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Matt Henderson 🚀

Press Hunt — Find the best journalists to cover you with our DB of 500k

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Press Hunt is a categorized database of 500,000 journalists perfect for DIY cold media outreach.

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Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
Hey guys! 👋 Last month we launched Howler: AI-powered media outreach. So far Howler’s working really well for our users and we're excited to keep making it better and better. In doing so we’ve had to build out a comprehensive database of journalists that includes their name, email, and tags that represent what they’re interested in writing about (determined by what they’ve written about before, where they write, and what they’ve tweeted about). We have just about 500,000 journalists now. Our goal is to perfect the matching of stories to journalists, helping startups get featured faster and helping journalists get less spam. Our tagging system is great at this (and getting better), and we think it’s the right time for this database to be a standalone product. While there are a few comparable services, they’re either a. too small (10k-100k contacts), b. outdated (making most of the data useless), or c. too niche (only TechCrunch emails). In our experience with cold media outreach, we’ve found it to be a game of numbers. Assuming you’re only pitching to people interested in writing about stories similar to yours, around 1% - 2% on average will feature you. Given this, a database of 10k contacts isn’t very useful (especially when only a small number of the contacts are relevant). The best strategy is to find as many relevant journalists as possible (a few thousand), and push cold email campaigns with a compelling story (but emails must be direct, not en masse spam––like sniping). Try it free (!) here: https://presshunt.co. As always, we’ll be here all day to answer questions! - Matt P.S. Our goal is to launch 2 products a month for all of 2018. This is product #5 of the year.
Matthew Keys
@juhaszhenderson if we are a journalist (raises hand) how do we submit for inclusion in your database?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@matthewkeyslive 🎉 I will follow up with a form soon, but in the meantime could you send me an email at hi@howler.media?
Aaron Tsai
Maker
@juhaszhenderson Excited to be here and hear about your feedback!
Sam Jacobson
@juhaszhenderson "P.S. Our goal is to launch 2 products a month for all of 2018. This is product #5 of the year." Hell of a goal! - Good luck!
Pillow John
Looks cool! One question: What's stopping me from paying just a month for the $79 option and just exporting the CSV of all 500k journalists?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@arecenello We limit the amount of people you can put on the media list at one time. So you’d have to add 500, then delete, then add again. It would suck 🤷🏻‍♂️
Tem Nugmanov
Just subscribed...this looks dope ✊🏻
Stewart Rogers
Wild miscategorization of what I write about, which means I'll get more off-topic pitches. And I get 100 a day already. Where's the "is this you" option for journalists to claim their entry and make sure it's accurate? And where is the option to be removed from the database?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@therealsjr Hey Stewart! Sure we’ll remove you. Algo’s always getting better and has room to improve. Our v2 wIll have crowdsourcIng features and the abilIiy to add or remove yourself, add more data, etc. Glad you don’t have a problem sourcing good stories—that’s not the case for everyone. 🙂
Kyra Durko
Congrats on another awesome launch that takes the “manual” out of manual labor almost every early stage founder does at one point or another 🙏🏻🙌🏻👏🏻
Ermek Rysbek Uulu
Great product! and great idea... esp if its a niche market...
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@bsmoder Thanks Ermek!
Justin Zheng
What would be the benefit of using this over just paying for Howler?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@legionof7 Hey Justin! Howler is a black box that takes care of everything, and uses AI to build your media list in seconds. Building your media list manually with Press Hunt would take a few hours. If you don't use something like Press Hunt it would take weeks. Howler (https://www.howler.media) is perfect if you have the budget for it and don't want to spend a ton of time worrying about media outreach. Press Hunt starts at $19/mo and Howler starts at $149/mo
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@legionof7 Nice! I know––put all that extra info you know already for everyone else in the thread. 🙂
Tem Nugmanov
Just subscribed...this looks dope ✊🏻
Noah Hyams
Nice work!
Michael Weiss
I've spent many hours hunting for relevant journalists...this is awesome!
kt
Huge fan of better matching journalists to stories; what are the verticals you're focused on, and do you plan on expanding those regularly or sticking to a core set?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@k_to_the_t The journalists we have cover every topic from startups to food to sports to fashion. We're less focused on any one vertical, but rather more focused on building out the tech that analyzes a journalist's writing history to predict what they'd like to write about. We're constantly expanding this database. It's estimated there's 1M-2M journalists in the world (salaried and freelance), so we'll try to document them all. We update data daily!
Uday Singh
Story matching is fantastic and positively aligns incentives between journalists and people pitching. Love what you're doing here, but quick question: how does getting the consent of journalists factor in here? Can journalists opt out? Can journalists request to be included? Also, how did you get started?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@udayrsingh If journalists didn't have stories to write about they wouldn't be journalists. While journalists giving consent to others to pitch them on stories makes sense, it doesn't mean that if they don't give consent they won't receive cold pitches. Or in other words, journalists (and influencers in general) will receive cold pitches if they want them or not (by nature of their position). So the question we're focused on is: how do we maximize the relevance of the stories that are pitched to the journalists? (The answer is better journo<>story matching algos.) However, journalists can opt out of Press Hunt. They can also request to be included. Soon they will be able to this directly in our UI (and also be able to manually tell us what kind of stories they want to be pitched). We started with a project called Aidem (www.aidem.network) that grew into one called Howler (www.howler.media). And Press Hunt is essentially (most of) the database we use for Howler's AI solution.
eboy
Don’t the journalists get annoyed with hundreds of people emailing them?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@eboy Most journalists already get hundreds of emails a day. That’s why we’re working on helping startups find the most relevant ones to pitch to (so journalists receive less bad pitches)
Aaron Tsai
Maker
@eboy That's precisely what we aim to solve with this product. Our goal is to make sure journalists receive more relevant stories.
Scott Bowler
I'll probably end up paying for this service, but I find your statement extremely ironic because your method uses this exact approach: You can not deploy crawlers, scrapers, and/or bots to extract the data from this database. Using automated methods like these are prohibited. We have systems in place to scan for this behavior, and, if detected, will automatically result in an irreversible lifetime ban from Press Hunt without refund.
Joe Thomsett
This looks awesome - just subscribed! Is there the ability to filter by location within the database?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@joe_thomsett Thanks! Most journalists have a tag representing their location, or at least the places they're interested in writing about. The ability to filter by those locations is a feature we're currently working on!
Brona Molnarova
How can I try it for free?
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@bronamolnarova Go to the landing page, scroll down, then start searching 🙂
Dainis Kanopa
quantity or quality?? I don't see a balance in such a big list!
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@dainiskanopa Cold media outreach is a game of numbers. Putting all the journalists in one DB so you can search through them to find the most relevant for you helps you find the quality (which isn't the same for everyone). Not a good idea to bulk spam 500k journalists at once though.
Mikayil Hajiyev
Before the product, the team/company should be trusted. Without my confirmation and knowledge, they have kept my subscription to both monthly and yearly (can you imagine absurdity?!) and charged yearly fee again, although last year we agreed on an exported data in exchange for 1 year subscription, no more. And now, you cannot cancel any plan yourself (!) and your repetitive emails are left without any response. Now wasting my time with chargeback requests and these bad reviews. Oh, and on top of above review, the data quality is bad - we could not see any benefit from the data. Disappointing product, disappointing service. Stay away.
Matt Henderson 🚀
Maker
@mikayilhajiyev Hey Mikayil! Haven't received any emails from you. What's the email on your account? I'll look into this for you and get it sorted. You can cancel at any time by the way, were you not able to find the cancellation form? Happy to send that over to you once you provide your account email 👍 (In case you don't want to share that here, you can email me direct at matt at presshunt dot co)
D Tyler Klune
beautiful. thx again
Shannon Bray
Where has this been all of my life