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the neediest and most in need of charity -- are not always those with the loudest voice.

Non Profits who serve them would rather write a grant and be evaluated by program officers (who hold expertise in specific giving areas) than waste time running in a popularity contest.

Those in charge of allotting corporate, shareholder dollars to charitable organizations have an ethical and fiduciary obligation to uphold best-practices when giving.

4. Optional: Determine which outlet gets the scoop In today’s media landscape, a story covered 15 minutes ago by another blog can already be considered old news. Therefore depending on the type of news and the market you’re in it might be wise to give one specific media channel the scoop.

5. Send personalized emails to journalists, under embargo If you decided not to give the scoop to a certain blog you can still let journalists know about your announcement before you actually make it public.

6. Write draft emails In the previous step you have probably only sent out the news to a handful of contacts on your contact list.

7. Make the announcement When the day finally comes, you can publish your press release (or have it published automatically if you’re using the schedule option).

8. Distribute your press release In a previous step you set up draft emails for all your PR contacts, now is the time to send them.

9. Thank the people that covered your story Congratulations! Now that your press release is out in the open you should see some coverage happening. Be sure to enjoy all the free publicity your company receives and thank the people that cover your story via a personal email so you can start building a relationship with them for your future press releases.

The trouble with my last company was that our experience in software development came from large companies, where your job is just to ship code.

So we thought that a launch was just about writing the code.  And, we did that in 6 months.  But, what we didn't account for was that in a startup, you don't have a ready large group of users just waiting to use your product. So, your launch time must also include a cycle of user experience and marketing.

So, if you do everything in series in a drawn out way like we did: build, market, measure, it's a cycle that can turn months into years.  Eric Ries suggests that shortening an iterative loop and going through such a loop multiple times quickly is the key to success.  I would take that a step further and suggest not only cutting activities to shorten that loop, but to do as much of this loop in parallel.

Our workflow looks like this: get your Unbounce or LaunchRock page up from Day 1 and start marketing before you have a product.  You can gauge interest and get signups from the very beginning until you're done with the first iteration of the product.  Start getting the Craigslist posts out there on Day 1 to get feedback and potential customers immediately.  Once you have enough of an idea of what to build, start mocking up your idea.  Get those mocks back out to potential customers to make sure you're on the right track.  Iterate as much as possible on paper before building, because it's much faster to re-draw than to re-code.  "Delete features" on your paper prototypes as well, reducing what you need to actually build in code.  Try to code as little as possible to shrink that build time to about 1-2 weeks.  By the time you're done building your first prototype, you've already acquired users from doing marketing in parallel.  This puts you in a position to start measuring usage and gauging interest immediately before iterating through that loop again.

Build, market, measure should happen as much as possible in parallel to reduce your launch time and keep your money, morale, and support up.