Lesson: How to Get Press with Ari Dyckovsky & Catalin Voss

Step #8 Benefits: Learn the benefits of getting press

Ari: One of the benefits that we've seen about releasing this to the press is not only that we have attracted possible clients, but more so that we've attracted possible recruitments. So one thing that buzz does really well for us is that it tells potential employees that we're serious and that, even though we're an early stage company and we're growing slowly and that we don't have funding, this is a very important place. And even though we're young and we're very hungry for getting bigger, it's a good place for them to come even if they're not getting paid and maybe they'll only get equity.

In the entire media storm of the past week that we've had, a lot of people have reached out to us. Some of them have been potential investors, whether it's angel investors, or people who work at a venture firm who want to just have a meeting. At the same time, we've had people send their resumes, people actually calling to see if we needed PR help, and in some cases, people just giving us their congratulations, others giving us paragraphs’ worth of advice, and some people just wanting giving us support for our decision to leave college because they agree with our statements. 

Catalin: When people hear about you doing cool stuff, they reach out to you and if they think what you're doing is interesting, they want even more people to hear about it. It's a chain of events. People at conferences reach out to you. Other journalists reach out to you. Investors reach out to you. Friends, who you haven't talked to in five years, reach out to you. Friends, who really aren't your friends and now think what you're doing is really interesting, reach out to you. You have to be careful to determine where to spend your time.

The Wired article, in some sense, framed the broad technology that we were developing, but it also mentioned a very specific use case. It was a use case that actually turned out to be, at the time, more of a side project for us than anything else. We wanted to know whether that was something to go after and whether people were interested in this at all. So we built a prototype, and obviously, you have the capacity to test it in your own lab. But if you're trying to reach a specific audience, a bunch of people with high-functioning autism, that's hard to do on your own. For that and for consumer products, press is a great way to alpha-test your hypothesis.