I’m a recently-exited entrepreneur and I have a few things to say about getting PR for startups.

My background: I co-founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000, built the site to over 100 million page views per year, and sold it last year (after seven years) to a fairly large Internet company from LA. In
the process, we never spent a dollar on PPC advertising or PR agencies, and we bootstrapped all the way.

My goal is tell other entrepreneurs and marketing people, and basically anyone who’s trying to figure out a way to get their product or service to take off, about our mistakes and what worked for us.

This first post was inspired by two things: Jason Calcanis’ post about ideas to help startups save money and a SXSW session called startup metrics for pirates. Yarr. (Ok, that’s it for my pirate schtick.)

One of the items on Jason’s list is, “Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm.” Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban agreed.

ApartmentRatings.com never had a PR agency and we got full page stories in the NY Times and Washington Post, A1 in the Wall Street Journal, an NPR interview, and write-ups in dozens of blogs like SearchEngineWatch and other major market daily papers.

With the press, we attracted a lot of good traffic (and clippings my parents could show their friends), but the thing that was more important to me was that we got lots of valuable organic links from highly reputed sites. I basically viewed PR as a form of SEO strategy. I strongly feel that PR is the most potent SEO
strategy on the planet because there are fewer more credible sources than newspapers and a good blog post from even a long-tail blog often gets picked up by A-listers and mainstream media.

This blog is going to go in some depth on how we did it, but here’s my first suggestion:

Don’t buy a media list from Bacon’s or Vocus; build it yourself with Google Alerts.

Go to Google Alerts and create some searches that will surface reporters you’d care about (and more importantly who might care about you). You can search competitor names, related companies, or basically anything you think would be in stories written by reporters who might cover you. If you do this right, you
should get 10+ stories a day in your Inbox that will be written by reporters who are covering your space. They are your media list.

Make a Spreadsheet to Store Reporters Addresses

Make a list in Excel with the reporter’s name, email and phone, and some notes about what they wrote, and start building your list. Many major papers put the reporter’s email address somewhere on their stories, so the easiest thing is to just copy it off the story. This is also true of phone numbers. If that doesn’t work, I’d visit a publication’s “Contact Us” page to figure out what the email standard is for their newspaper. If that doesn’t work, you can always guess that it’s either first.last@domainname.com or flast@domainname.com. I know it sounds like a time consuming pain-in-the-arse, but you gotta do what you gotta do. This is “pirate” PR my friends… do what works. A little bit easier is the phone number… you can often get the main number
for the publication by Googling “Publication name, city, state” and if that doesn’t work, look it up from
their DNS records.

So that’s your first lesson in pirate PR. Build a media list based on what reporters are actually writing (not by the categories that Bacons or Vocus have encoded to them), and lookup reporters email and phone numbers for free.