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How to get profiled on TechCrunch

March 28th, 2008 Posted in Business Strategy

At SWSWi, one of my many hallway conversations revolved around the trouble of getting profiled on TechCrunch. My fellow “mobile panelist” (thanks Chris Heuer for that term) said something like:

“If you don’t get profiled when you launch, you’ll never get profiled on TechCrunch. If they can’t point to their early coverage of you, they think they look like they missed something.”

For some reason this stuck with me, probably because it scares me that one of the biggest sources of news for this industry I love so much is so …. haphazard and personal. Eager to test this theory, I checked out the latest stories about startups on TechCrunch, and this theory defintely seems to ring true. When I wrote this blog entry, I checked the first three older startups featured on the site, and each entry made reference to previous coverage in a significant way.

[1] “In mid 2005 I profiled YouTube for the first time.”

[2] “London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007…”

[3] “See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.”

I have nothing at all against being self-referential. I do it here, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone else. But if this theory plays out in truth (I’ll be watching to see), then that’s a bit sad. Imagine CNN or MSNBC not covering a story because they didn’t break it.

Fox News? Maybe. But do we really want our biggest industry source to more closely associate with Fox News than honest journalism? (And yes, TechCrunch is absolutely journalism)


This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • The article content and title do not match well, but a good article none the less.

    I think getting profiled on TechCrunch would be critical to our property management application startup, http://www.propertystampede.com. After reading this, I definitely will put more emphasis on getting our startup in front of Arrington's eyes leading up to our launch.

    Chris
  • John
    I think the word is hubris, and it's usually not considered a strength...
  • Hugh
    I don't understand how this post relates to the title ... shouldn't the title say something like "Don't count on being profiled by Techcrunch"?
  • You make an excellent point Jake. I work at a startup thats now been live for 5 months and had received early coverage from Mashable but nothing from TechCrunch. We are a big player in our niche, and I was surprised to see nothing coming from TechCrunch.

    Thanks for writing about this. I want to see journalism in this are succeed too.
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