Thoughts on the Future of News

Its been an absolutely wild/fun/exciting/exhausting/successful past 48 hours. I’ve hardly had time to breathe in between interviews, follow ups, e-mails, monitoring the site and general craziness that any startup launch entails. We can’t thank you all enough for the amazing support and feedback we’ve gotten. I thought I’d recap some of the events of the launch and link back to some of our reviews. A lot of you have e-mailed and asked me how we did our marketing or P.R. The answer is simple: we didn’t pay a cent in marketing, nor did we hire a P.R. agency. I truly believe you don’t need one. If you have a genuine story, and are passionate about it, you can certainly reach out and do the P.R. yourself with a little bit of creativity. I’ll do a follow up post with some of the marketing details.

Our press release went out in the morning at midnight PST (which is 9am here in Europe). You can see the media version here http://www.prweb.com/releases/NewsCred/Launch/prweb1216594.htm or on Yahoo News. We considered using PRNewsWire, but eventually went with PRWeb. Only time will tell if it was a good decision, but so far we are really happy with the distribution.

At 930am, we were on TechCrunch. Its the second time this summer, so we were humbled, but excited. By the end of the day, we were covered on all the biggest blogs of the web, including ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica, SitePoint, CenterNetworks, Profy, Mathew Ingram, theNextWeb, and Louis Gray. There were a lot more, and I’ll link back to all of you in the next few days. BTW, check out Louis Gray’s blog to see some adorable photos of his baby twins wearing some NewsCred schwag. They surely must be our youngest readers, although I may have to get our lawyers to OK that

Even more exciting was that we were covered on the BBC, Reuters and BusinessWeek. So this required a bit of creativity and persistence, but it paid of wonderfully. Both Rory (BBC) and Robert (Reuters) spent significant time with me on the phone, and it shows. Their writeups were thoughful, considered and probably two of my favorite reviews of our launch. We have more press coverage on the way on The Guardian, a Reuters wire story, and a few more mainstream paper so look out for that!

Many thanks to all the bloggers and journalists who covered our launch. Also, a huge shout out to the members of the Hacker News community, who gave us a ton of feedback on the site and marketing tips. We couldn’t be happier, but the real work starts now. We have a vibrant community of users, and we need to ensure we do everything in our power to delight them. Please always feel free to e-mail me directly (shafqat at newscred dot com) and let me know what you love and what we can do better. So to all the new NewsCredders, welcome and make yourself at home!

I should give a shout out to Iraj for ensuring the launch went so smoothly – our servers handled the volume without issues and the site has been up non-stop without any issues (as he touches wood).

So wherever you are in the world, good morning, good evening, or good night!

Update: Here’s a video that was on NBC! Click on this link and you can read a short review and watch the video on the right of the page.