Sep 19, 2018 · 52m · y-combinator
PR + Content for Growth by Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon · Y Combinator
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this Y Combinator Startup School presentation, Kat Mañalac and Craig Cannon provide early-stage founders with actionable strategies for leveraging content marketing and DIY public relations to drive initial growth and build brand authority.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 0.1 Guest disagreement 0.1 The partners pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 45:36 Craig rejects clickbait titling
Craig firmly dismisses the suggestion of relying on clickbait headlines, asserting that understanding customer needs yields far better long-term engagement.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 48:59 Audience clarifies celebrity brand falloutAn audience member follows up to clarify whether brand controversy around endorsements can simply be leveraged for opportunistic PR.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:45 Kat demystifies outsourced PR firmsKat educates the audience on why hiring external PR firms at the seed stage is a waste of capital, explaining that founders must manage press relations directly like business development.
The partners hold their own ▶ 51:10 Audience professional shares HARO tipA marketing professional in the audience takes the microphone to contribute domain expertise on using HARO and Twitter to build direct reporter relationships.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Growth Foundations and the Role of Press | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Kat and Craig deliver an instructional lecture defining content versus PR, warning that press is not a scalable user acquisition strategy. No host is present or actively interjecting during this presentation segment. | |
| Content Strategy: Timing and 'Content as Product' | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Craig outlines the framework of 'content as product' and explains conversion and engagement goals for early-stage companies. The segment is an uninterrupted solo lecture. | |
| Channel Selection and Customer Distribution | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Craig explains channel distribution, using Scentbird and YC's early essays on Hacker News as examples of finding where customers congregate. This is delivered as a solo presentation. | |
| Creating Quality Content and Assessing Competition | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Craig shares the headline-selection process from The Onion and emphasizes that startup content competes against general viral internet media. The delivery is educational and lecture-based. | |
| Promotion Execution and Content Format Examples | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Craig details practical content formats like text interviews and SEO city guides before transitioning back to Kat. There is no host involvement or disagreement. | |
| Purpose, Timing, and Fundamentals of PR | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Kat explains why early-stage startups should avoid hiring expensive PR agencies and instead handle press outreach as business development. The section is presented as instructional guidance. | |
| PR Preparation: News Monitoring and Roadmaps | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Kat outlines practical PR preparation, including monitoring industry news and mapping out milestone announcements on a 3-to-6 month calendar. This is delivered as a structured monologue. | |
| Answering Reporter FAQs and Pitch Mechanics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Kat reviews pitch structuring, exclusive pitching strategies, and standard reporter FAQ preparation. The presentation continues without interruptions or host pushback. | |
| PR Pitfalls, Promotion, and Measuring Success | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Kat covers key PR mistakes to avoid, including asking for article drafts or fabricating metrics, and stresses the importance of promoting earned media. Monologue delivery. | |
| Audience Q&A Session and Conclusion | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Kat and Craig answer founder questions regarding clickbait, influencers, and publishing cadence before an audience marketer shares tips on using HARO and Twitter. The interaction is entirely cooperative and constructive. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Mañalac: Viral startup stories must be easy for others to repeat
“You will need to tell it clearly and succinctly because the goal is to tell it in a way where other people, it makes it easy for other people to repeat that story for you and help you spread the word. That's how anything becomes viral.”
Cannon: Avoid content marketing until user churn is low
“You really want to be doing this after you've made something people want, and you're confident that they're not churning. Because if they're churning, you're just wasting a ton of energy and a ton of money.”
Cannon: Zapier's early content mistakenly targeted Hacker News over actual customers
“In the early days, what they were doing Was making things that Hacker News wanted, but it turns out that Hacker News and their customers was not a 100% overlap. So they were spending all this energy generating this content to get people through the door, but t…”
Cannon: Early-stage startups should ignore brand building entirely
“There's this third thing called brand, which is kind of this like vague, misty thing about like how people perceive you. You really don't need to worry about this early on.”
Cannon: Remarketing to website visitors is the cheapest Facebook ad audience
“What this is going to do is capture who's hitting your site, who's logged into Facebook, so then you can later remarket at them, and this is going to be much cheaper than any other kind of Facebook audience that you can create.”
Cannon: Y Combinator has relied on content marketing since its inception
“YC, Although PG and Jessica, Robert and Trevor might not say this, has been doing, like, content marketing since the very beginning. Even before. So with Paul's essays, and then Hacker News was built, and then those essays do really well, and that's the exact …”
Cannon: Anonymous high-volume headline brainstorming eliminates status bias
“And so what this is really good at is, first of all, it removes biases for, like, who's the CEO, who's the new guy, or whatever, or girl, whatever. And it also gets you past the point of the, like, those first three ideas Which are kind of the same from everyo…”
Cannon: Content quality should dictate publishing cadence, not arbitrary schedules
“It could take you three days to write a blog post, and, you know, maybe in the early days you can't do that, but you should let that amount of time dictate how often you can put stuff out, rather than go the other way and be like, shit, I have to get a thing o…”
Cannon: Startup content competes with Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan
“Most people think that they're competing with people that make the same stuff that they make. That is a hundred percent not true. You are competing with this. Elon Musk smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast. I haven't checked the views, but I think it's probably…”
Cannon: Text interviews are a low-effort content cheat code for startups
“Text interviews are like a total cheat code for young companies, because they require way less production than video or audio. The internet really likes it for like SEO, for scraping and it makes the person look really smart.”
Cannon: Authentic engagement on Hacker News and Product Hunt remains undervalued
“Just getting good at engaging with your community on HN and Product Hunt is really undervalued.”
Cannon: Publishing physical books helps startups stand out because competitors won't
“This is super powerful in terms of, like, your influencer status, but really, really hard to track. So this would be later down the road, but it is effective, and because it's hard, most people aren't going to do it, so you can really stand out.”
Mañalac: PR provides early visibility and SEO, not scalable user acquisition
“As I mentioned, it's not a scalable user acquisition, but it can get you some early adopting users, it can give you, ah, you know, your investors or potential employees a heads up that you exist, and it can help with SEO.”
Mañalac: Most YC startups wait for product launch before pitching press
“Most companies who go through YC wait until they have a launched product and some very early users before they bother pitching to press.”
Mañalac: Most media outlets no longer cover very early-stage startups
“Most media outlets don't cover very early stage startups anymore.”
Mañalac: Seed and Series A startups generally cannot afford PR firm retainers
“PR firms are way too expensive. Typically you have to keep them on a monthly retainer, and, you know, most companies, even through Seed, Series A, they don't have the budget for that.”
Mañalac: Do not hire PR help until inbound exceeds founder capacity
“You shouldn't bother thinking about hiring a firm or someone in-house until you have more funding and so much inbound that the founders can't deal with it themselves.”
Mañalac: Early-stage founders must treat pitching press like core business development
“So like BD or sales, which you wouldn't outsource early in your company's life, you shouldn't outsource pitching to press in the very early stages of your company.”
Mañalac: A startup's one-sentence pitch must only cover product and target customer
“So one sentence pitch should go over two things, what you're building and who you're building it for. And you should be able to say this in jargon free terms that anyone can understand and repeat.”
Mañalac: Y Combinator uses three-to-five sentence email pitches for startup press launches
“So usually when we are pitching, ah, companies at YC, when we're pitching to press about their launches or fundraising, this is the pitch that we send to reporters.”
Mañalac: Outline three to five key points rather than over-rehearsing press interviews
“What I typically tell founders to do is have answers to all those questions and then what I recommend doing before talking to press is bullet pointing the three to five points that you want to make sure to talk about in an interview, and then let the rest of t…”
Mañalac: Early-stage startups should offer press exclusives to secure reporter interest
“A reporter is more likely to pick up your story and write it if they get an exclusive, if they can break the news, if they can get that scoop. So I recommend offering that one publication at exclusive, and once you're a bigger company, and more of a household …”
Mañalac: Warm PR introductions yield 50% response rates versus 10% for cold
“Cold emailing will get you, maybe if you're lucky, a one in 10 response, and warm introductions will get, you know, at least half the time you'll get someone to respond to you.”
Mañalac: PR announcements require an absolute minimum of two weeks lead time
“Say you want to announce something two or three weeks from now, give it at the very least two weeks for the whole process of warm introductions and making, you know, a, you know, meeting with that reporter and then having the piece come out. So two weeks is th…”
Mañalac: Asking reporters to review article drafts severely offends their journalistic integrity
“Reporters get incredibly offended. They think you're questioning their journalistic integrity if you ask Ask to see what they're writing before they publish it.”
Cannon: Early startups should host blogs on their own site, not Medium
“People connect with other humans, and so you, like having that little extra touch is nice, but I would say overall like you're gonna want it on your own site for SEO. Yeah, I like, I kind of disagree with people putting stuff on Medium and stuff early on.”
Mañalac: Paid influencer marketing is rarely cost-effective for early-stage startups
“A big problem is that influencers often charge you and are expensive. Like, if you get some huge influencer who just loves what you're doing and wants to tweet about you, and that's great, but more often than not, they're gonna charge you and it's not worth, a…”