# Story Angles — What Earns Press Distilled from Corey Haines's *Founding Marketing*, ch. 5. Chase press for the **compound effect** — authority, journalist relationships, AI-citation surface — not the traffic bump. The bump fades in a day; the backlinks, the relationships, and the citable record don't. **The story is not your product.** Journalists write about trends, data, conflict, and humans. Your product is the evidence, never the headline. If the pitch is "we built a thing," there's no story. If the pitch is "here's a shift happening and we're proof of it," there is. ## Contents - The three story angles - Newsworthy moments (data stories) - Build media relationships before you need them - The PR flywheel (repurposing map) --- ## The Three Story Angles Every earned-media story worth pitching bends toward one of three shapes. Pick the one that fits your moment — don't force all three. ### 1. Founding Story The origin, the build, the numbers-in-public. Works because people follow *people*, and a founder with skin in the game is quotable in a way a product never is. - **When to use:** you're early, you have a sharp personal reason you exist, and you're willing to build in public and share real revenue. - **Exemplar:** Pieter Levels' "12 startups in 12 months" — shipping in the open, posting MRR screenshots, letting the challenge itself be the story. The build *was* the coverage. - **How to run it:** share the arc (why you started, what you've learned, where the numbers are now), not the feature list. Revenue transparency is the hook most founders are too scared to use. ### 2. David vs Goliath Own your size. Being small against an incumbent is an advantage in the story, not a liability — you're the underdog readers root for. - **When to use:** there's a giant in your category and you do one thing dramatically better than they do. - **Exemplar:** Superhuman vs Gmail — a tiny team reframing "we're small" into "we're the fast, obsessive alternative to the default everyone tolerates." - **How to run it:** name the Goliath, name the one thing you beat them at, and let the size gap do the emotional work. Don't hide that you're small — lead with it. ### 3. Have an Enemy Give the reader something to be against. The enemy is a **broken system**, not a competitor. Attacking a rival looks petty; attacking a genuinely broken status quo looks principled — and journalists cover principled fights. - **When to use:** there's a systemic wrong in your space you can credibly stand against, and you're willing to take a real position. - **Exemplar:** HEY vs Apple's App Store (2020) — the fight wasn't "Basecamp vs Apple the company," it was against App Store rules founders saw as broken. It became a press cycle *and* a policy conversation. - **How to run it:** define the broken system precisely, stake a clear position, and make sure you're actually willing to be quoted taking that stance. A half-hearted enemy reads as a marketing stunt. **Guardrail:** the enemy must be a system or a norm — never a named competitor. "Company X is bad" is a smear; "this way of doing things is broken" is a movement. --- ## Newsworthy Moments: Data Stories Beyond the three angles, the most reliably pitchable moment is a **data story** — proprietary numbers no one else has, packaged as an industry benchmark. Journalists can build a whole piece around a stat; you get the citation. - **Exemplars:** Stripe's *State of New User* / annual data reports; Intercom's benchmark reports. Each turns internal data into an annual, citable, must-cover event. - **Why it works:** it's original, it's quotable, and it positions you as the source-of-record for your category's numbers. It also compounds in AI answers — benchmark stats get lifted and re-cited for years. - **How to run it:** find the one number in your data that surprises, wrap it in methodology, and package it as a standalone one-pager (not your homepage). See [journalist-pitching.md](journalist-pitching.md) → the "Data story" template. **Milestone reminder:** a milestone alone ("we hit $1M ARR") isn't a story — milestone *with narrative* is. Attach the number to a shift, a lesson, or a David-vs-Goliath frame. --- ## Build Media Relationships Before You Need Them Cold-pitching a journalist the day you have news is the hard way. The founders who get covered built the relationship months earlier. It's a ladder — climb it before you need the favor. 1. **Follow their beat.** Read their last 5 articles. Know what they cover and what they're tired of covering. (See the discovery checklist in [journalist-pitching.md](journalist-pitching.md).) 2. **Add value with no ask.** Reply to their work with a genuinely useful data point or correction. Share their pieces. Answer a question they post on X. Give before you take. 3. **Be a reliable source.** When they need a quote fast, be the person who responds in 20 minutes with a clean, quotable line — even when there's nothing in it for you. Reliability is what turns a contact into a relationship. Do this for a handful of journalists on your beat and, when you finally have a real story, you're pitching a relationship, not a stranger. --- ## The PR Flywheel (Repurposing Map) One core asset feeds every other channel. Don't create five things — create one exceptional thing and reformat it five ways. Each format extends the reach of the same idea and gives journalists more of a public trail to find. ``` Core asset (data report / strong POV / founding story) │ ├─→ Thread (X / LinkedIn) — the hook, teased publicly ├─→ Article (your blog) — the full argument, the destination ├─→ Guest post (someone else's audience) — borrow reach ├─→ Podcast appearance — the spoken, citable version └─→ Video — the durable, AI-crawled version ``` - **Sequence matters less than coverage.** Publish the article as the owned home base, tease it as a thread, pitch the guest post and podcast off the same idea, cut the video from the recording. - **Every format strengthens the next pitch.** A journalist who can find your thread, article, and podcast on a topic sees a voice in the space — not an opportunist. This is the public trail that makes newsjacking land (see [newsjacking.md](newsjacking.md) → The Public Trail). - **The asset is the flywheel's fuel.** One strong data story or POV can run this loop for weeks. Weak assets stall it immediately.