Pitch the Beat, Not the Company

The error it corrects

The default founder move is to spend months refining brand and messaging, decide the message is ready, and email a journalist directly. Eric Glyman developed this method during the Paribus years and argues the default move fails for a structural reason: "These journalists don't exist to go talk about your marketing. They want to do the news." The fix is to understand who these people are, what beats they cover, and what kinds of stories they write, then pitch a story that is interesting for them specifically. Announcing a startup exists is not a story.¹

The unexploited surface

National morning shows are effectively unreachable cold, but every local television station runs a consumer reporter with a recurring segment, something like "Consumer Watch" or "Stretch Your Dollar," whose entire job is helping viewers do a little better financially. Almost nobody pitches them.¹

The mechanic

Paribus estimated that Americans were leaving 15 to 30 billion dollars a year in unclaimed refunds, and built its local pitch from that number in two steps. First, localize the number by population: 15 billion dollars nationally becomes roughly 300 million dollars for a given metro area, converting an abstract national figure into a local story with a local stake. Second, attach local proof: "we had 50 people just in Las Vegas over the last week," real, checkable, recent case studies inside the reporter's own market.¹

Assembled, the pitch reads: Las Vegas locals are leaving 300 million dollars of refunds unclaimed every year, there is a new startup getting it back for them, and the company got money back for fifty people in the area last week. Some reporters ignored it; a meaningful number followed up.

The ladder

Local coverage compounds into credibility. After roughly ten local station hits, a company has enough momentum to move up a tier and eventually reach national morning television, where five to ten million people watch simultaneously, a volume that, at the time, was enough to overwhelm Paribus's servers.

The same principle, later

Ramp's modern version of the same instinct is data journalism rather than case studies: hiring an economist and publishing benchmark reports, because the company's transaction data can answer questions finance teams and journalists are already asking, such as what companies are spending on and which AI tools are actually seeing adoption. The underlying instruction has not changed: stop obsessing over yourself, and ask what people outside the company actually care about.