I would love to get any feedback on things to include for such a tool.
http://joshuaodmark.com/suggest/
Thanks in advance.
I came out with this: http://pitchajournalist.com
I am trying to solve the problem of finding reporters and journalists who would be interested in covering broad startups, niche startups, and micro-niche startups.
Right now if you asked for a list of journalists that cover web 2.0 technology startups, I would send you this: http://pitchajournalist.com/lists/1
I am solving this problem by scraping news websites for emails and doing reverse lookups for information about the emails for the purpose of creating lists of relevant reporters and journalists.
I can then manually email a journalist or send an email to a list of journalists (distributing a press release, or pitching a new startup). If the email is sent through the website, it is tracked so it can be referenced later by the user who sent it.
What do you guys think? Do you have any advice?
Do you see value in the time this type of a service saves if you commit to using it?
As for business models, I envision one of the following: 1) Sell a monthly subscription giving full access to every feature. 2) Sell credits for emailing journalists, distributing press releases to lists, and credits to download lists that you create. 3) Freemium model allowing people to send a limited number of emails, perform a limited number of searches, and create 1 list. Subscription to full featured site. 4) Give full access to everything, limit the display of lists to 20% of the list, and sell access to the full list. Give 30% commission to the user who created the list.
Let me know what you guys think.
I am also interested in opinions on how to prevent people from abusing a site that contains tens of thousands of emails. Right now I converted all emails to images to deter people from being malicious.
You can use most of the site without registering, but if you do register, let me know and I will approve your account.
Thanks!
I was manually researching websites and recording the email addresses of reporters, journalists, and bloggers that might find my startup relevant. Needless to say this was tedious and inefficient.
So what I did was write a little script that would scrape a website for email addresses and then it would research each email address and provide me with a summary for each email address.
After I scraped approximately 2,000 email addresses and looked at the results with research, I was surprised at how well this worked.
I was able to build a list of 100+ reporters that have written about or published a related story in an industry that my startup is entering.
I was thinking about putting a UI around this technology.
What do you guys think?
If you could login and search tens of thousands of journalists, and then build your own list from these journalists to contact through the website (and save the list for later, plus access categorical lists predetermined), would you be interested?
I had the idea of limiting the subject and body of any email sent through the website to 100 chars and 400 chars respectively. It would force the person contacting the journalist to be short and sweet.
Thoughts?
However, I am not sure growth is always good.
Take for example the increase in popular culture articles. Not too long ago Hacker News was saturated with iPad articles, so much so that someone wrote a filter to remove them from Hacker News.
To combat this, I thought of an invitation only membership.
It worked/works for torrent sites such as Demonoid...com, maybe it can save news sites from saturation.
What do you think?
