Nobody Owes You a Headline: A Masterclass in Media Pitch Strategy

Part one of two. Why your product isn’t the story and what ignoring that will cost you.

By Criz Guerra

Last time, I made a case that annoyed a few people. If you’ve churned through five agencies and none of them “got” it, the common thread isn’t the agencies. It’s you. I stand by it. But “you’re the problem” is a lousy place to leave someone. So, here’s the follow-up I owe you: how you stop being the problem, build an effective media pitch strategy, and become worth covering.

Now, this isn’t a sales pitch. It’s the part your agency is too polite, or too worried about losing the retainer, to say to your face.

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Why Most Founders Are in Love With Their Own Product

Most founders are in love with their own product and ideas.

That’s not an insult. It’s an occupational hazard. You’ve put years into this, your team believes in it, and you’re all, hopefully, working towards a shared objective. Thus, you assume the rest of the world is on board too. Not really. “My team is excited about our product” and “a stranger will read an article about our product” are two wildly different sentences, and the gap between them is where most coverage goes to die. Your company’s existence is not a story. A funding round on its own isn’t one either. And the feature you shipped last week? That’s not news either, John. I’m sorry. I know it stings, but you need to face it.

Here’s the reframe that should change how you pitch. That reporter you’re chasing is not in the business of promoting you. They’re not against your success, but they have their own problem to solve, and it looks a lot like yours. They need to generate engagement for their publisher. They need to inform an audience that keeps coming back, because that means more subscribers, more advertisers, and more money. That logic is not different from yours if you follow the money. You want buyers, they want readers, and neither of you gets there by publishing a sales pitch. These outlets are solving the same problem as you. Use that information, and stop trying to convince editors to like your company. Focus on giving them a story their readers will actually finish.

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Case Study: What a Pitch-Worthy Story Looks Like

More than a decade ago, at another shop, we had a client with a marketplace app for record collectors. Buy, sell, trade, show off your shelves. On paper, cliché, no story at all. There are a hundred marketplaces for used goods, and retail is a brutal beat to break into. If we’d pitched “new app lets you trade vinyl,” we’d have been ignored, and we’d have deserved it.

But while the app wasn’t interesting, the human aspect behind it made it worth pitching. A teen founder had built it with his own father. They bonded over collecting and built a business. More importantly, they created a community. A crowd of strangers connected through the same obsession. That was the story. Not the marketplace, not the raise, which was a few million—far less than the rounds making headlines that year.

And that community did something a single company can’t do on its own. It opened a window onto the whole space. People were arguing at the time about whether it was the end of physical retail and what it meant that such a particular niche was moving online. The client was a way to look at that bigger picture. This is the part most founders miss. A reporter isn’t covering your company. They’re covering the sector, and a story that shows them the state of the sector will beat one about your solo show. We got that client into culture and lifestyle outlets that would never have run a funding blurb because we handed them a window instead of a spec sheet.

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The Real Cost of Ignoring Expert Advice

Now the ugly side. Same era, different agency.

A founder came in with an app and one instruction: pitch it as “the Pinterest for men.” He would not hear anything else. The app itself was adult content with a tipping system, and the founder’s “hook” insinuated this was the only thing men cared about. Our team flagged it more than once. It was reductive, tone-deaf, and it would read badly to all those editors he wanted us to pitch. He didn’t care. The contract was signed and paid a year up front. As juniors, we were stuck sending something that could hurt his reputation and ours because revenue comes first.

And here’s where his expectations crossed from optimistic into delusional. He didn’t want the niche corners where a thing like this might survive. He wanted GQ, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. These lifestyle titles also cover politics, culture, and serious reporting. Try selling an Instagram with “tasteful nudes” as “the Pinterest for men” to an editor who spent last week on an election piece. We warned him, but we got overruled.

It took about four hours. A senior editor at one of those magazines wrote back, and she was furious. Not a polite pass, not the silence you usually get, but a long, blistering email an editor only writes when something has crossed a line. That’s what unrealistic and tone-deaf earns you. Not just a no. A no with your name on it, at a title you’ll now never get into.

Needless to say, the sender was blacklisted, and that app didn’t survive either. Shocking! I know. But before you assume the world has loosened up since, check again. Even in today’s pro-OnlyFans world, if you try to market that same app, you might well find an audience. But the tier-one lifestyle titles still wouldn’t run it as a flattering feature, not in 2016 and not now. Some rooms were never going to be yours. A good PR team can tell you which ones before you walk in and embarrass yourself.

That’s the real cost of not listening, and it’s the thing founders underrate most. A bad angle doesn’t quietly not work. It burns a relationship you’ll want later.

If you hired a PR team, it’s because you couldn’t do this in-house. Whatever the reason, part of it is that you lack the expertise. So when the people with the expertise tell you an angle will land poorly, do yourself a favor and listen. That warning is the product. It’s the most valuable thing they’ll hand you all month, even if your ego wants to override it. Mike Butcher MBE, Founder and Editor of Pathfounders and former TechCrunch editor-at-large who has spent years telling founders how to pitch him, boils it down to one line: most pitches amount to a short email that just says “Hi, we exist.” That’s not news. It was never going to be.

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Conclusion: How to Build Your Headline

So if you want a headline, stop selling the thing you built and start finding the story that sits inside. A human change it triggered, or the argument it belongs to. That’s where a reporter’s readers already are.

In part two, the practical version: how to find that story on purpose. Knowing your real competitors, dropping the jargon, and digging out the case study and the data that prove you changed something. Because while you can build your own media pitch strategy and headline, you can’t build it around your ego.

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If you’re not sure whether you’ve got a story or just a product you’re proud of, that’s the conversation to have before you spend a cent on outreach. Talk to one of our senior PR advisors, and they will tell you straight; if it’s the second one, we’ll help you find the first.