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DO NOT COLD E-MAIL US with a single, vague paragraph. It will go into the bowels of oblivion into tips@techcrunch.com where we get 95% crazy and 4% decent and 1
by ktothemc 14y ago
DO NOT COLD E-MAIL US with a single, vague paragraph. It will go into the bowels of oblivion into tips@techcrunch.com where we get 95% crazy and 4% decent and 1% awesome information.
You should find the writer that most appropriately fits what you want to do. We all have different styles and interests. Josh does a lot of FB-related stuff, I do a lot of mobile & finance-related stuff, Leena does some more enterprise, Alexia does culture, Sarah Perez does mobile stuff.
Establish a relationship with them for future coverage. Many of our e-mails are just our first name followed by @techcrunch.com
In terms of explaining what you do, we basically ask the same questions that PG or any investor would.
1) Who are you? Tell us about your team and why they are interesting or uniquely positioned to build this.
2) What is the idea? How did you pick this problem?
3) Why is your solution better executed than everyone else in the space? Eg, tell us about your product. Why is it built this way and what does it let you do? Where do you think your competitors fall short and who are they?
4) What is the market opportunity?
5) How does the revenue model work if you have one? If you don't, what do you think it could be?
6) How do you acquire users? Most people do not have a thoughtful answer to this and it makes me very sad. Especially people who want to "launch this cool app" or whatever. The world does not work like this.
7) Do you have evidence of traction? If you provide arbitrary vanity metrics, I will go crazy (unless you have a really good explanation) for why you need to deviate from the standard engagement metrics like DAU/MAU/uniques/# of transactions/monthly or annual revenue, etc. In your case, sheer DAU or MAU may not really be that relevant since you have a very specific target market.
8) Do you have investors or advisors? How much did you raise and why did you take money from these people?
- ktothemc 14y agoBtw, this is for the basic company story. We also do trend, feature, or random culture stories, for which the bar is very different. :)
- pramodbiligiri 14y agoHey thanks much! I didn't expect someone from TC itself to be commenting. Will make sure my CEO reads your comments.
- eps 14y agoWhat's your general take on covering startups that haven't launched yet, but that have an interesting idea and/or a credible founding team?
- ktothemc 14y agoWe cover lots of companies that haven't taken funding or (even launched yet) but they need to have an interesting founding team or concept. I covered a company the other week from the FB engineer who built Presence (hasn't launched) and another wearable computing company that was built by a very, very interesting team (hasn't launched but took funding). We've also written plenty about Airtime (from Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker + some early Facebook design talent) but it hasn't launched yet. If you were early and instrumental at a profoundly successful company or were key to a big project at a giant co like Google, then we'd be interested. These are all examples though, we'd be flexible in how we think about it.