Get more press with AI-powered media outreach 🚀
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Daniel Greenberg

Howler AI - Get more press with AI-powered media outreach 🚀

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Howler takes away the tedious, time-sucking work of media outreach by sending personalized pitches hand-written by experts to journalists likely to feature your product.

Each list of journalists we target is unique to the product, and determined algorithmically based on what the journalist has written about before (among other things).

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James Walsh
Similar issue to @ryanheybourn with Instaaa.com - come on guys, absolute rip of the copy from Prumio.com. Awesome that we could inspire you (I guess you saw us on the Productized Startups group you’re also a member of) but please try to be original - your pitch sounds exactly like ours and it’s a pretty scummy thing to do. Besides that, I’d be interested in learning more about your AI system.
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@ryanheybourn @mr_j_walsh Hey James! This is a logical progression of our last product. 🤷‍♂️ Made a lot of sense for us. Using AI in PR isn't original (it also isn't hard). Good luck!
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@mr_j_walsh @ryanheybourn Ryan, Instaaa is a carbon copy of Pressfarm (https://press.farm/directory/). Your original directories were copy/pasted directly from their site. Better yet, over half of them were out of service at the time you launched with them. (Which of course means you didn't even check them before ripping off the entire product.) Further, your current version borrows a lot of unique features from Aidem, for example "45 minute strategy calls." Which is fine, I'm not going to whine about it. All is fair! If your product is better, people will use it, and that's the way it should be. Feel free to compete!
Raul Popa
@ryanheybourn @mr_j_walsh with AI systems, it's usually not the same thing behind the scenes, I wouldn't jump in to conclusions.
James Walsh
@ryanheybourn @juhaszhenderson I have no problem with competition (it’s healthy and pushes one to be better) but ripping off content is just lazy. It’s not a coincidence that you launched this after you saw our post in the Productized Startups group on Facebook (which Robin tagged you in) and then launched about 7 days later — which really makes me doubt the honesty of your ‘AI’ or your testimonials. As I said, I have no problems with you running with the idea (genuine AI makes the process more targeted as you can analyse multiple data points to build the best press lists), but ripping our content and even our general page layout is so dishonest I’d be seriously concerned for your future clients. If you’re going to copy an idea, you should at least have your own spin on it - please be original. You did it to @ryanheybourn and now you guys are doing it to us.
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@mr_j_walsh Here's how it works: we've refined 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. Howler is powered by genuine AI and completely realistic for our team (who has experience with advanced NLP, namely topic modeling) to build and integrate within a few weeks. We've actually been working in the AI space for almost a year, starting with classifying content for education and training deep learning models to generate personalized curriculums. Our intention since before we launched Aidem was to find a spot in the PR/growth space where we could work on AI. We wanted to find a spot in this space because of our past experience with projects like Rumblr (https://goo.gl/XDcPE5), Hacbook Elite, Extensions.af, etc.
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
Hey everyone! 👋 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. 🙂
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@juhaszhenderson Like Matt said we'll be here all day answering questions. I also want to give a big shoutout to our awesome advisors @jjeremycai @stefanstok @afshin_pishevar @johnxie @kyradurko @lucky_lance_gobindram @james_ingallinera @_liso_ @chadgrills @andrewlinfoot and @cebsilver
James Walsh

Stolen copy from Prumio - glad to see you were inspired!

Pros:

using AI could potentially be useful

Cons:

Ripping off copy once again

Kestas Vaitelis
Hey James good thing you posted would have never known about alternatives. Would you recommend service for launched live products only? We have launched our product but based on user feedback went back to waiting list and will launch BETA 2.0 few months from now. Would you recommend service like that at this stage? Thank you
Will Jamieson
Incredible use of AI for a task that often takes founders endless hours when they don't have the resources for a PR team.
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@willjamieson93 you're the man :)
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@willjamieson93 Yeah there's definitely a PR access gap. Startups don't have the resources for real PR strategies, so they're left with high risk, uncertain growth hacking tactics to grow. PR's a great supplement for sustainable growth!
Kieran O'Reilly
This is a great use of Ai! Super excited
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@kieran_o_reilly thank you!!
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@kieran_o_reilly Thanks! 🎉
Mathew Pregasen
a lot of companies just tag on AI to gather more hype but this looks like a perfect application of it.
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@mathewpregasen PR is such a pain, so we know this is gonna help
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@mathewpregasen I think the buzzword-followers are moving to crypto anyway. 🙂
Andrew Linfoot
This looks dope! Will definitely be using for an upcoming launch in couple months :)
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@andrewlinfoot Looking forward to it! 🚀
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@andrewlinfoot thanks Andrew
Alex Naoumidis
@andrewlinfoot @15greenberg Did you guys just rip off Prumio?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@15greenberg @alex_naoumidis This is a natural progression for our product and team. We're glad there are other validations of this model in the market though.
John Xie
Excited to see this launch!
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@johnxie Thanks 🙏
Daniel Greenberg
Maker
@johnxie we are so pumped as well
rotem gal
@15greenberg Thanks for this - I'm a little bit curious, I followed your profile and saw you previously hunted - https://www.producthunt.com/post... -- a free PR tool who doesn't seem to work.. I also tried to see whether two of your reviewers got any press (assuming they used your service - otherwise why review) but couldn't find any mention of them online. TLDR: Do you have any case studies/happy clients who got press? anyway, dope idea you have my vote just not sure if it works.
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@15greenberg @gal_rotem Hey Rotem! Most of our reviewers are reviewing this as customers of Aidem (an earlier product that focused more-so on product launches than media outreach). Worlds Fair Nano, Richie Simple, and Daycation. Pretty easy to find them online!
rotem gal
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
Rashid Khasanov

We used their services to launch our product and we're very satisfied with the results. They saved us tons of time and helped bring lots of traffic and signups.

Pros:

These guys are just awesome!

Cons:

There is still a room to improve.

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