Evolution of a Public Relations Marketplace - with Gregory Galant, Founder and CEO, Muck Rack

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Greg Gallant, founder and CEO of Muck Rack, the Shorty Awards, and host of the Venture Voice podcast. We'll be covering four primary topics with Gregory today. First, the catalyst for founding Muck Rack. Second, overcoming friction between marketing, PR agencies and the press. Third, what role does the press play in a company's content marketing strategy? And fourth, the future of public relations in the AI era. Greg, would you take a moment to give a brief background of your journey becoming a guest of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Gregory Galant** (1:23)
Great. Thanks so much, Greg, and thanks for having me on.
I guess it starts with podcasting and it ends here on this podcast. But I'd started a podcast where I was interviewing founders about how they got started with their business, which today is very common podcast format. But back when I started it in 2005, no one had ever launched a podcast like that before. And this is kind of at the dawn of podcasting. It was just when I graduated college. Launched that podcast, had some great guests on in those early days. I had Reid Hoffman on back when LinkedIn was still just a 50 employee company. I had a founder of Yelp, Vanguard Group, a whole bunch of other amazing entrepreneurs. And one of the folks I had on the podcast was Ed Williams who is working on a startup called Odeo. Odeo, if you haven't heard of it, it's because it didn't work. It was supposed to be a podcast directory. It didn't work. So he pivoted to a little side project called Twitter. And that led me to sign up for Twitter way early. I got my first name on Twitter, just at Gregory, because I was the first Gregory to sign up for it, or at least the first one to think to grab their name. And then I was there for that early social media revolution. Later, I got at Gregory on Instagram, and it was right in the middle of that all. And realized there wasn't a way to figure out who you really need to pay attention to on social media. This was back like 2008 It's very hard to discover anyone on social based on your interests. So my co-founder, Lee Semel, and I had the idea that we could launch a site where people could vote for who's the best on social media and figure out how to help people discover new people on social media to follow and connect with. So we were thinking, well, tweets are short. So we called that the Shorty Awards, launched it, and originally the Shorty Awards was kind of a joke. Like we built the website in two weekends. Back then, social media was so early, it was hard to know where it was just going. A lot of people still thought it was a fad. But it became the top trending term on Twitter. We had 400 people come that first year to the awards show. We organized it in two months. It was a real whirlwind.
But then we realized, one thing that struck us was how many journalists came and covered the shorty awards. We had dozens of journalists come, we ended up getting coverage in the New York times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, all without doing a whole lot of work for it. We realized that social media really drives public relations, and yet there was no way to find where journalists were on social. We launched the first version of Muck Rack in 2009 as a free website for journalists, and it was free for anyone, so news junkies and people wanted to know about the news, could find journalists to follow. We launched that within 24 hours, it became the top trending term with journalists. We had over 10,000 journalists requests to get added to Muck Rack in just that first year. Then being in New York at the time, I had run into lots of PR people and they'd all tell me, I'm using Muck Rack to figure out which journalists to pitch. That made us realize, there's probably a business opportunity there. What if we built more tools for the PR people and solve this big problem that they have, which is finding the right journalists to pitch on a story idea. In 2011, we rebuilt Muck Rack from the ground up. We kept it all free for journalists in general, internet viewing. But then we added all these SaaS tools for the PR community and launched it with the SaaS model. Now, we're 15 years after that initial launch in 2009, but 15 years later, we're still at it. That SaaS model has really worked. We've scaled it up to thousands of customers, including lots of Fortune 500 companies. Pretty much every large PR agency uses it now, and lots of startups and up-and-coming companies too. We've got a team all over the world making it better every day.