8 ms·

How I started BetaList

92 points by keesj 12y ago

simonsc 12y ago
This was actually an enjoyable read. The best part for me was making good on the promise they made with BetaList, having successfully featured Pinterest, Mailbox, IFTTT, and so on.
- sujal 12y ago
  Love the hacks that turn into something useful. I know it may have been a 'trick' or whatever, but this is an example that proves that "scratch your own itch" to build a great product. He could've used BetaList for his own startup, so he built it. That it was built quickly, using Tumblr, and then evolved is just being fast on your feet and doing good work.
vinothgopi 12y ago
I was honestly out to thrash you guys in the comments when i read the title. But the article indeed turned out interesting. I guess this is what people have now termed "growth hacking"!
- maaarghk 12y ago
  absolutely - this was fascinating! that is some serious lateral thinking!
- keesj 12y ago
  Haha. Glad you found the article interesting in the end. I made sure to explicitly thank TechCrunch at the end of the article as BetaList wouldn't be there if it weren't for them.
- dkrich 12y ago
  And don't forget, while it is unethical to intentionally deceive a reporter, a large part of a journalist's job is to vet sources and do some research to make sure claims are true. In reality, blogs make their money on advertising so if they publish downright fabrications or knowingly stretch the truth, they do not care as long as they are getting clicks. In other words, don't feel bad for the blogs.
  - dulvac 12y ago
    I honestly didn't consider for a second I'd feel bad for the blogs. The reality is they get tons of e-mails and you have to sell it like you'd sell your handmade flutes in the market to somebody that is bombarded by people selling flutes. Now, lying about it through your teeth is a different story.
  - keesj 12y ago
    Not sure if you're saying this was unethical, but what I emailed them was 100% true. It's just that I disclosed only one reason for starting BetaList (wanting a platform like that) and not the other one (wanting to leverage TechCrunch's article to also promote my own startup). Whether that's deceit depends on whether you consider the other reason being relevant to TechCrunch. As far as they were concerned they wrote about a cool platform that was interesting to their audience. It would be different of course if I swapped out the sites at the last minute, lied to them about how long I've been working on it, etc, etc, but that wasn't the case. Again, not sure if you were saying you thought it was unethical, just trying to clarify.
    - dkrich 12y ago
      Certainly not. I don't think there's anything unethical about what you described. What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's. If I send a bogus tip to the Washington Post and they immediately run a story on it without question, that's incredibly irresponsible on their part and the fault lies with them. That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the same thing happens on a daily basis on blogs and slightly lesser-known news outlets with readership in the millions.
      - keesj 12y ago
        100% agree. Thanks for clarifying. (In this case there was not much to vet for TechCrunch of course as they could see what I described exist)
peterwiese 12y ago
The title did indeed keep it's promise. Rare that is. Great real life hack, especially since beta list seems to have been more successful than open margin. He tricked himself it seems.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- chollida1 12y ago
  Please don't post "comments" like this. If you have something to say....please say it!
  - keesj 12y ago
    Fair point. Please note that I'm not a native speaker however. You write a Dutch email and we'll compare, okay? ;) Just kidding. Nowadays I have important texts spell checked before sending it out, but I wanted to include the original unedited email here. Edit: Oops. Replied to the wrong comment. Meant to reply to the one above.
dkrich 12y ago
As someone who went through almost the same exact process, these are my tips for getting coverage: -Keep your email brief (three sentences, tops). -Tell a story. Many of the stories on publications like TechCrunch are as much about the founders as they are about the startups. Look for an interesting angle related to yours and pitch it accordingly. -Bloggers have to create several stories a week. Do as much of their job for them as you can by framing the outline of the story they will write in your pitch for coverage (related to previous point). If you started it as a side-project while in college, great, mention that. If your startup is in the same space as [hot trendy startup], great, mention that. Just make sure the whole thing is less than four sentences. All that said- don't waste your time trying to get covered if you don't have a regular user base. Yes it is true, if you are covered it will result in an enormous spike in traffic. That spike will quickly diminish and you will be back to trying to find more users. I'm very happy for the author that BetaList turned into a profitable business, but getting covered and hatching a profitable, sustainable business because of it is the exception, not the norm. Not to say PR isn't useful (and surprisingly easy to game), but that should come after you've grown a reliable customer base.
- keesj 12y ago
  Great advice here. So many founders pitch their startups by describing the features of their product instead of telling a story. Whenever you're selling something you want to make it as easy as possible for the other person to say yes. You want to remove any concerns. Same when pitching a journalist. Don't let them figure out why your startup is interesting, but explain it. How is your startup different? How is it remarkable? Whether it's the product, team, vision, etc doesn't really matter, as long as you've got something interesting to tell that the audience of the journalist will love to read. (Founder of BetaList)
- consta 12y ago
  I totally agree with keeping the message short. Also I have read from several other sources that telling a story is key. But how are you supposed to tell a story in 4 sentences?
  - keesj 12y ago
jbarrec 12y ago
Thank you for taking the time to write this inspiring post!
- keesj 12y ago
  You're welcome! Of course part of why I wrote it was to create additional publicity for BetaList and myself, but IMO one of the best marketing strategies is to inspire others with your own stories.
thinkt4nk 12y ago
The title should actually be "How I trick all of you into reading this story". I'm probably not alone in hoping that this story contained some slick hack.
- keesj 12y ago
  Nice! That will be my next article: How I tricked Hacker News into reading about my writing about how I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup.
  - thinkt4nk 12y ago
    I'll probably read that one too
  - alphadevx 12y ago
    +1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.
    - keesj 12y ago
      The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.
      - thinkt4nk 12y ago
        Ah! I think this gets lost somewhere in the telling of the story.
- sequoia 12y ago
  Yeah, started skimming it, looked at what betalist is (startup reporting service)... link on startupnews to post by startup founder of startup tracking service on how he got coverage from a startup oriented news site for his startup. This is some inception-level circle jerking IMO. "The best minds of our generation" :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jlockfre 12y ago
He didn't trick them. He stilled emailed them. That headline makes no sense.
- keesj 12y ago
  My goal was to get publicity for Openmargin. I created a quick site called BetaList, emailed them about it, and as an end result got publicity for Openmargin. That was the trick.
skizm 12y ago
So in order to "trick" techcruch into writing about your website, you made a more interesting website that techcrunch would write about which would in turn, help you gain enough leverage for them to write about your other website. This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  "How do you make a small fortune in the airline industry?" "Start with a large fortune..."
- keesj 12y ago
  Fair point. I don't think the initial website was necessarily uninteresting (it was later featured by Fast Company, The Next Web, Wired, and many more), but it was likely at a too early-stage for TechCrunch to feature. My way around that was create something quick that, due to its simplicity, could be launched immediately and therefore more likely to get picked up by TC.
rootuid 12y ago
linkBait spammy spam spam. Bah.
jonalmeida 12y ago
There's a great IFTTT trigger that takes betali.st startups and adds them into an email[1]. I have it directed to a folder in my mail which I go through once in a while to find good products I like. [1]: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098 https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098
- keesj 12y ago
  Cool! Thanks for sharing. Keep in mind we publish about 4-5 startups a day, so if it's too much we also offer an 'official' newsletter which you'll receive either daily or weekly depending on your preferences. http://betalist.com/newsletter http://betalist.com/newsletter
  - jonalmeida 12y ago
    I prefer the individual emails for each startup so I can read the startup name and first line of each description quickly. This is what my email folder looks like right now[1]. It quickly builds up to 100+ emails if you don't check it every second day. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/oUNaFSO.png http://i.imgur.com/oUNaFSO.png
    - keesj 12y ago
      Oh wow, thanks for sharing. That's great feedback. I didn't consider that approach. Would it be helpful if we provided a daily or weekly email that showed the startups like that? Name + pitch.
      - jonalmeida 12y ago
        Glad I could help! That kind of option would be nice. Someone in this thread mentions that short pitches are easier to consume. Since there are many startup posts everyday, it's hard to go through all of them in detail, so I have to pick out the best one from all to discover at the end of the day. Maybe there's a way to build up on this concept? Looking forward to seeing what comes out, good luck!

92 points by keesj 12y ago

This was actually an enjoyable read. The best part for me was making good on the promise they made with BetaList, having successfully featured Pinterest, Mailbox, IFTTT, and so on.

sujal 12y ago
Love the hacks that turn into something useful. I know it may have been a 'trick' or whatever, but this is an example that proves that "scratch your own itch" to build a great product. He could've used BetaList for his own startup, so he built it. That it was built quickly, using Tumblr, and then evolved is just being fast on your feet and doing good work.

vinothgopi 12y ago

I was honestly out to thrash you guys in the comments when i read the title. But the article indeed turned out interesting. I guess this is what people have now termed "growth hacking"!

maaarghk 12y ago
absolutely - this was fascinating! that is some serious lateral thinking!
keesj 12y ago
Haha. Glad you found the article interesting in the end. I made sure to explicitly thank TechCrunch at the end of the article as BetaList wouldn't be there if it weren't for them.
dkrich 12y ago
And don't forget, while it is unethical to intentionally deceive a reporter, a large part of a journalist's job is to vet sources and do some research to make sure claims are true. In reality, blogs make their money on advertising so if they publish downright fabrications or knowingly stretch the truth, they do not care as long as they are getting clicks. In other words, don't feel bad for the blogs.
- dulvac 12y ago
  I honestly didn't consider for a second I'd feel bad for the blogs. The reality is they get tons of e-mails and you have to sell it like you'd sell your handmade flutes in the market to somebody that is bombarded by people selling flutes. Now, lying about it through your teeth is a different story.
- keesj 12y ago
  Not sure if you're saying this was unethical, but what I emailed them was 100% true. It's just that I disclosed only one reason for starting BetaList (wanting a platform like that) and not the other one (wanting to leverage TechCrunch's article to also promote my own startup). Whether that's deceit depends on whether you consider the other reason being relevant to TechCrunch. As far as they were concerned they wrote about a cool platform that was interesting to their audience. It would be different of course if I swapped out the sites at the last minute, lied to them about how long I've been working on it, etc, etc, but that wasn't the case. Again, not sure if you were saying you thought it was unethical, just trying to clarify.
  - dkrich 12y ago
    Certainly not. I don't think there's anything unethical about what you described. What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's. If I send a bogus tip to the Washington Post and they immediately run a story on it without question, that's incredibly irresponsible on their part and the fault lies with them. That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the same thing happens on a daily basis on blogs and slightly lesser-known news outlets with readership in the millions.
    - keesj 12y ago
      100% agree. Thanks for clarifying. (In this case there was not much to vet for TechCrunch of course as they could see what I described exist)

peterwiese 12y ago

The title did indeed keep it's promise. Rare that is. Great real life hack, especially since beta list seems to have been more successful than open margin. He tricked himself it seems.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

chollida1 12y ago
Please don't post "comments" like this. If you have something to say....please say it!
- keesj 12y ago
  Fair point. Please note that I'm not a native speaker however. You write a Dutch email and we'll compare, okay? ;) Just kidding. Nowadays I have important texts spell checked before sending it out, but I wanted to include the original unedited email here. Edit: Oops. Replied to the wrong comment. Meant to reply to the one above.

dkrich 12y ago

As someone who went through almost the same exact process, these are my tips for getting coverage: -Keep your email brief (three sentences, tops). -Tell a story. Many of the stories on publications like TechCrunch are as much about the founders as they are about the startups. Look for an interesting angle related to yours and pitch it accordingly. -Bloggers have to create several stories a week. Do as much of their job for them as you can by framing the outline of the story they will write in your pitch for coverage (related to previous point). If you started it as a side-project while in college, great, mention that. If your startup is in the same space as [hot trendy startup], great, mention that. Just make sure the whole thing is less than four sentences. All that said- don't waste your time trying to get covered if you don't have a regular user base. Yes it is true, if you are covered it will result in an enormous spike in traffic. That spike will quickly diminish and you will be back to trying to find more users. I'm very happy for the author that BetaList turned into a profitable business, but getting covered and hatching a profitable, sustainable business because of it is the exception, not the norm. Not to say PR isn't useful (and surprisingly easy to game), but that should come after you've grown a reliable customer base.

keesj 12y ago
Great advice here. So many founders pitch their startups by describing the features of their product instead of telling a story. Whenever you're selling something you want to make it as easy as possible for the other person to say yes. You want to remove any concerns. Same when pitching a journalist. Don't let them figure out why your startup is interesting, but explain it. How is your startup different? How is it remarkable? Whether it's the product, team, vision, etc doesn't really matter, as long as you've got something interesting to tell that the audience of the journalist will love to read. (Founder of BetaList)
consta 12y ago
I totally agree with keeping the message short. Also I have read from several other sources that telling a story is key. But how are you supposed to tell a story in 4 sentences?
- keesj 12y ago

jbarrec 12y ago

Thank you for taking the time to write this inspiring post!

keesj 12y ago
You're welcome! Of course part of why I wrote it was to create additional publicity for BetaList and myself, but IMO one of the best marketing strategies is to inspire others with your own stories.

thinkt4nk 12y ago

The title should actually be "How I trick all of you into reading this story". I'm probably not alone in hoping that this story contained some slick hack.

keesj 12y ago
Nice! That will be my next article: How I tricked Hacker News into reading about my writing about how I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup.
- thinkt4nk 12y ago
  I'll probably read that one too
- alphadevx 12y ago
  +1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.
  - keesj 12y ago
    The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.
    - thinkt4nk 12y ago
      Ah! I think this gets lost somewhere in the telling of the story.
sequoia 12y ago
Yeah, started skimming it, looked at what betalist is (startup reporting service)... link on startupnews to post by startup founder of startup tracking service on how he got coverage from a startup oriented news site for his startup. This is some inception-level circle jerking IMO. "The best minds of our generation" :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jlockfre 12y ago

He didn't trick them. He stilled emailed them. That headline makes no sense.

keesj 12y ago
My goal was to get publicity for Openmargin. I created a quick site called BetaList, emailed them about it, and as an end result got publicity for Openmargin. That was the trick.

skizm 12y ago

So in order to "trick" techcruch into writing about your website, you made a more interesting website that techcrunch would write about which would in turn, help you gain enough leverage for them to write about your other website. This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.

steveklabnik 12y ago
"How do you make a small fortune in the airline industry?" "Start with a large fortune..."
keesj 12y ago
Fair point. I don't think the initial website was necessarily uninteresting (it was later featured by Fast Company, The Next Web, Wired, and many more), but it was likely at a too early-stage for TechCrunch to feature. My way around that was create something quick that, due to its simplicity, could be launched immediately and therefore more likely to get picked up by TC.

rootuid 12y ago

linkBait spammy spam spam. Bah.

jonalmeida 12y ago

There's a great IFTTT trigger that takes betali.st startups and adds them into an email[1]. I have it directed to a folder in my mail which I go through once in a while to find good products I like. [1]: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098 https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098

keesj 12y ago
Cool! Thanks for sharing. Keep in mind we publish about 4-5 startups a day, so if it's too much we also offer an 'official' newsletter which you'll receive either daily or weekly depending on your preferences. http://betalist.com/newsletter http://betalist.com/newsletter
- jonalmeida 12y ago
  I prefer the individual emails for each startup so I can read the startup name and first line of each description quickly. This is what my email folder looks like right now[1]. It quickly builds up to 100+ emails if you don't check it every second day. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/oUNaFSO.png http://i.imgur.com/oUNaFSO.png
  - keesj 12y ago
    Oh wow, thanks for sharing. That's great feedback. I didn't consider that approach. Would it be helpful if we provided a daily or weekly email that showed the startups like that? Name + pitch.
    - jonalmeida 12y ago
      Glad I could help! That kind of option would be nice. Someone in this thread mentions that short pitches are easier to consume. Since there are many startup posts everyday, it's hard to go through all of them in detail, so I have to pick out the best one from all to discover at the end of the day. Maybe there's a way to build up on this concept? Looking forward to seeing what comes out, good luck!