Thanks––we agree! We built Investor Hunt to make finding relevant investors easier. In our experience, investors don't mind receiving cold emails as long as they're polite and relevant. Startups who aggressively spam irrelevant investors won't have any luck raising.
Last month we launched Howler: AI-powered media outreach. So far Howler’s working really well for our users and were excited to make it better and better.
In doing so we’ve had to build out a comprehensive database of journalists that includes their name, email, and tags that represent what they’re interested in writing about (determined by what they’ve written about before, where they write, and what they’ve tweeted about). We have just about 500,000 journalists now.
Our goal is to perfect the matching of stories to journalists, helping startups get featured faster and helping journalists get less spam. Our tagging system is great this (and getting better), and we think it’s the right time for this database to be a standalone product.
While there are a few comparable services, they’re either a. too small (10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too niche (only TechCrunch emails).
In our experience with cold media outreach, we’ve found it to be a game of numbers. Assuming you’re only pitching to people interested in writing about stories similar to yours, around 1% - 2% on average will feature you. Given this, a database of 10k contacts isn’t very useful (especially when only a small number of the contacts are relevant).
The best strategy is to find as many relevant journalists as possible (a few thousand), and push cold email campaigns with a compelling story (but emails must be direct, not en masse spam––like sniping).
As always, we’ll be here all day to answer questions!
We're not making $ right now. Our goal is to learn what users want from a game standpoint before monetizing.
Eventually, we'll look to monetize through in-app virtual goods or tangential products focused on sports betting in the US market, should it be legalized (lots of movement right now in New Jersey)
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.)
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Last month we launched Aidem Network: a simple tool to launch your product on hundreds of websites with one click. We expected to get 5-10 customers, but instead got over 50. It was super MVP, so our system (both operations and tech) was primitive––and obviously this amount of demand blew it up entirely.
While we’ve been drowning in emails and operations backlog, the product still worked really well for most of our customers (especially Bitcoin Regret Club who went viral with features from Mashable, The Next Web, and Tecmundo). We got a ton of feedback on what was wrong with our product and how to improve like:
1. “I’m doing an ICO, can I choose which media outlets you target? I don’t want to waste time pitching to Cosmopolitan.”
2. “I would rather you pitch to 10 hyper-targeted media outlets than 150 general ones.”
3. “If the 150 media outlets don’t respond, I want you to iterate the pitch and send it to more.”
4. “I want you to follow up a few times with everyone you’ve pitched to."
5. “I don’t think I’ve framed my product well enough to get press. I want an expert to work with me to refine my pitch for a few days before launch.”
6. “I want to see the emails and confirm them before you send."
7. “I want a report of all the emails you sent with open rates.”
8. “I want to pitch all sorts of media outlets: everything from small niche blogs to CNN. Getting CNN would be great, but so would a few local new stations in Ontario––where our customers are.”
With our version 1 system, all the above was either physically or economically impossible. So for the past few weeks we’ve been working on a pivot away from our original product that solves all this and more.
Howler is a simple tool that helps any startup regardless of budget or network execute a real PR strategy like the ones used by massive PR agencies. (These agencies cost anywhere from $5k-$50k a month, while our packages start at just $149 a month.) Here’s how it works:
We personally work with you to refine your pitch to press and framing strategy, build a custom hyper-targeted list of 500 media outlets to pitch to, send your pitch to 500 of the writers (1 writer per outlet), send 2 personalized follow-ups to each of them, then send you a report of everything sent complete with delivery, open, and reply rates. This process takes 1 month and starts at just $149.
We’ve made Howler this affordable by refining some open-source topic modeling (NLP) algos to scan through pitches and company profiles to match them with outlets in our database of 50k+ journalist profiles. We’ve also automated all non-essential operating activities (like physically clicking the “send” button on thousands of emails each day) by building a custom system on top of a stitch-together of almost 10 third party tools (thanks Airtable and Zapier). Now the only thing we spend man-hours on is perfecting our customers’ pitches and engineering.
Thanks for taking the time to read this! We’d love your feedback. We’re also hiring growth hackers with experience in media outreach. @ them here if you know anyone!
PS: All of our past customers will be getting a free month of Howler on us.
FutureList is meant to provide a place for anyone [on the internet...] to put the future. The 'future' can be a subjective idea, but we define it as something that few people know about or have access to, and has the potential to change many lives for the better.
Keeping track of all these futures is an arguably impossible task for any one person or centralized group. By leveraging submissions of the future from anyone, FutureList might be able to keep up with the breakneck pace of creation.
This list spawned out of another project I work on called Worlds Fair Nano (https://www.worldsfairnano.com), which is an attempt to get the future in the same physical space for people to experience. Our long-term goal with the fair is to bring a 6-month Worlds Fair back to the U.S.
I am obsessed with organizing the future and making it accessible to everyone because having knowledge of 'the future' enables a person to think creatively about how to affect it. I hope you enjoy FutureList and add a cool future or two!
Thanks for the comment! Because of the vast amount of data, we saw an opportunity to use natural language processing to better parse and understand the millions of documents that existed. This allows for faster discovery of information, more relevant data being served, and a better understanding of the text.
Gong is focused on call recording and helping you re-listen to the recordings, while Whipnote is focused on giving you detailed information from your calls as quickly as possible (zero wait time), so you can follow-up efficiently and move on to your next task or meeting. We built Whipnote so that you don't have to go back and spend hours listening to call recordings (something I personally used to do, too often).
My Co-founder and I have completed dozens of growth hacking projects like Rumblr (featured by 200+ media outlets in 4 days: https://goo.gl/Xbp7R2) and Hacbook Elite (six figures in sales through press and forum marketing: https://goo.gl/LFNVc5).
In our experience, launching is the most annoying, tedious part of building something new. Spending months pouring your heart and soul into a completely new product––only to have it seen by 100 people––is exhausting.
Aidem is a simple tool to get your product in front of thousands of people with a single click.We hand-craft custom pitches for every product, then manually submit them to hundreds of journalists, communities (like Indie Hackers), and directories (like the Startup Button).
Aidem is the tool we’ve always dreamt of to take care of shitty launch days where we’d imagine spending our time––instead of filling out hundreds of forms and sending hopeless press outreach emails––talking to users, fixing bugs, and getting upvotes.
“What if we could just, like, pay someone to do this for us?”
That’s what Aidem’s for. It’s a completely manual solution: no bots and no spam. Daniel and I write all of the pitches ourselves, then manually send them to our own network of writers and journalists. We don’t copy/paste/spam “open databases of reporter emails.” That doesn’t work.
Our process takes 5 days, submission takes 30 seconds, and it starts at just $49!
We’ll be here all day answering questions! We’re going to continue refining this system, so we'd appreciate any and all feedback.
P.S. Bonus points if you can figure out where our name comes from.
