How did we spend $0 to get published in more than 30 publications and even mentioned on national television?

SimplyGuest was covered in over 30 publications over a period of 2 years. This even included us getting mentioned on national TV, which came at $0 cost. Many people have asked me how we were able to do it. The following points are just the framework we used to extract the value. We were covered and mentioned by the Times of India, Bangalore Mirror, Economic Times, Yourstory, NDTV, CNBC, Inc42, Dainik Bhaskar, Scroll, BusinessWorld, LBB, MoneyControl, Mansworld, etc., to name a few. You can find most of the media coverage here.

So we had time and no money, and hence we traded time for things that could have been done with the money. So read on and build a mechanism that can work for you.

Sharing real founder stories

We all came from humble backgrounds and were building something totally outside our comfort zones. All three of us had no experience in real estate. This made us underdogs, and everyone likes an underdog. We started sharing and speaking about our stories of how we started up and met each other across all possible channels and opportunities. This made us real. And trust me, a real story that connects with people while being an underdog and challenging industry people is a recipe for a perfect story for any journalist. Hence, this got picked up by many people. Each interview we gave was from a different angle. I still remember the first story we had in the Bangalore Mirror, written by Sudha Pillai, and another mention in the Bangalore mirror when the new rent law was discussed. But our first actual coverage came when NDTV Gadgets 360 wrote about us. Again, this was someone who saw our stores on Twitter and reached out for an interview. It was Gopal Sathe.

Using social media to find journalists

Once we had the first 2 or 3 coverages and mentions in the media, it became relatively easy to talk to journalists on social media. We now had some talking points. Below is the message I would use on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc., to reach out to journalists. I would repurpose the content for different platforms, but the intent was to have at least five touchpoints with each journalist across various social media platforms and then hope that they would at least see one of them and respond.

Hi Journalist,

We at SimplyGuest are popularising the new way youth want to live. In short, we are building and creating shared, collaborative spaces where like-minded people can live and grow. This is not possible without a technology platform.

We were recently mentioned in the Times of India, Bangalore Mirror, and even NDTV for our work.

It would be great to speak to you and share our journey and what we have set out to build.

Looking forward to a response

Mayank

Cofounder, SimplyGuest.

Here I made sure they had social proof, used an expert persona to communicate to build initial trust, and the rest is history. Using the above tactic, we got covered in YourStory by Sindhu Kashyap.

Using Linkedin extensively.

Linkedin has been an excellent tool for us to reach out to people organically. We just started posting everything we were doing in real life. This includes everything from fixing a geyser in a SimplyGuest house to building a formidable blue-collar workforce. We kept sharing our ways.

In parallel to this, I just used to connect with ten journalists a day, with a conversion rate of about 30% of them accepting me. This enabled me to connect with more than 500 people in just 6 months.

We were coming in their feeds regularly, and then, using the social media outreach tactic, we would hit the nail on the head. This whole network effect helped us get a print publication in the Mans World by Tushar Burman.

We just made sure we were consistent and relentless enough to continue it until we got what we wanted, and it worked for us. Call it luck or whatever.

Blogging our way to an answer

We had the habit of creating a blog out of every small conversation. To give you some examples, we created a blog on how I became a cofounder, how SimplyGuest used to work as a remote team even after operations heavy business model, user insights, and much more.

This gave us a lot of credibility and many story angles to talk about with journalists. The moment they saw written content on the point we were speaking to them, their trust levels would skyrocket, and this helped in getting many points out to them as we were talking about facts based on data.

You can read all our blogs here.

Customer Stories

We never had a single negative review by a tenant, and we have served more than 2000 people across the years of our operations. We were bootstrapped and managing 500 tenants simultaneously at a point in time.

This gave us many customer stories that became a part of our conversation with journalists. And everyone likes real-life examples. Some of the stories we would share were around the automation we did in homes using Raspberry Pi to make resident life easy. How we were able to help our tenants create meaningful relationships when they came into the new city; how a tenant's problem of losing keys was solved using key locker boxes, and much more.

We built all these solutions, and when customers would speak about them to other people, it created an excellent branding proposition for us. Some of these stories were picked up by our journalists.

Relentless Outreach

The one thing I have learned in this whole process of getting PR and coverage is that you have to be relentless. That's the most important thing. Because whatever you do will work only 1 out of 100 times. There will be a lot of "no" and significantly fewer "yes." I had to go through more than 1000 rejections to get these 30 coverages out. But I just made sure that we kept at it and did it as part of our daily routine. This enabled us to even come on national TV.

We would go with the expectation of hearing a NO, and in that process, if we listened to a YES, we would be overjoyed. That has been my mantra for anything I do. I start with a positive trust with zero expectations from any conversation I am having, and the rest works out.

If you are reading this, I hope your time reading it was worth it. Please share your experiences and stories, as I feel there is a lot to learn from everyone. If you want to know anything else in detail, do drop me a dm or write to me at mayankpokharna.imnu@gmail.com.