Getting Coverage

A couple of months ago my company did a hack week, essentially we decided to all get together (there was only 7 of us) and build out a whole new project from a to z. This project did not have to be in any way related to my company or what we did. Instead, we were allowed to come up with ideas for problems we saw that needed solving. We then voted on our favorite and started to build it.

We ended up building a road map tool that would allow you to build a road trip and add stops for interesting landmarks, restaurants and more. For a one week project that we started from scratch, we were proud to have built a functioning and useful tool that looked pretty nice too.

The next step after building was to let people know about it. We tackled this by reaching out to prominent and local blogs on technology and travel. We sent out personal emails to the owners giving them a short synopsis of the tool and links to try out it. In some cases, we would reach out to people who we already had a relationship with. This kind of personal, small scale outreach worked great and we got coverage in Geekwire, LifeHacker and the New York Times.

One of the many reasons why we were successful in getting the coverage we wanted was because we had an interesting story to go along with our new product. The story of how we, a small startup team of 7, created a useful and beautifully designed app during a hack week was a story that tech blogs would find interesting to publish for their readers. Also, since we were already active in the tech startup world it was easy for us to reach out to people who we had already formed relationships at these sites. In all, it was a successful campaign that required minimal work and no cost whatsoever.