A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:36:06 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:36:06] S2: But for you guys, how did you do? Is that how you do? You went to a conference, you found the right people and just kind of pulled them into your community? [00:36:11] S0: We went to one conference, we met a hundred people, we spoke. We became friends with twenty, and we were like, this is the vision. This is what we want to do. Is this valuable or not? Would you use this if we build this? Would you be a part of this community if we build this? And they were like, some said yes, some said no and then that became the founding member circle. There's been eight or nine of them and then it grew and grew and grew and grew. Because they invited their friends, they told their friends, nobody paid them to tell their friends, they just got a lot of value out of it. It's weird, getting clients is so much harder than building technology. The easier it is to build technology, the harder it is to get clients and I really encourage everyone to think about user psychology as the first step. If you're not connected with your user fully, then no amount of tools are going to help you and it's not that dissimilar from managing a group chat with your friends. If you're planning a bachelor's party and you have forty people in a group chat. How do you get the group chat going? Maybe you are awkwardly posting yourself for the first ten posts and maybe you post jokes that people don't find funny and you're like brutally embarrassed about it. But ten jokes in it starts going, there is a call, you've solved the cold start problem. You were not afraid to be awkward.
00:37:22 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:37:22] S2: The other thing that we want to talk about, because the other thing that you did. I think on the go to market side, that's worth going deep on is the PR side and working with influencers. I mean, you mentioned you work with fifty influencers, and then you find that getting PR. Earned media, is something that's a little bit underrated. I know a few founders that care about it, but I will say of a hundred founders, probably ninety five don't even consider that as a way to really get traction. What have you done on that side? What's worked? [00:37:48] S0: I would say my psychology, generally in capital allocation when it comes to go to market. Is that every dollar that I invest in go to market, I want it to increase defensibility of the business. Let me give you an example. The best dollar is investing in the channel that will never churn. That doesn't exist, but I mentioned that that would exist. Let’s say, two years ago, there was SEO. If you could invest in SEO, and then you stopped investing in SEO. Then you basically, the SEO kept going whether or not you're putting dollars into it or not and that was wonderful. Because, you were investing dollars upfront, and then it had zero cost of goods sold. [00:38:22] S2: Well, this is like, you're building an asset instead of an expense. Makes total sense.
00:38:22 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:38:22] S2: Well, this is like, you're building an asset instead of an expense. Makes total sense. [00:38:25] S0: Exactly, and the worst dollar is obviously paid marketing. Paid social is the worst on that spectrum. So to me, I always try to invest in assets, and earned media is an incredible asset. It's highly scalable, it compounds, it doesn't have the added cost associated with it, and you can be so creative in getting it. Small media, you know, ManifestOS Law Attorneys publish a monthly report that gets cited by hundreds of media outlets every month. Because that report has a unique point of view. That unique point of view is the differentiator. So if you're building a company that does, I don't know, AI for pest control, and you have a unique point of view of how AI helps with pest control. And that unique point of view, you actually immerse yourself in the head of your buyer. You go hyper deep, and you actually connect with them. And you know that this is what matters, this is going to be interesting to them, you can get any amount of media for free. [00:39:18] S2: That’s what you have now, and I’m sure you have content writers and all this stuff. At the beginning where you were kind of an unknown entity, what do you do at the beginning to get the first few articles of PR and get this? Because it’s easy to well, you can have a point of view. I’m not saying that’s easy but then you write something up, you put it up, nobody reads it. How do you actually get that thing distributed?
00:39:18 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:39:18] S2: That’s what you have now, and I’m sure you have content writers and all this stuff. At the beginning where you were kind of an unknown entity, what do you do at the beginning to get the first few articles of PR and get this? Because it’s easy to well, you can have a point of view. I’m not saying that’s easy but then you write something up, you put it up, nobody reads it. How do you actually get that thing distributed? [00:39:35] S0: I did that a year and a half ago or two years ago, and the world has changed so much that my answer is probably irrelevant right now. For us, it was early on with a lot of SEO. In SEO, you just start with low hanging fruit. You're like, hey, there is a lot of search volume, not a lot of keyword difficulty to go after that specific keyword. You win that specific keyword because nobody cares about it. [00:39:53] S2: But that was more blogging than actually necessarily having to be earned media.
00:39:53 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:39:53] S2: But that was more blogging than actually necessarily having to be earned media. [00:39:57] S0: Right, but then when you have enough citations on the website and you have enough credibility. And you have a high enough domain rating, then you write an interesting POV. You pitch it to earned media, and then earned media picks it up because they know that you're a credible resource. So they're intertwined. But if you talk about just earned media, some data slicing that's unique. You could even use public data. GPT and Claude can do that so well right now. For ManifestOS Law website, there was some research that was done around which states do immigrants mostly immigrate to, and that got picked up, and then, you know, a local newspaper from X state would cite that their state is the most likely state for immigrants to move to. And that got a ton of local media because it covered every single state. And we got publications in most states covering how that state ranks against other states in terms of how desirable it is as a place for immigrants to move to. [00:40:52] S2: In the pitching side? You just go into your industry, figure out what the publications are and you send them the article, and say, hey, do you want to publish this? [00:40:59] S0: You have platforms where, ask a reporter anything. I forgot what. [00:41:04] S2: Oh yes, right.
00:41:04 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:41:04] S2: Oh yes, right. [00:41:04] S0: Yeah, HARO, Help a Reporter Out. I think is what it's called. You've got platforms like this, you've got syndication platforms, you've got social media. You could literally scrape and cold email every single reporter in the world, and it doesn't take long. [00:41:17] S2: Is it a numbers game or is it a quality game? Like invest, if you think about a founder. Invest a lot of time in having just a great piece and then that’ll get published or just keep churning out things. Email one hundred people every time and cross your fingers, like what’s the model?