YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Feifer

lines on the record: 129
first: 2023-10-12
most recent: 2023-10-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The structure of how I'm communicating and then sent me a pitch that very quickly and clearly seemed customized to me and told me her story in a way that I could imagine telling my audience. At that point, it's a pretty easy yes.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The solution I create artwork for their homes that depicts their favorite views from skiing, as it were, right? She goes on and on and on. I read this and I just think, you know, there is something here about what this person did to reinvent their business at a time in which one marketplace shut down, but it created a new one that I think people would like to hear because at that time everyone was thinking about how to reinvent themselves in their business. And, you know, even though I reach people who have very complex and large businesses, sometimes it's really a beautiful thing to hear a single individual who does the simplest thing in the world, which is put paint to canvas, talk about how she did it for herself because you can extract these wonderful little lessons about how to reinvent yourself that I think are going to be relevant to a very broad audience. So Meg sent me that email. I replied and I said, I like it. And we did it. So that's a good example of someone who spent time understanding my work down to”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resorts to come and paint landscapes for their facilities. And when the border shut down and people weren't going to these resorts anymore, she had to come up with a completely different way of doing her business. And so she started to think, well, I can't work for these resorts anymore. They're not hiring me. But all these skiers who used to work at the resorts who have seen my work or who used to ski at the resorts, who were maybe familiar with my work, they're not seeing either. They probably are sitting around wishing that they were skiing. They'd love something to see of their favorite ski location. And they also have money sitting around because they're not spending it on the ski resorts. So then she lists off the problems and the solutions in bullet points, which I love because she has listened to the show, the problem solvers show, which is structured in exactly that way. Tell me the problem. Tell me the solution that you came to. So she lists it off. Here are the problems. You know, skiers can't come. People are spending more time at home.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is good This was good. This turned into an episode of a podcast that I do for entrepreneur, and I might have also then converted it into an article. I can't remember. And so here's what she did. So, her name shouted her out. So this is Meg O'Hara. And Meg O'Hara is a painter, a Canadian landscape painter, which is a small business. And she writes, hi, Jason. I have an idea for a story I think would be valuable and relevant to you, entrepreneur magazine, and the problem solvers podcast. That's the show I do for entrepreneur. And then she says, here's what's going on with my business. All entrepreneurs have entrepreneurs had to be flexible during COVID. This is a story about how one artist in Canada benefited from the border closure, right? This just sort of intrigues me. Oh, how? Okay, when COVID hit in March, all ski resorts across North America shut down early. Skiers are a high-earning demographic. In Canada, they fall in the top 5% of income. And, okay, well, anyway, so she goes on. What she tells me, because I remember this now, what she tells me is that her business used to be being hired by”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is, I just pulled this up. So, this is, and I haven't read this in a long time, I'm kind of like trying to read ahead as I'm talking, just to see if this is appropriate to read. But I think so. I don't know, whatever. We're just going to read it and see what happens. All right. So the subject of this was idea for entrepreneur and problem solvers, how the border closures grew my business. So this was sent to me in September of 2020.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. So, well, here, let's see. We'll have to do this in real time here, but I keep in my inbox a folder called bad PR pitches and a folder called Good PR pitches We can go through both.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Butter dish itself and opening up telling me a little bit about the butter dish and then immediately moving into this very clever story about the product market testing like survey. That's the difference. She told me the story that was going to be relevant to my audience. She got there quickly and it felt like to me this is a interesting human being with an interesting entrepreneurial story to tell and that's why I'm going to engage.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percentage chance that the next things that they're going to tell me are going to be relevant to me, maybe even turn into a story, which is great. I like when that happens because it saves me time, frankly, right? Then it's one less story I have to find myself. So I'm happy for it, but it's got to be right. So you want to structure and then the email that you're writing is don't go on forever, like three paragraphs max. And you are telling the version, you're not like writing an article, right? But you're telling me the thing that you are pretty sure I'm going to be interested in. It's the difference between going back to the butter dish example, woman sending me a three-paragraph email about”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes you can do that by referencing something that I wrote in the past. I see people do that a lot. Don't fake it. People fake it all the time. People email me and they tell me they're fans of my work. They've never read my work. It's very obvious, right? Like, don't do that. But if you've read something or if you're familiar with something, if you're familiar with the publication in some way, any signals of that are good. Because again, what you're trying to do is just separate yourself from like noise to this is customized to you. Because if you think about it, right, this is really like an efficiency question. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to spend my time on the things that have the highest percentage chance of being relevant to me. And I'm filtering out the things that seem not relevant to me who are wasting my time. So if I see something that where somebody's writing me and they have a sense of the publication and they have a sense of me, there's a higher...”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you want to do is write something that makes it pretty clear to me that this is targeted to me. That's step number one, because most of those emails that I got in my inbox are not targeted to me. They're mass blasts and I'm delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. So which is the one that actually is reaching me?”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I wish that there was, but there is not. There's no format. People always ask me, what should the subject line of the email be? This is a good question. There's not one answer to that. The closest that I can give you to an answer is that picture me. Picture me at my computer. I have a lot going on, and I'm glancing at my email, and 40 new emails are sitting there. And my instinct is to delete all of them as fast as possible. But I'm going to glance at each one. I'm not going to open each one, but I'm going to glance at it, which means that I get, you know, I see the subject line and I see the preview text or just the first thing that somebody had written.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of that, and you're trying to distill it down into a presentation that they're going to find appealing. Which again, to go back to the thing about how press is not that dissimilar to going out and raising money, that's kind of what you're doing when you go and meet an investor too, right? Like you are not, if you have meetings with 10 investors, the way in which you talk about yourself and the company should not be exactly the same with those 10 investors because they're all going to have somewhat different approaches and different theses. And you're not trying to scam anybody, but you're just trying to be as customized as possible by building in your knowledge of what it is that they do and what their firm does. And the same is true for media. So all of this is really going to take the form. And it's most traditional sense of a short email. A short email pitch. And what does that look like? I mean, look, there is literally no magic answer to that.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you okay way to reach out? I find them kind of annoying because, number one, like the format doesn't lend itself very well, right? Like if you write anything long in a DM, it just looks like this endless thing that I got. But also, I don't know, my Instagram DMs, I just kind of don't think of as like the place to be pitched. But other people don't care. So I don't know. You can roll the dice on that. Email is just the most traditional way. If you know somebody's going to be speaking at a conference, that's great. Come up. You can talk to them. But the question, of course, is what do you sending them? And here's what you're sending them. You're really sending them the product of the work that you have done in the previous two steps. Because you have now spent some time thinking about your story and who you're pitching and the publication and how they're telling stories to their audience. And then the individual person who you're reaching out to who you now have some sense of how to how they write about this. And you're taking.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how do we do that? This is where really the rubber hits the road. Okay, so things not to do. Don't call them if you track down their phone number, which. Is a real thing that happens people call my personal cell phone number. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. And I don't even know where they get it from, but I don't like it. And media people are torn on whether or not DMs by”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Print magazine, for example, without me saying yes, right? But I'm also trusting my editors to be passionate about the ideas that they're finding and convince me of yes. And so the thing that you are really looking to do is to find the way in to a publication because nothing gets covered until a single individual at a publication takes interest in you enough that they go to somebody else and say, I think that this would be a good story and that other person says yes. So you have to find your way in because media is not a coordinated effort. It's a bunch of people showing up every day trying to figure out how to make the best thing for their audience.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason why you're doing a lot of this is not just for the crazy busy work of it, but it's because you have to understand that the media, just sort of go back to like translating the media, right? The media, which is a phrase that is used in all sorts of different ways, is a pretty bad way of actually understanding the media because the media, quote unquote, makes it feel like it's a unified entity. Either in politics, the media will be criticized as a sort of like multiple publications colluding together in some way. But the way that we're talking about it is just kind of as organizations that you're trying to reach out to. But really and truly, these are just publishing companies made up of individuals and those individuals are all making fairly subjective decisions about what it is that they're going to write about. And there are layers of approval that they have to pass through. So nothing makes it into the”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the next step is going to be how to actually reach out to them and pitch. At this stage, I think that we've fairly well covered it. And I love your summary. And just to kind of double click on part of that.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You find them on the publications website. So let's say that you go to Cosmo and you click on an author's bio. If they're staff, it'll say a staff. If they're not staff, it'll probably say something else. It might say writer. It might say contributor. It might say, you know, Jen Miller is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. But also, you can just go one extra step and just Google their name because any smart freelancer Has a portfolio website where they should be very easily found. So Sometimes just take their name, plug it into Google, you'll very quickly figure out who they are.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pitches have to overcome their instinct to go find things themselves. So Jen is constantly hustling. Jen is constantly talking to people. Jen is curious about the world and will spend a lot of time hunting things down. But if somebody reads a story that she wrote and says, ah, I think I have an idea of what this person is interested in. And then tracks her email address down and then emails her. Jen is getting a lot fewer pitches than me. The chances of her reading it are close to 100%, and the chances of her taking it seriously if it's relevant to any of the publications that she writes for is much higher than me. So sometimes going to the staff person is not actually your best move. Finding the freelancer who's doing the work is sometimes the better move.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Jen on a day to day basis. A freelancer is hungrier for stories than me because Jen has to hustle for her food. Jen has to find stories and pitch those stories to editors at publications. And that's when she gets paid. So she actually is more incentivized to be looking for stories than I am because I am a salaried employee of entrepreneur magazine. And my email address is very easily found and people just send me stuff all the time. And I should add here also note that a good journalist, a good media, a good writer, is not actually sitting around thinking that their job is to wait for people to pitch them so that they can just write about the best pitches. Their job, as they see it, is to go and find the most useful things for their audience. And they like to do a lot of that themselves. So they're not sitting around just waiting for your pitches. And in fact, you're...”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line is right there. You can click on the byline. You can see what this person does. And in many cases, this person will be, maybe they're the food editor. Maybe they're the lifestyle editor, whatever. Like, you'll see what they cover and you'll have a good understanding of now how to frame the thing that you're looking for. Now let me introduce one other possible option. They don't work for the publication at all. They're a freelancer. Publications use a lot of freelancers. Freelancers are basically independent contractors. They're writers who are working sometimes they have kind of longer term deals with publications. Sometimes it's just one-off. My wife is a freelancer. My wife is a freelancer who writes a lot for the New York Times and Washington Post and Guardian. And the interesting thing about my wife versus me is that whose name is Jen Miller, just so I don't keep saying my wife. So Jen.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, who is your target audience? Who's buying your stuff? And he says, millennial moms. I said, great. Okay. So Cosmo is a good place to reach them. So let's look at how Cosmo covers snacks. I don't know how they cover snacks. I don't read Cosmo, but let's find out. It's not hard went to Cosmopolitan.com, search for snacks. What I found immediately was a lot of stories that are all basically Roundup-Y and anchored to some time sensitive thing. So it's 10 snacks for Valentine's Day. It's, you know, our 10 favorite new fall snacks, whatever. It's all stuff like that. So now we know they are not going to run a thousand word feature on your peanut butter company. Instead, the best that you could hope to do is get into one of these seasonalish roundups. So now next step, who's writing these things? Let's look. Let's open some of the articles.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Covering your competitors. So, a good example is I was once consulting with a guy who has a like a kind of fun peanut butter company. It's like imagine peanut butter meets Ben and Jerry's. So it's like peanut butter with lots of stuff and fun names. And so he's trying to figure out how to get press. Originally his thinking, and the reason why he reached out to me was because he's like, well, I'm an entrepreneur. I run a business. I should be an entrepreneur. And I was like, no, no, no, you shouldn't because none of our readers are going to buy your peanut butter.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I get to say, oh, that's a good one, or like, oh, let's refine that, or like, I'm not sourcing as much. And so you really should start by looking at who's writing about your subject area. And you can do that by going to the website and surfing around. You can do that by Googling around. But you'll find the answer. Every publication is structured differently. Some people have specific beats. Some publications will be like, this is the person on the transportation beat. And some publications don't. Entrepreneur doesn't really have a beat system necessarily. But if you look, you'll figure it out. Oh, that editor is clearly interested in food or that writer is clearly interested in food. They seem to write all the food stories. Oh, that person is writing about a good way, again, to do it is to start with the publication and then look at how they're”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so a lot of people make the mistake of emailing me, right? If they want coverage in entrepreneur, they email me. And I understand why they're emailing me. It's really for two reasons. One, I'm the most visible editorial person at entrepreneur. And so it's easy to find me. It's easy to find my email address. And also they just assume, well, editor-in-chief making all the decisions. But, you know, no, right? You know, I mean, think about it if you have a problem with a purchase that you made on Amazon, you don't email Pesos. He's too busy. And I'm not comparing myself to Bezos, but I am the busiest editorial guy at entrepreneur for whatever the hell that's worth. And I'm just not the guy to pitch because my job actually isn't really to select stories that go in the magazine. My job is to work with editors who develop their own ideas.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we co host together. And we got coverage in variety. And that was the result of pounding on a lot of doors and finally getting someone at Variety to take interest. And they ran an article about us. Did we get anything from that story in Variety? The answer is no, like nothing. But you better believe that every email we send out to every potential advertiser, to every partner, includes the link, right? Variety has covered us. And I guarantee that when someone receives that email, it makes them pay more attention. And I have used it many times too. When I reach out to people, it just gives you that's validation. So sometimes what you're looking for is a prize to walk around with. And I would bet that the same is true for TechCrunch, which was your original question. Like, why get the funding announcement in TechCrunch? Probably not because anyone's going to care because they read it on TechCrunch.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I see a lot of people do that. They'll take articles that we ran on entrepreneur and they'll basically turn them into advertisements. And that's really smart because what they got out of entrepreneur was the social cachet. It was the validation in the marketplace. And then they're going to do something with that themselves. That's really smart. You also see it, right? So sometimes the reason to get coverage is just so you can put it on your website as seen in. As seen in is probably more valuable than anyone actually reading that story to begin with. They probably won't read the story. You might not even have to link it on the website, but you could just get to say as seen in because again, it gives you that validation. Me personally, I am building a small podcast company with my friend Nicole Lappin. Nicole Lappin is a bestselling business money expert. And we have a company. She's the founder and I'm an advisor. And it's called Money News Network. We have a podcast on it called Help One.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Largest possibility here is that your story will reach like five to ten thousand people, a small number of people, because these publications are publishing tons of stuff. So you might get this story. It might look awesome. It might not reach that many people. That might also be okay. Because maybe the reason in your logic for why to get that kind of coverage is not to have reached that publication's audience at all anyway. Maybe what it really is is to tweet it and then put some money behind promoting that tweet because then you can target that you got coverage to the people who you want to notice you got coverage.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To reach the people who are reading it at all, possibly a very small number of people are going to read it, which by the way is a real, real possibility because although all of these publications that I have mentioned, entrepreneur Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Fast Company, whatever, whatever, these are reaching millions of people. Their websites get many, many, many millions of unique visitors each month. That does not mean that your story is going to be read by millions of people. In fact, the”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you sort of like personal press journey moment, and then I think that it will translate into the answer for TechRude. Okay, something we haven't talked about so far yet, and this is sort of almost skipping all the steps that we've laid out to like what happens after you get the press, but the point of the press is sometimes to reach the people who are reading it, right? Like you get covered in entrepreneur and entrepreneurs are going to read it and maybe something good will come of it. But sometimes the point of it is not.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responds really in a testy way. And they're like, but don't you write about entrepreneurs? I'm a great entrepreneur success story. And it's like, no, that's not. Yes, entrepreneurs are featured in our stories, but no, we're not just like a directory of entrepreneurs, right? Here's a good way of thinking about it. If you have a startup and you're trying to figure out what publications to be in, Go look at where your competitors have been featured. That's a great place to start. Like what audiences are they reaching and how are they doing it? That should give you some direction about where you might want to go next.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“B2B in some way that it would be possibly very reasonable that business publications might not be your target right now. Maybe men's health is. Maybe, you know, I don't know anything could be. I think oftentimes people tend to think too close to them about where they belong. I get right like here's Lenny's real kind of exchange that happens, which is if somebody will email me, I don't respond to every publicist. It's just literally not possible. I would not have enough time in the day. I do do my best to respond to every entrepreneur who reaches out because I feel like they deserve a response. And sometimes somebody will email me and they'll send me something and it's not. It's just not relevant. And I'll reply and I'll just say, you know, hey, thanks. Congratulations on what you've built, but this isn't a fit for entrepreneur. And maybe like once a month,”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, honestly, it really so much depends upon what it is that you're looking to do. You could be a startup founder and entrepreneur and inc and fast company are for maybe some good reason, not at the top of your list because you're a startup founder, but your goal right now is to reach consumers. And those publications don't reach consumers. And they don't reach people who are in a buying mindset. They reach people who are in a creating mindset. So I would expect that if you have a startup and that startup is not like...”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through Greg because he just knows everybody. I just texted him recently. I was like, I need somebody who can write about this very specific AI thing. He happened to be at TechCrunch Disrupt, and he found some freelancer and connected us. That's great. So those are four I will have more that I'll give you for the show notes.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The show notes, whoever else. Yeah, well, here they are. Sure. Okay, so let's see off the top of my head. So John, Jack Taylor, he does a lot of wellness stuff, right? So PR agencies tend to specialize. And so you want to make sure that you're going with people who really understand you and the media ecosystem that you're reaching out to. I think Johnny Smart, let's see. Hannah Lee at Hannah Lee Communications is great on hospitality stuff. So restaurants, hotels, booze. They're really smart. Jen Squilla, sorry, Jen, if I mispronounce your name. Max Borges Agency, really good on sort of like consumer focused products. Greg Dellman, who's based in San Francisco. He's got a really small shop called 3G Media, and he does a lot of like tech startups stuff. Just really knows that world. Greg, I'll even, I'll find writers.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And who really respect you as an entrepreneur and are going to give you the hard feedback? Because there are a lot of people who will go and hire PR and they'll say, I want you to email this and this and this and this and this publication. And if the PR person just does that, all they're doing is like annoying their contacts. If they don't really feel like this was meaningful, you should like when a PR person pushes back on you and says, you know what? I don't think that your story is right for that publication. Here's why. That's someone you should hire.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PR people in this world who I think very highly of. I think they're incredibly smart, incredibly good at what they do, and they only pitch me when they have something that they think I will genuinely be interested in. Instead of a lot of PR people, which just who just like send me some random thing every week or every day, I don't pay attention to those people. But when I don't know, just like shout out, when John Beer from Jack Taylor PR sends me, like, you know, John, I met him in a PR capacity like a decade ago and we've since become friends. Like when he emails me, I pay attention. I don't write about it all the time. I'm not going to write about something just because I like John, but I will pay attention. And paying attention honestly is like half the battle because people in media are getting so much email. So you want someone who's going to understand you, understand your industry, understand and know the people who they should be reaching out to.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, don't confuse posting press releases, even on very big websites with actual success. What you want in an actual PR person is someone who traffics in one thing, and that is relationships. The most important thing that a PR person can have is active relationships with people in media. Why? They cannot guarantee if a PR person is guaranteeing you press, that's another reason to run out the door as fast as possible because the PR people cannot control this. The writers and editors, they do what they want. It's a completely subjective industry, very frustrating, I completely understand. It's totally subjective. So the best that a PR person can do is shape your story, understand who to pitch, and then get that writer or editor to look at it, to pay attention to it. There are some...”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But here's what's fascinating. PR agency. A PR agency I wouldn't recommend might do this. They'll tell you, we're going to put together a press release about this new thing. So you have to pay a little extra money for the production of this press release and then also the distribution of this press release because what we're going to do is we're going to put it out on the wire, right? Because there are a whole bunch of press release distribution wires. So they'll do that. You'll pay the money. It'll go out on the wire. And then they'll send you a report about all the places that this press release ended up on. It ended up on Yahoo Finance. It ended up on Market Watch. And it technically did the press releases there. It was posted. And zero people are going to see it in the whole world because Yahoo Finance has a section where they just publish every damn press release that gets published by all these different distributors. Nobody saw that.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the things that they recommend doing that you should spend money on is a press release, like a traditional press release run as fast as you can away from that. I don't know if you know this. Do you know this? The press release, there are some purposeful reasons to put out a press release, but the press release is really no longer the primary unit of press attraction.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And can be, I'll say can be a very frustrating journey because a lot of PR people are very bad at their jobs. They're very bad. And this isn't just me bashing PR people. I have literally been hired to give keynotes at PR industry conferences and I get on stage and I say most PR people are bad at their jobs and everybody nods. And they all know it, right? And of course, none of them think that they're one of the bad ones, but they all know it. PR is full of people who are bad at their jobs. Why are they bad at their jobs? They're bad at their jobs because they're lazy, because they're primarily relying upon email blasts, just sending things out because they have a older idea of what it means.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, hiring PR can cut out a lot of this. Now you're not doing this research yourself. You're not thinking through these challenges yourself. You're working with people who understand exactly how to identify the most interesting parts of your story and then turn them into good pitches. So why wouldn't everyone do that? A couple reasons. Number one, cost. PR can be expensive. So you just have to factor that in. Number two PR is...”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's a ton of work, right? Like everything that I'm describing is a ton of work. And let me be clear. People succeed in getting press without doing any of the things that I'm describing because dumb luck happens in the world, right? You know, you could very well just bang out an email to some random editor and they might like it. That's entirely possible. You could disregard everything that I've just said. What I'm really helping you do is try to optimize your approach.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, yeah, trying to get in front of investors, trying to get in front of partners. Look, there's a million reasons why being visible can be useful. But you need to make sure you understand what you're actually trying to do.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people, a lot of big companies keep knocking on my door because we don't just hear from startups. We hear from major companies as well who are pitching stories. And I know why they want to be an entrepreneur. They want to be an entrepreneur because they're trying to position their brand as also being relevant to small business owners. And so it's helpful to have that kind of context because coverage in entrepreneur can help them go out to the marketplace and say, look, we're also reaching XYZ people. So sometimes it's not even about a conversion, but rather it's about a positioning. And that's a good reason to also maybe put forward your executives. Sometimes it's just about establishing your CEO or your founder as an authority in a particular area because you want them to be more trustworthy. You want them to be invited to more conferences because all of that stuff draws more attention to the company. All sorts of reasons to do this stuff.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it could also be that you're looking to position yourself in your own marketplace a little differently. So I see, for example,”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, awareness of something new, but also doesn't have to be awareness of something new. It could just be continued growth trying to reach into a new marketplace. That's fine. Anything that's tied to growth or reaching a new customer base would make sense. That makes sense.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, who else is writing about that? It's not central to her story as a brand. It's not central to her sales pitch. It was just for us. We were probably the only publication in the world who cared about that. But I really cared about it.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follows the blow by blow by blow of a restaurant industry might be interested in your new president, but I'm not because you hiring that new president isn't useful to my audience. Stories in entrepreneur are not really about the person that I'm writing about. They're really about the audience. They're really me serving the audience through the stories of the people I'm writing about. That's not useful. I wish that they had spent a moment and thought about that, but they didn't. Once you start to think about who it is that you're trying to read, you can step back and say, well, what part of my journey is going to be most relevant to them? And I would push you to be really, really creative about it. Because if you go back to the buttery example, the butter dish, that little funny story about the airport.”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really thought at all about what entrepreneur publishes, but instead just has something that they would like to get out into the world. I mean, a good kind of dumb example is yesterday somebody sent me an email about a company that had just hired a new president. I don't care about that. That's not useful to my audience at all. I'm sure that there is a trade publication, right? Let's say that there was a company in the restaurant industry. I'm sure that a trade publication that”
2023-10-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to get press for your product | Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source