NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club, award winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith. And in this episode, we are talking all about digital marketing. Maybe you have a startup or business that you want to promote. I know a lot of you do because you are reaching out to me to come on the New York Launch Pod, but I know, and you know too, that it’s hard to promote your business, but our guest in this episode has figured out a way to automate that and get in front of the right people at the right time. So you can basically be your own publicist. Here’s Andy Cabasso the founder of Postaga.
Andrew Cabasso: The traditional process for doing link building and doing outreach is very, very time and labor intensive. Like for me to spend time scouring Google, scraping LinkedIn, using research tools that take that on its own can take hours. Then finding email addresses and invalidating the email addresses and finding the right contacts can take hours and then creating personalized emails for everybody also can take hours, but with our software, instead of it taking hours or days to do outreach, it just takes minutes.
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NY Launch Pod : So, what is Postaga?
Andrew Cabasso: Postaga is a tool that helps you with cold outreach. In particular, if you’re looking to get more traffic to your website, by building links to your website and to your content, or if you want to get more press coverage, like get featured as a guest on podcasts, or get other websites to write about your business or your blog or anything like that, or if you’re looking to get new potential customers. Postaga helps with the entire outreach process from finding relevant businesses to sending outreach emails.
NY Launch Pod : Well, we’re certainly fans of people being guests on podcasts, but I want to talk in terms of outreach and what that means. How exactly does it work?
Andrew Cabasso: Sure. So basically with outreach the whole, like the process of it, first it starts with prospecting. So, finding the relevant websites to yours, finding relevant businesses to yours and our, what the Postaga platform kind of walks you through the entire workflow, whether what, depending on whatever your goal is. So if you’re looking to build links to your blog articles, we help you find, in the prospecting stage, find relevant blogs to yours. And then once we find those relevant websites or businesses, then we find the right contact people at those businesses. From there, we find their email addresses and from there build and send personalized emails for all of them.
NY Launch Pod : So how are you finding relevant businesses?
Andrew Cabasso: Magic?
NY Launch Pod : Magic, you have a magic start-up?
Andrew Cabasso: Aren’t they all. Algorithms and programming and a lot of coding. My co-founder and I come from a digital marketing background and so we built this because this is something that we really originally wanted for ourselves, and we didn’t see out there in the market. And so far, a lot of other people have wanted it as well, which has been great. It turns out we built the right thing. So yeah. How does it work? Computer algorithms basically. We can, depending on what it is that you’re looking for, we have ways to find the things that are most relevant to you and to your goals.
NY Launch Pod : So you’re not going to share a little bit about the secret sauce, but you find relevant businesses and do cold outreach. How does the cold outreach itself work?
Andrew Cabasso: Sure. So, basically, like, let’s say we found an email for someone we found, all right. We want to, let’s say we want to reach out to Hal, because we want to be on Hal’s podcast. If we’re searching for startup podcasts and we find the New York Launch Pod, and then we find Hal’s email address, we were like, okay, so we’ve got this person we want to reach out to, among others.
NY Launch Pod : How do you find other people’s email addresses?
Andrew Cabasso: So we find emails from like a variety of sources, basically things that are publicly available on websites and things like that. Some scraping and some magic and we integrate with some other tools that are widely available that also find email addresses. But once we find email addresses, that’s only part of the battle being won because there are a lot of email addresses out there that just don’t work, that are, that bounce, that people have left the company and don’t work there anymore. And that’s kind of been one small challenge, is well we want to make sure that the people that we’re reaching out to, that these emails that we’re sending, are going to actually go to real humans. And so in our system we also validate these email addresses to make sure that the recipient is actually going to get those emails, because this is all related to deliverability, which is important. If I send a bunch of emails to random email addresses and enough of them bounce, meaning they don’t go anywhere and then they get like returned to sender basically, then it increases the likelihood that my email address, that any emails coming from me in the future will go to spam folders, which nobody wants. So keeping deliverability high is a super important thing.
NY Launch Pod : So you said that people wanted a service like this. Why did people want a service like this?
Andrew Cabasso: A bunch of reasons. So, one of the more popular use cases, one of the more popular use cases and reasons that people are doing cold outreach is because ranking in search engines is super difficult for competitive terms. Whether you’re a law firm or you’re a blog, or you’re someone who makes a product, has an e-commerce business, and you want people to be able to find your content, find your products, and be able to buy them and help your business make money. It’s really competitive in search engines and probably the most important of Google’s various hundreds of ranking factors is the quantity, and, but importantly, quality of websites that are linking to yours. And so if, like, for example, if like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal linked to your blog or your website, that’s worth a lot more in Google’s estimation than if a bunch of small blogs linked to your website. And so finding relevant websites to pitch, to get them to link to your content, helps you rank better in search and ultimately helps you make more money as a business.
NY Launch Pod : So I get it, people want to rank better in search. This helps people link to various websites. I want to talk about the negative side of things. Is this what people want, let’s say who are running these websites. They’re getting all of these cold emails, cold outreach, kind of automated. What’s been the feedback on that front.
Andrew Cabasso: That’s a really great question because you’re thinking on the receiving end, “I don’t want to get hit by people spamming me”, right? Like you’ve got a lot going on and people taking up your inbox with irrelevant questions or reaching out to you for something that just isn’t really pertinent, is wa sting your time. We absolutely do not want that. In fact, one of the main reasons that we built Postaga was so that you could not be spammy, so that you in particular are finding the most relevant opportunities, the most relevant websites, so that you could better build your business and also help out the people that you’re connecting with. When I reach out to podcasts in general, I get about a 20% response rate. That is really high for cold outreach or cold emails or anything like that because in my pitches, I’m very selective and I am trying to provide value. When I reach out to a podcast to say, “Hey, I think I’d be a great guest. Here’s what I think I could talk about. Here’s why it would benefit your audience. And I’m also happy to promote this and share this with my audience as well”. There it’s a win-win situation. And for people that are trying to promote their blog content as well, and build links to their content, when you’re doing that, hopefully, you are reaching out to other relevant blogs that are going to benefit from adding your content to theirs.
NY Launch Pod : So you try to solve the problem in terms of being relevant for the podcasts, the blogs, journalists, who are writing the content. What’s to stop anyone from abusing your service?
Andrew Cabasso: Fair question. We, so we do have some, we do have controls in place. We see who is sending emails, how many emails they’re sending. We also have spam guards. Basically, if people get marked as spam and their spam rate goes too high, we boot them from our platform.
NY Launch Pod : So what have been some success stories? How have you helped businesses get noticed? Is this something that’s actually working out there in the marketplace?
Andrew Cabasso: Yeah, so like a few examples of some case studies. So one particular person, she’s in digital P.R. So she has a course, she has a business that’s geared towards, offers copywriting services. And just by spending literally a few minutes each month, she pitches other podcasts in the digital marketing space to have her on as a guest. And she gets two to three podcast interviews a month, and that’s good for her, that’s all she wants. And that helps her increase her profile and get visibility in front of relevant audiences to hers. To other people, like a digital marketing agency for example, where you want to build links and get visibility for your clients. The traditional process for doing link building and doing outreach is very, very time and labor intensive. Like for me to spend time scouring Google, scraping LinkedIn, using research tools, that on its own can take hours. Then finding email addresses and validating the email addresses and finding the right contacts can take hours and then creating personalized emails for everybody also can take hours, but with our software, instead of it taking hours or days to do outreach, it just takes minutes.
NY Launch Pod : Well, that is phenomenal. How do people find out more about you and Postaga?
Andrew Cabasso: So you can check us out at postaga.com. With the promo code: NY Launch, you can get three months of our pro plan for 50% off.
NY Launch Pod : Well that is wonderful and I’m sure our listeners will appreciate that. Andy Cabasso thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Andrew Cabasso: Thanks Hal. Happy to be here.
NY Launch Pod : And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod or for transcripts of every episode, including this one, visit nylaunchpod.com. And if you are a super fan of the podcast… Andy, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Andrew Cabasso: Of course.
NY Launch Pod : If you are a super fan like Andy, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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