# 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)

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## 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.
