Lesson: How to Get Press with Ari Dyckovsky & Catalin Voss

Step #5 Appealing Stories: How to best construct your story to appeal to reporters

Ari: One of the big things that these media companies are interested in when launching stories, especially about early stage companies, is where the company came from. So in both of the titles, they mention the fact that there's a college student leaving to start a company and in the Wired article, especially, they talk about two Stanford students are leaving college, and so that creates a lot of buzz for them because it’s a topic of interest.

At the same time, one of the things they are interested in hearing from us is why at our young age we chose to do so. And then the third thing that they're most interested in is probably just what new insights we have and what we actually plan to bring to the table.

Catalin: We were in a lucky position for PR for a number of reasons. We had no goal of creating this much buzz. We did because we basically jumped onto a rolling train. Yeah, of course, people, journalists, VCs, look for patterns and one of those patterns happen to be, “18-year-old Stanford kid does blah, blah, blah.” So we fit that. The other pattern is, “New Google Glass App does blah, blah, blah,” so we fit that one. And so, I would argue if you fit at least two of these patterns very well, that makes everything else very easy.