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Thanks Kareem!

He was one of my favorite guests. I'd interviewed much more famous entrepreneurs than Fabrice, but the episode with him was one of my most popular because he was by far the most candid -- even telling me his net worth at every stage of his career.

There are risks to building in house too: Things will break over time Key programmer leaves, no good documentation or succession plan left behind New needs will arise (e.g. if you built an expense tracking app before smartphones, you'll now need to build a iPhone/Android app) Maintaining security - is your security team really better than the outsourced service's? API support Developer ecosystem

There's always a build vs. buy decision and sometimes you should build, but this is why even huge companies use Salesforce over maintaining an internal CRM.

We have engineers and we already spend a lot more on them than we do on SaaS. But we want them focused on building Muck Rack into an awesome PR tool for our customers, not internal tools unless they're specific to our product.

Even so I don't think there's any engineer we could hire for $60k salary (or any salary for that matter) who could effectively maintain all of the functionality we get from these products, but if you know of one please send them our way! http://sawhorsemedia.com/jobs/

Since we run two products (both Muck Rack and the Shorty Awards), we end up paying twice for some services like Github.

Agreed with everyone else here: don't submit that press release anywhere!

Short emails, 2-4 sentences, to the right journalists will be much more effective.

Check out our primer on how to write emails to journalists: http://muckrack.com/daily/2013/11/21/how-to-write-email-subj...

And if you still don't believe us on press releases, read the article I wrote for the PRSA that questions the press release's value, and debunks that it will help with SEO or social: http://comprehension.prsa.org/?p=6202

What's your goal for the press? To get users? Investors? Customers?

For a tech blog like you describe, don't bother with a press release. Best to send a short email describing why what you're doing is interesting. Most reporters prefer hearing from founders rather than PR people.

Journalists are like anyone else: They wake up in the morning wanting to do their job well and write about stories that will be interesting to their audience. If you do your research and pitch them a story that's interesting and up their alley they'll appreciate it. If you spam them they'll ignore it.

Find reporters who cover your beat using http://muckrack.com (full disclosure: my company made that site), follow them on Twitter, see what they like to write about, and start building a relationship by tweets or email based on what they're interested in.

There's no standard for the email to journalists, but just keep them short and immediately say why your web app would be interesting to their readers.

Love this service. I've used it for years on all my sites, great to know if you have a traffic serge before Google Analytics catches up. Amazing UI too. Receives far too little buzz for how great of product it is.

Well said Ramit. There was a great interview of Jeff Bezos by the now defunct Portfolio Magazine in which they asked him how important A/B testing is to Amazon's success. He said it was important but that still many decisions, such as launching the Kindle, need to "come from the heart".

In this age of analytics, I think a lot of small startups are overlooking the gut decisions they need to make and focusing too much on optimization (e.g. this HN question).