Story by
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
CEO and co-founder, TNWBoris is a serial entrepreneur who founded not only TNW, but also V3 Redirect Services (sold), HubHop Wireless Internet Provider (sold), and Boris is a serial entrepreneur who founded not only TNW, but also V3 Redirect Services (sold), HubHop Wireless Internet Provider (sold), and pr.co. Boris is very active on Twitter as @Boris and Instagram: @Boris.
When we decided to start this company, we needed to hunt down for writers.
We didn’t have a big budget so only one writer was needed. So we wrote down some requirements and tweeted them in hopes we would find that special someone we were looking for.
And nothing happened.
Nobody cared about some unknown company hiring one writer. And that makes sense. So we deliberated for a while and tried again from a new company account.
This time we didn’t say we were looking for a single writer – this time it was 18.
And something happened.
Within hours we were flooded with applications.
We also had journalists emailing us what the hell happened and what our plans were. Did we raise funding? We must have been VERY ambitious with our company if we were going to hire that many writers!?
We just smiled and said ‘no comment’ to most requests, which made us seem even more interesting. Pretty quickly we found our one writer and nobody ever followed up to enquire if we really hired the rest.
What I learned from that experience is that any story can be turned into a newsworthy story with a bit of creativity… and a little bluff.