I'm incredibly excited to announce Brooklyn Bridge Ventures' investment in Plum Print. Plum Print turns your kid's artwork into buyable merchandise like coffee table books, and soon note cards, framed prints, and calendars. While other apps store art for future printing, Plum Print is different because it doesn't require large amounts of time for you to do it yourself. You throw everything in a box and Plum Print does the hard work for you, returning the art and a completed keepsake. So, yes, they're conceding the market of parents who have enough time to scan hundreds of pieces of artwork a year.
I don't think that's a big market. :)
I'll talk more about my investment in another post, but what I really loved about their announcement today was how great the article in Techcrunch was. Sometimes, you send some info over to a reporter and they do what needs to be done, but the result is the same kind of story you see everywhere else. Yes, I'm accusing tech journalists of barely rewriting press releases.
And you know what, why shouldn't they?
You sent them the same pitch you sent everywhere else. If they bang something out in twenty minutes, you'll link to it, you'll get some traffic back, they'll get traffic--it's transactional. If you treat PR like a transaction, that's the way press will treat you back.
So when Meg and Carolyn wanted help on their announcement, I knew the right person to cover it from the tech side--Sarah Perez from Techcrunch. I met Sarah in person at Techcrunch Disrupt in NYC a few years ago. We had connected by e-mail about Tinybop and I knew she was interested in kids apps and companies. She's a mom herself and her family is a big part of why she lives down in Florida. So, she knew why I was sending her the Plum Print story and I, just as importantly, I knew why I was sending her the Plum Print story.
I just read the story she wrote and it's fantastic.
It's comprehensive--it covers all the major points about their new upcoming product line, the fundraising partnerships they're striking with PTAs, it's got great photos and it really gets to the value proposition while fairly noting what else is out there.
We didn't get a ton of press out there about this seed round as it turned out to be a very busy funding story day, but I'd rather have one great story like this than a dozen reprints of a press release.
Thanks, Sarah. It's a great reminder for me to be a lot more thoughtful about who I'm sending which stories to and treating journalists like humans rather than distribution centers.