Getting PR for your SaaS
How we got PR for Simple Analytics at zero cost
👋 Hi, I’m Iron from Simple Analytics, and welcome to my newsletter, The Road to 1 Million ARR. Sign up for weekly insights, growth strategies, and playbooks on how we are growing our business to 1 Million ARR. Fully transparent.
To me, PR always felt like a black box. You want to do something with it but don’t know how.
It’s an item on your “marketing-to-do-list,” and it gets moved up the list if you see your competitor featured on Techcrunch. You discuss with your team how to go about it, but you have no clue where to start.
Yes, there are PR firms that specialize in getting you featured. Most of them are insanely expensive. At Simple Analytics, we’ve gotten into the PR game with zero money spent. It’s not easy, but definitely doable.
Who are we
Before we dive in, here is some context: I’m the founder of Simple Analytics (together with Adriaan). It’s a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.
We don't sell your data, we don't have ads, and we don't have investors that tell us what to do. We’re just trying to build a great product for our users.
Adriaan and I always look for creative ways to grow our business - since we don’t have VC money to blow. We took the same approach to PR.
Newsjacking
Adriaan and I were discussing where to find new users for Simple Analytics. We knew most initial customers found us through forums like Hackernews (HN) and Reddit, so we knew where to focus.
To get some eyeballs on our business, we needed to publish content that would get upvoted. Getting more upvotes = getting more exposure. However, it’s notoriously difficult. There is a lot of competition, and both HN and Reddit are known for their unforgiving audience, who are allergic to self-promotion. (Fair enough).
I spent many hours figuring out how to turn “getting HN/Reddit eyeballs” into a repeatable strategy. I found one: Newsjacking.
Newsjacking might not be considered a pure PR play, but fuck that, you want eyeballs. Here is how it works:
These are our website analytics, where I marked the HN/Reddit spikes. Feel free to play around with it here to see for yourself.
The War Room
That’s what we called it. Feels a bit cringe now to be honest. We’re not at war - we’re selling B2B analytics software. Sometimes I forget that.
However this is what the “war room” looked like:
Understanding your audience
First, you need to understand your audience. The HN/Reddit crowd is not the easiest. The people on HN will slay you if your stuff is not 100% on point. Also, competition is fierce.
After spending many hours researching, I noticed that posts about newsworthy stuff get on the front page a lot. The only caveat: You have to be the first with a well-written article!
Newsbot
To be the first, we needed to be on top of the news in our niche. So, Adriaan created a “newsbot” to notify us immediately of interesting and relevant news items.
For us, news on privacy issues, big-tech fines, data breaches, and anything concerning Google Analytics is relatable to us and relevant for HN.
Here is a link to our code for the newsbot. Feel free to steal it.
When implemented, it looks like this in our Telegram chat: (yes we called our bot “Robin”)
Start Typing
When our newsbot pings us with some really interesting, relevant news item, we drop everything and start investigating. If we feel there is something there, we start writing about it.
To be relevant for HN, you can’t just copy past the news item. News items are often very plain, so by providing more context and implications, you can create something relevant that can coexist with the source.
Outline:
State the news item and link to the source (so people can choose what to read)
Explain what the problem is
Explain what the implications are
Explain what we can expect in the future
Final Thoughts → Your moment to shine
Be super super super careful with self-promotion. We only do this at the end of the article. After providing tons of value to the reader, only include one sentence that is the least salesy you can do.
We do it like this, and sometimes even that backfires:
Depending on the news item, we can create a blog article in 1-2 hours and post it on HN. This way, we’re always the one of the first to cover the issue and take a broader perspective than just the news item itself. That’s the value you add.
SEO
The goal is to get traffic to your website and increase brand awareness, but there is an unanticipated (positive) side-effect to it: SEO
Because we’re the first to cover these news items, other websites link to our content. Three of our most popular articles got tons of backlinks (and even more traffic from those sources):
Italy declares Google Analytics illegal: 158 backlinks from 72 different domains
EU moving closer to Facebook ban: 191 backlinks from 52 different domains
Vodafone & Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent user tracking: 392 backlinks from 88 different domains
We even won the Dutch Search Awards for this strategy. In one instance, even the Indian Times linked to us:
How to apply this to your SaaS
The above does sound very specific to Simple Analytics and the HN/Reddit crowd, but the same strategy holds for other use cases.
We even used this strategy at UniHosted (my other company) lately:
Built a bot that would notify us if Ubiquiti would do an update
Summarize the update + add perspective, and turn it into a blog
Post it on the right sub-Reddit
You could literally do this for anything.
For example, if you are working with Notion - look for Notion-related news or feature changes. If you are working on climate change technology, look for news about the effects of climate change, etc.
If you are an engineer (or work with engineers), make sure to build a little “newsbot” to automate this process.
Getting real PR
Another angle we are now trialing at Simple Analytics is sending our newsworthy blogs to journalists who haven’t reported on the news.
Tech journalists/reporters always look for the latest scoops, but they can’t cover everything.
By sending them a fully written, in-depth article, they don’t need to write everything from scratch. They can use our version. We only ask to be mentioned in some way.
Here is the strategy:
Newsbot triggers
We write an interesting piece of content
Before we publish, we reach out to relevant newsletters/news outlets with this email:
“Hey there, I’m not sure if you’re working on {XYZ newsitem}. I see {newsoutlet competitor} already covered it. Since we’re deep in the space, we wrote about it with our implications and thoughts. You can use it if you want - just give us a mention.”
We’d still publish on HN/Reddit under our blog if they don't respond.
We haven’t succeeded with this strategy yet, but I feel this is the only way to get “real” PR without paying a lot.
In PR, you are never the story, but you can be part of it.
No one is going to write about your little B2B accounting software startup. Why would they?
I don’t see Techcrunch featuring Simple Analytics anytime soon. However, I could see them writing about Google Analytics getting into a privacy lawsuit and Simple Analytics being mentioned as a privacy-friendly alternative.
Let’s see how this plays out. It’s too early to tell just yet.
Final Thoughts
Getting PR doesn't need to involve expensive agencies. There are more creative opportunities to go about it.
At least, newsjacking has proven beneficial for us in consistently reaching a big audience. It still requires time and some form of pressure since you must write something interesting fast.
The other strategy of reaching out to journalists with our article hasn’t been a rewarding endeavor yet. Still, it feels like the right approach instead of bombarding journalists, asking them to write a story about your little b2b startup.
Either way, start digging into that PR black box. I’m sure you’ll find an angle.
Cheers,
Iron
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This is brilliant, thank you for sharing. Giving me many ideas for my own projects on how to use the news and provide actual value through them, and as a bonus side effect, promote my sites