# Pitch Your App to the Press – Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXiVgq0X4x8
Duration: 56 min
Language: English
Words: 11053
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/CXiVgq0X4x8

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Matthew panzarino the former editorinchief at TechCrunch on the podcast I talk with Matthew about how to pitch your app to the press the importance of focusing on differentiation and why customizing your pitch to an individual writer is so much more effective hey Matthew thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks David I appreciate you having me on yeah so I'm excited to talk through you know you were at Tech crunch for 10 years and before that working at the next web and have a lot of insights in what it's like to be a writer who's

[0:39] pitched hundreds of times a day but also know how to tell great stories and how to get attention for things so I want to dive in just talking about what it's like to be a writer in 2023 I think a lot of folks don't quite understand just how inundated folks email boxes are so when they send out a pitch they don't know that they're one of maybe hundreds in a single day and they're expecting a response but aren't crafting their pitch in a way that helps get attention and so let's just kick it off with that like what is it like for your average Tech crunch writer and you know so many other

[1:18] people in the press as well but what's it like in 2023 to be a tech journalist yeah I mean it is tough you're right like the fire hose thing is real there's just an enormous amount if you look at like the early days of the app store in the 2010 2011 range I mean obviously app store was launched a couple years prior but didn't really start to gain steam Beyond Boutique apps or early adopters shipping apps until about the 2010 2011 range that was essentially when the pendulum swung towards everybody must have an app like oh you are a brand you are a company you are an entity you

[1:54] should have an app as well as of course the new companies being founded turning towards oh you're founding a company that does a thing on the internet why aren't you doing it as an app that was the kind of Turning Point at that time the volume was very much manageable right it was hey dozens of apps are launching every week but we can scan those get a feel for what's interesting maybe there's an existing brand that is launching an app presentence and so we're going to see what their take on it is cuz at that point you're charting in real time charting the history of what it means to

[2:29] make an app yeah what features it needs what design looks like in that space Etc I believe that's how you and I met when you were at the next web I think it was like a cold pitch at the next web in in 2010 2011 is when we first were talking and it was it was genuinely easier back then to get a hold of somebody like you and have a conversation and talk about your app yeah I mean I think those days of hey I'm just a person who's trying to do a thing and it's app related the app part of it was enough to kind of go okay

[3:02] cool it's an app thing let me look at it see if there's anything that I think on the first glance it seems compelling or clever or stands out in some way like they're leveraging a new piece of framework that iOS is launching right now obviously not everybody thinks this way but as far as the core Tech press which is really my only real perspective on this I never really existed in the longtale news rooms where it's like the storytelling gets more nebulous around does this TCH on a cultural moment is there a celebrity involved does it tap into another Zeitgeist that I already cover that's different but for us at

[3:37] that time specifically and frankly even to this day it's like oh you're leveraging a bit of new technology that's been launched by the platform whether it's like Apple or Google or whoever else or you're leveraging a new sensor a new piece of hardware and you're saying like hey this makes this experience possible it wasn't possible before I think a lot of that stuff was very easy in the early days to pick up on and go oh okay cool this is clever it seems interesting the person seems like they have their stuff together it seems welld designed because design is a calling card as you and I both well know

[4:07] it's the equivalent of a well-designed business card is now your web presence or your app if it looks clean crisp welld designed well presented the copy is Simple and Clean and spelled correctly the font choices are good these things are for someone who is actively looking at an app and saying should I cover this or should I not every day you just sort of get a sensibility about which of those are going to be worth your attention out of the hundreds of pitches that you may receive in a day uh if you're flicking through those you're like hey this stands out for those reasons um but even

[4:44] if you are not a student of app design or a student of typography or anything like that it is very much subc contan it's there right whether you actively realize it or not it's affecting you as the viewer and so I think that's important to remember putting your best foot forward design-wise or sidestepping that entirely and generating curiosity based on lack of information right that's also aack because the fact is it's like to rein ourselves in and bring it back to that exact question about getting intention and what it's like to be a writer you have a few seconds per email at most to make any judgment call about whether or

[5:23] not you're going to engage with it and I'm talking about whether or not you're going to click through from the subject line some people are crazy and work with their inbox on an expanded basis for me it's sender and subject line that's the most I can afford real estate wise you other writers work differently so this is not a mandate it's not how everybody works but most of the people I know work this way and so your subject line needs to be simple it needs to either be very short or very long in other words are you putting everything in the subject line and the body is basically just

[5:54] here's the contact information or here's a link to a press kit or are you trying to say please look at this because XYZ very short very simple and then get in there and then make your pitch in the copy so there's two major approaches I feel that work very well for a writer who's scanning subject lines so your subject line maybe gets in the major keywords which should not by the way for the most part be hinged on public affairs I just don't feel that public affairs pitching works well that's news hook pitching which I think a lot of PR agencies will tell you to do and think

[6:30] is very useful I don't in general find it very useful and I think most writers unfortunately tend to be more skeptical and jaded than your average audience because they've seen more right they see 10 times as much as they actually write and publish and that means that if you're going to them saying like oh did you see that so and so said some dumb stuff on the internet while our app fixes that right or even worse some natural disaster just happened guess what our app it's like don't do that a it's just poor taste but then B like I don't think any writer has ever really

[7:08] been tempted by that hook you know any quality writer I think that's the last thing I would do your subject line keywords should however be geared towards one or two levels up in the meta of what's happening so you should be cognizant of the world around us let's say we pull you out a current affair that would be interesting to pitch around if you're Tech app this post zero interest rate Universe if you have something that appeals to a demographic that may have been less likely to be interested in it before when interest rates were low let's say you are I'll just pick one out of The Ether because I

[7:46] like them I think they're cool but co-pilot co-pilot took advantage of the fact that and very straightforwardly and non queasily took advantage of the fact that mint was shut down by into it and pilot had been building for a long time this is obviously not something where they're like o mint's going to get shut down let me build this thing they have existed they've been grinding it out I use it I think it's a really cool app for Personal Finance Management but they' done the work however they were ready they were on the balls of their feet when mint was shut down they took advantage of it by sharing doing a

[8:22] little pitching I'm sure there was organic stuff a lot people just said oh what is the other good stuff out there well they had done the work to make their presence known and they had a little bit of traction so you end up in this position where you're able to capitalize on this mint shutdown that's a very organic current affairs news hook type marketing plan at least marketing reaction right they're a small team so I'm sure it was not like let's gear up the department it's like no all hands on deck what do we need to do to take advantage of this scenario and I think

[8:50] they did that well I use a very similar app Monarch money it's a fantastic one as well so your co-pilot your Monarch you were talking about you only see the sub subject line so what's the subject line they write that's going to get your attention how do you tell that story in in 10 words or less to get attention in that subject line yeah it's like if you're losing mint we're here to help if you're going to go at it at the subject line I think what you do is instead of capitalizing or leaning into the shoden fra of the situation or the negative connotation oh mint sucked we're better

[9:23] or oh so sad mince gone good thing we're here instead it's like hey this thing millions of people used over the course of a decade is going away and we know a lot of you are sort of wondering what's next we are here to help we think we're next we think we're great Etc so confidence Clarity in your mission we're here to help you manage your finances we're here to step into that Gap but no like reving in the demise that's a restraint thing that is hard for people to feel because in the moment you want to like take advantage of it and you are viewing it as an

[9:58] entity because the fact is most people realize if you're a m user early on you realize they haven't really done anything with that product in a long time it hasn't gotten any better in any material way it however was doing a job for a lot of people still and it was being maintained and there are still people that work at Mid trying to keep it running and the financial systems connections require constant upkeep so like there's no way that that app was not being worked on so there's dozens if not hundreds of people that are probably out of a job now etc etc so You' got to

[10:30] think through your second order effects of your copy so if you're to go into that thing with really leading into the capitalizing on the shutdown angle then you end up setting yourself up for looking like a jerk saying like oh you don't care about the people that just lost their jobs or capitalizing on the misfortune of people who maybe really relied on mint to give them a snapshot of their financial situation and are now desperately looking for something new and instead you're like hey it's really unfortunate that such a pillar of the community shut down but we've been working on something we think is even better so feel free to take a look at

[11:04] what we've got here that's the way I would position my thought process around pitching that you want the attention you got to capitalize on the moment that's a given but doing it with style and with restraint allows you the freedom in the future to be like hey we were never an antagonist in this space we were always working alongside these other places to try to do the job we're all trying to do which is help you manage your finances better our job is not to beat other people it's to do a job for you hopefully better than everybody else and I think that's hard for some early stage

[11:39] companies to modulate on that note while I'm forcing you to live write pitches I think this is another good kind of example of that kind of opportunity in I think it was this spring or last spring apple weather was going down a bunch there were actually a lot of posts about like hey Apple weather's not reliable anymore here are the apps to instead and I actually have a weather app we hadn't updated it so I didn't bother pitching it but if I were in that moment with my weather app how do I pitch like hey Apple weather's going down use my app instead how do you approach that without

[12:10] throwing Apple under the bus these are the kind of things that come up for app developers where they've got a better solution or things happen to other app or things like that so how would you pitch that without totally throwing Apple into the bus there's two components to that one is you have to understand when you're punching up or punching down this goes for journalism as well writers often have issues with this especially early in their career you have to understand the weight that you carry versus the weight that you are pushing against Apple can handle it right like in many ways like apple can sort of take the abuse as an

[12:47] organization now on an individual level I'm sure the people that work on weather weren't happy that it was breaking a lot but it is a matter of General States and I think if you evaluate every scenario by that rule of not punching down you can sometimes realize like hey it's okay to get a little feisty with our marketing when it comes to competing with a company like apple which has enormous resources to get the stuff right they have essentially infinite resources the fact that they work in small teams does not absolve them from the idea of having infrastructure that's sound and that works well and they take

[13:21] that seriously and the fact of the matter is is that they should and so calling them out or saying hey if you went to Apple weather today and you got a blank screen maybe it's time to look at some other options is not necessarily something where I would put it in that same pocket of reveling in the demise of an architecture that employs a lot of people or that people have relied on for a long time so I think it's actually okay to get a little feistier when you're dealing with the Giants literally the biggest company on the planet definitely biggest tech company sometimes biggest company overall I

[13:54] think it's harder to generate empathy in audience or in yourself when you're competing with that there's a phenomenon I think where people will capitalize on a moment in time and create a marketing plan or create a pitch around it but without any sort of consideration of what happens after so let's say Okay Apple weather's kind of being wonky maybe it's been wonky for a day and then the second day of outages goes in you're like we're a weather app why aren't we putting ourselves out there as an alternative for people who need a weather app right now you know and you go and you make that plan and

[14:29] you put it out there let's say your plan is something like to Riff on the idea that Apple weather isn't there but we're there for you we still have all of this stuff we have all the information you need to decide whether or not you're wearing a coat or whether or not your job site is going to be muddy today and whatever right the second order ramifications of weather is what you're playing on right like what do you need and then you make that whole marketing plan around that but what happens when Apple weather comes back up and it's really strong again what stops people from moving away from you and back to

[15:02] Apple weather because they like your whole pitch was they're not there we are okay well they came back so why you right and so I think instead you really have to go to this order of Apple weather is down so we're going to use that as an opportunity to Market ourselves but the marketing really should not be around Apple weather being down and us being up instead it should be around why our experience and feature set is better than Apple weather at any time you're the moment that they're down to push into that Gap and push into keywords being on the rise and the searches being on the rise and all of

[15:36] the pattern matching and registration is aligning and spiking Search terms are spiking and your attribution opportunities are arising your keyword marketing opportunities are rising up all that's great step into that Gap but instead of stepping in with the message that like haha they're down we're not you step in with a message that like hey they're down did you know we offer like all of these really cool features that Apple weather doesn't mainly because they have a focused experience and we have on that single app and they're doing so many things but this is all we do this is all we care about we care about weather weather weather all the

[16:10] way down Apple cares about weather for 5 minutes out of a year metaphorically speaking and we all we do is care about this and so here's all the features and things that you've been missing from that experience that just happens to be down right now and I think that that's the way you do it because on the other end of that marketing push on the other end of all those users the churn is mitigated by the fact that those users came in through a pipeline of understanding the differentiation factors not just the needs in the moment of an app that was up while another one was down and I think that that's like a

[16:41] key strategic mistake that a lot of companies make especially early on is that they view targets of opportunity as moments to win in the moment but they don't consider the ramifications Downstream like if your marketing has been preaching that you're really good because X Y or Z other external not internal but external factor is in place weather being down mint being shut down those are externalities the internalities are we're really good we're welld designed we're a pleasure to use we can serve you well those internalities are the things that will keep your users there and keep them from turning back out when Apple weather comes back up or even when the next

[17:20] keynote announces one more feature for Apple weather it keeps them from churning out cuz they're like oh yeah but I have all these features that I was pitched on marketed on as I was coming into this thing they're still there I still use them and they're still great and I think that's a huge misstep that a lot of people make because they're so anxious to take advantage of the moment they think that the moment is the marketing when in fact the moment is just the moment and the marketing should be the same story that you've been telling about yourself and your benefits the apps benefits to the user the whole

[17:49] time and will tell into the future I want to get back into pitching in a bit but I did want to step back to the first question we started on which was understanding what it's like to be a journalist in 2023 and as you alluded to there's so many more pitches so much more news how did you at Tech crunch as editorinchief decide how to balance the breaking news the this company rais this amount of money this app did this I mean there's so many potential topics to write about help us understand that thought process for a writer of like what is actually worth covering when could technically

[18:30] write 10,000 posts a day and potentially all of them be fairly interesting it's like you have to prioritize so how does a newsroom kind of approach that in 2023 yeah I don't want to pretend that there's some sort of magical equilibrium that I ever was able to achieve you are always balancing those needs the needs of the audience to hear new information for you to you know scoop new information that was previously unknown for you to serve an existing Audience by covering the things that you know they already want and then certain percentage of it that is about keeping yourself from getting burnt out by covering

[19:02] things that you want to cover you just go like this is personally interesting to me and honestly those stories tend to be the most potent and valuable and interesting long term especially for early stage companies like you convert somebody into a Believer a believer in the thing that you're doing the thing that you're trying to accomplish the mission that you have and those writers will become sort of chroniclers of your progress over time if you're able to capture one or two of those folks everybody else is targets of opportunity but you're able to sort of get into the minds and hearts of individual writers at a publication it's so much more

[19:40] valuable than oh we got covered by publication X it really is about getting covered by writer why and that is because they have an audience that they are trying to intentionally build and it's just like anything else like why do you advertise on Google instead of advertising on the street well Google has aggregated an audio audience intentionally for this purpose and like that writer is doing a lot of the same work not for the same reasons but really to the same end which is they want a portable audience that comes with them wherever they go they want people to understand that they are an authority on

[20:12] a particular subject and because that begets new stories they're able to generate sourcing in a particular Universe build a Rolodex in that Universe understand it really well so that when you come along pitching an app that happens to exist in that universe let's say laundry as a service or whatever you're pitching they're like hey I've covered laundry for a decade like I know this I can pull together my priors to help me to understand how they are actually trying to make a change here or make an impact here and if they have all of that pre-existing knowledge of the space you're going to get somebody that's approaching it in a more

[20:51] intelligent way in a more understanding way you're going to get a deeper story a richer Story one that has more meat to it and one that frankly will be more useful to you down the line if you are in the Venture back space it can become an easy way to replace sending your pitch deck you say hey check out this story that so and so wrote about us I think it captures pretty well what we want to do and if you want to know more I'm happy to dive in and let you know what our progress has been since then Etc but I've had plenty of people tell

[21:21] me personally and I know other writers have the same experience in the past where they're like hey we pitched you you really got it from the beginning you wrote a great story on it it wasn't like the story was universally positive it pointed out some of the things the challenges that we had we thought it was fair and we just stopped sending our deck and started sending the story and we raised essentially off of your story because it was an idea that here's somebody who is a student of that thing of that space and they are essentially taking on the role of an outside board member and saying like here are the

[21:53] challenges I think you're going to come up against these are the things that really would be interesting if they did in the future here's what they're trying to do now here are the founders and their story and why they seem to be the right team to tackle this and if you're able to get that kind of story it could become a pretty lynchpin moment and I'm not being like agonizing here there are other ways to chart your course than getting one great story but I have had that told to me over and over and over and over over the years that if you have somebody external that really believes

[22:25] in it and is a good storyteller and manages to tell the story in that way even if it's not like every word is something you love maybe they're critiquing things about it or whatever you end up with a Believer outside and that helps boost morale it boosts your ability to tell that message and say we're not just speaking our book somebody else sees what we're trying to do and that can be really helpful yeah I think that's a really good point is don't just in andatee all the tips email boxes but actually go look for the writer so if you want Tech crunch to cover your app you need to know know

[22:58] who's the fintech rider who at Tech crunch cares about weather apps who at Tech crunch cared about mint because the example we were giving earlier like you're going to land that pitch better if you're pitching the person who actually cares about personal finance versus pitching a broader story I guess there's some amount of the mainline tips email gets distributed if there is something interesting your hit rate's going to be higher if you know the person actually cares about what you're doing and then craf your pitch more individualistic like hey I know you've written about personal finance in the past and those sorts of things I think

[23:35] get missed often in just this spray and prey approach to PR versus that kind of more nuanced and crafting a message and then I think that audience site fit is also important like Tech crunch is not the place to pitch certain things and like the tech crunch audience doesn't go to Tech crunch I mean it's a good thing for you to chime in on like how do you view the tech crunch audience and what they care about versus some of these pitches you get where it's a cool app but you're like eh it's just not what the tech crunch audience is coming to TechCrunch for this would be better for

[24:13] 95 Mac or Mac Rumors or somebody who covers the kind of Enthusiast side of things more how do you think about that there are a lot of reasons people read any site so I don't like to overgeneralize because I've seen just how granular it can get from an audience perspective and how you have to sort of play the keyboard and really touch different tempos for different people on a day-to-day basis but I can say with some Authority that some of the major reasons people read Tech wrench there really three kind of major reasons Market intelligence like what are competitors doing what's happening in the space what are people investing in

[24:49] who are they investing in and is this somebody I should Target because I'm in a similar space the second is recruiting so very simply we want people to join us so if we can get a story told about what we're trying to do how hard it is how hard the problem is how interesting it is ETC we can then use that as recruiting tool and then raising money if we're able to get a story there we can then use that to raise money or get attention set us apart from the rest of the industry the thousands of companies that are pitching investors because you think our inboxes are in that dat

[25:22] investors in boxes are 10 times worse right on an individual basis they're not we get it all but I get an aggregate investors in boxes are very full too so those are kind of like the major reasons so if somebody has got an app and they're not doing any of those things it is the fourth reason that anybody pitches anybody anywhere just why I didn't really include it in the primary Tech crunch bucket is user acquisition so you want to pitch so that people download and use your app our audience is very specific in that regard so when we post on an app it often gets

[25:50] thousands of new users that is not unusual sometimes tens of thousands in rare cases hundreds of thousands of new users over the course of several weeks that the article stays in high circulation and you know obviously there's exceptions where Evergreen articles feature a particular app and that app still tells us man we still get people signing up from there and that's great it's all lovely it's sort of the reason you put an app out there in the first place as a writer you're like I found it interesting so if other people find it interesting that's a win right for you like you don't really I'm going

[26:21] to use the term very Loosely here so forgive me but you don't care if they get users or not but it's nice because you cared in the first place you cared to write about it so then the followon effect of them getting users feels good cuz you're like cool I cared about it enough other people cared about it that's my job that part of it is fun but the user acquisition thing is very targeted so like if you're looking at that being your primary goal you're not raising you're not recruiting a bunch of people like you're hiring maybe one or two almost always hopefully if you're

[26:51] growing looking at maybe bringing on some additional help to help you grow but your primary use case is like okay user acquisition I really think that user acquisition that Target for this much better suited to things like Tik Tok install ads or Facebook install ads or attribution on Google or whatever the case may be like that should be your user acquisition strategy for the long-term broad base scattershot however your pinpoint user acquisition like acquiring certain users certain kinds of users then pitching a particular publication becomes very useful so it's not like I'm going to get a million users just because I got an article on tick crunch but you may get a few

[27:31] thousand users of a very specific type like early adopters power users people that are very likely to give you feedback people that are very likely to like email you personally and be like hey I noticed this thing was broken there's lots of really interesting cross-section of people Builders creators Engineers investors people that take a very particular high intensity interest in apps and in in companies that they see on our site and I think that that is very useful at certain points in your growth career in your growth trajectory so whereas the longtail may feel a little different the near term it could be very strategically important and

[28:11] interesting to Target certain sites and on that topic of posts that do sometimes get 100,000 views or whatever how much in 2023 are writer still thinking like how much traction is this post goingon to get like how important is that and I know that's going to vary publication to publication but speaking from your experience at Tech grunch and you know all the friends you have in journalism how much are you thinking like well I don't really want to cover this because I doubt it's going to get much traction like is that still something you're thinking about day in day out yes You' be a liar to say that that wasn't a

[28:45] concern that was always floating in your head because the cascading set of goals is that the publisher defines a growth goal the editor has to figure out a way to generate the traffic to contribute to that goal or other Revenue aspects that involve editorial anything related to that whether it's traffic or in our case events programming or other things like that from an editorial perspective and of course it Cascades down from there if you have managers or editorial desk managers or managing editors or whatever and then down to the writers at some point it's going to Cascade down and that writer is going to understand that

[29:20] the overall goals of the publication hopefully in a nice good way where they feel like I want to contribute to this goal I want us to win that's great at a lot of Publications I understand it is not that Pleasant and it is much more specific like you have traffic goals of x amount and where are the posts that are generating that and you know I want these out now and we need to generate traffic X Y or Z now that's understandable these are businesses editorial business is still a business we handle things differently I think than a lot of other news Orcs because we were extremely always were extremely

[29:50] transparent with our writers about where we were in terms of goal setting why we were going there where you're headed it's just my leadership style to try to operate from consensus rather than mandate rather than saying like you will do X it's here's what we want to accomplish and then back into the and then therefore I really need you to do X and that's I think has been helpful you'd have to talk to my former employees but I think it has been helpful in like keeping people around for a lot longer than a lot of other orgs or at least happier at their jobs but the fact is that every writer every

[30:22] day has a story selection job to do that that's their primary job it's not it's not any of the other things everything else Cascades from there they have to select stories to pursue right sometimes that comes from a source that tips them off to a thing and then they're like I'm going to pursue this because this is unknown information I'm going to pursue it sometimes it's from a pitch somebody's like I have this app I really think you'd love it given everything that you write about I convinced that you'd love it you're like okay cool I'll bite right what is it like that's a story selection choice and those choices

[30:53] are always predicated on the fact that like will this push the overall or towards its goals and that in many ways is traffic so if you're writing therefore ipof facto if you are writing about something that nobody's ever heard of you have to be very convinced that you're going to be able to tell that story in a way that's going to capture brought attention and translate that into traffic or you're going to have to say this one goes in the column of I think it's important that we write about this now so that we look really smart later or this will turn into a larger story later on or we'll be able to

[31:28] follow this down the course of its becoming a much larger thing that more people care about and I think that's the sweet spot for Tech runch is that we always wanted to be super early to stuff 12 to 18 months early to things so that by the time it made it to the pages of the times or the journal or anything like that people could go look at the history of the company on Tech wrench they could go what did the founders say about the company like three weeks after he started the company to Tech wrench that's an important thing because it keeps people honest we definitely have a

[31:59] lot of company history and I always told my people that in some ways we are writing the history of silic and Valley in real time and so like if you're able to go back onto the pages of TC and see an early an app covered very early before anybody knew who the founder was or maybe there was their first company and now they're a Serial founder big wck or something like that but you could see the story of it and what they were saying about it and why they founded it and all that stuff so our writers had the remit to balance those needs to about broad interest stories about

[32:29] companies like Apple or Google or big names that almost anybody be interested in some move they were making but put it in the context of the startup Universe oh Apple farted what does this fart mean for your business what does it mean for a developer trying to generate its own fart that's an important distinction you know about the way that we covered stuff it wasn't just like oh Apple did X it's like apple did X and here's what it means for you and for our audience for our particular Universe I think a lot of sites out there their primary job is just to recount and announce the things

[33:00] that Apple has done which is fine if that's your job if that's your remit and you are an Enthusiast site for an Enthusiast audience great there's no shame in that that's your thing like a lot of people are busy they work all day whenever they come home they're like I can just open 95 Mac and scroll and see the cool stuff that's happened or I can open Mac rumors and see if new hardware is going to be launching and like they got their calendar and I can kind of make a buying decision those are all genuine user driven services for us given our universe our service that we

[33:32] were providing is like Oh I'm a developer we're a young company there's three of us we're trying to make X happen and apple just announced a thing that we can take advantage of to maybe get us to the next level I really want to understand that thing I want to understand what it's about I want to get a perspective of a certain writer as you mentioned because I know that they understand the space really well and if this writer tells me this is actually kind of a dead end and most of the apis you would want to use to take advantage of this or private still so don't get

[34:01] too excited I'm gonna be like okay cool we can modulate we don't have to like pivot and like put all of our engineering resources on implementing this if we understand that it's still nent and Apple's like we'll do something cool with this in two years we can take our time or whatever that application of engineering resources business decision making from an inuring perspective or from a true business perspective monetary perspective like those things we've felt were like important duties but at the same time you have to also be doing the work of finding the new stuff putting the gashes on and waiting out into the swamp and picking and holding

[34:37] these things up to the light because that is the job that we provide the core readership the people that sit down at their desk and open a tab and the tab defaults to De Crush right like we had to service that audience of hundreds of thousands of people that read us every single day that idea of balancing those was always a huge point of stress like you carry that in your lumbar because you have to satisfy the needs to grow and the revenue needs of the organization but you also have to satisfy the innate job that you're doing for the audience especially the most loyal audience and make sure that you're

[35:13] not giving up one for the other you can't just be all pigeon hole all the time or all rabbit hole all the time because then you'll end up not getting any new audience at all but you also can't go fully broad because then the core audience is like you don't do this job for me anymore that you used to do I can get this broad stuff elsewhere too and your unique perspective isn't enough I need the unique perspective and then I also need the brand new that Balancing Act is tough yeah to kind of circle back to pitching understanding this about tech crunch I think will help folks

[35:50] understand how to pitch Tech Crunch and this is why I wanted to have you on and this all may be changing just so everybody knows I'm no longer in chart but I will say a lot of the writers individually at tC have always appreciated individual pitching and I know writers other Publications do too they tell me every day and I'm sure they tell you if you know their work and you follow their work and you know they'd be interested and fascinated in that that is going to be a far more effective pitch than the most clever subject line that you could write that gets blasted out to everybody

[36:21] and so when you're going to pitch Vogue you understand what Vogue carries and Carries about and why they care about your fashion app when you're going to pitch the Verge you need to understand what the Verge cares about what those Riders care about what their job to be done in the broader Cress ecosystem is and like you said 9o5 Max's a great place for new app developers to pitch because they do a ton of stories and so you can understand okay if we're pitching nin to-5 Mac they just care more about hey this is a new app and they're less focused on that broader storytelling of writing the history of

[36:54] Silicon Valley than Tech crunch is so when you pi check crunch you need to be thinking about that kind of Storytelling and when you pitched nin to-5 back you don't send them the same pitch that you sent to the riter at Tech crunch you send them a totally different pitch and to be most effective at this you you really do need to understand and think about those perspectives I think it was really helpful for you to share that perspective everybody thinks TechCrunch is the ultimate place to get my app covered or business covered whatever because it is that history of Silicon Valley the paper record for the tech

[37:28] industry if you will but sometimes you got to tell the right story if you're actually going to get coverage so let's talk a little bit more about that we kind of used two hypotheticals with mint going down and then Apple Weather Service having issues but what are some other ways and stories that you think an app Business should be pitching Tech crunch specifically and then maybe more broadly that will register with the writers will register with the broader audience given the how crowded the app space is I think it's really important for you to tell stories that they're going to focus on differentiation factors almost exclusively in other

[38:10] words I think a lot of times especially in early days you get so wrapped up in all the work that you've done to build out like the basis for this thing that you're creating that you get really enamored with it as you should you should be really pleased with all of your work you should be really happy because otherwise why are you doing it like you should be really excited about the fact that it exists and that the company exists and that it has employees and that it has a product and that it's on the app store or or about to be and you should be really proud of all the

[38:39] fundamentals that you've built in maybe you've done work with accessibility maybe you've done work with design that you're really proud of maybe you've done work with some base cleverness of your approach but in all reality all that stuff is sort of assumed like we wouldn't even be looking at your pitch or at your idea or concept or whatever if those things weren't already met the bar is just higher now existing does not mean anything congratulations and I'm not being rude or crude about it but it doesn't mean anything it's like the old saying that ideas are worthless ideas are worthless that Still Remains true to today let's put it this very

[39:18] specifically ideas are worthless in company building because if you do not execute on those ideas if you don't build those ideas if you don't make those ideas real they're worth zero right which is why somebody's like I have an idea for an app congratulations you have nothing that remains True to this day however I would say the bar is even higher now which is that solid design that uses at a base level Apple's fairly robust design Frameworks and UI Frameworks that they provided you know the bone stock stuff looks pretty good these days that uses those basic frames or Google like if you're launching on the Android store Google has a really

[39:56] solid set of design language and a solid set of UI elements now that I think 10 years ago definitely didn't exist it even 5 years ago wasn't that great but I think in the last few years we've gotten to a really solid place where there's no excuse for you not to come with like a really solid game on all those fronts but then once you reach that point you have to realize that you've just reached zero and so like from there it is what you're doing in service of your mission that sets you apart like that differentiation in execution or onboarding or feature use or set of

[40:33] circumstances that is really going to allow you to catch the eye of a reporter or catch the eye of someone the cleverness that exists above and beyond the table Stakes or what is going to set it apart that is I think sometimes a hard realization for a lot of people because they get into this place where they've been so close to it for so long that they're like we did all of these things really really well that's great so do a lot of people I'm just gonna give you rough percentages here so if we get pitched by 500 people in a day not unusual for any writer you get pitched

[41:10] by 500 people in a day 100 of those people have really done the work to just put something together that looks like it actually is a real company out of those hundred maybe a dozen are even in your space that dozen have done the job of like actually pitching you correctly like and saying like Hey we're real but also we're really interesting to you we're not just real and interesting to someone like we're real and interesting to you as a writer and out of those dozen you are then forced with this forcing function of okay what is the unique bits out of these and I'm exaggerating here because it doesn't

[41:46] always come in clumps like this but let's say those dozen you're a fintech writer and all of those dozen are fintech companies and all of those dozen look legit they've done the work to have a solidly designed app that seems to have some user affordances that are cool and that looks like they've done the work and so out of those which of those has the interesting hook of that additional percentage above zero whether that's a really cleverly designed feature taking advantage of a a freshly launched new sensor or feature of a platform like Apple or Google or somebody else's shipped is addressing a need in the current environment we

[42:25] talked about post earlier but other environments can be like Co was a good example obviously of many people capitalizing on that I don't even really think it matters if I'm talking about something that exists right now because people may watch this and it may be different a week from now well like open AI launches a new model you've utilized that new model in a clever way you've got a new feature threads that tie into the overall stories that that writer has been covering or that the industry or audience is interested in and then I think the big elephant in the room that we haven't talked about yet and that I

[42:56] think can be very interesting if it's done right is the story of the people that have built this thing so you have to reach to zero you have to get to zero first you have to have a thing that exists that's really well built that seems clever that seems like it's tackling an interesting problem and then you can start telling personal stories my brother and I founded this app my sister and I founded this app we saw a need because our mother was in hospice and there was no Elder Care app that also integrated message in this way so that we could check up on her quality of

[43:29] care every day you know with a few simple Taps Etc and like those kinds of opportunities I think are ones that allow you to do that storytelling above and beyond but you have to hit zero first I think that's a really good point that even in the storytelling like oh my sister and I created this app because our mom was in hospice that's part of a story but you still have to tell a story of like why does it matter and did you do something unique cuz if there's there's a hundred other apps that do the same thing your personal story of why you created it doesn't matter as much as

[44:02] it actually doing something and so I think that was a great framing it's like you got to get to zero like it's got to be a good functional well-built app there's just such a high Baseline now but then you really do need to do something above and beyond and I think this applies to marketing generally as well is just that you need to focus on that differentiation and if you're not doing something new and unique and exciting and help what are you doing and so getting to zero and building that stuff on top and then telling those stories is then what gives you the authority to then tell

[44:37] more stories about why and how and things like that so that's a really good framing changing gears a little bit how effective do you think PR agencies are these days at helping folks tell those stories and how effective are PR agencies at working with the press these days do you recommend working with somebody to help craft those stories or is it maybe something a Founder should just get really good at themselves and take that onetoone approach there is a service provided by good I prefis by saying let's say you managed to identify a solid PR firm with good reputation that seem very attentive to your needs

[45:20] and understanding of where you are in your course of existence as a company there are definitely services that they provide that you're trading money for time with a lot of those agencies and they're doing the work of like packaging press kits and offering up services that allow you to pitch a broad number of Publications or a broad number of media or come up with that but I think that honestly strategy based comms and marketing is so much more interesting and so much more important longterm I think a lot of people get into this thing like okay we need somebody to make press releases and send press releases

[45:58] and write those and Pitch people on our behalf all that's fine and I think it can work for certain classes of company and app so like for an app that is interested in garnering the largest possible pitch surface area that goes across hundreds or thousands of I don't know let's say gaming blocks right like let's say you're a game that has a relatively quasi predatory inap purchase scenario and your job is to get it out to hundreds or dozens of sites that can just get it into circulation so that your SEO and therefore attribution and acquisition strategies across Google and Facebook are aided by that you want like

[46:42] the purest form of PR Company right which is like generating press releases pitching it to thousands of sites managing that flow and all of that stuff because you don't have the time for it these are not people that are doing CEO interviews or in-depth explorations of the rationale behind their app they just want the name of the app out there the fact that it exists the fact that it has a few screenshots that are interesting and has a link to download it they want to seed that into the universe in a way that is one step above completely inorganic acquisition which would just be them placing ads that's one step

[47:16] above that but I think several steps several layers above that is the idea that you have a strategist that works with you to generate a strategy around your story like the story that you're trying to tell how you're trying to tell it the narrative that you're building over time that your users now and in the future will always recognize as true the story you've always been telling you won't get that out of a PR firm you really need to get that out of a PR strategist you mentioned one of the services that PR agencies can help with is prits and things like that I know it's something that's actually really

[47:51] important for somebody pitching to consider is to make it as easy as possible on the writer to write the story any tips on how to make that super easy so we've talked crafting a good pitch you've got their attention but now they have to do the work how do you make that easy and more compelling for them to tell that story if you want to talk about like mechanical Baseline pragmatic stuff that you can do to help make sure that your pitch is more well received short simple straight to the point subject lines a couple of lines of body copy don't inundate because most of that

[48:26] stuff won't get read especially if it feels like it's been pasted in which inevitably it will because if you're pasting something in there why should I read a paste I want to read a couple of simple sentences from you about why your thing is unique why it's interesting if you have a very defining potent straightforward screenshot of something that's in your app you're like look we did this it's really cool you're going to love it put that in there too write in the body of the email and then most writers if they have any sort of opsc will not have images loading automatically so it's no harm no foul it'll load just as

[49:03] fast you don't have to worry about it the image will be collapsed and then they can always click on view image if they want to right but just from the nature of protecting against viruses and tracking pixels and anything else most writers have images hidden by default by the way if you can avoid on any individual pitch I would never include tracking pixels or links it's just sort of a matter of respect now I understand completely if you're doing a campaign or a broad pitch you need those right we everybody understands everybody gets it but if you're doing individual pitch don't do like read receipts or tracking

[49:38] pixels inside emails and especially never ever call them on oh you I saw you open by email creepy it's really weird that's not going to do anything if you want to like email them say hey I didn't know if you got my email great you know what I mean fine okay we understand persistence and followup up although at some point chill the tracking stuff do away with that and then you can always attach the press kit and attaching the press kit with high resolution images or just providing a link to it depending on the service that you're using with high resolution images all the information they could ever want about the founders

[50:12] their backstory the app its purpose and then the images or assets necessary in a link or tucked away in an attachment but leaving the main copy as a place for you to tell your personal story a few sentences I think is the most effective pitches that I've seen or that way we've given you all the resources that you need to write the story if you find it compelling without any additional Outreach however we're here if you need us feel free email me directly I'll answer right away whatever here's my direct email here's my phone number whatever you feel comfortable with as a Founder as a app creator but whatever

[50:45] direct connection you can provide is always good text me at whatever if you have any questions things like that because oftentimes writers are under crazy deadlines they're trying to move fast getting a quick response could mean the difference between them writing that story that day or maybe it gets pushed to the next day if they don't get a response and then Instagram sells for a billion dollars and they don't write about you anymore right because they're busy with other things and so you want to provide the most lubrication possible but you also don't want the body of the copy to read like a Facebook ad or to

[51:15] feel cluttered with all this information that's overwhelming just keep it simple I think that that's fantastic advice and it's something I probably haven't done good at over the years with my presskits specifically is that I've kept my pitches pretty tight but I've also kept my presskits maybe a little too tight so you're saying the best thing is to have that really tight pitch but once they click you want to give them as much resource but organized well easy to read you still want to craft that in a way that makes it easy on them but to just give them all the resources where they don't have to interview you to

[51:47] understand parts of the story like they could just jump to that press kit they have everything they need images details list list of features like that's where you put the depth because you've already got their attention right yeah I think so I think that's a really straightforward standard tactic the one thing you do want to avoid is attempting to write the story for the writer so if you're like including a section let's say on bios let's say you feel that your founder story is really strong you've got a set of strong Founders we mentioned that brother and sister earlier that had a compelling story about their mother in hospice and wrote

[52:25] this app to facilitate communication and standards of care and all that stuff a couple of lines about that is great but you don't want to go too in depth because it doesn't leave any room for the writer to tell a story if you have a really compelling founder story and you've explained it enough in a few sentences so that they understand it that will be enough and then you offer the communication so that they can then communicate with you do any additional interviewing and tease that story out and draw it out that feels good what doesn't feel good as a writer is somebody having pitched to what they

[52:55] view as the story pre-written in quotes maybe not a full story pre-written although I have seen that it's so funny um but like a story about them you want to tease them with your story I've got a really compelling story XY I think is really cool but then let them go wait really like how did that happen how did it come about you know pulling out the details from there so when I say details you want enough detail in there to offer them teasers of why the story is interesting and then of course mechanically speaking you know like app store listings and descriptions and screenshots all of that stuff so that

[53:26] you don't have to like manually go to the App Store to pull screenshots or anything like that and of course test flight links or links to download the app if it's live just to make sure that they have access to it and direct access they don't go searching for it all the mechanical stuff that I'm sure everybody knows but I think that's super important to include you know and I think that's maybe a good framing then is that don't write the story but provide the building blocks for them to write the story awesome well I think this has been super helpful to dig into all the thinking

[53:57] behind how something goes from Pitch to actually landing on Tech Crunch and how to tell the right stories and I think so much of this applies to marketing more broadly pitching influencers creating your copy for advertising all those kind of things everything we talked about applies to that as well but as we wrap up anything else you wanted to share I really had a nice time talking about this stuff I mean I think there is a high amount of noise but signal still pokes through and those ones that poke through typically are so much more fun to write about and interesting and I think if you have an interesting

[54:32] compelling story you know it's truly differentiated it's not a shell game that it's basically like another vehicle that's very similar to anything else out there but you think you've got a unique story but you really don't I think you're going to win out attention somewhere persistence does pay off people are very very very busy it's very intense out there so don't lose heart you will find a way to punch through it's not a function of you I think it's very important for Founders to understand from a mental health perspective and a frustration perspective it's very very very unlikely that it is anything about you personally or about some competitor though that got

[55:10] covered and you didn't it is generally a byproduct of it just being extremely noisy out there these days so he B it stay persistent all right thanks so much Matthew it's great having you on today no problem David thank you very much thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private [Music] community

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