Last month we launched Howler: AI-powered media outreach. So far Howler’s working really well for our users and were excited to make 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 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While there are a few comparable services, they’re either a. too small (10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too niche (only TechCrunch emails).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).
As always, we’ll be here all day to answer questions!
Check us out on PH here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/press-hunt
- Matt
P.S. Our goal is to launch 2 products a month for all of 2018. This is product #5 of the year!