How to Get Free PR for Your Startup—Tips from the Editor-in-Chief of Canada’s TechCrunch. | Douglas Soltys, Editor-in-Chief of Betakit

Douglas has been in media and PR for over two decades. He’s the founder of Betakit Inc and has been running Betakit, Canada’s TechCrunch, for nearly 10 years. He understands what startups need to do to leverage PR, and how PR can help startups hire, fundraise and sell.  

On this episode, we get tactical and go deep on exactly when it makes sense to use PR and how founders can get the most from it.

Why you should listen

• Why you should treat PR like a subset of inbound marketing
• PR is all about telling the right stories to the right audiences
• How to conduct media profiling to find the right journalists in the right channels so you can get other people to write about you

Keywords

PR, media strategies, startups, business goals, target audiences, media storytelling, marketing initiatives, traction, leads, stories, funding announcements, product launches, media profiling, channels, audiences, founder, pitch, media, framing, storytelling, target audience, channels, journalists, PR, origin story, company values, thought leadership, customer stories, employee stories

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:19) The 101 of Media PR
(00:06:04) Three Questions
(00:08:40) An Operational Lens for Media Engagement
(00:12:16) Understanding the Target Audience
(00:19:55) Inbound Marketing
(00:25:20) A Super Important Caveat
(00:29:08) Roam Auto as an Example
(00:34:00) The Right Channel
(00:36:40) Treating Media Pitching Like Investor Pitching
(00:43:04) Be Professionally Interested
(00:44:49) Putting a Human Face on Your Company

Chapters

• 5:19 The 101 of Media PR
• 12:16 Understanding the Target Audience
• 19:55 Inbound Marketing
• 29:08 A specific example of what to do
• 34:00 The Right Channel
• 36:40 Treating Media Pitching Like Investor Pitching
• 44:49 Putting a Human Face on Your Company

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00.162)

Media coverage equates to traction for their business. If you build it, they will come circumstance. If we could just get coverage in publication X, then dot, dot, dot Y will happen. You should not approach your marketing initiatives any differently from your PR initiatives because the real truth of it is like pitching to journalists is a form of inbound marketing. You are trying to create interesting content that draws back people to you and that could be on your own channels.

or could be convincing a journalist. Think of the Globe and Mail example. Everyone would love Sean Silikoff to write a story about their company, right? He's the biggest named tech reporter probably in Canada. There are other reporters at the Globe and Mail that are very, very new, that don't have that level of profile, that are not being inundated with a couple hundred pitches a day, that would love to build up their portfolio and their career.

and would write the shit out of that story if you gave them the time and opportunity. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a sixth stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (01:14.552)

Well, dude, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. So you're the editor in chief at BetaKit. And you're just telling me you're the founder of BetaKit Incorporated, but not BetaKit the publication. So we're starting off in a really confusing way because I'm like, what does that even mean? So maybe just walk us through a story, even just for context of like that kind of history of BetaKit and what BetaKit is for those, I mean, within Canada, anybody in the startup ecosystem knows BetaKit, but outside Canada, many might not.

Yeah, this shows that I'm truly legit because it's a messy origin story like every other startup. BetaKid is the publication of record for Canadian tech and startups where for a broader North American audience, you can consider us Canadian tech crunch if that helps make it easier for you. And like most startup origin stories, we've got some real up and downs and like most, I think media companies, have a lot of failures before we've kind of hit.

like product market fit now. So I'm the founder of Betakit incorporated, which is the company that now owns the publication. I didn't found the publication that was founded by Sarah Preved in 2012 after post media, which is a Canadian media chain bought her entrepreneurship focused social network Sprouter. And they're like, Hey, you should launch a startup focused imprint within the post media network. And that was called Betakit. They were

Canadian based and globally focused. So they were covering covering a world startup news and they had a crack team of people you might recognize in terms of Aaron Burry or Darrell Etherington who went on to TechCrunch and now working at Omers Ventures. Crazily enough, the media space is weird. They punched way above their weight for an incredibly small team and had zero support from Postmedia. So they were shut down after a year because Postmedia is like

hey, you're not making any money. And Baitiki was like, well, isn't that your job to monetize our work? We're just doing the journalism. So was shut down. And then in 2013, was bought back. Sorry, was shut down in 2013 and then bought back by one Ian Hardy, who at the time was the owner of Mobile Syrup, which was like

Pablo Srugo (03:28.846)

Let's say again, for your audience, Canadian end gadget, Canadian focused consumer tech publication. And he recognized that it'd be really great to have a business tech counterpart beside all the phone reviews and stuff. It relaunched as Canadian based Canadian focus. I got involved around 2014, took over as managing editor, and then we spun it out as its own company, February 26, 2016. So we, it's now been eight plus years of beta get incorporated.

I think all of the different iterations that beta kit had gone through to find where we are now is like a good reflection of like all businesses, whether you consider yourself a startup, have to go through these evolutions of finding like right product market fit, like right delivery for your audience, proper monetization strategy and all that stuff. But, I mostly speak to that to make sure that no one ever assumes that I am the founder of this thing, what I feel like I am the steward carrying on like a legacy and a responsibility of those who came.

appreciate kind of that context. So today we're doing I mean, we're going like, very tactical in the world of PR, which is we were talking about earlier is kind of these things that I think it founders either like, don't care at all about or care way too much about it. is kind of hard to that that sweet middle, where you use it kind of as a weapon in the right place, right time you've been now in like the absolute nucleus of, let's say PR and startups for like over a decade. And so I think you've seen

everything that can go right and probably everything that can go wrong as well. you have built some, I mean, I guess you've talked about this topic a lot and you have a lot of examples. So we'll dig into all of that. But I guess let's start at the kind high level, like what are the 101s of media, of PR, maybe some high level thoughts and then we'll kind of tangent off from that. I'll even go with like you're making me feel...

Really sad because it's my birthday tomorrow and it's happy almost birthday. It's it's two decades I've been two decades of doing this stuff because prior to beta kit I was doing marketing communications and like PR Stuff for either Canadian startups or at that time Canada's largest tech company Blackberry In addition to like other tech blogging stuff, so I only say that just to let people know if they're like, okay Here's this journalist guy gonna tell us what we're doing wrong. It's like

Pablo Srugo (05:47.092)

I have been on the other side of this. used to pitch stories to BetaKid before I ran it. Nice. I understand what it's like when, I think you accurately said they either care about this stuff too much or not at all. It's because in Canada specifically, a lot of founders, they might get advice on their fundraising, product development, go -to -market strategy, and then the media thing is this weird thing off in the corner that they don't have mentors and advisors for.

and they either poke at it with a stick or they completely ignore it. part of the reasons why I spend time on this, basically it's beneficial for us if we have companies that understand how to engage with us, but it's my give back to the ecosystem to help them navigate this stuff. So founders don't know how to engage with this stuff and they often don't get guidance through whatever support programs that they...

currently have for other mechanisms, and it leads them to have really weird misconceptions about what this stuff is in service of. And I think the biggest one off the top is that media coverage equates to traction for their business. If you build it, they will come circumstance. If we could just get coverage in publication X, then dot, dot, dot, Y will happen.

And it doesn't really matter what they want to have happen from Y, whether it's like a funding round, customers, you know, love and affection from the masses or whatever. The important thing is that equation is the dot, dot, dot, because they can never actually directly connect how the action will achieve the results. Traction comes from a great product, comes from sales, comes from customers that love your product. It does not necessarily come from media attention. And it certainly won't, if you just assume that it will naturally come from that.

you're not doing some of the funny you say that right because I remember back like as a first time founder I guess like right around that like we're talking 2013 2014 and there was just so much like importance associated for us it was like the Ottawa Business Journal like we're not like it's like OBJ man like making the front page OBJ that was like dude we've made it right it like now did anyone tell me other than sending it to your parents did anyone tell you why getting coverage in a paywalled local my parents framed it but besides that yeah no I don't

Pablo Srugo (08:05.494)

I don't know that much like, you know, came from it. It just felt like a big deal, like something we had to do. Felt like something you had to do, felt like something you probably spent a lot of time on with limited returns. And here's the difficulty, right? So if, media attention doesn't get you anything other than like some mom and dad love, because it means they, they might not understand your company, but they know like, like the auto business journal wrote about these guys must be onto something. Like for the, the time, like the decade that I wrote about BlackBerry and worked at BlackBerry.

I think my parents thought that I made the phones by hand myself. Like they didn't understand the stuff, right? The problem with this is if you have real problems with your business, if you actually have problems with traction, if you are burning too hot, if your runway is short, if your board hates you, if your technical co -founder just left, not only will pursuing that OBJ coverage not help solve those problems, because you were putting time and attention into it, you're expediting the death of your business. And that's like just the first place I like to start with is

I try to give founders an operational lens to see their approach to media. And I'm to say broadly storytelling. So they know where to slot it in, how much emphasis to put on it and like when to friggin ignore it. Cause I know for me as a founder, getting permission to ignore things, even if it just for the future allows me to focus on the stuff that's really, really important. And that decision paralysis of like, we could do this, we could do this. What about this?

My lead VC really wants some media coverage, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of those things go out the window and you can just lock in on executing. So I really like starting here because I've seen a number of companies desperate for coverage in the hopes that it's going to Hail Mary save their company. And there are a lot of other things that you can do before getting a journalist to write about you if you're desperately trying to save your company. Well, can I even ask that? Like what is it even going to do? Like sometimes I'm a little jaded on the announcements. I actually like it on the receiving end.

as a consumer of this information to know who's raised and how much and these sort of things. But I do sometimes wonder like for the startups announcing their seed round, their series A, what does it actually do? And maybe the bigger question is like, what's the strategy where that actually makes sense and is something you should pursue? Like how should you think about it? Yeah, there's a couple of things that like, early stage startup kind of PR and media attention can get you. Awareness is a huge thing. Like the number of times that we've heard

Pablo Srugo (10:29.742)

media coverage has helped close around a beta kit, help get first interns or hires in things like that is pretty common. It's not just because like, you know, like I think beta kit is awesome. That doesn't happen because beta kit is awesome. It happens because if you're an early stage company and you bought whatever domain that you could get in 2024, they're very limited ones and no one can find you on the internet. When they search your name and a site of authority shows up so that one, they can just see information about your company, but like two,

Hopefully there's some positivity there showcasing that you've launched your product, you've raised around things like that. That can add a lot of value. Just like getting your name out has some core intrinsic value. It can help with lead gen. It can help you get customers if you understand how, I'm assuming we're probably going to dig into that. But at this point, it's just like positioning. It's allowing you to establish what your story is or trawl on the backs of larger stories, right? And you see this all the time where there's like,

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the Superbowl, right now every AI story, things like that. are larger narratives that are happening in the media environment that your company might be able to take advantage of before you're necessarily ready. It's like, it's part of the reason why we all know about like Abcellera, where prior to COVID, no one would have known that company's name. There was like a global health crisis going on and all of a sudden all these biotech companies were suddenly being...

profiled on the regular. There are larger narratives that are like giant boats in the water that you can trawl behind and make your journey a little bit easier. But those are kind of the core three. would say in terms of like audiences that you're trying to reach with that stuff, it's usually like VC investors, right? You go to business and tech press to get in front of the people that are going to lead your next round. It's about hiring. It's about, again, from that awareness perspective, trying to make sure that the people know that you...

One, that you have money to hire them. Two, you're a great place to work and you're doing some interesting things. And then it can be customers, but all of this is reflected in an exercise that most founders do in other lenses, but don't apply it to media. Like everyone does a customer profiling exercise, right? You understand like who your customers are, where you try to reach them, what they care about, what they don't care about, stuff like that. And then all of a sudden, when you're trying to do like any sort of media stuff, you don't think about the audience you're trying to reach.

Pablo Srugo (12:53.174)

what channel you can reach those audiences on and then what aspects of your company, like what story you're trying to tell them that works on that channel to like convince that audience. They're just like, let me go to the Globe and Mail. Let me go to the New York Times. Let me go to OBJ, biggest established brand name. And then that will waterfall down somehow to the person I'm trying to reach. Whereas depending upon your objectives for your company at stage you're at, a Discord server, a Slack channel.

A newsletter, an in -person meetup could be way more impactful to actually converting on your goals as a business. And this is usually the point where people realize that I've Jedi mind tricked them to talk about their overall media strategy, that this just isn't a PR thing. can be your marketing efforts and stuff like that. These are just different stories and channels that you're optimizing for, but it should all be considered as part of one portfolio.

I don't know, but for you, I'm sure you were super locked into your target customer, what they like to read. Were they an Apple or Android person? Do they like to get a pump in the morning? Do they get one in the afternoon? How many grams of protein are they taking? And then you're like, yeah, they're probably reading OBJ. Yeah, that's right. It's right. It becomes 100 % around what you said earlier, like what's the biggest...

I honestly would almost say like my really simple way of thinking about media, especially back then. And now I'm almost like, I don't even have an opinion on this thing. Like I'd realized I know so little about it. I almost like throw my hands up, right? But like back then it was like, media is hype. Like that's it, media is just hype. So like, what's gonna be give me the biggest hype? Like the New York Times will give me bigger hype than the Globe and Mail, which give me bigger hype. The OBJ will give me a bigger hype than, you know, and it just goes down that chain. And I'm just like, the hype is thing. If I can get on TechCrunch, I'm the shit. Cause like I'm on TechCrunch, like that's hype.

It doesn't, you I don't know what it leads to, probably doesn't lead to anything. And that was the stupid way of like thinking about it. So I guess I'm curious, like you mentioned a few things there, which I thought made telling wonders around media profiling and the yellow ones around finding bigger narratives and finding like stories you can tell that are more than just we raised around, or maybe like we launched a new product, which tend to be the two like classic go -tos I would say. Do you have some examples of some companies?

Pablo Srugo (15:13.4)

that did either of those things right. And you can either name the company or not, like really so we can go rich and detailed on like the examples, like a specific narrative that some company latched onto or like how to really do the media profiling and the sort of things you might say on different channels for it actually drive something. Yeah.

I'm a little wary to highlight specific companies that do it well, because that's where probably all of the stuff that I do behind the scenes are in we do these office hours or just media programs for the benefit of the ecosystem. It's little separate from me commenting on, man, this company really pitched us really well. I want to make sure that we maintain our independence and our credibility there. But I will say, talking through this, the companies that are like...

Let's take the opposite of your approach of just like chasing hype, chasing directory. What would it look like if you were doing the exact same customer profile exercise, but applying it to a media lens? You're asking three questions. Who am I trying to reach? Where am I trying to reach them? And then how am I going to reach them? And that's both like the tactical execution of like, like what's the work back schedule? What aspect of our company story we were trying to tell them that's going to convince.

And then you can easily see how this thing that would be just for your customers can be like, well, I'm pretty sure we're going to be telling a different story to our potential investors from our customers. And it's definitely going to be a different story to people that we're trying to hire. And then it's simply a matter of like, when you go to execute that, you start with the audience first, because when it comes to channels that they want to be reached on, what they like or don't like about your company, like assuming that the VC is going to be more interested on.

total addressable market, business traction, leadership team, velocity. Employees might be more interested on company values. Is a great place to work. Like what attracted other people there? And then your customers are like, are you better, faster, cheaper? Right? If you are struggling to articulate any of that or maybe find the channel, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it is a beta kit, whether it is, you know, whatever hype beast media publication you're hoping is the biggest, or if it's like straight up just like

Pablo Srugo (17:24.649)

some micro targeted newsletter or Facebook messenger group because you're running a two sided marketplace and that's where all your people are trying to reach. I can't answer the specifics of those for you because I don't know your business. But what I can tell you is much like when you do customer profiling, if you ever want to know the answers to those questions, you go back and you talk to your target audience. The reason why you start with your audience first is that you don't have to guess on that other stuff. You ask them like, Hey, are you actually reading beta kit?

Are you reading strata curry? Are you just like on tick tock meme in every day? it's blown my mind seeing companies across Canada. Like, do you know that there's like a, like a farmer tick tock there are ag tech companies across Canada that like, when we sell through our stuff, we've got to get on farmer tick tock because it's all of these like 65 and up generational farmers who only wants that peer to peer kind of analysis and evaluation from a farmer that looks like them.

but they all glommed on to TikTok because they love showing videos of the tractors and stuff. If we can attack that market and sell through to one, we're going to just roll through this demographic. I would have never have known that. But I know that if you go through this process of starting through your target audience and figuring out where they want to be reached and how they want to be reached, you don't have to guess. Does that connect? I think that helps, and that's a high level marketing.

Strategy that I think you have to you have to do to understand which channels you can go after the question I have though is when it comes to like traditional media like getting somebody doesn't have to be traditional It's actually just getting somebody else to write about you because if you're talking any social media channel or even a new like Newsletter may be less so but like slack anything where you control and it's user user generated you can decide like okay Let's talk about this and let's talk about that whatever but like when you need to get somebody else to write about you whether it's a newsletter or You know a beta kid or whatever

You need a story, like you need something, like what are the sort of things you can even as a startup, and we're always talking here like early stage startups, you're over series A, like this is kind of the stage, like what are the sort of things you can actually get them to talk about, or is it really mainly just like you raise around or big, product launch? No, there's way more stuff that companies don't even take advantage of because they don't, they take it for granted or don't consider it. So I can dig in through like what maybe like for any early stage startup.

Pablo Srugo (19:47.434)

the stories that will be available for them and they can prioritize and assign based upon value. But I just want to say like you nailed something kind of implicitly right there that's even way more important. I'm not talking about PR. I'm broadly talking about marketing. You should not approach your marketing initiatives any differently from your PR initiatives because the real truth of it is like pitching to journalists is a form of inbound marketing. You are trying to create interesting content that draws back people to you.

And that could be on your own channels or it could be convincing a journalist. Like most PR people, most journalists wouldn't consider that to be inbound marketing, but like a inbound marketer and marketers in general don't care where that attention comes from. They're different channels to optimize for. And when we go back to like founders spending too much time on this or not enough time, it's like, Hey, why did you get your one junior marketing hire?

to spend a full quarter trying to pitch an op -ed in the Globe and Mail or get Kara Swisher to write about you instead of improving the conversion funnel of your landing page. And this is where it gets to, if you don't see these as like responsibilities that you need to prioritize, you will have these very capable people doing things that don't really like matter to the business in that moment.

So just want to even like just acknowledge that. I think it's great point and it actually goes back, think the way I saw it, like not solve for that, but the way that I see that happening is that you forget that it all comes back to the same thing. Like it's all traction, it's all leads. Like that's the thing that you care about. And then when you kind of go off like the rail and you start caring a little bit about like the ego stuff, the hype, that's when you spend a quarter chasing an op -ed or like get super hyped up about making the front page of some like bigger.

publication that gets you a lot of props and like zero customers. But when you just say like at end of the day, I need like SQLs, need MQLs, like that's just what I need. Then it becomes a little bit more like, okay, this channel is actually going to drive that. This one's not like, should I spend this much more time here versus that one? Like what in your experience works really well? and, just like increases the odds that the people that, you know, journalists like that will cover you. Well, let's even break that down an extent. Cause I can even agnostic of the company. I can probably expand the breadth of people you might want to be reaching out to. Right.

Pablo Srugo (22:05.386)

If you like, cause when you raise a round of funding, one of your target audiences are like, if say you raised your seed round, who might you wanting to be reached with that news? People who are going to lead your A, right? What publications do they read? They read business and tech press, right? So like across North America, beta kit and tech crunch are two easy ones. So it behooves you to announce that information in a place where those people will see it. So you can get on the board with.

getting them in the funnel for your A round. Also, there are tons of people that read that stuff to see where their next job might be. So you're also targeting potential hiring candidates, right? Especially if you're in the AI space and it's just like an open arms race in terms of like financing, even down to like who's got the chips, right? This is why you see, it wasn't Sequoia, was Andreessen Horowitz just announcing they're just gonna make like X.

hundreds of millions of dollars worth of compute available to their portfolio companies. Are they doing that out of the kindness of their heart? No, they're doing it, to support the success of those companies, but it's a major recruiting tactic for any deals that they're trying to get in in the future, right? They're just leveraging their muscle. But it's probably a situation that your customers are not reading Betakit or TechCrunch or the business tech press unless you sell into that. A lot of people...

Well Simple stories are popular on Beatikit, not only because Well Simple is like a prominent Canadian FinTech, but a lot of our demographic are these are Well Simple customers because they're looking for like optionality when it comes to financial solutions. So we often see those companies that are pitching us as like verticalized tech and business press, they're going to some other kind of trade publication or focus publication in their space that like are where their customers live.

And that could be like aerospace, ag tech. I think of any, any target vertical that you're in, there are usually a couple of publications like that. They're like the beta kit for fintech, the beta kit for ag tech, things like that, where they want to tell a similar story, but targeted for that audience, which is probably like customers, right? People that are reading that to stay up on new services and ideas. So just thinking that you nailed the checkbox of like, we raised around, we got the tech press.

Pablo Srugo (24:26.85)

You're not really thinking through the value that you can extract from that moment. Similarly, I always give the example of if the CBC and beta kit write the exact same story, what do the headlines look like? And a beta kit story would be like, company X raises Y millions of dollars to do Z in whatever space. What is the CBC story going to look like? This company has a new solution helping Canadians with their health care problems.

They won't even mention the company. They don't care. Why? Because the CBC as a general media publication wants to frame stories that their audience wants to read, like solving their everyday problems. You could say that that stuff happened through magic. It doesn't matter that it came through a startup. The company's name is going to be somewhere in that story, but they're not leading with that. is that your job as a founder when you pitch, when you reach out to frame it, reframe it, thinking about how they might do that? Or is that, is that on them? Great question. I'll say it's really important to note like,

You know, I said before that when you're pitching to media, this is like kind of like a digital marketing, inbound marketing activity. The real difference, the super important caveat is that this is a marketing activity you don't control. These are your, you're going with intermediaries, gatekeepers. You're trying to convince them to get that content out into the system for your benefit. Very different than if you're like publishing on your own social channels or your website or something like that. So I would say that the more that you can do to make it easier for them, for that to click in.

the better, but you have to understand like they're gonna have their own take on it, their own spin on it. That's kind of the conversations with journalists aren't conversations, they're interviews. You're kind of entering into the arena and you have to be prepared for that. But there's a lot of specific things we can dig into like pitching journalists, how that might go. think that's really what I want to go deep on now because I think we understand in general

Like I think what I understand right now talking to you is like, first of all, PR is a small part of the bigger marketing thing and you shouldn't think about it any differently than the second thing is within PR and getting other people to write about you, kind of want to have like whatever story you have, have think about it more broadly and understand where else that story might be able to fit versus just like the tech press stuff that you know, everybody knows about. And if you're, if you're unsure, go talk to the target audience, you're trying to reach them. They're to tell you where they read and where they get information. You're not going to have to guess, right?

Pablo Srugo (26:49.676)

And so once you know that now the question is, okay, how do I make it happen? Like, how do I actually get people to write about me, whether it's beta kid or tech crunch or something more specific to like your, your target customer. So if, you know who you're trying to like, if you're like, okay, we've got this funding around, we think we can hit, some VCs, some customers and some, maybe we use this recruiting tool. We're gonna, we're gonna try and target three audiences with these news.

And then we have some specific channels for each that they've said they all read and would really make sense. And just because we're in the industry, we pay attention. We know these are some good places. Now you've got to match. This is the how part. This is like, how do you actually like convince the journos to cover you? But then also like what aspect of your story, right? You had asked us before, what are some of the stories that are accessible? You have your origin story. Like what was, what was the founder moment where you flipped the table and said, fuck it, I'm building this. Someone needs to solve this problem.

There's a great company in Canada called Willful. They're trying to make it super easy for every Canadian to have a digital will and kind of like end of life planning. And it came about because the founder was like caught on a highway in like traffic, like complete car jam. And like someone was having a health incident and they were sitting there being like, what if that was me? What if that was my circumstance? I would like, my partner would have, they wouldn't even have like one password login to like cancel our

phone plans, like that, right? Every company has that origin story, which can be incredibly powerful to some of these audiences. There's your company values. How are you different? What do you care about? Is it like, are you a clean tech company? Is it like how you work? Is it how you treat your employees? maybe your only value is making a profit, right? Those are generally appealing to different audiences, but you can lean in on like what makes you different in that way.

Can I, by the way, this is little tangent, but can I put you really on the spot? Like, can I tell you about one of my portfolio companies that I'm sure would probably be comfortable and then we can like be like, this is what, you know, let's say you were like hired, know I mean? Sure, portfolio company, man. Yeah, let's like work through it. Okay, cool. So, and it's also one that would make sense to a lot of people because it's like, it's not like a complicated thing to get. So, a company called Roam .Auto and they do like car subscriptions. So they sit in between like, if you want to get a car for a day or a car for a week,

Pablo Srugo (29:14.382)

you're on vacation, these sort of things, you go to like herds, you go to aviations, maybe get around, right? If you wanna like have your own car for a long time, you're committed, you either buy a car, you lease it, you finance it, that's like two, three years. But if you want a car for a few months, maybe you just need a car for the summer, or maybe you move to a new city, you're not sure where you're gonna work yet, but you want to have like a car accessible every day, or you just got a new job, these sort of things, you go to Rome and you get a car, you subscribe to a car for three months, six months, a year, these sort of timeframes.

And by the way, just for what it's worth, like they also have an enterprise angle. So if you're like, a big movie production is like one area, but there's a lot of different businesses you wouldn't know that actually have fleets of cars. They don't necessarily want to buy them. So they might work with a Hertz or an enterprise or they might work with a realm to get like 50 cars, a hundred cars, like imagine for a movie production. The consumer one is probably the ones that that's like cleanest to go after, but let's just say they're like, you know, I mean, they're always marketing, right? And especially on the consumer side, they're always marketing, they're doing social, they're doing a bunch of different things.

So let's say they want to like, you know, we should have more of a PR strategy. Like we should get more people to, to write about us. How would you start? Like, I don't expect you to just have the answers on the spot, but like walk me through how you might start thinking about this stuff. No, I can, I can kind of match this to fit, right? Like just based upon like the small details of what you told me, I'm going to make from experience some assumptions on like what's going on there. But you know, you would even said, okay, they've got this general consumer story, blah, blah, blah. That's usually like the hardest one to nail, right? That because,

When they're doing something like that, that product story has to be one of that, put yourself in the eyes of your customers. Did you just move to this new town? You need access to a vehicle occasionally. You're not willing to buy something they commit. That is a customer focused story for those customers. You could have something similar where maybe you're leveraging customer testimonials where they're talking about how much time to save them, how worried they were about ...

They're in a new city, they don't really know the transit system, things like that, all of that stuff. You can easily see how you flip the lens from you telling the story about what those customers are going through to allowing customers the opportunity to tell those stories. Depending upon the publication and who those customers are, they might be more interested. Now, you also backchanneled, well, of course they've got this enterprise model because that's how they're moving units and they have long -term agreements, ... You know, community economics, things like that? That's right.

Pablo Srugo (31:37.89)

What publication might be interested in like how you're making money? Is the CBC really care that you've got this enterprise solution for like the film industry or they like new solution in the province of BC to help people who don't have cars. That is the prototypical CBC story of like, here's this thing, who cares where it came from? Here's how it helps our readers because they want to know that. Business reporter at Bloomberg, Globe and Mail, BetaKit TechCrunch. Like what?

What enterprise deals are you signing with specific industries? How many units are you moving? How much money are you making? Logistically, can you handle this stuff? Like that is the business element of your company's story that they're going be way more interested in than like, poor Sally moved to a new city and she doesn't know how to get a vehicle. that's, if you're pitching that story, they're going to be like, okay, well then show me that you're doing this well. Where does that type of story best fit those publications where your target audience of like VCs are reading?

Similarly, if you have targeted certain industry verticals where it's like film industry and stuff like that, are there any like film television trade publications where you might be able to pitch a story and be like, yo, is your studio like tired of using Teamsters to like ship your staff back and forth? We've got the solution for you. And then logistically, like let's take the CBC as an example. how would you go, how would they go out? Like do they got to figure out like who in the CBC might write about this? And then like

readable story for them, how specific should they get if that's one of their many goals? Okay. Let's go back to the idea of channels, right? And we're thinking any channel, any digital space online has two things, rules to that space and then gatekeepers that enforce those rules. Have you ever been kicked out of a subreddit or an ICQ group? You know what that's like, right? In a media environment, that's both the publication itself, right? Because they curate specific types of news. Even like...

CBC, which is a general interest publication, has specific sections and segments for politics, local news, stuff like that. Right? Baiting it as much as it pains me doesn't write about sports. Right? So like our audience is coming because they know that we're presenting a certain type of news and we're ignoring the rest of it. Additionally, you have those individual journalists and editors that you've got to pitch and convince to tell the story. Right? If you are pitching health tech stories to the FinTech reporter, are you putting that information in front of the right person? And...

Pablo Srugo (34:01.646)

If we go back to the media profile I was talking about before, where you start with the audience who trying to reach the channel and then that how, if you've got the right publication, the right channel that you know you want to reach, well, you should dig in. The publication usually tells you how to pitch them, what they're looking for to pitch. If you're in the crypto space, you look at a publication like CoinDesk, they specifically tell you how not to pitch them because there's so many rampant opportunities for fraud that they're like, do not pitch individual journalists, send this through our centralized things so we can make sure there's no like...

pump and dump situation, but every individual journalist at a publication on their social profiles are either like implicitly or explicitly telling you what they're interested in, what they're not interested in, how to reach them. They're so inundated with people that are just like shotgun sending them pitches that aren't targeted to them at all. They are more than likely willing to take the time to help you triangulate or find the right place if you show any amount of effort. Even if it's a quick email saying,

You might not know us, we're a company in this space. You've written about similar companies. We read your stuff. We think you might like, we might be a fit for you, but we wanted to check and see like what you're working on right now. If this is of interest, if there's specific things that we need to do to make that happen. It's the reason why beta kit has office hours. We just give time away every week as an open door policy for like founders to come in and just hype check on stories. What we're interested in that we want to make it as easy as possible.

And do you find like reaching out that way called like what should you expect? Because sometimes I think to myself, even if I find the right, like at a big, you know, big like something like CBC, which is like the report on so many different things, I think with beta kit, you kind of know, like if I have this kind of story, you know, somebody will probably, you know, should answer me because like I'm going like right. And I think that'll be the same for more like trade publications where you're like, you know, I'm selling act act act. Cause like they probably answer me, but like you go left to the CBC, they write about everything.

What should you expect they'll answer you if you think about it or you got to do like 10, 20 of these to get like one person to be like, yeah, maybe I'll write about you. Within that in the CBC, you've got to find the right like segment of the publication and often geography, right? Like think of the car company example you were given before. Maybe they're expanding to a new market. You can probably find the local people on the municipal beat in cities in which you're launching and pitch them in a very targeted fashion rather than being like.

Pablo Srugo (36:25.014)

Dear Mr. CBC, right? Right. Exactly. you've, and, again, this is a, this is work, but isn't this work, like preparatory work so much better than just guessing or throwing stuff out there, never hearing back and then wondering what happened. Now, similarly to your question of like, like what you're trying to get out of it upfront, I'm going to give you like the easiest example here is like, let's compare this to VC pitch, right? Because that's the one thing that every founder is willing to put like,

Whether it's your fundraising pitch or your sales pitch, they are constantly working on it. They're constantly iterating it. They're constantly adapting it. If you're not doing the same for your media pitch, like, you treating this the same way? So if you were to email a bunch of VCs cold and say, yo, we would like you to invest in us by this time next week. We're this company. We're really fucking awesome. Here's a PDF of our basic level information or a Google drive.

please contact us for wiring information. It's like, that's not usually how it is. is, one, you profile the people that you want to meet and you might cold pitch YOLO that. would never stop a founder. Part of the founder value proposition is the fearlessness to just go and just fire it off. What I'm saying is set yourself up for success by making sure that like,

You know, it's not just luck, but you are skill shooting that in. So it's like in much the same way you might be like, Hey, we know you've invested in companies like this. We have an amazing company. would love a coffee to let you know, 15 minutes of how this is working. Like that, that easy to convert ask that leads to the relationship that leads to the round, or you're going warm intro. You've got, you've already got an investor and they're trying to secure someone else. Maybe it's a repeat.

founder that was invested in by that person who'd be like, my God, so and so VC would love this person. You don't know them, let me make them connect. There's been a little bit of vetting that's happening there because you're by proxy getting someone else to let you know, okay, this person is interested in this stuff, you seem to be the right fit. And usually those warm intros are mutual opt -in. The introducer sends a private email saying, hey, is it okay if I connect you with this person? They're doing blah, blah, blah. They say yes, and then you're connected.

Pablo Srugo (38:46.774)

Same thing happens in the media space. We're also human beings. Send us an email being like, hey, beta kit, we're a company in this space. We know you cover Canadian startups. We're a Canadian startup. We have some upcoming news. We would love to share that with you. Can you give us any feedback on the best way to do that? Happy to schedule a call, send more information on email. Love to grab a coffee if you're local, buy you a muffin or something like that. That's really easy to either move forward or course correct as a journalist.

isn't easy or automatically gets archived is, hey, we're this PR agency. We have this major executive announcement coming for something that you'd never covered before, never be interested in covering, but we're getting paid to send this to you and we're going to send this, put this in your inbox, fully throw to pitch without you ever indicating you're interested. And then we are going to follow up three more times that week and leave two voicemails because we are under the pressure of having to do this. Right?

Which do you think is going to be more successful? Is that how you approach securing lead investors for your funding round? Why would you expect it to work for media attention? listen, Doug, I mean, we'll kind of stop it there. mean, I guess my last question for you is, there anything that, I mean, there's many things we haven't covered, but anything that's like really top of mind that you think we should have covered that we haven't covered? Yeah, that's a great question, man. And like, if your audience found this valuable, I would be more than happy to...

like come back and do something super focused where we just get like, it's all detailed in the weeds. I lean more to the framing thing because if I can give founders an operational framework, they can fill in that detail later, but if they don't know where to put it, it's a real struggle. I will also say that like for companies that might be hearing this, we offer up these sessions and office hours to a variety of companies across Canada through our innovation leaders program.

So if like, if you've got an investor, you're part of an incubator and accelerator across Canada, you might already have access to these and we can like go through it more detail. But I think high level, what I'm really trying to do here is to scare founders into taking this stuff seriously. Understanding that it's set from knowing operationally what your goals are and then how you might using storytelling to execute. And then everything else is preparation. At this stage, all you really need to do

Pablo Srugo (41:09.078)

is take your best, most impactful story, your juiciest, lowest hanging fruit target audience, and the most accessible channel to you, saturate the hell out of that, learn, and then iterate. Companies like Well Simple, companies like Shopify can tell multiple stories to multiple channels, to multiple audiences all at the same time, because they have teams of people all dedicated to executing on that, right?

If you are listening to this podcast, you probably don't have those resources. Lowest hanging fruit, biggest return for smallest amount of impact. Execute, learn, and iterate. I love, by the way, the idea of finding that juicy story and kind of retelling it because I think that you tell me actually, but I feel like there's some stories that are really time sensitive. Like I raised a round. You're not going to cover a fundraise that happened a month ago if it's already been covered. It's kind of a dead story.

kind of like the origin stories in example of this, but other stories like that about a specific, you know, and I'm a founder and I just know like these are the stories when I tell them, people just, it just really resonates. Then you can just keep telling that story over and over again, like through different channels in different publications. I assume people would write about it. Two things here I want to close on because we kind of brushed upon this and then we went down another route, but like, yes, 100%, you don't have to remake the story.

What is the version of that story for social media? What is the version of that story in long form? What is it like, can you do some like rich media stuff? What is the GIF meme version of that story? What is the one hour keynote talk at a major tech event version? Like you can tell the same story over and over and over again in different formats and you're gonna be reaching different audiences or highlighting different aspects. Don't reinvent the wheel, man. Like use everything on the animal.

like saturate the value of it. The second thing there that I want to talk about when we just noted all the different types of stories that are available to founders. I'll just give it again, like your origin story, your company values, your thought leadership, customer stories, both by customers and for customers, your product story, your employee's story is do not take for granted because you know this stuff that it isn't interesting.

Pablo Srugo (43:27.05)

I feel my job as a journalist is to be professionally interested in the space that I'm covering. And I approach it that way because you're showing up every day, building your company, you're taking for granted how far you're come. The cool, great smart people on your team, the cool shit that you're building. And there are so many companies, particularly in Canada that work in like highly technical, highly regulated spaces that are very, very complex.

that can see defeat on ever trying to explain to people why that's really cool. When if they would just lean in a bit, and if you can make it clear to them why you care, why you're passionate, why this matters, they're on board. I gave the example of Willful earlier. It's literally a company that deals in death tech. And you will see that their co -founding team, one of whom is the former managing editor of the original version of BetaKit, she has op -eds everywhere.

She gets media appearances, she does keynote speaking, and she's talking about death and wills all the time. And if you can make that palatable to a large degree of audiences, don't concede defeat on your life biotech company or your boardroom software that helps governance or things like that. Show people why you care. Make sure that you're focusing on the customer and their problems.

the good and interesting characters within the company and your customers who you're servicing. Like put a human face on this stuff and people will lean in. Sorry. Obviously it's clear that like I get up on this stuff. I like stories. I like telling stories. I like consuming stories. I like helping founders figure their shit out because it's really, really hard to build a company. And these things seem like really small things, but they could be the thing that leads you to ultimate success. So.

Hopefully this is helpful, man. And if your audience digs it, I'd love to go back and dig in on any aspect of this because I've got like six hours of presentations on all the things that we just try to speed run in like 50 minutes. Perfect. Well, I think it's been great and I'm sure we'll have you back to go deeper on some of those specific elements. Thanks for jumping on the show. Thanks for having me, If you listened to this episode and the show and you like it,

Pablo Srugo (45:45.216)

I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. But whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to a product market fit show and leave a review. Please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews and

The reality is if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. So please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing like great podcast or I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you will be helping me. But most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.