PR hacking -- getting your first hundred media coverage

I recently attended another meetup on PR hacking, and how to get 200+ media outlets in 21 countries to love your startup. The speaker was Ben Kaplan, founder and CEO of PR Hacker, which basically helps startups hack their way through marketing their product. It was a very interesting session, and I had some great takeaways from Ben:

1. Relate your product to timely news or generate the news yourself. Why wait for news to match your product, when you can create your own? For example, if your product is about how to help improve posture of office workers, link it to a recent piece of news that mentioned a celebrity getting ill from poor posture. If there are no relevant news available, generate your own news about how facing the computer for long hours results in bad posture and poor health. Do surveys and interview people to get statistics of how many people get back aches, and how many of those work at a desk-bound job. (Of course, do make sure that your news are reliable) 
2. Make it easy for media outlets to say "Yes!" Customize your tactic of contacting media outlets to each one of them. For example, find the best times to contact a morning show producer, which would probably be different from the best times to contact an evening news producer. Measure the response rates with the various methods, and use the best ones for other similar media outlets. And of course, leverage the numbers game in your favor -- the more you contact, the more positive response you will receive. Another trick to increasing the number of "yes"es, is to choose email over a phone call. Why? Because if you were contacting the wrong person, it is much easier to forward an email than to pass your phone number to the right contact.
3. Create strong "traction steps". A media hit is not the ultimate goal -- it is essential to follow up after the exposure. A traction step would be the next step of action you hope the viewer would take, be it visit your website, sign up for a beta, or call a phone number. Include that action step in your media exposure, so your 'contact' with the audience does not end right there. 
4. Adapt your approach to the specific media type. To make an impact, tell a good story, and optimize it! Optimization is done largely by trial and error, and takes a lot of time. However, the effort is definitely worth it, because reaching out to media without an optimal story line is almost as good as not getting any media exposure at all! Try different ways of telling stories, try different stories, basically try, try, and try more! You'll definitely get better as you go (and remember to measure the impact of each iteration)
5. Create waves of media coverage. Having one giant wave of media coverage is not sufficient. Instead, when the ripples from that first wave has almost died down, start another wave, with a different / wider set of media. When that dies down, start yet another one. Such multiple waves not only keep your customers coming, but may also serve to interest potential investors, when they realize there's always something new whenever they meet with you. An active startup is definitely much better than a stale one ;)

Growth Hacking -- getting your first 1000 customers

Being involved in early-stage startups, we always think about getting 100,000 customers, 1 million customers etc, when we pitch to investors. Because that's where the money is. However, what REALLY is difficult (and one of the many major reasons startups don't even get past the initial phase), is how to even get your first 100 and first 1000 customers. Customer / User traction builds upon EXISTING customers/users. Virality, no matter how inherent and how great, also builds upon existing relationships. But why doesn't anyone talk about the initial growth? The first 1000 customers cannot be obtained by virality nor networks. After the first 50-100 customers that are usually family/friends, where do we get the remaining 900 people to start building traction?

Finally, this very important but often forgotten topic was addressed at a recent meetup I attended, organized by a team of students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, called "Igniters". The speaker was James Kennedy, founder of piehole.tv. They had recently obtained their first 1000 customers, so James was a perfect person to speak about the topic -- both success and fresh in mind. A few take home points that I personally felt were new and useful:

1. Brainstorm on 30 different ways to get leads, and 30 different ways to get conversion. Getting leads (the connection and the list of people) and conversion (leads becoming sales) is very different, so methods for both need to be brainstormed separately. 
2. Delete the 1st 20 things on both lists. WHY!??!?! Didn't you just brainstorm 30, why delete 20 of those now? The reason being -- the first 20 is probably extremely common, and everyone else is already doing it! Not to say that you shouldn't use any of them anymore (tried and tested), but if you want to be different, or if you aim to disrupt, go for the last 10 that you had to squeeze dry your brains to get to. 
3. Test only a couple of methods each month, using a metric to measure effectiveness of each method. Discard the ineffective ones after each month, and test new methods. Keep using the effective ones, and eventually dedicate most of your resources to the most effective.
4. A/B testing. Optimizely is a useful site to help you do your A/B test. (Hey, they have big-name customers such as Walt Disney Company, Fox media, Starbucks, techcrunch!) 

Let me know if any of these were useful in helping YOU get your first 1000 customers! :)