The mainstream media will go at any length to cover anything related to startups - be it founders' fav food to underwear color; and all it takes is a smart founder to figure this out.

Now that you are done with funding press releases, you have to build something. While you can’t employ 9 women to produce a kid in 1 month, you need to be a buzzing brand in order to please investors and importantly, your own ego.

Welcome to the new new world of startups and PR in which founders often mistake PR as a validation tool.

Media Coverage = Product & Business Validation

The assumption that media coverage = product validation has killed many interesting products.

Founders have found a cheat sheet on how to fool mainstream media, which is super desperate and hungry for startupgasmic words like funding, M&A, consolidation, layoff etc. The mainstream media will go at any length to cover anything related to startups – be it founders’ fav food to underwear color; and all it takes is a smart founder to figure out this desperation.

But let me tell you this. You end up chasing the wrong dream. This smartness is a never-ending pit. A pit where greatness is sacrificed for mediocrity because the focus is purely on today and cheap marketing than building something bigger and something which can potentially last for more than 10 years.

Coming back to the point, here is a classic example of how Lookup *FOOLED* mainstream media publications to cover the launch of …well, its twitter handle!

Yes – the twitter handle creation is now news!

This is how Lookup fooled them (and this is precisely why I respect Rahul Yadav – who took the mainstream media head-on with his confusing quotes around funding/firing – proving their lack of knowledge & interest in the space).

Anyways, coming back to the PR game – this is the Lookup PR that was well covered by some mainstream media (ET, Business Standard, Financial Express and several others).

The technical integration will include a Twitter account @lookuplite to answer people’s queries. Whenever you Tweet your request, you will get a reply through a mention on Twitter. If you want to ask something in private, you can send a Direct Message to @lookuplite. Twitter’s support in encouraging the entrepreneurial culture is rampant in the world today. There are over 320 million Twitter users in today’s world and a large number of Lookup users are also active on Twitter. With this partnership, Twitter is providing Lookup a larger social establishment. Now, ‘getting things done with a message’ is now more convenient and easily procurable. “Our idea is to make Lookup ubiquitous. Being one of the most popular social media in the world, Twitter is a real-time communications platform for us that can’t be skipped for our on-demand local commerce service,” said Deepak Ravindran, Co- founder and CEO of Lookup.

Really?

I mean creating a twitter account (with 93 followers and 165 tweets) now translates to ‘technical integration’? And partnership where you are provided a larger social establishment.

Sorry, that’s utter f**king bullshit and often shows the fact that PR >>> PRoduct for some founders.

Yes, there is a PR in the PRoduct – but let the PRoduct speak for itself, first ? Great companies are not built on such fluffy talks.

Let me end with a golden quote by Seth Godin

“Finding new ways, more clever ways to interrupt people doesn’t work.”

Go. Build a great product! Everything comes later.

Great Companies are NOT built on press releases.

[Image credit: shutterstock]