A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:41:30 · Dan Mishin
[00:41:30] S0: I think it depends on the stage. I think the first P zero is understand the psychology of a user. Every market is different. There's no generic advice. If you understand the psychology of a user, try to solve their pain point with whatever content you're building. In our experience, there was this piece around every year, sorry, every month, US Department of State publishes what's called a visa bulletin and a visa bulletin determines how long it will take for you to get your green card. The way they publish this is so confusing. It's so freaking hard to understand. It's insane, you've got spreadsheets with numbers. It's impossible to understand it. Instead of writing, and every single media piece about that topic was like just same tables and slightly prettier designs. There was no first principles thinking and the first principles thinking is like, I don't freaking understand this table in the first place. You build a simple PLG led growth where you're saying, here's a calculator, enter your nationality, enter where you're from, and basically enter a date. And that spits out an answer for you. You don't need to look at the spreadsheet. You just need an answer to a fundamental question, and again, it's so basic. I'm embarrassed to even make this as an example. But, people don't ask themselves first principles questions. What's best for the user? What's best for the reader? And what's best for the reader is usually not what's best for Google Search Engine anymore. So, I think the superpower that we have at ManifestOS is really two things and we suck at so many things. But there are two things that we're probably good at. One is we're deeply focused on this market. We're not boiling the ocean. We're not going after fifteen practice areas at the same time. We picked one, we stuck with one, and we just went hyper deep, and we built such a nuanced expertise that there's nobody who understands this space better than us. And I'm very confident in saying this on every level of the company. And the second piece is we basically asked ourselves a lot of first principles, user behavior based questions. And people miss this all the time. I interviewed the fanciest marketers from the fanciest companies with the best degrees in the world who totally fail in understanding user psychology.
00:43:26 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:43:26] S2: Perfect. Well, Dan, I think that's a perfect place to end it, man. Thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It’s been great. [00:43:30] S0: That was a lot of fun. [00:43:32] S2: Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.