances,
I'll go and contribute articles to different publications, you know, entrepreneur Forbes,
I've written over 1500 articles over the last 11 years, I've cataloged all of them on criminally
prolific my blog. But it's just, you know, you're trying to make sure that you're referencing
your own writing in your guest articles, if it makes sense. So I would put a lot of examples
and templates into my articles on my own site on just reach out blog. And then whenever
I write about it, whenever I talk about it, I bring up these examples and people link
to them from different blogs and podcast notes. And then eventually they start ranking and
they start ranking for very specific terms in my industry, such as like how to do PR
outreach, how to write a press release. And then once I rank for them, then I start pulling
in traffic. And so something that I didn't mention on your other question is when people
read your articles, they're not necessarily ready to convert, they're kind of like interested
in something before they buy something from you, they need to know you better. And so
I have a lead magnet, which most people kind of understand, it's like a little PDF of something
that they can use. And it's pitch templates, how to pitch journalists, whoever comes to
my blog, gets a little sort of teaser saying, Hey, do you want the pitch templates? When
they get and they sign up to the pitch templates, only then do I say, Hey, you're going to get
the pitch templates in a few minutes. I suggest you check out template number three in there.
But if you want to kick it up a notch, if you really want to start doing PR outreach
on a different level, sign up for a demo. And our tool helps you kind of streamline
the whole process. So that's where I try and see if they can self qualify to a sale. So
they might say, all right, well, I'm all for these pitch templates, but I don't want to
demo like I don't have money for it, or they start filling it out. And they tell me that
they've never been impressed. They don't have a content marketer. I'm probably going to
say, listen, you're not the best fit, but do use the pitch templates, do it on your
own. So I try and make sure like there's a whole conversion mechanism there in terms
of people finding me on Google and converting through. But I don't do any big splashes.
I'm never in TechCrunch. I'm not on featured guests on any big talk shows. I don't go on,
you know, I've been on Mixergy podcast, but that's like my client kind of like but I've
been on entrepreneur on fires is a big podcast. But I, I try to avoid the big splash homepage
slash a lot of our clients have been, I just don't think it's useful for me. I want to
rank for those keywords. I just published an article on SAS PR. So my my goal for the
next three months to try to rank number one for the term SAS PR. And so now I'm going
to be doing outreach and I'm going to do mainly not really outreach, but just literally doing
a lot of interviews and doing a lot of guest writing to link to that piece to promote it.
So that that ranks number one on Google. That's mainly how I do it.
What if I wanted to do PR for indie hackers? For example, I've got the podcast, there's
so many cool episodes like this one where you know, I want as many people to listen
to it as possible. How would you approach something like that? You know, would I try
to get the press to write about individual episodes and the story shared there or the
podcast as a whole or is PR even a good way to promote a podcast?
So I wouldn't get journalists to write about it. I would actually try and do guest writing
yourself about it. So I would go out to blogs, marketing blogs, or it could be even company
blogs like there's tons of companies out there looking for good content that are in the communication
space or even cold email space, sales, blogs, whatever. And I would write guest articles
that link back to your episodes. So make your episode the best thing they can be. So under
say our interview, put together like a crazy resource list and the infographic of a process
of how to do PR, kind of like break down what we just talked about. A, get some keyword
research, figure out which keywords I want to rank for. B, figure out, write the article
on my blog. C, do some guest posting and podcasts to promote the article on my blog. D, get
my article to rank high. Kind of like break that down into sort of a little step by step.
Have our interview on there, have all the resources on there. Now it becomes sort of
a magnet for people to check out, learn something from and reference. Now you're ready to go
and write about it. So now you can go out to, I don't know, maybe you go out to startup.com
or startups.com or you go to like some other marketing blog, marketingprofs.com and you
go and you say, listen, I have a great article about how to do PR on a shoestring based on
this interview. And you write it and then you reference your interview on your site.
So you say, well, Dimitry talked about this one tactic at 20 minutes on the, on the interview.
I broke that down in my article. And so now this article is on, on your site, you're writing
a guest article. You're really linking to the original piece where we have the interview,
we have this posted and you're doing that over and over and over again so that you're
getting these links inbound to that piece of, that piece of content on your site. And
you're not going after too many. Like we have a case study pipe drive did with us, you know,
we did six articles or five articles on other sites, blog posts, and they ranked number
one for the term sales management, which is a huge term is get hundreds of thousands of
searches a month. So you don't need too many inbound links. You just want them to be high
quality. That's how I'd do it. Most founders listen to this podcast or I
would say in the pretty early stages, they don't have a ton of time, you know, maybe
they're working on the side of their full time job. And I think a lot of people just
lack confidence that certain things are going to work. So they just want to kind of dip
their toe in the water. They're not really sure if they want to go, you know, for the
full checklist of all the things that you're saying, you're kind of laying out here. Cause
it's a lot of work. If you're just trying to get started with PR, you know, what are
some of the smallest things that you can do to see if this, you know, it was even the
right channel for you to get a little bit, you know, of success if you wins under your
belt before you dive into the full SEO, write articles, put together infographics and surveys
and pitch everybody.
For me, I'd go on press opportunities filter here and just type in entrepreneur, which
I just did. And it's like five things you need to know to succeed in remote work life,
right? Forbes reporter needs it by second of August. So, and so as a person that doesn't
have just reached out, I'd go to help a reporter out.com or I'd go to Twitter and type in hashtag
journal requests. Journal is in journalists, journal requests or hashtag PR requests and
literally look for something that's in my space. I'm on the indie hacker. I'm an entrepreneur
type in entrepreneur hashtag journal requests in Twitter. You'll see all these people popping
up saying, Hey, I want to, you know, chat with entrepreneur. I'm a social reporter.
Some of them might be Forbes. Some of them might be a no blog, no name blog that you
don't know, but respond to them, get them to feature you correspond with you and then
see if you can get any kind of traffic out of it or any kind of business activity out
of it and start dipping your toes in the water that way. That takes you 20 minutes a day,
maybe three times a week. That's not a huge commitment. You have that time and it's nothing
that's going to change your work life, right? It's not 20 minutes a day, three times a week's
going to be fine. And you'll get to see, you'll get to live the process a little bit. It's
going to be cheap. You're not going to spend any money on it and you're going to start
dipping your toes in the water. Then say you get one hit and you get featured somewhere
or you get quoted somewhere. You don't get too many people coming your way. We're like,
well, heck maybe that blog wasn't the right fit in terms of my audience, but it was cool
that I got on there. Maybe I need to dial into who I got to go after now. So now you're
going to go after only an entrepreneurship blog or whatever, where your audience hangs
out, but you're going to use that as ammo. Now, now when you reach out, you're going
to say, hey, I was on this blog already. I was just there. Are you at all interested
in having me on?
Very cool. Well, listen, Dimitri, you are obviously a PR expert and I've learned a lot
just in this episode, but you're also an empty hacker yourself. You have a very successful
business. We spoke earlier this year on an earlier episode that I suggest people go and
listen to because you've got just such a cool working style. You work in five hours a day.
After that, you pull the plug and you're just like back to your normal life. You're profitable.
You're bootstrapped. What's your general advice for an empty hacker who's just starting
out? What do you think they should know? What do you think they should avoid and take away
from the lessons that you've learned?
I'd say avoid this mentality of we need insane growth to prove who we are to the world and
do what you're passionate about and stop chasing numbers and other successes that other people
have in your industry or generally in life. Worry about you and what you can do. That's
not to say that you shouldn't have goals or aspirations. It's just stop basing what you
want to do on others, other stories or other successes that people have had. Don't Google
success tips and try and learn from people who have made it in their life because I know
this for a fact. They're not telling you the whole truth. The most successful, most wealthy
person in the world, I'm sure their relationship with their loved ones and their family is
not the same as you with not as much money. There's a lot more to learn to that success,
whether they have to kill off to get to that success. That person with 700 people who work
for them that makes multimillion dollar business in the same niche that you were at and you're
killing yourself saying, well, I can't even get 100 customers. Put it all in perspective
and see where you want to be. That's mainly what I say. Do what you're passionate about.
Don't forget your family, your loved ones, your friends. Don't forget that you just get
this life. You only get this time once. Spend your time as if it was time. Most of us don't
live that way. I feel like I interviewed Patrick Byrne from overstock.com. He's the CEO. He
was diagnosed with this rare disease and I told him he was going to die in the next 12
months. Then something happened. They were able to cure and they said, well, we can extend
it for another 12 months. When he was younger, he learned to live his life in that way. I
only have 12 months to live. I only have 12 months to live. He now lives that way. They
figured it out. He didn't die and he's alive and well, but that mentality stuck with him.
If I was going to die in 12 months, what would I be doing? What would you be doing? You're
listening to this interview. You're doing what you're doing working, but how would you
change your life? Try to live that way. Don't chase other people's dreams. Don't chase some
growth numbers because somebody said that you should have them. Don't raise money because
you think you need to scale because you're not making enough of an imprint on the world.
Just do what you're passionate about. Help people out the best you can and just do the
best job you can. Live life to the fullest, I'd say, because you won't get this time back.
Beautifully stated. I love all of that. So much of what you see on the internet and articles,
it's all kind of like a facade. It's like Instagram. People are going to put their best
foot forward. They're going to show you all the glamorous, best parts of their lives and
their stories. That doesn't mean that it's fake. The good stuff really is good, but no
one's going to... They're not going to tell you all the sacrifices they had to make to
get there. They're not going to tell you about the hard parts. They're not going to be putting
up profiles of the way their business ruined their family, as you mentioned. I'm reading
a biography on Warren Buffett. I love biographies because they're so long and they're in depth.
You really do get to see kind of both sides. You don't just only see the sort of glitzy
magazine profile of the things that went well. It's like that guy, obviously very successful,
but he was so obsessed with his work. His wife just left him. She just left and moved
away and he was totally blindsided by it. He didn't have a relationship with his kids.
He to this day has a lot of regrets about just how myopic he was about that success.
I think you're totally right.
That's a big theme, man. There's Clayton Christensen. Clayton Christensen wrote the book called
Innovator's Dilemma. He wrote another book called How Will You Measure Your Life? Clayton
Christensen was in Harvard and all of his class, like in the 70s or 80s, whenever he
was graduating from there, they made it to the biggest heads of McKinsey Consulting and
Bain and Company and some of the biggest, Ernst & Young, some of the biggest firms in
our lifetime, these people were like heads or very high up in these firms. They're most
successful people out of him. He was a somewhat successful author and he went and talked to
them like, what's their personal life? What are they doing? Most of them are on their
fourth wife. They haven't talked to most of their kids in years. Their kids don't talk
to them. They have insane amounts of wealth, but their personal relationships are spent.
They're done and they're workaholics. They're going crazy with working, working, working.
I read a lot of that stuff and I knew I was fortunate to follow 37signals and those guys
early on because they guided me to this thinking and lifestyle where it's family first, man,
like your personal life first, your personal kind of inspirations and all that.
Yeah, it's interesting because even those stories which seem pretty horrible aren't
even the worst. The worst stories are the ones that nobody writes about where somebody
spent all their time being a workaholic, trying super hard to build something huge and then
they didn't succeed and they still sacrificed all of their happiness and their personal
time and their relationships. I think the whole point of being an Eddie Hacker is realizing
that you don't have to do that. You can build a really great life for yourself. You could
be making millions of dollars a year and be super happy and only be working 30 hours a
week. It's totally possible. I've spoken to lots of people who've done it. So, Dimitri,
appreciate the reminder and appreciate you coming on the show as usual. Thanks a lot.
Awesome. Thanks for having me and happy to help anybody out there.
Will you let us all know where we can find you, where we can find some of the resources
you talked about, maybe get in touch? Yeah, check out Just Reach Out and CriminallyProlific.com.
CriminallyProlific.com is my main blog where I just kind of personally share everything
that I talk about and Just Reach Out is the tool that I run.
All right. Thanks again, Dimitri. Thank you.