Leo Widrich pitched TechCrunch first, the way every founder hopes to get their break. He wanted the big write-up and the traffic spike that comes with it. Nothing came back. Not a yes, not a no, not even an automated reply. He tried smaller blogs next, including ones with only a couple hundred subscribers, and got turned down there too.
That's when Widrich stopped pitching and changed the plan entirely: "We realized that if no one wants to write about us, at least we can start writing about ourselves." But he didn't just write on Buffer's own blog, almost nobody was reading that yet either. He wrote for other people's blogs instead, borrowing audiences that already existed rather than waiting to build his own.
He treated it like a full-time job because it was one. "Two to four articles every day, nothing else," he said. "Sitting down, hammering out great content, getting it featured as guest posts, doing the same in the morning again." Over roughly nine months that added up to about 150 guest posts across other people's sites.
- Pitch the big blogs first, TechCrunch included, and expect silence more often than a rejection.
- Try smaller blogs next, some with only a couple hundred subscribers, and expect more no's.
- Stop pitching, start writing for those same blogs instead of about your own product.
- Hold the pace at two to four guest posts a day, every day, for months.
Buffer credited that single channel with around 100,000 signups within those first nine months, while Widrich and co-founder Joel Gascoigne were still a tiny team building the actual product.