Anyone know how this works? I see there's a journalist sign up so do the emails go directly to journalists who've signed up or to a general mailbox, or to journalists' inboxes who haven't signed up
@taylorhou - your check is in the mail. :P
@yongfook - can you share more about how it's working today? Does it just blast pitches to reporters' inboxes or is there something more fancy going on behind the scenes? Reminds me a bit of HARO (cc'ing its founder, @petershankman)
Definitely a needed tool, but what do the actual conversion rates for getting a published blog post look like? I'd bet people with more personal emails that are handwritten to the journalist would have a higher conversion rate.
Also, is this only for mobile apps? What if you have a website url to point the journalist to?
@rrhoover@nowmiles@kyler
re: conversion rates to getting published
Warning, mild rant ahead!
Pitchpigeon is a distribution platform. Note that our value prop is "notify hundreds of tech blogs". It's not "get published in...". Our job isn't getting you published - that's a job for a PR firm (who will charge you a lot more than $49 ;)
I'm always a bit puzzled by people who ask that question to be honest. It's like asking mailchimp how many people will buy your tshirts if you send out a "buy me now" newsletter to a mailing list. Obviously, that has nothing to do with mailchimp (whose job is distribution) and depends entirely on the content of your newsletter and the quality of your tshirts.
Getting published is the same challenge. If you send out a press release for an amazing product, with an amazing story, in an industry that's currently trending and journalists like to write about - it's likely you'll get a good response and maybe even some published articles.
If you just send out a boilerplate press release for a product that has no story hook, or a product that isn't unique etc - then you'll get a crappy (or zero) response.
To answer the other question - sending personal emails is definitely a much better way of getting some exposure. But I don't think these two things are mutually exclusive. You can work directly with journalists in your network and also cover the long tail by sending a press release. Best of both worlds.
@yongfook@rrhoover@nowmiles@kyler yeah but if your distribution channel is just a bunch of noise and crappy apps, then nobody will pay attention to it and it will have no value. This is one of the most important things for an app developer; finding channels that aren't already wastelands. For example, here on Product Hunt you get a super high conversion and click-through because they have trusted members and screening of products. This builds trust in the users so they come back and actively respond to new products. If your system blasts out anybody who pays, the people on the other end of the line are gonna stop listening. Imagine Product Hunt was only anybody who paid. It would fall apart in a day. No offense but I feel like this is exactly what is happening or will happen to services like this (like Pitch Pigeon). I think a better model would be to do something similar to product hunt, screening for quality (to some degree). Also, allowing people to know what the likely conversions are is a good way to be transparent, build trust, and get more paying customers.
I'm the founder of Pitchpigeon.
Thought I'd take this opportunity to say that Pitchpigeon is for sale! It's been around for a year and does decent revenue every month, entirely organically. At this point it's basically zero maintenance but still doing 4 figure USD monthly.
Still lots of untapped potential but I'm just way too busy with my main business.
At some point I'm going to do a public tear down of revenue / traffic etc in order to sell the site. But I guess this is a sneak preview for anyone on producthunt :)
If anyone is interested, email me at:
yongfook@gmail.com
@yongfook This is great. I've been a fan of your products going back years now (esp. Tactics: http://datainsightsideas.com/pos...).
Although I'm not a traditional journalist - *cough* addicted to sharing products on Twitter or my blog *cough* - I did sign up as a "journalist" since it looks like another way to engage w. new products from a venture investment perspective.
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