@ryanheybourn Had a very similar experience with another company called Prumio (https://www.prumio.com/) with a very similar proposition (too similar). Lost the money, no PR, no follow up, no way to contact. Highly caution startups thinking of trying out such services.

@ryanheybourn @karthik_mahadevan I had the exact same experience with Prumio. A complete scam. I disputed the charges and got my $$ back.

@ryanheybourn This is a smear campaign. Our service is 100% legitimate. If all the reviews and features on our website aren’t convincing enough, let me run through a close look at our operations & backend through a series of screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Gvb8fNB. As you can see here Howler is definitely not a scam. In fact, it took us a ton of effort to build, and continues to take us tons of time to run this. We're probably not charging enough. Here's a few more notes regarding your scathing review: 1. Yes, Aidem Network 1.0 was not perfect. Neither was Instaaa. On Instaaa 1.0's reviews, the word "scam" is mentioned 8 times. On Instaaa 2.0's reviews, it was mentioned 6 times. On Aidem Network? Zero. No one is calling us a scam, even if they're unhappy with the service. Likewise for Howler: 0 mentions of being a scam. Go check for yourself if you'd like. 2. Journalist privacy was a big issue for us. We interviewed at Y Combinator, and Paul Buchheit told us to be very careful about this. It's of a little less concern now, so we've actually resolved this and now share the complete email list for premium subscribers. 3. The expectation of a journalist outreach campaign shouldn't really be traffic. Sure you get traffic if they feature you, but the initial email blast, much less so––if any. They really only take a look at the pitch and say yes or no. They rarely click through unless they're *super* interested. 4. We didn't really "not reply to your email for weeks." You came to me asking for a refund. I told you we weren't going to give you one because we did everything promised on our website and had already incurred costs. Then you told us you were going to dispute the charge. We let you, believing we had a good case and trusting the bank. We were wrong, and as far as I know the bank sided in your favor. 5. I also recommend looking into Howler properly. We're legit. 6. We paid our Head of Campaigns for around 3 hours of work on your campaign. You paid $199. The hourly rate for someone like Frances (our Head of Campaigns) is ~$100/hr. I don't see how you can be concerned about the cost. Anywhere else offering a service like this at this price is probably a scam. We've barely made the economics work out. I hope this addresses everything and we can move on. Again, if you need any more proof Howler isn't a scam, see here: https://imgur.com/a/Gvb8fNB.

@ryanheybourn @juhaszhenderson Matt, what a pity you had to address this as anyone following you is well aware you are not out there to scam people. Kudos for addressing it so thoroughly and diplomatically. I would perhaps blur out the client names though? Privacy senses are tingling here...

@ryanheybourn @juhaszhenderson I've been with Matt since the launch of Aidem 1.0 (and Howler 1.0) and met his team in their NYC office. A "scam" is far from what this is. They're constantly working on pitching for their clients and improving the service, and they barely make enough doing it. Even Howlers company's earnings are publicly available for anyone to view. That's the epitome of full transparency. Would a "scam" company reveal their financials? Competition is good, but please keep it clean and have some good sportsmanship. No service is perfect; this subscription-based PR service is still a novel business model that takes time to build. At the price Howler costs, it's still worth it to use them than hire a dedicated outreach specialist.

@mungerology Thanks man! Yeah, a product launch is a great use-case. You could use Howler to quickly get attention for a new product. You could also just as easily use it for a more mature product that has some credibility in the marketplace already so long as you have some sort of catalyst (new partnerships, fundraising news, new milestone, new features, etc etc) What kind of product are you working on?

@juhaszhenderson That's reasonable. I'm working on a software product. I found you through Indie Hackers and have been following along with your 24 in 12.

@aatsai 🚀🚀🚀

@uren_d Thanks Uren! Pitches aren't A/B tested throughout the month, but we compare stats of each campaign and adjust based on that. Yes 400 new journalists targeted every month. Yes, 1 campaign / company / month. If you need to run multiple campaigns at once you can subscribe multiple times (and we can hook you up with a bulk discount)!

@karthik_mahadevan Hey Karthik! Sorry to hear about your experience with Prumio! I've been seeing a lot of "Prumio is a scam" reviews around the community: https://www.indiehackers.com/for.... cc'ing @ismaelyws What I know is he went MIA, deleted his Intercom, then never fulfilled any of his orders. (And there's some speculation that his entire personal identity was stolen from a semi-famous singer in the UK.) This is inherently fraudulent behavior. If you haven't already, I recommend disputing your charges with them. We're definitely not that! Here's a full walkthrough complete with screenshots of our entire order flow and backend (blurred out to protect sensitive info about our clients): https://imgur.com/a/Gvb8fNB. As you can see here Howler is definitely not a scam. In fact, it took us a ton of effort to build, and continues to take us tons of time to run this––we're probably not charging enough. 😅

@prsarahevans Thanks Sarah! Mind leaving your contact info in our live chat on our site? We'll get back to you asap!

@harrystrick Hey Harry! The app was a hoax we used to market our marketing agency. We never built the product because we didn’t think it’d be very good for the world. But the case study of this whole campaign is very much real. Rumblr was featured by over 200 media outlets in 4 days (like this Business Insider article, The Washington Post, The Independent, Fox News, etc)

@andrei_nedelcu Thanks Andrei! Journalists have made their contact information public with the intention of receiving pitches & news stories. So long as we don't "spam" them with irrelevant content like shopping discounts or affiliate marketing, this isn't technically considered spam and doesn't interfere with privacy regulations. In addition, we also follow CANSPAM guidelines and make it easy for journalists to opt out of our campaigns. In fact, we're actually an effort to reduce journalist spam by matching pitches to only the most relevant journalists. Our algorithms aren’t perfect, but they’re dramatically better than just blanket emailing static email lists you buy on the internet for a thousand bucks.