How do I get effective PR for my start-up?

Dear Rodinhooders!

I’d be glad to know the right formula to get the right coverage for my start-up.

We’re an online start-up in the online dating space called QuackQuack.in (oh, a clean one!) and we’ve had very little success in getting our start-up covered by media. We were covered by ToI, ET Now, Deccan Chronicle, Pluggd.in in the past. Most of them were by chance and un-expected and we loved the attention!

On the contrary, the competitors in this business seem to be getting more attention than us. Why? Because they have a story to tell – they’re either ‘gora‘ guys whose business model did not work there and set up shop here – so that makes a good story to tell! Or some are medium-level celebs who can get easy attention!

But if you look at the whole, we do a better job in the business, we have 6 digit members, we have better UI, we’re more appealing product wise, our portal works, but at the end of the day, guess the journos care a damn about what we genuinely do!

Off late, we’ve been writing to tech blogs about us asking them if our profile was interesting enough to be published in their ‘start-up’ columns. More or less, these days, it sounds more like I am begging for attention! But hey, I am genuine and a normal person – I am not a ‘returnee from US’ or ‘IIM / IIT grad’ but a genuine ‘from the root’ start-up!

So, what are the best possible steps you would recommend for a start-up to get the media talking about you? Is there a template for PR? Do you go about spamming editorials or journos? How do you connect with the right people in this category? I am quite naive at all this but I would love to know from the experts – How do I get effective PR for my start-up!?

Also: We were approached by a journo from Economic Times who was doing a story on ‘dating’ and wanted some factual data from our business. I declined to comment saying I was not comfortable revealing hard earned information on the how’s and what’s and how much. How do you get your message across in such a scenario and still get the start-ups mentioned in the columns.

Cheers!