Entrepreneurs: What You Need to do to Get PR Coverage Without Funding

The entrepreneurship media has a very annoying habit: they tend to only cover funding news and write about funded companies.

This puts all those companies that do not have any funding at a grave disadvantage. In many cases, entrepreneurs will need to work their way to become fundable by climbing the rungs of the credibility radar.

And during that phase, they need to get the word out there that they exist, they offer something of value, and customers ought to look at them.

Very few business writers ask the question: What is your revenue?

Most ask the question: How much funding have you raised? From whom?

I will give you an outline of how we decide which companies to write about, and how we screen the pitches we receive. Please note, we only cover the technology and technology-enabled services sectors.

The FIRST question we ask is: What is your revenue?

If your revenue is above $5M (and we don’t give a damn whether you have funding or not), we will cover you in one of two ways:

• Entrepreneur Journeys: This is the flagship series from 1Mby1M in which we’ve covered over 750 successful entrepreneurs and their journeys, lessons from the trenches, wisdom, and guidance in very large, case-study style stories. This includes over 50Unicorn companies, over 400 venture-funded companies, and over 300 bootstrapped success stories. The series has resulted in 12 books and we also teach the 1Mby1M online curriculum based on this body of work. You will get a 7-part story based on an hour-long interview with me. This will probably be the largest and most in-depth story anyone will ever write about you.

• Thought Leader Interview: We cover about 20 different trend areas includingArtificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Online Education, Internet of Things, etc. In each, we routinely invite people with interesting vantage points to talk about what they are doing, what they’re seeing, where they see open problems, what trends are developing in the horizon. Again, you will get a long multi-part story based on an in-depth interview with me.

If your revenue is between $1M and $5M, your option is to do an email interview with us, and we will publish a profile for our 1M/1M Deal Radar series. You will find the interview questionnaire here with further detailed instructions.

If your revenue is below $1M, the option we offer you is to come and pitch at our weekly free roundtables. I will spend 10-15 minutes with you on your company, and write about your business in my roundtable recap, and the video of the session is published on our blog and YouTube channel.

[Note: 1M/1M Premium Members have an additional option even if they’re below $1M in revenue: An 1M/1M Incubation Radar profile.]

So, pretty much, from $0 upward, we offer a way for you to get coverage through our platform. And, we promote the stories we do aggressively through all our social media channels, so you get good, solid leverage through those as well.

One of the upshots of a story on the 1Mby1M blog is the potential for other journalists and bloggers to pick it up. We’ve created such opportunities for many entrepreneurs, and it is part of our philosophy to help entrepreneurs get as much leverage through us as possible.

So, to come back to your strategy of how to get media coverage without funding, you have two options:

(1) You can pitch us, and see if your story fits our editorial direction.

(2) You need to find other business writers who focus on customers and revenues, not funding. There aren’t that many, but I’m sure there are some.

One final thought: Media professionals really need to change this destructive habit of behaving as if Entrepreneurship equals Financing.

Entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues and profits. Financing is optional.

 Photo credit: www.audio-luci-store.it/Flickr.com.

This segment is a part in the series : Entrepreneurs