Hey guys! 👋
Last month we launched Howler: AI-powered media outreach. So far Howler’s working really well for our users and we're excited to keep making 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 at 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While there are a few comparable services, they’re either a. too small (10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too niche (only TechCrunch emails).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).
Try it free (!) here: https://presshunt.co.
As always, we’ll be here all day to answer questions!
- Matt
P.S. Our goal is to launch 2 products a month for all of 2018. This is product #5 of the year.
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@juhaszhenderson if we are a journalist (raises hand) how do we submit for inclusion in your database?
Wild miscategorization of what I write about, which means I'll get more off-topic pitches. And I get 100 a day already. Where's the "is this you" option for journalists to claim their entry and make sure it's accurate? And where is the option to be removed from the database?
@therealsjr Hey Stewart! Sure we’ll remove you. Algo’s always getting better and has room to improve.
Our v2 wIll have crowdsourcIng features and the abilIiy to add or remove yourself, add more data, etc.
Glad you don’t have a problem sourcing good stories—that’s not the case for everyone. 🙂
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Congrats on another awesome launch that takes the “manual” out of manual labor almost every early stage founder does at one point or another 🙏🏻🙌🏻👏🏻
@legionof7 Hey Justin! Howler is a black box that takes care of everything, and uses AI to build your media list in seconds.
Building your media list manually with Press Hunt would take a few hours. If you don't use something like Press Hunt it would take weeks.
Howler (https://www.howler.media) is perfect if you have the budget for it and don't want to spend a ton of time worrying about media outreach.
Press Hunt starts at $19/mo and Howler starts at $149/mo
Huge fan of better matching journalists to stories; what are the verticals you're focused on, and do you plan on expanding those regularly or sticking to a core set?
@k_to_the_t The journalists we have cover every topic from startups to food to sports to fashion. We're less focused on any one vertical, but rather more focused on building out the tech that analyzes a journalist's writing history to predict what they'd like to write about.
We're constantly expanding this database. It's estimated there's 1M-2M journalists in the world (salaried and freelance), so we'll try to document them all. We update data daily!
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