Digital PR for a small product: the study, not the pitch

A writer's job is to tell their readers something they did not know. Your funding round, your redesign and your new feature are things you did not know, not things they did not know.

A figure is different. If you can say what is true across ten thousand sites, or what changed in a market this year, the writer has a paragraph they cannot get anywhere else, and the citation carries a link because that is how attribution works.

You do not need a research budget. You need a question whose answer is inside data you already touch.

Worked example. PingFox monitors uptime. It crawls the status pages of a thousand well-known products and counts how many are hosted on the same infrastructure as the product they report on. That is a question an engineer, a journalist and a rival all want answered, and only somebody with the crawl can answer it.

• Aggregate, never individual: no customer is identifiable, ever.
• Say the sample: how many, from where, over what period.
• Publish the method so someone can disagree with it.
• Pick a question you would read about if a rival published it.

A study that cannot be quoted does not get quoted. The page has a fixed shape and it is not a blog post.

1. 1

   One headline finding, in the title

   The title is the sentence a writer will paraphrase. Put the figure in it, and the population it describes.

2. 2

   The findings as a list, near the top

   Four or five lines, each a complete fact with its number. A writer on deadline reads this and nothing else.

3. 3

   One chart per finding

   Simple, labelled, with the axis units. Give each an alt text that states the finding, so it can be read and quoted without the image.

4. 4

   The method, in full

   What you collected, how, when, what you excluded, what could be wrong. This is what separates a study from marketing.

5. 5

   A line granting permission

   State that the figures may be reproduced with a link to the page. Writers check.

6. 6

   A stable URL and a date

   Put the year in the page, not the URL, so the update next year keeps the links.

Publish it on your own domain, at a path you will keep: yourproduct.com/research/status-pages-2026. Not on a third-party publishing platform, where the links accrue to somebody else.

You are not pitching a press list. You are writing to the small number of people who have already written about this subject in the last year.

1. 1

   Build the list by reading

   Search the subject and collect the bylines of the last year of coverage: trade press, newsletters, the big blogs in your field, the podcasts. Twenty names is a full list for a niche.

2. 2

   Find the person, not the desk

   Their contact is usually on their profile, their personal site or their social bio. Many publish an email precisely for this.

3. 3

   Write one paragraph each

   The finding, the population, the link, and one sentence on why it matters to their beat. No attachment, no embargo theatre, no boilerplate about your company.

4. 4

   Offer the raw data

   A writer who can re-cut your numbers writes a better piece and cites you more precisely. Offer the table as a file if they want it.

Subject: 1 in 5 status pages sits on the infrastructure it reports on

Hi Marta,

We crawled the status pages of a thousand products and found that a
fifth are hosted on the same provider as the service they report on, so
they go down together. Method and full table here:
pingfox.com/research/status-pages-2026. Happy to send the raw data if
it is useful for your reliability coverage.

Thomas, PingFox

That subject line is the story. If it is not interesting to a stranger, the study is not ready and no email will save it.

For one founder, working alone, a study of this kind is a week of real work spread over a month.

• A day to choose the question and check you can actually answer it.
• Two days to collect and clean the data, whatever the source.
• A day to write the page, with the charts and the method.
• A day to build the list of writers and send the emails, by hand.
• An hour a week afterwards to answer, to send raw data, and to log who covered it.

Most of the value arrives late. The first wave is coverage in the weeks after publishing. The second is people citing the figure for the next two years, because it is the only number available, which is why the yearly update matters more than the launch.

• Do not commission a survey whose conclusion is that people need your product. Readers and editors see it instantly.
• Do not round or reframe until the finding is exciting. A quiet, true figure survives scrutiny; an inflated one gets you a correction.
• Do not buy placements. A paid article that passes ranking is a link scheme under Google's policy, and it should carry a sponsored attribute, which removes the reason you bought it.
• Do not mass email a scraped media list. It is the fastest way to be blocked by the twenty people who matter in your field.
• Do not hide who funded the study. You did. Say so on the page.

One honest study, updated every year, out-earns a quarter of press releases. It also keeps working while you build the product, which is the only kind of marketing a small team can afford.