Over the course of two weeks in the final quarter of 2020, Nugget made its two biggest press appearances in company history: full-on, in-depth profiles in BuzzFeed News and the L.A. Times. I sat back and waited for my life to change overnight. Surely, a call from Ellen would be next. And yet, no call ever came. Sales didn’t spike, or even surge.
Where was the tidal wave of site traffic? Was major press not all it’s cracked up to be? If only there was a parallel lesson from earlier in my life that could guide me…
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In 2014, I sold 40% of my business (which I had poured years of blood, sweat and tears into) to a famous basketball player for $10,000.
If I ever try to tell you that I was smart at 23 years old, just remember that I sold 40% of my business to a famous basketball player for $10,000. Yes, I valued my entire company at $25,000. Some companies are private, some companies are public, and some, apparently, are microscopic.
Looking back on it, a more appropriate financial vehicle may have been a loan — and yet, I was starstruck by the idea of a partnership with someone I had watched on TV as a child. It wasn’t just about getting cash from him. Our partnership was going to be a manifestation of the college basketball nostalgia that had made our brand popular, a demonstration that this was part of a new generation of businesses run not from the out-of-touch owner’s suite but from the players on the court.
What I failed to realize was that, famous as he was, no one looked to him for lifestyle inspiration, no one looked to him for what to buy. His brand was capable of drawing eyeballs to a basketball court, and that was about it. Beyond his own line, which we printed up and sold for him, his retweets and Instagram posts barely budged the bottom line. All these years later, I’ve never forgotten the lesson: someone who can get a million people to do Thing A might not be able to get even 50 people to do Thing B. All influence is not created equal, and rarely is it directly transferrable.
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Getting your startup in a major news outlet is kind of like when I sold 40% of my company to a famous basketball player for $10,000.
It looks cool. It creates a major sense of pride and excitement. And it doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. Just like the fans of that famous basketball player were conditioned to do one thing (watch him play basketball), readers of that publication are conditioned to do, primarily, one thing: read that publication. They aren’t conditioned to shop with you — no matter how glowing that profile is.
Not long before I sold 40% of my business to a famous basketball player for $10,000, a picture of one of my shirts was a bold, unmissable, two-page spread in Sports Illustrated. The day I got the issue, I excitedly opened my website dashboard to see how it had influenced sales… and it hadn’t. At all. Sports Illustrated, beloved (at the time, at least) for sports reporting and narrative nonfiction, was not as beloved for sartorial suggestions, it turns out.
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They say press is the best advertising money can’t buy. And it’s true, it can be great. Whether or not it generates any revenue, it can lead to relationships and opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. But more often than not, in my limited experience, if you don’t have a base of support built up first, traffic created by press will be gone as quick as it came.
Plus, the high expectations of early-days press placements can be brutal pressure for a business while it figures itself out. The business model often isn’t nailed down, the founding team might not be the one that makes it to sustainability, and early miscues with personnel could be some of the toughest lessons in the business’s history. This is a period well-suited for anonymity.
That early press that we’ve been conditioned to go all out for in the beginning — to pay a PR agency to dip into their rolodex and generate for you? It’s for the birds. Spend that time and energy building a community, making a great product, hiring (or contracting) talented people, and the press will come in due time.
That being said, I’m definitely framing that L.A. Times article.