Kathy Wang

All right all right what's your name what are you building I'm Kathy I run a company called Press Club we help founders land press like on Forbes Wall Street Journal TechCrunch etc I heard that a lot of PR firms charge a lot of money how do you charge? So we are purely results-based pricing. You only pay if you actually land coverage. That's how confident we are in our ability to get you press. That sounds very, very risky. What if you don't deliver? That's a lot of risk that you're taking. Yeah, it is a big risk on our part, but we're confident. Cold outreach really works. and how many customers have you helped land press we have landed over 20 customers and we actually recently got our first Bloomberg exclusive and brought this company out of stealth and I just heard that you have a company in one day land a lot of publication what's that number yeah same company we helped them bring out of stealth announced their 10 million dollar round then subsequently announced their 20 million dollar or sorry 50 million dollar round and we We landed them 11 articles in a single day, insane. In one single day, 11 articles, what's the secret to that? The secret, cold outreach. We hook up an AI agent to your email inbox and then we send it out to 200 targeted journalists in your vertical and wait till the journalists respond. And how do you actually find customers? So we host a ton of events. We host weekly events. We're actually hosting this event today, Hot Sauna and Cold Plunge. That's how we meet the majority of our customers. so why do you host events like this rather than like you know a panel or event or speaking event why this event? Because panels are f***ing boring like I see people like chopping it up during in the sauna trying to compete with each other how long they can stay in the cold in the cold plunge like that's way better than listening to a panel and what's your record for staying in a cold plunge? My record was a minute I think I officially surpassed that tell me how long this was based on the length of this video we're a 1 minute 52 seconds how how far can you push yourself yeah we're for building press club how hard like what's the hardest part that you have to endure the hardest part honestly having like uncomfortable conversations I feel like I I would rather do a cold plunge and have these types of uncomfortable conversations any day so what are those cause is it like sales it was conversation or some other kind of like when a customer is pissed off at us when we have to do some conflict resolution like all all the s*** you know eating s*** as a founder like all of that all What's next for a press club how many founders can you help land a lot more publication I mean we're you know our uh internal goal I'm about to say out loud we are on track to hitting a million dollars in annual run rate by the end of this month um and we we're actually gonna hit it so hopefully we book a ton more customers uh we're gonna you know increase that goal next month so we're really excited how big is actually press club if you can hit a mil by the way before we start when did you actually start press club how long press go a little over a year ago yeah so in less than a year and a half you will hit a 1 million AR in five years how much revenue will you hit in five years I mean hopefully a hundred million dollars like that Going back so you help founders do code outreach why can't they do that themselves you could do it yourself honestly you could do a cloud agent or chat GPT agent honestly we tried to do that it just didn't work the quality of messaging isn't there you're talking to journalists who write for a living your message your copy for your email better be f***ing good um no m dashes like it better not be ai slop so it's really important to actually do it well so if the founder called a richie journalist and they kind of fucked up yeah like would they get a second chance uh that's that's hard um like yeah that's hard like it's it's really hard to like f*** it up and then be like oh okay I'm back um you you bet you might as well just make a good first impression right off the bat Why do you want to host events like this and how many customers have you gotten from this event and how many customers do I oh I mean if we just get even like one customer from this event that'll be worth it all right Okay. Well, what's like other than building businesses, other than this, what's the hardest thing that you've done in life? The hardest thing that I've done in life? Oh my goodness. I don't know. What is the hardest thing? I would say one hard thing that I did recently, I confronted a friend, and I was honestly scared that I was gonna lose that friendship. And I was literally like talking to Chachi to be consulting it and being like, how should I confront her? But I actually did it and it made our friendship stronger Yeah, that was really tough. By the way, is this your first company that you're building? This is my first company. What was that moment for you? You thought to yourself, I need to build this for other founders. The moment? I really wanted to go to TED AI which is hosted in San Francisco but I didn't a single ticket was like $1,900 almost $2,000 so I did something slightly unhinged I went to the conference website I pulled all 50 speakers and I called message every single one of them on LinkedIn and lo and behold one of them responded that same night and I got a free ticket I was sitting front row the morning after. What are some other unconventional things that help you you build press club unconventional things I mean honestly like cold outreach works you guys like you gotta just you gotta just ask for it like go go to the booth like reach out to sponsors like spam people on linkedin whatever it takes you know that's you just gotta do whatever it takes as a founder all right in the next few years everybody will have ai agents will do this for you what happens when that happens to press club when that happens the press club when I mean we we are building for that world. Like our vision is like agent to agent communication. Like that's how it's gonna work. So, yeah. By the way, Kathy, you've been here for seven minutes. Longer than Frank. Woo! All right. Good job.