Kat Manialik, a partner at Y Combinator, discusses the importance of content marketing and PR for early stage founders. She explains that good content allows founders to shape their startup's story and attract a specific audience, while pitching to press helps reach a larger audience. However, it is crucial to first ensure that the startup has a product that people want before focusing on content marketing and PR. Craig Cannon, who works with Kat at YC, provides advice on content marketing, including the need to create content that customers are interested in and the importance of setting goals and analytics. He also emphasizes the need to find the right platforms to reach the target audience and create content that resonates with them.

- YC has been doing content marketing since the beginning
- Not enough time is spent brainstorming, resulting in derivative content
- The Onion's headline selection process is effective in creating consistently good content
- Dedicate time and good people to create valuable and engaging content
- Promotion is necessary and should be done creatively
- Examples of effective content marketing strategies include SEO, influencer marketing, customer profiles, industry advice, tools, community engagement, and publishing
- Press can be useful for early user acquisition, investor awareness, and SEO

- Most companies wait until they have a launched product and early users before pitching to the press, but there are exceptions for bio or hard science companies.
- Media outlets don't typically cover very early stage startups, so it's important to have a compelling reason for them to care about your company.
- Hiring a PR firm is not recommended at the early stages due to cost, and founders should build relationships with press themselves.
- Spending 30 minutes per week reading industry news and keeping a list of relevant publications and reporters is recommended.
- Creating a calendar to plan milestones and announcements for pitching to press is helpful.
- When pitching a story, define your goals and audience, and draft a one-sentence pitch, a three to five sentence pitch, and answers to frequently asked questions.
- The one-sentence pitch should be clear, jargon-free, and easily understood by anyone.
- The three to five sentence pitch provides more context, including why your company is better than what's currently in the market.
- Drafting answers to frequently asked questions by reporters is important, but avoid over-rehearsing to sound more natural.

- Founders should have answers to all potential questions before talking to the press
- Bullet point 3 to 5 key points to discuss in an interview
- Timing is important when pitching to the press, consider news hooks and avoid pitching during major events
- Identify target publications and offer exclusives to top choices
- Warm introductions are the best way to get in touch with reporters, cold emailing is less effective
- Give the process of pitching to the press at least 2 weeks
- Don't lie or act entitled, don't suggest headlines or ask to see a draft
- Promote the published story on social media and through personal channels
- Evaluate whether the press coverage helped achieve goals
- If journalists reach out but the company is still early and lacks product-market fit, engage with them briefly and offer to keep them updated on progress.

- It is recommended to keep contacts updated on progress rather than pitching a story
- When starting content marketing, it is best to have a personal blog with a link to the company for SEO purposes
- Working with influencers who do not currently need your product may not be worth the cost
- It is important to balance vision for the future with what the company is currently doing in communication
- Clickbait headlines may not be effective, but it is important to have a strong headline that appeals to the target audience
- Founders should aim to publish good content every month during the early stage of product market fit
- Celebrity endorsements can have downsides, but it is generally a good problem to have enthusiastic supporters
- If a catastrophe occurs, the founding team should be prepared with a response
- Regular updates should be sent to the press if there are developments in the product

- Reporters do not want to hear every update about a product, but they are interested in news and announcements.
- It is worth reaching out to reporters if there is news to share, but give them the chance to decline if they are not interested.
- Some reporters may ask to be added to an email or press list, allowing for more regular updates.
- Engaging with journalists on Twitter can be effective, as they are often responsive.
- The tool HARO (Helper Reporter) can be useful for experts to contribute to stories in their field without pitching a product.
- Contact information for Y Combinator is provided for any further questions.

- Content marketing and PR are important for early stage founders to shape their startup's story and reach a larger audience.
- It is crucial to have a product that people want before focusing on content marketing and PR.
- Effective content marketing strategies include SEO, influencer marketing, customer profiles, industry advice, tools, community engagement, and publishing.
- Press can be useful for early user acquisition, investor awareness, and SEO.
- Founders should build relationships with press themselves and avoid hiring a PR firm at the early stages.
- Timing, warm introductions, and exclusives are important when pitching to the press.
- Promote the published story on social media and evaluate the impact of press coverage.
- Regular updates should be sent to the press if there are developments in the product.
- Engaging with journalists on Twitter and using tools like HARO can be effective in contributing to stories in the field.

YC Partner Kat Manalac and Director of Marketing Craig Cannon describe the most effective ways to use PR and content to help your companies brand and to find more users.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/42

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/

Now we have Kat with Craig Lader to talk about PR and content for growth.

And during my time at YC, I've helped hundreds of companies with their launches, with their pitches, with their initial interactions with press, and I'm gonna be joined by Craig Cannon, who creates a lot of the content for YC, and we're going to be giving you a framework for thinking about content marketing and press as an early stage founder.

So before we jump in, let's define some terms.

When we talk about content, we're talking about anything that you create and distribute on your own channels to attract a specific audience or user.

So that means anything you make for your blog, YouTube, podcasts, anything that you create and distribute yourself.

When we talk about PR or press, we're referring to an early stage startup pitching an independent third party publication.

So that's news, blogs, anything that's external to your channels.

So as a founder, it's 1 of your primary jobs to tell the story of your startup.

You'll need to tell that story to investors, to press, to users, to potential employees, and you'll need to tell that story throughout the entire lifetime of your company.

So you will need to tell it clearly and succinctly because the goal is to tell it in a way where it makes it easy for other people to repeat that story for you and help you spread the word.

So making good content lets you shape that story and put it out into the world yourself.

And then pitching it to press helps you put that story in front of a potentially much larger audience.

So the combination of the 2 can be really powerful, but making good content and setting up a press practice is a lot of work.

You have to decide and hopefully I will help you go through that decision tree whether it is worth doing at the stage where you are at right now.

We will cover when and why to start thinking about doing content marketing, how to think about content like a product and how to measure it, how to DIY your own PR, and then we'll open it up to questions.

And so a couple of things before we get started.

First, for the majority of you, before you focus too much time and energy getting the word out about what you're building, make sure that you're making something people want.

Make sure you're focusing on the right things.

And it all comes back to this, writing code and talking to users.

No amount of press or content marketing is going to help you if you don't have something people want.

And how do you know that you have something people want?

And additionally, talking to your users will make it easier for you to create better content and do press that will target them.

And second, press is not a scalable user acquisition strategy.

It can help get you in front of early adopters.

But it's not something you can rely on long term for growth.

It's not something you can really control.

And it's not even the best way to talk to your earliest users, which is why we're gonna talk about content and content marketing first and I will let Craig kick it off here.

I work with Kat at YC, do the podcasts and all that kind of stuff.

All right, so I, before working at YC, I worked at a place called The Onion.

I did a Photoshop, so like putting Joe Biden's head on like a fat guy's body in front of the White House, that kind of thing.

And then after working at The Onion, I co-founded a company and we made a thing called Comedy Hack Day, where developers and comedians work together to make funny apps, and then we had these big events.

And now I work at YC, so hopefully that's like the least logical connection of things in this deck.

So today I'm gonna talk about content, content marketing.

Some people call it content marketing, some people call it editorial, some other people call it brand publishing, some people call it social content, and then some other people call it a word I don't know.

But like Kat said, this is just basically everything you make.

So it's gonna be your podcast, YouTube, blog, video, social stuff, whatever.

We can get more specific and granular about each of those channels if you want to talk one-on-one, but this is going to be kind of like broad, across-the-board advice that hopefully you can use.

So the number 1 question I get is when to start.

Really the thing is, just like Kat said, and just like Gustav said last week about applying growth tactics, you really wanna be doing this after you've made something people want, and you're confident that they're not churning.

Because if they're churning, you're just wasting a ton of energy and a ton of money.

So assuming you've hit that point, you can start thinking about content marketing.

A lot of people do this in the beginning because they can't afford paid acquisition.

So the way I think about it is the content as product.

Hopefully you can just apply all the learnings from the lectures earlier on about product and just throw them right at content.

So when you think about content as product, the only thing you have to change from like the YC advice of make something people want is make something your customers want.

You have this very clear market that you're going after and you want to make something that they're interested in.

I was talking with Wade Foster from Zapier.

And what he was saying is that in the early days, what they were doing was making things that Hacker News wanted but it turns out that Hacker News and their customers was not a 100% overlap.

So they were spending all this energy generating this content to get people through the door but those weren't actually the customers that they were looking for.

And so now that you've committed to doing content marketing, you're gonna do this, what you need to do is pick a goal.

So there are basically 2 things that early stage companies want.

Engagement, if you're a social company, that's like Instagram, whatever, that's like time on site.

There's this third thing called brand, which is kind of this like vague, misty thing about like how people perceive you.

You really don't need to worry about this early on.

I mean, obviously you don't want to like do evil things and have people hate you, but it's much harder to kind of comprehend and work towards.

And now that you're going, you want to just set up analytics.

Suhail talked about this, but really it's like super basic stuff.

The first thing I would do is set up Mixpanel, not Google Analytics, but something similar to Mixpanel will get the job done.

You're just tracking where people are coming in, what they're doing, what they're clicking on, how long they're on their site, all that stuff.

And then the next thing you want to do is install a Facebook pixel.

Again, this might not be super valuable to you in the beginning, but a lot of YC companies launch without a Facebook pixel.

And what this is going to do is capture who's hitting your site, who's logged into Facebook, so then you can later remarket at them.

And this is going to be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create.

So you want to do this because if you launch on Hacker News and have like 10,000 people hit your site and you don't have it installed, you won't know who it is afterward.

All right, so the next most common question I get is what platform?

So you just talk to them and be like, where do you hang out?

Do you hang out on Reddit, Instagram, whatever?

You can look at your refer data, but this is really all you have to do because your objective is to find people like them.

And then once you're hanging out there long enough, you're gonna be able to figure out what does well there.

So for instance, like essays like Paul Graham's essays, they do well on Hacker News.

Makeup tutorials do well on YouTube, vlogging, all that kind of stuff.

Because you're gonna wanna make the stuff that does well on those platforms.

Distribution is really hard even for huge companies.

A lot of companies would just rely on paid acquisitions, you know, like boosted posts on Facebook, that kind of thing, and you have no money.

And so assuming these 2 things are true, you have to figure out where your customers are and you have to figure out what does well there.

2 examples, so Scentbird, they're a YC company.

They do perfume and makeup subscription box.

So YC, although PG and Jessica, Robert and Trevor might not say this, has been doing like content marketing since the very beginning, even before.

So with Paul's essays and then Hacker News was built and then those essays do really well and that's the exact kind of audience that would create a startup.

So now that you've found out where you're gonna go and generally what you wanna be making, I think not enough people spend enough time brainstorming.

It sounds kinda silly, but Most content, because people don't spend enough time brainstorming, ends up being derivative of all the average of all the other stuff people see.

So it doesn't stand out and it looks like all the other stuff because you got the ideas from the other people whose blogs you're reading or your competitors, whatever.

And my example of this is going back to The Onion.

So The Onion's been around for like 30 years, maybe more at this point.

And they've had hundreds of people work there.

And I think it's particularly important because it's allowed them to create consistently good stuff with a lot of different people over a long period of time.

So the way The Onion picks headlines is they have, say, 10 writers.

Each writer is responsible for 10 to 15 headlines a week, and then they email those headlines to an editor, the editor removes everyone's name, and then they just pick their favorite as a group.

And so the objective is to have only 5% to 10% roughly survive.

And so what this is really good at is, first of all, it removes biases for who's the CEO, who's the new guy, or girl, whatever.

And it also gets you past the point of those first 3 ideas, which are kind of the same from everyone.

This is a huge problem, and if you go on just any average company blog, they're all writing about the same stuff.

There's this American Life episode about it if you want to learn more.

Can we just stay here for the rest of this?

All right, so now you want to make something good.

Again, this is like dumb stuff that should be self-evident.

It doesn't seem to be based on the internet.

So to break down what I talked about before, maybe that's like an hour a week or every 2 weeks brainstorming.

It could take you 3 days to write a blog post.

And maybe in the early days you can't do that, but you should let that amount of time dictate how often you can put stuff out rather than go the other way and be like, shit, I have to get a thing out every week.

And then you write a post in 10 minutes, and it's garbage.

That's not to say that you're hiring bad people, But what it's saying is that you want to dedicate the people who have actual domain expertise and can lend something that's interesting to the rest of the world.

You know, that means usually like a co-founder, lead developer, that kind of thing.

Just 2 other little things from the media world You need to be prepared to edit all the time like just really be precise about your language because people don't spend that much time on your site or your video or whatever and You need to be prepared to kill a lot of your work and that really sucks But you have to do it, you know Like I said at the onion like most headlines by definition, would not make it through.

I think for a company, that's really hard to do, but you can easily kill 25% of your stuff.

And so this is, I want to illustrate why this is important.

Most people think that they're competing with people that make the same stuff that they make.

Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast.

I haven't checked the views, but I think it's probably like 10 million now.

You're competing with this guy, you're competing with porn, you're competing with everything else on the internet.

And once you like really let that sink into your brain, you will have the motivation to make something that's both valuable and engaging.

Alright, so then the next thing, this is the part that's really hard for me, is promotion.

So promotion is both incredibly boring and totally necessary.

This means like sharing articles out over and over on your Twitter feed, figuring out new, different, creative ways to do it.

A lot of people will tell you to make a version for each platform.

You can do this, but again, you're going to be optimizing for 1 place where your customers are.

You know, YC, so like now I clip up the podcast and put it on Instagram.

And that's cool, but we're still getting way more podcast downloads than we are getting Instagram views.

Not everything's going to work everywhere.

I'm putting this slide in here twice because if I were watching this talk, this would be the thing that I would be like, oh, yeah, man, I got it, don't worry about it, and then I would skip over it, and then I would have played myself because I'm dumb and lazy and I would not promote it enough.

Alright, so just really quickly, I'm gonna rip through a couple examples.

So, Gustav talked about this 1 last week.

You can hit someone with a Facebook pixel.

You can get your brand in there, and then you can convert.

Influencer, Scentbird, Influencer Marketing.

If you Google just those 2 words, you'll read a bunch of blog posts about that.

Customer profiles, so Zapier, who I mentioned earlier, they help non-technical people work with APIs by doing all these integrations for them.

What's particularly cool about this is that they are always finding new and creative ways to link stuff together.

The customers want to talk about themselves, and they do it over text.

Text interviews are like a total cheat code for young companies because they require way less production than video or audio.

The internet really likes it for SEO for scraping and it makes the person look really smart.

Time over time, the person wants to promote it more than they do when they see themselves in a video and they feel weird.

So Triple Byte helps companies hire engineers.

Intercom is that little chat widget you've probably seen before.

Desk Trainer at Intercom writes about product and content marketing.

Triple Byte Harge, who used to be at YC, writes about hiring engineers.

These are all great posts, with the 1 caveat being that you have to really know what you're talking about or this just won't ring true.

Next thing, Tools, Front, this is a YC company, they made a website called Good Email Copy or something like that where Matilda just like pulled together her favorite lines from emails and then tagged things.

So like onboarding, we're shutting the company down, like all kinds of like fairly templated emails.

And you can go on there and check them all out.

So if you have like extra engineering time these can be super effective.

So both Hacker News and Product Hunt were kind of like built out from from YC entities but just getting good at engaging with your community on HN in Product Hunt is really undervalued.

If you're someone who's known as a good actor on these sites and engages with people and is cool, that's worth your time.

Not saying just like lurk and comment on everything, but just know how it works if that's where your customers are.

And then the last thing, and this is like not exhaustive at all, but these are just like some examples, publishing.

37 Signals, Basecamp, they make books too.

This is super powerful in terms of like your influencer status but really really hard to track.

So this would be later down the road but it is effective and because it's hard most people aren't going to do it so you can really stand out.

So Kat's gonna come up to talk about Press.

All right, so let's jump back into press.

As I mentioned, it's not a scalable user acquisition, but it can get you some early adopting users.

It can give you your investors or potential employees a heads up that you exist.

So a lot of people ask, when do, when should I start thinking about press?

So ideally you will have a sense that you're making something people want, as we said.

So for most startups it's worth waiting to pitch until there's a call to action for your intended audience.

So is there a product that they can try or buy or something they can sign up for?

So most companies who go through YC wait until they have a launched product and some very early users before they bother pitching to press.

So there are companies that do press pre-product if there's something particularly novel about the or notable about the company.

This is especially true if you're working on a bio company or something in the hard sciences that will take you a long time before you get to product.

And there are other companies that wait years before they do press.

So 1 thing to note is that most media outlets don't cover very early stage startups anymore.

So you shouldn't waste their time with a non-story.

Think about what you're pitching objectively.

Why should they care about this and why now?

And so that's 1 reason why a lot of startups, the first time they pitch press will be to announce a fundraising round, because that's timely news.

And that's why you see a lot of those fundraising announcements.

It's just an opportunity, a timely opportunity to pitch.

So we'll talk about, I'll go through a checklist of things that you should prepare when you are pitching press and the mechanics of how to do it.

At the stage that you're at, PR firms are way too expensive.

Typically you have to keep them on a monthly retainer.

And most companies, even through Seed, Series A, they don't have the budget for that.

So, the thing is that your relationships that you build now with press will hopefully, similar to investors, last throughout the entire life cycle of your company.

You shouldn't bother thinking about hiring a firm or someone in-house until you have more funding and so much inbound that the founders can't deal with it themselves.

And so 1 thing that, you know, PR people, so PR people, you know, a lot of people think, oh if I hire someone to do PR, they'll magically think of all the most interesting stories that I can pitch.

The most interesting stories are gonna come from you, the founders, You know your company better than anyone else.

And so what PR firms do have is connections to reporters.

So like BD or sales, which you wouldn't outsource early in your company's life, you shouldn't outsource pitching to press in the very early stages of your company.

As I said, these are relationships that you should build now and will hopefully have for years to come.

And so when you think about how to do this, we can talk about what you need to do to DIY your own PR, essentially.

So A couple things that I recommend any company do is, and people ask me, how much time should I be spending on this?

I think you can spend at least 30 minutes per week reading about the news in your industry.

Keep a list of publications that cover your space, a list of media outlets that your users read, and a list of specific reporters who are interested in your vertical.

So if you don't know which outlets to track or to read, talk to your users and ask them what they read and what they're interested in.

Then I think that if you decide you want to try pitching to press, I think about it in 3 to 6 month increments of time.

You can spend half an hour once a month thinking about what milestones are coming up that you're going to hit, what announcements you might have, and map them out.

So here's an example using a startup school company in this batch.

Orbi is building flying robots that help retail with inventory tracking and surveillance.

So for example, in January, assuming they raise a seed fund, they might want to announce their seed fundraising with the intended audience of being engineers.

Then in March, for example, they may want to pitch a trend data story targeted at CTOs that talks about how AI is lifting up brick and mortar retail sales.

So it's just good to do these brainstorming exercises similar to what Craig talked about in the content space for potential stories that you can pitch externally to press.

So once you've decided you want to pitch a story, the first thing to do is to define your goals and your audience.

That will help you determine everything else, who you wanna pitch, you know, the exact story you wanna pitch, and how to measure its success.

And so once you know who your audience is, you have to draft 3 things.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon