The ultimate guide to PR | Emilie Gerber (founder of Six Eastern)

No one ever gets this tactical in PR. (laughs) There's just so much theoretical, you know, conversation and examining the big blunders. But like at the end of the day, if you are a startup that wants to get coverage for your company, you need to know like actually the steps to take to do it.

You mentioned a bunch of amazing companies you've worked with, Ramp, Perplexity. Most products don't have as interesting of a story to tell. How do you help find something that is a nugget?

You can get so in the weeds with your own messaging that you want to set up this massive problem statement, you want to make it a huge trend story. But if you're like very straightforward and you're like pattern-matching, it's generally actually going to work.

So I asked you to bring some examples of pitches that are great and also examples of pitches that could be better.

I want to read one to you and then I want to see if you can tell me what this company does. (laughs)

(laughs) . Deal. Today my guest is Emily Gerber. Emily is the founder and CEO of 6Eastern, a PR agency that has worked with over 100 tech companies from stealth startups to publicly traded companies, helping them get press, build awareness, and level up their PR and comms strategy. Before starting her own firm, she worked at Uber where she led PR for the business development team and B2B programs. Prior to that, she worked at Box on product communications, with a focus on product launches and partnership announcements. In our conversation, Emily shares so many golden nuggets of advice on how to get press that I lost count. We talk about which publications to target depending on your market and story, how to craft your pitch in your outreach to reporters, how to actually reach reporters, and also how to craft your product story for people to pay attention to what you're doing, why warm introductions to reporters are actually that important, how to find podcasts and newsletters to pitch that might be even more effective than traditional media, how much it would cost you to work with a PR agency instead of doing it yourself and how much lead time you need if you do that. Also, we go through a few real-life examples of press and outreach, both good examples and bad examples and what we can learn from those. Also, we look at a pitch that Emily sent to me about a podcast guest that is a client of hers that worked and this guest is coming out in the future, so we look at what was effective about that pitch, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Emily Gerber after a short word from our sponsors. Let me tell you about a product called Sprig. Next gen product teams like Figma and Notion rely on Sprig to build products that people love. Sprig is an AI-powered platform that enables you to collect relevant product experience insights from the right users so you can make product decisions quickly and confidently. Here's how it works. It all starts with Sprig's precise targeting which allows you to trigger in-app studies based on users' characteristics and actions taken in product. Then Sprig's AI is layered on top of all studies to instantly surface your product's biggest learnings. Sprig Surveys enables you to target specific users to get relevant and timely feedback. Sprig Replays enables you to capture targeted session clips to see your product experience firsthand. Sprig's AI is a game-changer for product teams. They're the only platform with product-level AI, meaning it analyzes data across all of your studies to centralize the most important product opportunities, trends, and correlations in one real-time feed. Visit sprig.com/lenny to learn more and get 10% off. That's S-P-R-I-G.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytics cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. Emily, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.