PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon

Now we have Cat and with Craig later to talk about PR for content, PR and content for growth. Thanks, thank you. Jeff.

Hi everyone, I'm Cat Min. Alec, I'm a partner at Y Combinator, and 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 by Craig Cannon, who creates a lot of the content for YC, and we're going to be giving you a framework for thinking about marketing, content marketing, and press as an early stage founder.

So 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 startup pitching an independent third-party publication, so that's news blogs, anything that's external to your channels.

As a founder, one of your primary jobs is to tell the story of your startup. 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.

So 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. So 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. So a couple of 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, and 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. And 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 going to talk about content and content marketing first. And I will let Craig kick it off here.

Hey everyone, I'm Craig. I work with Cat at YC, doing the podcasts and all that kind of stuff. All right, so before working at YC, I worked at a place called The Onion. We made fake news before it was cool. I did a Photoshop—like putting Joe Biden's head on, like, fat guy's body in front of the White House, that kind of thing. Oh, and 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. Then we had these big events; Alexis judged a bunch of them, and now I work at YC. So hopefully, that's like the least logical connection of things in this deck.

So today, I'm going to talk about content. 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 then some other people call it a word I don't know. But like Cat said, this is just basically everything you make. So it's going to be like 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 going to be kind of like 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 Cat 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 they're not churning. Because 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 content as a product—hopefully, you can just apply all the learnings from the lectures earlier on about product and just throw them right at content. When you think about content as a product, the only thing you have to change from the YC advice of "make something people want" is make something your customers want.

You are 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, and 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 is 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 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.

So now that you've committed to doing content marketing, what you need to do is pick a goal. So there are basically two things that early-stage companies want: engagement—if you're social company that's like, you know, Instagram, whatever—that's like time on site. Anyone else, it's going to be conversions. There's this third thing called brand, which is kind of 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 than engagement or conversions.

Now that you're going, you want to just set up analytics. Suhail 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 your 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. What this is going to do is capture who's hitting your site, who's logged into Facebook, so then you can later remarket at them. This is going to be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create. You want to do this because if you launch on Hacker News and have, like, 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 and 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. Then once you're hanging out there long enough, you're going to be able to figure out what does well there.

So for instance, like essays—like Paul Graham's essays—do well in Hacker News; makeup tutorials do well on YouTube; vlogging, all that kind of stuff. Because you're going to 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 would just rely on paid acquisitions, you know, 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 a perfume and like makeup subscription box. They do Instagram influencer marketing; you can read all about this online; they've blogged about it a bunch. Another example is YC. So YC, although PG and Jessica, Robert, and Trevor might not say this, has been doing content marketing since the very beginning. Even before, with Paul's essays and then Hacker News was built, and then those essays did really well, and that's the exact kind of audience that would create a startup. They just kind of like rinse and repeat.

All right, so now that you found out where you're going to go and, like, generally what you want to be making, I think not enough people spend enough time brainstorming. It sounds kind of silly, but most content—because people don't spend enough time brainstorming—ends up being derivative of all like 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've 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. So The Onion's been around for like thirty, thirty 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 particularly important because it's allowed them to create consistently good stuff with a lot of different people over a long period of time.

So 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. The objective is to have only 5 to 10 percent, roughly, survive. So 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 whatever, 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 like 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 a This American Life episode about it if you want to learn more.

Now you want to make something good. Again, this is like 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? So that means dedicating real time. So to break down what I talked about before, maybe that's like 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. And, you know, 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, "I have to get a thing out every week," and then you write a post in ten minutes, and it's garbage, and so you're just wasting your time.

You also want to dedicate good people. It doesn’t have 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. You know, that means usually like a co-founder, lead developer, that kind of thing.

Just two other little things from the media world: you need to be prepared to edit all the time. Like, just really be precise about your language because people don't spend that much time on your site or your video or whatever, and you need to be prepared to kill a lot of your work, and that really sucks, but you have to do it. You know, 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 know, you can easily kill 25% of your stuff. And so 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 is like a 2 or 3-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. Man, that was a good podcast.

All right, so then the next thing... this is the part that's really hard for me is promotion. So promotion is both incredibly boring and totally necessary. This means like 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 going to be optimizing for one place where your customers are.

You know, at YC, it's—so like now, I clip up the podcasts and put it on Instagram, and that's cool. But like we're still getting way more podcast downloads than we are getting Instagram views, and 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 I'd 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 going to 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 just those two words, you'll read a bunch of blog posts about that.

Customer profiles: so Zapier, who I mentioned earlier, they help non-technical people work with APIs 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 like a total cheat code for young companies because they require way less production than video or audio. The internet really likes it for, like, SEO, for scraping, and it makes the person look really smart.

We've done some of these at YC over time, and the person wants to promote it more than they do 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. Desk trainer at Intercom writes about product and content marketing; those are great essays.

Triplebyte, 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. Matilda just like pulled together her favorite lines from emails and then tagged things, so like onboarding, we're shutting the company down—like all kinds of fairly templated emails.

You can go on there and check them all out. So if you have, like, extra engineering time, these can be super effective. Community—so both Hacker News and Product Hunt were kind of like built out from YC entities, but just getting good at engaging with your community on HN and Product Hunt is really undervalued. If you're someone who's known as like a good actor on these sites and engages with people and is cool, that's worth your time. I'm not saying just lurk and comment on everything, but you just know how it works if that's where your customers are.

Then the last thing—and this is not exhaustive at all—but these are just some examples. Publishing. Stripe is now making books; 37signals, Basecamp, they make books too. This is super powerful in terms of like 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 going to do it, so you can really stand out.

And that’s it. So Cat's going to come up to talk about press.
[Applause]

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 your investors or potential employees a heads up that you exist, and it can help with SEO. So a lot of people ask, "When should I start thinking about press?" 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. So there are companies that do press pre-product if there's something particularly novel 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, so 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.

We'll talk about... I'll go through a checklist 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 you know, most companies, even through seed Series A, they don't have the budget for that.

The thing is that your relationships that you build now with press will hopefully, similar to investors, last throughout the entire lifecycle 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, you know, 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 going to come from you, the founders. You know your company better than anyone else.

What PR firms do have is connections to reporters, but you can build those yourself. 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. So 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 of things that I recommend any company do is—people ask me how much time should I be spending on this. So here's some recommended prep work: I think you can spend at least thirty 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 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 going to hit, what announcements you might have, and map them out.

So here's an example using a Startup School company in this batch; they're called Orbi. Orbi is building flying robots that help retail with inventory tracking and surveillance. For example, in January, assuming you know, they raise a seed fund, they might want to announce their seed fundraising with the intended audience of being engineers. Then in March, for example, they may want to pitch a trend data story retinue targeted at CTOs that talks about how AI is lifting up brick-and-mortar retail sales.

You know, it's just good to kind of do these brainstorming exercises, similar to what Craig talked about in the content space, for potential stories that you can pitch externally to press.

So 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, you know this 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 startups. So let's dig into each one of these things. The 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.

So here are a couple of examples of Startup School companies who I think had pretty strong one-sentence pitches coming in: So Orbi, who I mentioned before—flying robots that help businesses monitor inventory and do surveillance. It's so clear and straightforward that I remembered it, you know, 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—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 the one-sentence pitch. Just make it really clear and compelling enough that people follow up with questions, and you know you want them to ask you, you know, questions that will let you give them more context.

So 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. And then also, if there's anything really notable about the founders or the story or the market, make sure to put that in there.

So usually when we are pitching companies at YC, when we are pitching to press about their launches or fundraising, this is the pitch that we send to reporters. So let's go through two examples for Orbi and The Box Company.

So Orbi 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. Orbi 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 is currently in pilot talks with major U.S. retailers.

So we covered what they do, you know, who they're building it for, and why they're better than what's currently in the market. When I talked to the Orbi founders, they said, "What makes us special is that these are very lightweight, and they're very safe so that they can fly around indoors, you know, alongside humans and really help them." You know, we also tease the fact that they are in talks with big retailers, and so that's something that might pique someone's interest, a reporter's interest.

Second is The Box Company. They're building smart, eco-friendly boxes for food delivery. 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. Then you can talk about the problem—it's still difficult to order food delivery and get the same quality you'd get in a restaurant.

Additionally, packaging is often non-recyclable and non-compostable, which creates an enormous waste problem. So then you talk about their solution: The Box Company is solving these issues with a patented box that improves the entire delivery process. You could talk a little bit about the units—that they're stackable, easy to assemble, they solve this soggy, sloppy food problem. You know, then if you have specific customers, you might want to put that in and 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. 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.

So I talked to many reporters, and one of them sent me this list, and while she was at the Wall Street Journal, Laura Kolodny 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.

And one piece of advice I have is that 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. So what I typically tell founders to do is have answers to all those questions, and 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 sort of flow organically. It's good to practice but don't over-rehearse.

So let's talk now about how to pitch to press, like 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? You know, TechCrunch, back when they first started, covered pretty much every single company that launched because they were like, you know, one startup every two weeks would launch, and in the early 2000s, but now they get tens, if not hundreds, of pitches per day. So you have to think about, you know, 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 current news story, that might be, you know, what makes it easier for you to get a response.

An example for Orbi, they can say, "You know, Orbi, we're a flying robot company, and we're giving brick-and-mortar retailers a fighting chance against Amazon." So everyone's talking about, you know, it's all retail against Amazon these days. So if you can plug yourself into a trend piece like that, that makes it easier.

Now, 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 TechCrunch during TechCrunch Disrupt, you'd be crazy lucky to get a response from them. Or if you're pitching a reporter who covers Apple, don't hit them up during WWDC; your chances of getting a response will decrease immensely.

So now after you are picking your moment, you have your news hook; you know what you want to pitch—you can pitch your targets. This is easy because you think through 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, you know, these are the three publications that I would most like to cover my news, and be realistic.

Realistically, the New York Times isn't going to cover a newly-born company, and as much as I would love them to. So I would, you know, look at who is actually covering startups at your stage and in your vertical and add those as your, you know, your first three choices.

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, you know, publishes their story. A lot of people ask, "Why an exclusive versus giving, you know, kind of a lot of different reporters a heads-up on the news?" The reason is a reporter is more likely to pick up your story and write it if they get an exclusive, if they can break the news, if they can get that scoop.

So I recommend offering that one publication an exclusive. Once you're a bigger company and more of a household name, or you're bigger, you know, say fundraising Series A plus 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 in anyone pre-YC, I always recommend exclusives first.

Now that you know who your target is and 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 person—to that reporter. Cold emailing will get you maybe, if you're lucky, a one in ten response, and warm introductions will get you, you know, 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 of reporters that you'd want to reach out to. If I were Orbi, for example, I might want to hit up Laura Kolodny at CNBC; she covers drones and flying industrial robots. I'd then ask my network: you know, everyone I know on Facebook—any other founders I know—would you be willing to get... Does anyone know Laura? Has she covered anyone in my network? Would you be willing to give me a warm introduction?

YC founders often ask each other for introductions to press, and that's for them the easiest way. So assuming you find that person to give you an intro, make it as easy as possible for them to introduce you. So, I would draft the email for them. You know, this is what a draft email might look like: they should be no longer than this; anything longer than, you know, two short paragraphs, a reporter or anyone really, their eyes will glaze over. So draft that warm, you know, intro email for your friend, and hopefully you have a better chance of getting a response from that reporter.

Then finally, I would say give it time. I often get requests from founders saying like, "Oh, can you help me out? I need this to be done tomorrow!" I want to launch on Wednesday, and that just isn't going to happen. Ideally, you know, 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 and making, you know, a meeting with that reporter and then having the piece come out.

Two weeks is the absolute minimum time I would give it. And then sort of, you know, what things, you know, what not to do once you're in touch with the 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. You know, as 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.

Don't act like you're entitled to a story. If you get in touch with a reporter, feel free to, you know, follow up if they kind of go silent; follow up once or twice very politely, but don't sort of—I've seen some founders follow up every single day for weeks, and 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 reporter's job to do, and they see it, they can be—I’ve seen people get offended by founders suggesting specific headlines. Then 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; they're used to peer-reviewed journals. 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 some things, so they'll show you something ahead of time, but let them make that ask of you.

And as I mentioned, don't speak like a marketing robot. Just, you know, talk like a human, know your numbers, know the answers to the questions, but don't worry about having everything super memorized.

If everything goes well, and you know, you have a piece that is published, as Craig says, don't be lazy—take the time to promote it. You have your own 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 TechCrunch." I would draft a tweet for them, and when folks trim, you know, draft tweets for me to send out, they're much more likely to just copy and paste, and, you know, help them promote it.

So promote the story; you know, don't be afraid to ask friends and family, put it on all the socials.

Then Plan B, if they, you know, if it turns out no one wants to run your story, it's not a big deal; it's not going to make or break you. So post it on your own channels and put it through the whole content process. You know, I think it's a reasonably good practice to do that.

Then think about, after you go through this whole process, was it worth it? Did it help? Did the piece that came out in TechCrunch 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? You know, inbound? Did it actually help you achieve what you said and what you set out to achieve?

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! If journalists are already reaching you and you don't find market fit, should each spend any time meeting with them, or just like focus on the product?

So the question is if journalists are proactively reaching out to you and are interested in writing about you but you don't have product-market fit at the moment, should you spend any time engaging them? You know, frankly, I— you know, it can help to have that relationship, and if there's a way you can be helpful. If you're like reasonably quick—for like, “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 you say like, "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.

What are you going to write about?

Oh, right! Yeah, sorry. If you are just starting out in content marketing and 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? Okay, so one thing that's really effective is doing it like the title of the blog by so-and-so. Like, you see this with a lot of podcasts: it's like whatever the podcast name; I mean, like Joe Rogan is like 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 going to want it on your own site for SEO. Yeah, I like... I kind of disagree with people putting stuff on Medium and so early on. I've seen it work really well when you have a company blogging—it’s like Stripe has their company blog, but then they have specific authors for each blog post. But people really like connecting with that human.

How do you feel about working with influencers who don't necessarily need your product at the time? Like, our company is based around moving, so if an influencer is not currently moving, how do you feel about working with them?

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 early-stage. I think a big problem is that influencers often charge you and are expensive. Like, 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 going to charge you.

It's not worth the conversions; not going to be worth it, especially if they're just, you know, generally talking about you versus answering a real need for themselves. But this is totally something you can test. I like—but kind of like what Cat's saying—like, I wouldn't bet the farm on something like this; be like, “Oh man, for $100,000, we can get in on this thing.” Like, I would skip that. But I mean, like, at scale, it ends up working. Like, 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. I've seen folks often, you know, if you know folks with hardware or like physical product will send, you know, samples or demo pieces to press or influencers, and that's sometimes enough. Like, Casey Neistat loves Boosted Boards, so he sort of organically talks about it, and that's great.

But having to pay those influencers is not usually worth it early on.

With the three to five-sentence examples you provided for Orbi and the Box Company, how much is that what they're actually doing today versus what they want to be doing or hoping for? How do you draw that balance?

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? And so I think you can... there is a fine line, as you said. I think it's possible to communicate both. You know, you can say this is the vision, you know, and today they're doing X.

So, you know, for Orbi, in Orbi’s case, I think they have prototypes; they have pieces that can do that theoretically, but they're—or at this point when they would be pitching—but, you know, they can say they could 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.

This is on some Greg. I think the clickbait versus authenticity thing... So that example of Elon Musk smoking weed is great because it was my mercy on my smoked weed, but there was really awesome stuff in their podcast, and it was authentic. But how do you— we've got a lot of great content, but it's really sort of expert-level, and we sort of sit at that level of what do we want to do—some catchy titles, 'cause that's gonna bring in the audience? What's your view on this?

How should we balance this?

Yeah, because you can't give the audience... you do not have some sort of headline, right? So I would say... So the question is like make clickbait? The assumption is like 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 clickbait headline to hopefully get people in, right?

So I'm generally not for that. The thing that bothers me more than clickbait headlines are really shitty stock photos. Like, I think that that's like a red flag more than anything on a blog, so definitely skip those. This is something you can test, but kind of back to that Zapier point: like if you know where your customers are and, like, 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, like, giant mass appeal, you might have to do that, but like I've never... I've never had success doing like clickbait stuff and in getting like good results.

Yeah, I mean, it depends on what the product is, that's the objective, right? Like, it's not quick made technically.

Yeah, the question is, like, should you make a good headliner or a shitty headline? I think you should make a good headline.

During the product marketing, at the early stage, open to the founders: how often should founders publish content during the phase we are trying to hit product-market fit still before our product market fit?

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... you know, that might be unrealistic for a team of two, right?

But I mean, I would say, like, if you can make something actually good every month, you're doing great. And I mean, I think a lot of it takes companies a good amount of time to really find product-market fit. So you can start earlier than, you know, prior to hitting product-market fit.

It’s all relative to also like the amount of value that you give with the piece. So like a lot of these, like, 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 going to like just write, you know, a four-paragraph blog post, you probably have to publish a little bit more frequently. You know, I mean...

Oh yeah, so if you don't have product-market fit... she did 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.

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?

Oh, like, you know, like if the alt-right or something decides, 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 in general, it's a good problem if you have people who are so excited about what you're building.

I mean, in the case of, I think it was New Balance or something where, you know, the alt-right was like, “We love New Balance.” You know, New Balance had to come out and say, "You know, we don't endorse what they're saying," and so I think... you know, you have, but this is such an uncommon problem that I don't think you have to worry about it early on.

Also, like I agree 100% with Cat, but if you're getting a celebrity on board just because they are inflammatory—like if you thought Alex Jones was like the best representation of your brand and like you weren't prepared for the show that was gonna come—like that’s kind of on you.

Series of obsessor, just curious... I mean, how often should we send updates or should we send updates? Technically, um, you know, for the vast majority...

No—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, you know, that kind of progress. If you have news, they certainly want to hear that. If there's something you want announced, and even, you know, 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, you know, for example, at 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. In those cases, you can send out more regularly, but I wouldn't sort of blast reporters every month with your company updates.

Let me give you... let me give this to 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 journalists, which publication you want to cover you later, and Twitter is the right place for you to engage with them.

You know, they're super responsive; it works amazingly well. Apart from that, there's this tool called HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out. 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 biotech to machine learning to healthcare to anything, and they send out these emails about, you know, 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, you know, 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.

So that's good advice. All right, thank you! Thank you so much! And if you have any questions for us, we're just Cat (k8ttie at Y Combinator) and Craig (CRAIG at Y Combinator).
[Applause]