Notes — Jason Feifer on Getting Press, Pitching Journalists, and Opportunity Set B

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about? A tactical guide to getting press for a startup or small business, narrated from the inside of editorial decision-making. Covers why most pitches fail, how to identify the right publication and specific writer, and how to construct a pitch that lands. Closes with Feifer’s career philosophy: Opportunity Set B.

Q2 — How is it argued? Through the lens of editorial logic: Feifer explains how editors actually think (audience-first, not founder-first), then walks each phase of the process with concrete examples — the butter dish airport story, Meg O’Hara’s Covid pivot pitch, Fred Ruckel’s Ripple Rug Amazon arbitrage story, and Barbara Corcoran’s Corcoran Report. Each story illustrates a distinct principle. The Opportunity Set B concept emerges at the end as a broader career claim: all of Feifer’s growth came from pursuing things nobody asked him to do.

Q3 — Is it true? The framework is coherent and matches what is known about media relations. The audience-first editorial logic is empirically verifiable — publication missions genuinely differ, and pitching the wrong publication wastes effort. The freelancer advantage claim (fewer pitches, actively looking for stories) is structurally sound. The Corcoran Report example is historically documented. The Opportunity Set B framework is unfalsifiable as stated but resonates with career literature on proactive development.

Q4 — What of it? Practical value for anyone seeking press coverage. Broader lesson: understanding your counterparty’s real incentives — not their stated role — is the master key to any pitch, whether to journalists, investors, or customers. Opportunity Set B is the cleanest formulation I have encountered of why people who go beyond their defined role compound career advantage.

Glossary

Publication mission: The internal editorial logic of a publication — who they serve and what problem they are solving for that reader. Different from stated topic area; requires reading several issues to infer.
Freelancer: Independent contractor writer who pitches and sells stories to publications; structurally more receptive to inbound pitches than staff editors because they are actively hunting for stories and receive far less volume.
Press release wire: Distribution service (e.g. PR Newswire, Business Wire) that blasts press releases to hundreds of outlets simultaneously; auto-published to aggregator pages that receive zero organic readership. Feifer considers it a signal of a low-quality PR firm.
Opportunity Set A: What is explicitly asked or expected of you in your current role — job responsibilities, deliverables, performance targets.
Opportunity Set B: What is available to you (professionally or personally) even though nobody is asking you to pursue it; Feifer’s term for the space where career growth actually happens.
Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage: Scheme where third parties list Amazon products on eBay at a higher price, buy from Amazon on demand, and ship directly — causing brand confusion and return liability for the original seller.
“As seen in”: The press cachet play — getting coverage primarily to display the logo on a website or in a pitch deck, generating third-party validation regardless of actual readership.

§ Media is not a service

The core mental model failure: founders treat editors as service providers who are in the business of providing coverage. Editors see themselves as serving their audience. They are not sitting around waiting for good pitches — they actively source stories themselves, and a good pitch has to overcome that default. The question is never “how do I get a feature?” but “what is this publication trying to do for its readers, and how does my story serve that?”

Publication missions are not interchangeable. Fast Company under Bob Safian: stories that illuminate where business is going — insight into evolution of industry. Entrepreneur under Feifer: not a magazine about business, but about thinking — counterintuitive decisions that other entrepreneurs can extract transferable lessons from. The butter dish butter dish itself is irrelevant to Entrepreneur; the airport market-research hack is deeply relevant.

§ Three-step press framework

Step 1 — Prep. Clarify what press is actually for, as precisely as possible. Growth? Investor signalling? Repositioning? Authority building? Without a clear goal, you cannot evaluate success or target correctly. Then identify what part of your story is genuinely interesting — often not what you assume. The interesting thing is rarely “we made a great product”; it is usually a counterintuitive decision or a clever workaround that other founders can learn from.

Step 2 — Target. Not all press is equal, and not all publications reach the audience you need. Hot dog truck in DC → local food press, not Entrepreneur (national reach). Peanut butter targeting millennial moms → Cosmo snack roundups, not Fast Company. Process: (1) go to the publication website, search your category; (2) observe the format of coverage (feature vs. roundup, founder story vs. trend); (3) click through bylines to find who writes in that space; (4) determine staff vs. freelancer.

Freelancer advantage. Freelancers get paid per story; they are actively looking for things to pitch. Staff editors receive hundreds of emails per day and are primarily focused on self-sourced stories. A pitch to a freelancer who covers your space will be read at close to 100% and taken seriously if relevant. Volume differential makes the freelancer channel materially more effective per unit of effort.

Step 3 — The pitch. Short email (three paragraphs max). Subject line and preview text must signal customisation — that this was written for this specific person, not blasted. Referencing recent work is good if genuine; faking familiarity is immediately obvious and fatal. Tell the story as they would tell it to their audience, not as you would tell it as a founder. Open with the interesting detail (the airport survey hack, not the butter dish specs). Be prepared to be open about challenges in the follow-up call — success stories bore editors; problem-solving stories are what they print.

§ The “be part of the story” strategy

An alternative to being the feature subject: create or surface context in which you are a natural embedded participant.

Trend angle: approach a journalist covering a trend and position yourself as one of several actors in it. Jen Miller (Feifer’s wife, freelancer for NYT/WaPo) wrote about startups helping people prepare for death — the company that reached out to her framing itself as part of a trend got prominent billing.
Data/survey creation: produce your own data that becomes news. Barbara Corcoran compiled her own sales data into the Corcoran Report and sent it to New York papers — became an authoritative source on Manhattan real estate before she was famous. Zapier produces an annual “fastest-growing apps” list from its usage data; gets covered every year. A remote work consultancy (hard to feature) funds surveys on top states for remote work — the survey gets covered, the company appears in every article.
Fred Ruckel / Ripple Rug: initially pitched his cat toy (not Entrepreneur’s story); pivoted in a follow-up email to “if you’re ever interested in the scam happening on Amazon to small businesses, let me know.” That was Entrepreneur’s story. Fred ended up as the main character in a 4,000-word reported feature.

The lesson: you do not have to be the story to get in the story. Create the context that journalists want to write about, and you become unavoidable.

§ Press as cachet, not traffic

Most stories in major publications (Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fast Company) reach 5,000–10,000 readers despite millions of monthly unique visitors — because the publication publishes very high volumes of content. The coverage may generate no measurable conversion.

But the cachet play is often more valuable than the traffic: “as seen in” on your website; promoting the article as an ad targeting the specific audience you want to notice you got coverage; using the link in investor or partner outreach. Feifer and Nicole Lapin got Variety coverage for Money News Network — zero business from it, but every advertiser outreach email now includes the link, and it changes attention. Press as social proof asset, deployed by you, often exceeds press as traffic source.

§ Opportunity Set B

Two categories of opportunity co-exist at any moment:

Set A: what is asked of you — job responsibilities, deliverables, expectations from employers or customers.
Set B: what is available to you, even though nobody is asking — new responsibilities, side projects, speaking, writing, building in public.

If you focus exclusively on Set A, you remain qualified only for what you are already doing. Set B is where compounding identity formation happens. Feifer’s illustration: when he became editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur, nobody asked him to hit the speaking circuit, develop a podcast, or write a book. Those were all in Set B — available, unclaimed, unprompted. Pursuing them shifted his self-conception from “magazine editor” to “entrepreneur who helps entrepreneurs.”

The Set B opportunities are not invented — they are available, meaning they exist in the environment around your current position. The work is noticing them and acting without external instruction.