Validation: Get your startup in front of media and pay only if they respond

Do you remember the good old days with Earn.com? You were able to get in touch with interesting people (like investors, funds, startup founders, designers, etc.) one by one or in bulk and pay only if they responded.

It got acquired by Coinbase for $100M.

I’d like to reuse a similar principle to media space. As a co-founder of one of the biggest tech media in the Czech Republic, we get a lot of pitches, but only a few are relevant – and going thru all of them one by one is impossible. Journalists from bigger outlets get 10-100x more of them.

So imagine you could send a pitch to relevant journalists (filter by type, media, category, interests, etc) one by one or in bulk and pay only if they reply.

They need to either reply with an interest or an explanation of why they are not interested in order to get paid. Each journalist sets their own profile, pricing and it could work as an extra income for the daily job they do for free (opening emails with pitches). Also, they do this with their consent and have a huge incentive to stay active – not like all those spammy services with stolen emails without their knowledge.

It could of course have a lot of additional services later on, like an email review before you send it out to journalists or help with the PR.

What do you think?

I’ve been getting some interest around this between journalists, so I’d like to validate the idea and move to MVP.