How startups actually get press coverage
Journalists do not cover companies. They cover stories their readers will care about. Getting press as a startup is the discipline of turning what you are doing into those stories, and putting them in front of the right person at the right moment.
What earns coverage
- Data nobody else has. Usage patterns, benchmark results, survey findings. If your product generates numbers about a market, you have a story engine.
- A contrarian position you can defend. Journalists need tension. A founder willing to say the popular approach is wrong, with reasons, is quotable.
- Milestones with context. Funding, launches and hires are only stories when tied to a trend the journalist already cares about.
- Being useful fast. Answering a journalist's source request within hours beats any cold pitch you will ever send.
What does not work
- Press releases blasted to a purchased list
- Pitching your product instead of a story
- One burst of effort at launch, then silence
- Emails that could have been sent to any journalist, because they say nothing about this one
The consistency problem
Every founder knows a version of the list above. Almost none act on it weekly, because pitching well is slow: reading the journalist's recent work, finding the angle, writing something specific. That is the part HE4RD systematises. The system does the research and drafting continuously, a human approves every email, and the pitching never stops because you got busy.
Rule of thumb
If a pitch would still make sense with another company's name swapped in, it is not ready to send. Every HE4RD pitch is written to fail that test.