Press coverage on no budget

Flushiest got picked up by four news outlets and radio without a marketing budget. I want to describe how that happened accurately, because the tidy version of this story is a lie that costs people months.

The story is the product, not the launch

Nobody covers a product launch. Launches are not news — there are thousands a week and no reader has ever cared about one. What gets covered is a story that happens to involve a product: something locally specific, mildly funny, mildly useful, or genuinely new to the person reading it.

So the question to answer before you contact anyone is not "how do I explain my product" but "what is the story a journalist could file about this, and why would their editor run it this week". If you cannot answer the second half, you are not ready to send anything.

Small and local beats big and general

A local outlet has space to fill and a mandate to cover things happening nearby. A national tech desk has neither. Being specific to a place is an advantage when you have no budget and no name, and it compounds — coverage in a smaller outlet is the thing that makes the next, larger one plausible.

What actually goes in the email

• Who you are and what happened, in the first two sentences. Not the backstory.
• Why it matters to their readers specifically, in one sentence. If the answer is generic, pick a different outlet.
• Everything they need to file without asking you for it: images they are allowed to use, the correct spelling of everything, and a number they can call today.
• No attachments, no deck, no embargo theatre.

The honest part

I sent a lot of these and most went nowhere. There is real luck in which ones landed, and anyone selling you a repeatable formula for press attention is describing a process with the failures edited out. What you can control is being easy to write about and being ready when someone says yes — everything else is volume and timing.