Getting Featured in Top US News for $0 (feat. CNET)
An early DelightRoom episode of doing global marketing that doesn't scale
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Alarmy got featured in major foreign press just a week after its launch, which helped us gather a ton of early global users. Back then, I used to get asked a lot: “Wow, you guys are so lucky! How did you get covered by major foreign media?” Today, I want to share exactly how that luck was made.
August 22, 2012 — Alarmy Launch
I launched the app on the App Store with high hopes, but... aside from my friends, nobody cared about our app. Watching it trickle in just a handful of downloads a day, I quickly realized that people weren't going to magically download Alarmy without any marketing.
The problem was, I had zero marketing experience, and zero money.
I wondered what I could try right away for free, and news articles came to mind. Figuring that if we got featured in a bunch of articles, a lot of people would download it, I started scraping email addresses of journalists from various media outlets.
Looking back, it was incredibly naive. I simply thought, "If our app's idea is fun, they'll write about it," and fired off dozens of emails, expecting that at least a few articles would come out of it.
Naturally, I got zero replies.
When I asked myself, 'Why doesn't anyone care?', the answer was obvious. A seemingly simple alarm app made by a college student wasn't exactly a riveting scoop.
So I decided to flip the approach: Who would be interested in our app? Who would find our app's idea fascinating?
That's when an article about the "Ramos Alarm" popped into my head. The Ramos Alarm was a novelty alarm clock that had been on Kickstarter. The concept was that when the alarm went off, you had to get out of bed and punch a code into a keypad installed in the bathroom to turn off the alarm in the bedroom.
Despite costing a hefty 400,000 KRW (about $300), this novelty clock got tons of global press coverage, and was even featured in many Korean articles.
That sparked an idea: Wouldn't the journalist who wrote about the Ramos Alarm be interested in our app? I tracked down the reporter who first broke the Ramos Alarm story. It turned out to be a journalist from the global media outlet CNET, so I shot them an email introducing our app.
August 28, 2012 — A Reply from CNET
Two days after emailing CNET, I was stunned to receive a short reply containing a link to an article introducing our app. (The original article)
The ripple effect of that article was way stronger than I expected. Not only did we get more press, but we were also featured on TV broadcasts, and several foreign outlets like Gizmodo and the Huffington Post dubbed us the "Devil's alarm app." On top of that, similar coverage started popping up not just in the US, but across other English-speaking and European countries.
September 2, 2012 — Featured in Korean Media
I expected that getting featured in foreign media would naturally lead to press in Korea, but crickets. There was zero reaction locally.
So I thought, What kind of angle would Korean journalists actually care about? I figured the hook would be: "App made by a Korean college student gets featured in foreign press." Figuring I had nothing to lose, I blasted out an email to several reporters with the following pitch:
"There's an app that was just featured in major foreign media, but it hasn't been covered in Korea yet. By the way, it was made by a Korean college student..."
Fortunately, my hypothesis was spot on, and reporters who liked the angle started writing pieces. From that point on, articles essentially started getting reverse-exported(?) back into Korea.
The Result
Thanks to the press coverage not only in the US but also in Europe, China, and Korea, we saw an even influx of global users. An app that was only being used by a few of my friends suddenly had tens of thousands of users pouring in from all over the world.
As a result, we were able to build a global user base just one week after launch. By continuously building the product to satisfy these early users, we've somehow grown into an app that wakes up 75 million users every morning.
Key takeaways
I've jotted down a few lessons that come to mind when I look back on this experience. These lessons are still baked into DelightRoom's culture like DNA today.
There is always a better way.
If you fail, keep looking for another way. If you constantly question whether there's a better approach based on why you failed and iterate quickly, you'll eventually find it. It's rare for any strategy to succeed on the very first try.Aim for 10x improvement, not 10% (10x not 10%)
Improving by 10x isn't necessarily harder than improving by 10%. In fact, brainstorming ways for a 10x improvement can actually be easier than squeezing out a 10% one. If I had kept trying to do PR in Korea right after launch, it would have been much harder than doing it in the US. (Yet, the impact of US PR was 10 times greater.)Do things that don't scale (Do things that don't scale)
A harsher environment and unscalable situations can actually be the very opportunity to find something more creative and impactful. If I had tried to build a perfectly scalable PR strategy from day one, I never would have achieved these results.