Hi Dmitry! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?
Hey Failory! Thanks for having me here! Like you, I’ve always been interested in the juicy details of failure. Learning from others’ mistakes can give you a lot of perspective around considerations you might be blind to when you’re concentrating all of your energy on turning an idea you have into a profitable business. I’ve been doing marketing and PR in the startup space for just over a decade now and many of the projects I’ve set out to work on often produce outcomes quite different from what I initially expected.
Currently, I’m working with a very lean team to scale the impossible - a SaaS PR business. That’s right, we’re working to massively impact the way entrepreneurs and marketers at early-stage startups tackle their PR strategy! We’re based in Brooklyn, NY but have seen over 5,000 users on our platform from all over the world.
We provide you with: the framework and resources you need to develop your PR campaign, a platform to find the most relevant journalists and track your outreach efforts, a sense of whether or not what you want to pitch is newsworthy, feedback to perfect your pitch, and all the necessary details in between!
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
When I was in the seventh grade I had a job after school working for a family friend who had his own business. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I got to see from an early age the freedom that an individual had to turn an idea into something profitable, and it was all his or hers. This was unheard of when I was growing up in the Soviet Union, so the concept of capitalism and entrepreneurship got into my brain and left me interested. When I was in high school I started working after school at a CAD software company where my uncle was an engineer. I did QA testing and this experience led me to pursue a degree in Computer Science in college.
Out of school, I was hired as a software engineer, coding flight plan simulations for training military jet pilots. The work was cool but I grew out of the day to day monotony and the old-school corporate tech culture in a few short years. Plus, completing twenty pages of government paperwork for every page of coding killed my momentum. I started paying attention to the buzz coming from Silicon Valley, the rising stars of tech startups, and the all-in data-driven marketing efforts. I wanted to be a part of it all, to experiment with moving the needle and watch a small startup grow from the inside.
I ended up in business school in California, not quite in the Bay Area, but close enough, in Monterey. With the goal of meeting the right marketer or founder who would be willing to take me under his wing, I knew that making new connections at school and through the strong alumni network would increase my chances of landing a gig where I could roll up my sleeves and learn at break-neck speed. I did just that, I was introduced to Mrinal Desai through the Dean within the first few weeks of school. Mrinal was an early LinkedIn employee, he had recently left the company and was currently doing the marketing for a remote helpdesk tool called Crossloop. He proved to be a phenomenal marketer and eager to introduce me to what he was working on for the purpose of getting some of the more tedious tasks off his plate.
From there I worked for a design firm, ZURB, where I really got a chance to apply everything I learned from Mrinal and run a lot of fun marketing campaigns - including an amazing speakers series - where I could zero in on the stories of founders, investors, and designers. I was having a blast living in California but my wife and I also started planning ahead and wanted to move back east to have a family. Before we did that though, we took a good amount of time off, traveled the world, figured out what we wanted to work on next and then moved to Boston. I started Criminally Prolific, a marketing consultancy that focuses largely on SEO, PR, and content related advising. Two years later, JustReachOut launched to support the work I was doing for clients, with an aim to make it useful for any marketers to dive into a PR campaign without too much effort or breaking the bank. I created JustReachOut and enlisted a few friends along the way for technical support, got my wife to join once I was at a phase where we had prospects and customers who were looking for something more robust than my PR hacks and she began to do the work of tying it altogether more cohesively and creating a framework for all the tactical stuff.
I’ve dabbled in building a few apps and of course got my start in tech as an engineer, but JustReachOut has been my very first product. When I started prototyping things, I really focused on what other marketers would find useful. I was involved in the founder community in Boston and I was constantly unofficially surveying the pain points marketers had with the PR process. So I convinced people to subscribe to the software before it was available. I would get feedback from my initial customers, incorporate it into my mockups, talk with more people and built it from there.
I built a basic version of the platform. But before I built it, I got buy-in from other marketers at meetups in Boston, where I was living at the time. I even got people to pay for the tool ahead of the launch. I would sketch ideas of how I was thinking it would look on a piece of paper and ask other people in marketing for feedback until I started getting responses that amounted to yeah, I'd pay for that. Getting constant feedback from someone, incorporating it into my sketches and showing it to them, again and again, is how I won my first customers.
