Growth Hacking With PR with Gregory Galant of Muck Rack and The Shorty Awards

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September 29, 2022

On this week's episode I chat with Gregory Galant, the Co-Founder and CEO of Muck Rack and the Co-Founder and CEO of The Shorty Awards.

Muck Rack is a Public Relations management platform that helps organizations find the right journalists to pitch, report on media coverage and prove the value of their work.

Greg has been in the NY startup game for a long time. He famously launched The Shorty Awards where they gave out awards for the best tweets in the early days of Twitter. Along the way he tinkered with a dozen business ideas until Muck Rack finally hit and took him to the moon.

During our chat we talk about Muck Rack, the PR industry and his wisdom about entrepreneurship. Enjoy.

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‍Transcript (this is an automated transcript):

MPD: Greg, thanks for being here today, buddy.

Gregory Galant: Thanks Mark.

MPD: Yeah, looking forward to diving in.

You mind starting off by giving us an overview? Ofm.

Gregory Galant: Sure. Muck Rack is a PR software suite. It's kinda like the system of record for a PR department or a PR agency, and it helps these groups find the right journals to pitch. So if you wanna have your name in the news and figure out like who are the right journals to pitch, it actually has a whole kind of CRM and workflow built in.

So you can then, Send emails to the journalists saying, Hey, why don't you write about my new company? Track those relationships they know, notify you in a journal's, writes about your company, and finally help you build reports so you can show the impact of pr enter media on your company. And now we started with journalists.

Now it's also podcasters like like we're on right now. We happen to already know each other. But if not, I might have pitched you on being on this show using. Finding you through mock rack and pitching you that way. And then building reporting on the impact of all those earned media connections too.

And

MPD: when did you start the company? It's been a little bit, right?

Gregory Galant: Yeah, we started in 2009. Originally it was a free website for journalists. And then being in New York at the time, I kept running into PR people who were like, Oh, Uck Rack, that's I use that all the time to figure out who to pitch.

We're like, Oh, we could probably. We had all these ideas for tools we could build for them, and then we felt it would fit really well into a SAS model. So we launched it as sa late 2011. Pretty much either at our Mitra year 13 years in is the brand mock rack, and over a decade in now is a SAS platform.

MPD: Love that. Why did you start this? Because it's a little bit of a, Seemingly random niche, but it is a classically good internet solution in the sense that you've got a lot of data that's unstructured and you guys are bringing structure and clarity to it. Had you land on this concept? Yeah, it was

Gregory Galant: kind a twisty path to get here.

So I, I got in into social media early on because I started a podcast back in 2005. Back before podcast, it was barely even a word. People were calling it RSS with enclosures back then. Cause that was a technology that it used. Lot people. You had some big names

MPD: on, you had some big names on your podcast.

Gregory Galant: Yeah, I got re min. It was like I was interviewing entrepreneurs about how they got started and now many people do that, but back then it was one, it might have been the first show that did that. So I. Read Hoffman on back when LinkedIn was 50 employees still. Wow. I believe it was the first podcast he was ever on and he's telling me about his like, wild vision that one day most people would have the resume online, which sounded nutty at the time.

And here we are 15 years later then I had the founder of Yelp on back when Yelp was under a hundred employees. I got John Bole, the inventor of the index fund and the founder of Vanguard Group on my podcast. And one of the people I had on the podcast was Williams, who was doing a a company called Odio, which itself was a podcasting company who was a kind of a podcast rectory discovery platform.

And if you never heard of it, that's cause it never worked. You never quite got to product market fit with. Pivoted to a little side project that he had called Twitter that led me to sign up for Twitter really early. I'm just at Gregory on Twitter. I didn't even call in a favor. I was just the first person to type think, to type in, Username Gregory into Twitter.

And so I was on that kind of early Twitter band. Re

MPD: I wanna add something on that I, I have at npd. I definitely had to call in a favor, but it was still pretty early. If you get the wrong name, the wrong handle, it's a disaster, right? A lot of people just type in at MPD when they think, when they're thinking Metropolitan Police Department, and so I get all these messages about crimes going on and whatever else that I'm tagged in.

It's bizarre,

Gregory Galant: but I think you should become like a vigilante superhero and go fight. How do you know I'm not already? Good point. Very well hidden.

MPD: Every vigilante. Is under five, five VC type. So there you

go. That's

you're

MPD: saying. You got in, you got Gregory.

Gregory Galant: Yeah. Got Gregory. I saw there was all this good stuff happening on social media and what struck me about Twitter was I was early. I was early on Facebook I was able to join while I was in college back when it was just for college kids.

But back then, Facebook was, you could only see content from your friends. It was before the news feed. And part to that, it was friends during MySpace and all them you were only really making content for your friends. And Twitter struck me because it was the first social network or social platform, whatever you wanna call it, where you could make.

That people other than your friends might be interested in. And that was starting to happen where you had celebrities getting on there and that you could actually good at Twitter, but it, this big discovery couldn't, if you wanted know a certain on there, no good way to out who follow, had this idea that you could someone could launch a site that would let people vote with a tweet, which now is common.

No one had done that to. And then aggregate who's the best by topic. And I got together with my co-founder, Lee Samo, and we were brainstorm how do we get people to want to vote with the tweet for who's the best? And we said let's call it an award. And tweets are short. So we'll call it the short awards.

And that was the birth of this crazy idea. We built the website in two weekends. We it wasn't a bit, we didn't think of it as a business. We were like, this is this be a fun thing to do and we can build on two weekends, Who cares? Let's see what happens. But

MPD: this became big deal in New York at least.

I don't know if it was nationally, but I was in the scene that time and this exploded. Yeah. So this, I didn't realize the short your words was a side project for.

Gregory Galant: Yeah, it's of everything I launched and I glossed over things that I launched that didn't work and I'm happy to get into them later on.

But a very business idea. I've launched at two days since the shorty words was the one that I taught, had the least potential to ever be a business or make a profit. And it's the one that got the profitability the fastest and it's still going today.

MPD: I love that. Yeah. So tell everyone short your words is cause I don't know if everyone

Gregory Galant: knows.

Yes. So now it's grown to be awards for the best of social media. It's the lar first and largest award of its kind, honoring we started with more influencers and we still have that now. It's also brands and agencies, their best work on social media and winning a short, he can really catapult someone's career forward and get them a lot more a lot more attention.

Really give them a lot more license and help them in their career.

MPD: Okay. But this was like a big award ceremony. I remember, I don't know what year it was, but first decade of the century. I remember showing up and you had celebrity hosts and you know a little bit about the shorty story.

Gregory Galant: Yeah. So it went viral in those first 24 hours. Then had this over. Oh shit. People are gonna wanna come to this award show. Cause we'd launched a site we didn't pro, we didn't say or promise there'd be an actual ceremony because we didn't know if anyone would care. And then when it happened, we were like, Oh, this people gonna wanna come.

We didn't have a background in an event production or word shows or anything like that. We didn't have much money. So I was just like scrambling Okay, I gotta put this thing on. I was like, We've gotta do the award show fast. This Twitter,

we just, so I just announced we're like, after it went viral, just announced like, Hey, the show will be two months from now. And then just scrambled to put the pieces together and the ignorance. I think the only reason we able pull it off is cuz we had no idea like how hard it is to pull off an event.

So like that first venue we found, I did the deal on a handshake with the with the owner. We did a Cogo start space in Debo Brooklyn back before Debo Brooklyn was a place anyone wanted to set, put. And I did the deal on a I did that on a handshake. And now looking back, knowing that. We do 50 page event contracts and have insurance writers and all this stuff.

I'm just like, That's insane. I can't believe we did it. I would never do that now. But we didn't know any better and it worked. Sometimes you get lucky. I wouldn't advise doing it, but it was just that kind of thing. We had wall, she journaled New York Times, BBC all covered the short awards within 24 hours of launch.

I, I DMed like at the time there weren't all that many celebrities on Twitter, so it was notable who was there. So I DMed both Shaq and Mc Hammer and got them both to participate all by direct message. I got Gary Vayner Chuck there back when he was just Divine Library guy. One of the craziest parts about it, so our office at the time was in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

And again, this shows how little we know about event production and why. After the first one, I, me caveat before it makes me sound completely irresponsible. We started hiring professional event producers. We learned our lessons that first we were doing ourselves out the script. First copy comes out, I'm like, Okay, lemme print out the second copy Ran outta in.

And there's no like office supply store anywhere near Dumbo, Brooklyn. And it, this is before Uber, so there's no easy way to get around to anywhere. So I'm like, okay, I guess we only have one copy of the script and I hand it to pass forward a few hours. I'm in the green room. I hand the script to Mc Hammer and he starts giving me all these notes on it.

He's just Hey, it says the Shorty Awards in music. It should be the Music Shorty Award. He's like critiquing the copy and I'm just thinking to myself like, Can't touch. This is the first single. I owned as a kid, the cassette tape. So I'm just like, it's just surreal that like hammers giving me this

MPD: feedback and you don't have a printer to change anything anyway, so what's the difference?

Yeah. Did he do it? Did he do it script or he riff? What happened?

Gregory Galant: Oh, he riff, but the real moment was that kinda he's giving me all these notes and holding onto the script and the show's about to start. And I'm like, Hammer I need the script back. And that's what he realized. He had the copy of the script Mortified

guys before, before they go up there, but it was just, yeah, completely slap dash. But it was like, The expectations then, cuz Twitter was so new that first year, we could get away with all that. And I'm just lucky it didn't turn into Fyre Festival. When I watch that, this was long before the F Festival, when I watched that hockey too, I was like, oh shit.

That could easily been us.

MPD: Okay. So but how did you get from short your words to Muck rack? Cause there, there's a

Gregory Galant: bridge there, right? Yeah. What struck me at the Shorty Awards was. How quickly we got press. So when I launched things previously, like when I was working in podcasting, it was always really hard to get the media to pay attention to something new.

I'm sure with your portfolio companies, like it's hard to get press attention. And with the short awards it just, landed on us. It was all the big outlets for reaching out to us to cover. We had a lot of these kind like early journals who were like big on social back then, like Brian er, who at the Times who at the time was still the New York Times and has gone on to being a CNN anchor and lot these kind of early Twitter journalists.

So got this front row seat to seeing like how journals specifically were using Twitter in a big way to figure out what to cover, what to write. And thought there's so no way to find it. And it was funny, everyone was questioning Twitter's credibility back then in that like, how can you trust that anything on Twitter is real at all?

And I thought if you trust the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or any publication, like why shouldn't you wanna pay attention to what their journalists are saying on social? So version one of Mock Rack in 2009. Again, very simple site, no business model. We built it in two weeks and there's just, here are all the journalists on social organized by what publication they're at.

Launched it and then in that first year we ran that long side trying a bunch of other business ideas. So we didn't focus on it just yet, but we noticed in that first year it, we had over 10,000 journals request to get listed on Muck Rack. So we found we'd kinda gone viral. In the journalism community, The New York Times, even linked to Mara on their internet, like to show their journalists how to find their colleagues on social.

So kinda in that early, like social revolution of journalism and and then being in New York at the time, I kept running into PR people. Cause it's a big media town and all the PR people were like, Oh, you do mock rack. I use your site to figure out which journalists to pitch and to monitor what they're up to.

I was like, Oh, that's interesting. We have this like profession of people already using us to do their job. We had all these ideas for software tools we could build on top of the data that we had to help them better find the right journalists. We saw there was this big problem where it was like hard for PR people, or even entrepreneurs who wanna find the right journalists to find them efficiently.

And the journals for getting all the spam, cuz all the legacy tools, they didn't have good targeting ability as far as we could tell. So we thought hey, here's a great opportunity. And I'd also got to witness a lot of my friends start, this is before even people were saying sa a lot, but just the idea of like subscription sites, we, you pay in a reoccurring manner to access online software.

And and I was always into all of those models because the short awards was always profitable, but we could never predict how much revenue we'd get. So I always had these kind of sleepless nights of, Hey, what if we don't land these deals this year? We could lose money and it was hard to grow it because we ended up growing it just fine.

But it was challenging because we couldn't predict the revenue, so it was hard to hire people around it and all that versus what. Sa I was like, Oh, if I knew exactly how much money I was gonna make every month, or at least be able to predict it with accuracy, I could reinvest and keep growing. So got really excited both about the problem that we could solve and the business model that that we could have and that us to relaunch it as a SAA application in I believe December 20.

MPD: Recurring revenue is really a godsend. Just to put an exclamation point on what you're saying, it makes it a lot easier to manage a business. You're talking about Muck Rack, you've talked about your kind of initial feature set, which got you in motion on this. What does the software do now? I'm, you're 10 years later in development.

I know you had a long roadmap ahead of you when you started it. What's

Gregory Galant: the scope? Yeah. Yeah, so probably 95% of what's there now in Uck Rack didn't exist when we launched it. But it still serves the same customer base and we still we still have a lot of customers from our very first cohort from 2011.

And where, yeah, it started really is this like point solution to find the right journals to pitch. And then as we talk to our customers, they were like, Hey, we love your software, but we also need to track those relationships with journalists. We need to monitor the news. We need to be able to reports for management and a whole host of other things.

So we kept building and we've now made it into this kind of system of record for the PR depart. By analogy, like how a sales team's gonna run all their processes through a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot or, your HR team when it comes to recruiting is gonna use an applicant tracking system like Greenhouse or Iims.

The PR department, they've never really had a system of record software. We have legacy competitors that have been more. Historically, like research tools that, that they use, but they've never had like a full kind of system of record that they can track all their relationships with.

Journalists have workflows, and then see the relationship between who they pitched and all the relationships they built and then the outputs of how much press they got. How that press drove the needle for them. So that's really what we're working on now in our next evolution. And we see the big opportunity in,

MPD: And I assume you guys are the big fish in the PR world, right?

It seems like everyone's on this platform is the right way to think about it.

Gregory Galant: Yeah. We are the fastest growing at scale. We have some legacy competitors, one of which was started as a book in the 18 hundreds that are still, bigger than us by by headcount and absolute revenue just cuz it, it takes a lot to grow.

But we're grow. We grew 75 last year where just about to cross the 200 person mark. So it's been we're taking that mantle and I think if you just find a PR person and ask them like, Hey what's the best PR platform to, to be on? Most of the time, you're gonna hear our name said.

That's

MPD: awesome. What's success for you in this venture? You've been tinkering it as an entrepreneur for a long time as she had.

Gregory Galant: The definition of success always al always changes as we go, but I, there are constants to it. To me, what, what's really fun is just getting to build software, solve customers problems.

That's something that, that's no different than when we started. As we got into scale though, a lot more of how I define success is about cause when we started was my co-founder and I, so we boots, Shopp, the whole thing. So it wasn't like one of these companies where we had 20 people working on our pre-launch.

So at the very beginning we weren't thinking Oh, that's making a great place to work. It's just it's just the two of us and we're having fun building the software. But now that's become a big part of it. We were early to the remote first movement. Pre covid. We had an office in New York, but only half the company was in the New York area.

And even for the New Yorkers, we never forced them to come. In an average day, less than half the people would come to the office. And then early on we meet in the pandemic. We just said, Okay, we're gonna be fully remote. Now to be successes can we make mock rack a great place to, to grow your career?

To make an impact on the world and do it all, in embracing this remote first world and not feel like that's a, a pressure, a disadvantage, but that it's something that that can make the company even better and that we can make people feel really, connected and included doing that.

And we think we do that that leads to us becoming. A whole lot bigger cuz we're in a, we're in a big market so we can bring even, give you more people that experience and then give everyone who works for us now the chance to keep growing.

MPD: It's the kind of answer from someone who keeps going, the people who are answering money. Once they make their money, there's not a lot left. But for a lot of entrepreneur types, the fear of not having money is the stick. And once, once those folks get a payday, there's still a carrot there. So they might not be stressed, but there's reason to play, reason to have impact, reason to get outta bed.

Someone really smart in my life recently said work is a luxury good. Which I thought was super insightful. Cause I think we all have this idea that you wanna retire and when you retire, I think that hearkens back to a day when people had terrible commutes. They were doing their job by paper and corporate culture was crappy and they never changed jobs.

But now in this age where you can sit at home by the pool for 20, 30 hours a week in your later years and use your mind and have purpose, it's really a luxury item. So it's when I hear you talking about this, I, it reminds me there's gonna be, we're gonna be on the show talking again in another 15 years about the next thing you built.

Now you mentioned something earlier, you said You, you bootstrapped the whole thing. Tell me about the pros and cons of that. I've built companies that have been venture backed. I built companies that we bootstrapped no correlation with success by model for me but the it's a different game.

How did you feel about the bootstrap approach? You recommended it to others, when to do it, when not to? Yeah

Gregory Galant: I love the bootstrapping approach. I'll get to when to do it and when not to. Cause I think that's important. I'm not reli like there's some people who are religious about 'em Hey, you should always raise venture and get to market fast.

And some people who are like, Oh, taking on any kind of money is debt and, is what ruins society. But before I get to that I'll answer your first question with the pros and cons. Lemme start with the cons. You have no money. So first years are rough. We didn't pay ourselves for a while, and there were many years where even where I could pay myself, I was, making way less than all my friends and my same age.

And yeah, not even saying that I had super successful friends, just that I was making way, way little money, especially living in New York City at the time. The great, my, my tips though is, between Joe's Pizza and Ma Moons paf, I was able to Able to eat really cheaply. I also recommend networking with as many dcs as possible, cuz they'll usually pay for lunch or dinner , which is another good way.

Great hat to Exactly. Yeah. I got the, I always got a venture funded without the, without giving up any equity. That's a big con. You don't have money and seriously too, not just, for yourself, but there were, Yeah, I would say until you get to like few million in revenue, at least in our, at least in experience, You're always like, Oh man, if I had an extra a hundred k I know exactly what to do with it.

And then every time the revenue grew, it's we know we need to hire these five positions who are gonna fight about, which of these five do we hire? And it's so hard to be like, Oh, do we hire that program? Are we desperately need or the first marketing person or a bookkeeper so that I'm not spending three days a week reconciling the books.

So that's the struggle, that's the struggle of bootstrapping is just like those, the, it's like until you get to a few million in revenue, it's always that battle. And then we get to the pro though, which is a you own the whole thing. Are you and your co-founders do, which you know, is pretty awesome.

And like people, Yeah, I think a lot of times people, especially like you're just in the venture capital, Bubble ecosystem. People downplay like the pernicious effects of dilution, which is, you take that first round when you're tiny and you go 20 per 30%. But then once you're on that VC treadmill, they're like you're being pushed to always spend more than you're making, so you have to keep doing more rounds.

So it's like you're not. I know there are some new models now where you don't have to do this, but the traditional VC model is like the second you take that first round. They're both pushing you to spend as much as possible to grow past, and they want you to take another round so that you know they can market to market and show that they have success, that they, their series A investment.

Now got a series B series signing up where you know the founders are all gonna get diluted to this minority position of the company. And there's a lot of middle outcomes where the effect of that can be huge. If you're, if you grow a company and you see this all the time, like company might sell for 50 million, but then you find out, hey, they, they raise 60 million a venture capital, or even maybe they raise 25 million a venture capital.

But because of preferences and all these terms in there, the vast majority go to the dcs and the founder. Despite selling a company for 50 million, which should be this, life changing outcome, don't make a lot of money, or maybe you don't make any money along with, the employees and all that versus, I know people who bootstrap companies and they sell it for 10 million and they make more money than the VC back company that sells for 50 or a hundred million.

So there's, that ownership, which is huge. There is not having to deal with a board of directors, which I think, people debate the value of a board, but I think in those early years in a business where you're always pivoting, I know I've never had the experience you probably a good perspective on this, but it can be hard to like fla flail around and keep trying out different business ideas cuz the strategies in those early days might be changing every week.

And if you have to layer in Oh, I gotta communicate this to a board and the investor community, it's a lot more work than just being like, Hey, I'm just gonna communicate this to customers in the market and see what sticks. And the final piece is always just the time it takes to fundraise is not insignificant.

Some of those early years we used to sometimes think what do, we went down and tried to get a series A. And we're like we'd have to drop everything and do nothing for three months except for fundraise. What have we spent those three months pushing like hell to get more customers and then we'd have more revenue, more funding and no dilution and the business would worth more.

So that was thought process. And just by, by entering the last part of your question, which is You know when to do it and when not to. Cause your VCs, I don't wanna dissuade all your listeners, but I think

MPD: No, it's good. I agree with everything you're saying so far, so let's keep going.

Yeah.

Gregory Galant: But I think the time to do it is if you're, a, if you're not sure how big your market is, then that's a great time to bootstrap because you have that optionality. And we weren't sure. It turns out our market's big enough, in retrospect, we would, it, we could have a venture like outcome for somebody, but we didn't know that right when we were starting.

So it was nice to know, hey, if this thing, if growth slowed at a few million on arr, could have still just been an awesome business for us. We could have just cash flowed a bunch out, had a few employees running it and had a good life. I think it's like you're not sure the market size.

It's great if you think you're gonna need long time horizon, it's great. We've been at this, the SAS part is we've been at it for 10 years. You think about it, we probably created more value due to our growth rate in the last two years than we did in the first eight. But if we'd raised venture at the beginning, it'd been unlikely we'd have found a venture capitalist patient enough to wait 10 years.

Largely just due to their fund structure and all the structural dynamics. I think, if you want time horizon, flexibility, you're not sure the market, how big the market is and how big the business could be, there's a great reason to bootstrap. And I think the reasons to take venture is like if you either, some businesses just need, if you wanna build a rocket you need to just invest a ton in r and d before you're gonna see a dollar in revenue.

Some businesses you need a network effect to have them work. Like even if you look at like Twitter and Facebook, Adam, for Greg's been taking venture money for Facebook, right? It needed this huge network effect of having lots of people on it before the ad model would really work for it.

So it made sense to go out and. For that. Sometimes if the growth rate is just super fast and or you're in a new market that's like heating up really fast venture could be really good for that. So I think there are definitely model, places where you should take it. I think there can also be some middle paths where, you know, a lot of times you see the companies get out ahead cuz they raise more venture than anyone else.

But then sometimes it's like you see the number two or the number three player they can. Sell, and they own a lot more of the company and their founders do awesome. And then that person who's the market leader gets so diluted that the, that the company might be worth more, but the founders are worth a whole lot less.

So I think you just have to be really thoughtful about how you stack up your funding and your capital st