Know who Peter Shankman is? If not, sit down because we’ve got some great news.
Peter is the original founder of HARO. He sold it to Vocus which then got consumed by Cision which recently got turned into Connectively. In that process, there’s been a mass exodus and negative sentiment towards the end of the the HARO Email Queries which we posted about 2 weeks ago.
3 Weeks Ago: In response to Cision’s move to kill the HARO email queries and force everyone to login to their new app and pay to pitch, Peter had the following to say in his LinkedIn post from 3 weeks ago:
No one is going to login 3x a day. HARO worked BECAUSE it was an email, BECAUSE it was intrusive. This is an incredibly stupid move. It’s going to end HARO, mark my words.
Peter Shankman
In that post, he also says: So I may have done a thing: https://helpeveryreporter.com/
And that right there is the beginning of the HERO story 😛
Goodbye HARO, Hello HERO!!
April 18: Fast forward and on April 18th, the first email arrived in our inboxes from HERO.
And just like that, PitchResponse was the first app to consume and display all the queries to enable our userbase to respond fast and land some pitches. We had them in the app within a few hours. And since then, the HERO queries have been visible within minutes.
For reference, here’s what the first email looked like:
Notice the part that I highlighted regarding its crazy growth: almost at 10,000 members in just over 24 hours
If that doesn’t showcase how desperate the media industry was for a Connectively replacement, then I don’t know what will. Maybe the fact that there were 40 queries in that first email. Or by April 22nd (only 4 days later), there were 13,000 members. Or that they’ll soon be sending two emails per day.
In short, HERO Queries are coming in daily and journalists and sources are flocking towards it. With that we bid farewell to the HARO era, and welcome the HERO queries to our daily lives.
05/01/2024 UPDATE: We’ve been processing HERO queries consistently without issue for the last 12 days.
