Press is not distribution

Fast Company ran a piece this year that I'm in. The framing was about brands betting on influence and the people in the middle of it, and I'm one of the people in the middle of it. It's a good piece and I'm genuinely glad it exists.

I want to write down what it did and didn't do, because I had a set of expectations going in that turned out to be wrong in a way I think is common.

What I expected#

Some version of: national business publication runs story, story is read by the exact people who buy what I sell, some percentage of them arrive at the site, a smaller percentage sign up, and the graph has a step in it.

I want to be clear that I never said this out loud in those terms, because said out loud it's obviously naive. But it's what I was carrying around.

What happened#

A spike for about two days, and then the traffic returned to where it had been. The spike was real and it converted at a much lower rate than our normal traffic, which makes sense in retrospect — a general business audience reading a trend piece is a different population than a marketing director with a budget and a problem.

Almost none of the value showed up in the funnel. Almost all of the value showed up in conversations.

Where it actually helped#

Credibility on calls I was already going to have. The piece didn't create the meeting. It changed the temperature of the meeting once I was in it. There's a specific kind of doubt a brand has about a young founder in a category with no name, and a national outlet having taken you seriously eliminates roughly the first fifteen minutes of it. That's worth a great deal and it's worth nothing until the meeting exists.

Supply, more than demand. The people who read it and reached out were mostly creators, not brands. That's not nothing — supply is half of a marketplace — but it wasn't what I was hoping for and it's the opposite of what I'd have predicted.

A permanent artifact. The spike is gone and the link isn't. It'll sit in my email signature and get sent to skeptical people for years. Press is not a channel, it's an asset with a very long, very low-amplitude tail.

The lesson I'm taking#

Press is a trust instrument, not a traffic source. I think I knew that as a sentence and didn't know it as a fact, and the difference cost me about a month of doing the wrong work — chasing more coverage instead of doing sales.

The thing that has actually grown Exposely this year is boring and repeatable: talking to brands one at a time and matching them by hand until the marketplace has enough liquidity to do it without me. No article changes that. An article makes each of those conversations start a little further along.

If I could do it again I'd take the piece, put the link in my signature, and go straight back to the calls the same afternoon instead of refreshing analytics. I'd like to say I'll remember this. I probably won't, and I'll be pleased about the next one too.