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DIY founder PR — agent-scraped journalist requests and tailored pitches

angus.sewell · 2026-08-03T14:50:40.000Z · in Creative
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100k ft — What is this?

DIY founder PR — agent-scraped journalist requests and tailored pitches
techniqueB-tier

50k ft — Why care?

Have an agent scrape journalist request sites into a database, pull each journalist's last ten articles, draft a similar story angle featuring you, and send short emails. Lessons: short non-AI-sounding pitches win, offer visibility, do ideation yourself, claim your Google profile, and it's a volume game.
agentsmarketingprompt engineering

10k ft — Key takeaways

• Give the model example emails so it doesn't sound like AI • Pitch angles close to what the journalist already writes • Short emails get more replies than long pitches

5k ft — Tools & techniques

(no tools tagged) AI agents, cold outreach, web scraping

1k ft — Deep-dive / try it

After testing this here are my main findings: 1. Really short emails get far more replies than long pitches. Try really hard to make it not read like AI. The best way to do this is to provide examples of exactly what the email should look like. 2. The fact that I have some followers on ig and TikTok definitely helped get replies lol. These journalists also want to be famous so framing it in a “I will get you more visibility” way certainly worked. 3. AI is going to be bad at writing stories so actually try to put some work into ideation yourself. 4. You apparently have to actually claim the Google profile thing. Mine hasn’t shown up yet so I haven’t gotten there yet. 5. It is a volume game. You are competing with a ton of other people who want their attention too. I didn’t know a singl…
Transcript excerpt
Something broke when founders started buying their fame. Choose any founder, like search their name on Google. How did they get Google to show them as like a celebrity? They paid a bunch of money to one of these PR agencies. Is how can we like build some shit ourselves right now, dude? What do these people actually do? Apparently it's this. First, they make like a list of journalists. Give this prompt to your AI agent. It will go and scrape all of these sites. This is where journalists post what they're trying to write about. It should save that list of journalists to one of these databases. Next, the publicist will read their 10 previous article. This prompt got you covered. You will scrape them and save them back to your database. Shit, we gotta come up with a story idea, right? Some idea that's very similar to the previous stories that the journalists put out, but like you're in it. And then they'll just like fucking email it. Being like, yo, I read all your recent stories. I have a very similar one that you will like. This prompt will do exactly that. Eventually somebody will probably feature you. Once you have enough coverage, that like panel thing just kind of appears by itself. You didn't need to pay 10 grand for that, dude. Follow your boy instead. I'll teach you how to build all this stuff yourself.

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Collection: Creative