Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Nima Olumi CEO of Lightyear Strategies, a public relations and technology company, simplifying the process of digital branding. Nima thank you so much for joining the show. I'm exciting to to chat with you about the different kind of strategies as we chatted before the show around how you deploy kind of public relations.

And maybe even some things that companies aren't doing well and some things that they can improve upon. I think we all think about brand in a specific way, but you know, how you deployed is so, so unique and so specific I feel like, to the types of companies. But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started like your strategy?

Nima: Yeah. So, so I mean, before we got involved in the public relations space we were a marketing business, so we represented a bunch of different clientele. You know, in the marketing space. We did everything for them from lead generation to search engine optimization to designing advertisements.

And we pretty much had like the entrepreneurial curse of like trying to do too many things. We were trying to wear a lot of different hats and we're just very like ADHD and naturally curious towards like a bunch of different angles. Which was fun from a learning perspective cuz I would say we learned a lot.

But we started specializing in public relations right when Covid started. Because one of our clients asked us to figure out a way to get. To the New York Times. And we were able to get them in the New York Times multiple times. We got them in Bloomberg, we got them in realtor.com and some other places.

And they got a 35 million funding round as a result of all the press, we got them. And the ceo, the company was super stoked and we were kind of looking for something more interesting to specialize in, and we saw the value that we brought firsthand from the PR standpoint, and we started focusing just on PR.

Since then.  

Julian: Yeah. Describe public relations for those of the audience who don't know. And, and we typically, you know, work with companies who are building software and, and who are looking to maximize their, their public image and, and their brand association with, with the technology. How would you define public relations and what's like the important key features that companies should think about when thinking about you know, when deploying public relations  

Nima: Yeah, I think a lot of things, like, there's a lot of misconceptions that I'll start with with public relations. One of them being that it's always about like cleaning up messes, you know? So when people ask me, when I do pr, they're always thinking that I'm like cleaning up some disaster, like you know, that, that some big company had or something, and.

I mean, we could do that. I mean, don't get me wrong, but that's not really the focus of the work we do. We typically put brands on a pedestal and we'll promote them to a lot of different media outlets. Public relations to me means the process of getting people written about in a, in a newspaper.

We don't really work with like influencers on social media and stuff. We really work with like, you know, pen and paper. You know, print journalism and obviously some of the, you know, more reputable outlets that are, you know, exclusively online as well. But it's a cool process. I think I really enjoy it because I feel like we get to network ourselves with some of the world's most renowned journalists and, and also some of the world's most renowned, you know, company owners get to really know their brands at a deep and.

Personal level and then figure out how to communicate their messages in a very concise way that represents their best interests.  

Julian: Yeah. When, when you go through the, the process of representing a brand, what, what's the discovery process look like? What are you trying to learn about the product? What are you trying to learn about their organization?

How do you, how do you define what you want to highlight? When, when you do take them on and start to promote their business and put, put their brand on our pedestal

Nima: Yeah. Well, I think you know what a lot of public relations companies mess up on is like, they try to do too much. They try to say like, way too much information.

Because of our marketing background, we are very good at having a concise message that's very simple to the point and has a lot of those interesting information right at the front. I always ask companies to tell me and communicate very effectively. What they do, how they make money, who are their ideal clients, what are the most interesting, you know, stories, you know, within their industry.

If they can send me, you know, marketing materials, like their pitch deck like PDFs that they have, you know, in-house you know, communicate to us what topics we should focus on, what topics we should avoid. And then it's our job essentially to go out there and review over 500 queries a day that we get from reporters.

Asking us questions to take a lot of information and do like an email marketing campaign weekly. Yeah. Where, where we market you. Interesting storylines that are newsworthy at that time to reporters in their target demographic. So if we were representing someone in cybersecurity marketing, like, you know, stuff about penetration testing and what are some of the interesting things that have come about in the world of cyber liability in the last like seven days to journalists who like write in that field.

and then it's just about maximizing the relationships that you have with journalists, figuring out how to scalably, organize the warm relationships that you have and. You know? Yeah. Really just focus on bringing value, you know, to, to journalists, helping them find data, helping them find quality information to bolster the articles that they're actively working on.

Julian: Yeah. When should a company start thinking about PR and bringing on a firm like yourself?  

Nima: I mean, it totally depends. I, I mean we typically work with like larger enterprises who have usually some sort of established funding. Those are the people I would say, , you know, typically can afford public relations.

We are a luxury service. We start at $8,000 a month. So we are definitely not cheap to work with. But we are very good at what we do. You know, So I would say if people are chasing a funding round if they're very confident in their product in the long term viability of it that once they've really gone and seen like there's a market fit for what they're doing and, and they've seen that response from the market and you're really trying to scale, I think it's important to have a really quality public relations.

Presence and, and I mean, what we do is we, we, you know, it's not just like a YouTube ad or an Instagram ad or something like we are, we are getting you people written about in really high quality periodicals. And then you can share those, you know, You know, links and you know those sources and put on your site that you've been featured in these main places.

And if you have, it can be the difference if someone's gonna give you a 2 million contract and not if you've been put in, in places that you know are reputable because a players wanna work with a players. And, and these big companies want to, to see that, that the public You know, I would say validated the messages is a really strong signal.

So, so we operate as a middle man in that space. I mean, we read books like all day, every day because it just makes us better writers and, and we know how to make the people that we represent more intriguing to reporters.  

Julian: Yeah. What would you say, you mentioned some things that PR companies don't typically do well by, you know, maybe, maybe focusing on too many different points, but what are some ways companies may, you know, not be focusing on in terms of building their brand or, or building some kind of general focus or trust or relationship or prestige?

You know, where are companies missing that you've seen in a lot of ways in that and not getting their message.  

Nima: I think one is like not putting it in the right, in front of the right audience is one thing. Another unspoken rule of PR is you should never pitch yourself to a reporter. So like I've been in many periodicals and stuff like I've been in.

Forbes, I've been in cnn, I've been in New York Times and stuff, but none of those times did I personally pitch myself to that reporter. I might have seen the query for it, but I sent it to someone on our team and they pitched me for it. So that's a big rule. Never, ever. If you're a company, try to pitch yourself to reporters.

You always need a third party to do it, ideally someone outside of your organization. But if you're doing it inside your organization, then definitely not yourself. That, because, you know, if you think about it, It just like it's more credible if the third party is pitching someone to a reporter than they don't at least seem biased, even though they are.

Yeah, it's just an unspoken rule in the industry.  

Julian: That's so fascinating. Is it, it seems like the, a lot of psychology around just like having somebody vouch for you in a way, is that, is that kind of where that mentality comes from or, or is it just how the industry.  

Nima: You know, I couldn't tell you. I've just, I, I'll tell you just from trying it myself, you know, pitching myself or if we had a client pitch themselves, you just don't get responses the same way as if you have a third party do it.

And a lot of brands are going out there and doing it. Another thing that I would say is like for a brand, whether you're a 50 person company, a 30 person company, a hundred person company, it's not very efficient to do public relations in house. The reason for that is , you know, if you do PR one, you need to know how to do it.

There's, there's like, you know, people in public relations don't really share the information of, of how to do public relations effectively. It's a learning process and we're always growing, but there are a few different softwares and programs that, that we use to do it more effectively. In order, like for example, to get the 500 queries a day, we use a program called Har Sense for Help a Reporter out.

We get 500. Day. And they're asking all of these different questions and they're saying, Hey, you know, I have a, I'm, you know, my name is John Roberts. I'm a reporter at, you know, CNBC and I'm writing an article about the FTX collapse. And you know, what, you know, you know, crypto companies or web three companies can do in order to prevent this from happening or what investors can look for.

So, you know, we represent a few people in the crypto space. When we see an article of that nature, we pitch them, right. But we represent a lot of people. So if I just represented one person, right, like going through a Harrow feed would get pretty exhausting. I would be like, oh, I'm not always seeing queries that are relevant to what my person's doing or what my one company that I represent is doing.

And you're probably not gonna be really good at writing cheeky subject lines. Like we have an over 66% open rate on our subject lines off queries, which is asinine, but it's because of our marketing background. A lot of people look at Harrow, for example, and they're like, oh, like I don't get, you know, enough stories on that, that are quality.

they look at it a few times and they don't see something that interests them. But, you know, we get, we get 500 queries a day. We actively go through those because we represent so many different people. It's more efficient, you know, for us to specialize in that process and do it versus, you know, a company of 50 people try to have their own like internal communications team.

For a person that's likely not very skilled at the job. A lot of companies I've seen that have. Process just aren't getting any quality coverage. And they have a negative, you know, taste in their mouth from public relations just because they feel like they haven't gotten anything really out of it.

Yeah. But I would say that person isn't trained or doesn't know how to do it really well. The people that are best at public relations are either working really high up at like a billion dollar company running the comms efforts there. Or they're working for a public relations industry, typically people who just do, like internal comms is only one person, team at a company of 40 people, like, just in my experience, like aren't  

Julian: very effective.

Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, in, in regards to kind of you building relationships with brands and, and, and just building, you know, take it a step back. Going off the technology bit, what? What are some ways, I guess that you said horrors is one technology that enables you to. Create a more efficient process around, you know promoting a company and, and kind of creating a web of, of association between the companies that you have and, and addressing a lot of queries.

What are some other ways that, you know, you use technology to I guess kind of comparably engage and in better pr or create better strategies for other companies or your clients that, that you.  

Nima: Yeah, that's a great question. Julian and it kind of segues us to our, our technology aspects. So we've taken all the retainer money that, that companies have given us have been kind enough to, to give us for, you know, quality representation.

And we poured it into hiring the best software developers that we can find. And we've. Software as a service, particularly for the public relations industry to help other public relations companies do their jobs more efficiently and effectively in order to drive more. Earn media placements for the clients that they respectively represent.

Mm-hmm. . The reason for that is like, you know, when we entered the space, I mean, like, I had a lot of pressure on me to drive press for people. Like, people were like, get me in the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or Ink or whatever, or else, you know, so I'm like, right, I'm gonna go figure it out.

So I tried everything. I researched every tool, like I wrote every best email. Like, you know, I'm very motivated in that sense and I, I was shocked by the lack of quality software applications in this space. Yeah. And it became evident that the reason for it is because software developers don't understand public relations and public relations.

People don't understand software development. So we built our own SAS tech. For other public relations companies to be able to use in order to track journalists more effectively, research all of the queries that have ever come out in order to come up with more creative headlines get. Links and article titles, you know, from the, you know, top out, you know, top 50 outlets in the world, you know, sorted by industry for them daily.

We created an email validator, which helps public relations. People upload like a list of, you know, journalist prospects that they have. And send a clean list so that it, it, it eliminates like any sort of bounce rate and ensures that your emails won't go to spam. So we created like an in-house suite we're calling it PR Monkey, that's the name.

So I'm happy to show it to you if you want to see it.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. You can do free share.  

Nima: Yeah, so this is our new landing page. So it's like pr, productivity reimagined. You know, we show the, you know, the table and the different tools that we have. This is just the landing page. And if, you know, people can go and sign up, see a little bit about our team and, you know, the people that built this product this is the application.

So these are the four tools that we've built so far. One of them is the HARO table. So right now the way HARO works is if you go into my inbox and you type in haro you'll see like, and Haro just again is a, a website that Anyone can go and sign up for. And if you have any interest in public relations, I highly recommend you go and do it.

It's just like where anyone can really get a story. You can sign up as either a journalist or a source. Because we're a source, we sign up as a source. And when you sign up as a source, you start getting like 500. Questions a day that people are, you know, asking like all sorts of stuff. So you'll see like, you know, someone's  

writing an article about explaining death to children, like how riveting you hope, hopes a luck from Psych Centrals, like looking for psychiatrists and, you know, specialists in the children's and mental health.  

And if we felt like that would be a good story for someone we represented, we would pitch them. Right here, data box is asking, an AR is asking a question about how many accounts can one agency account manager  

handle. You know, all sorts of stuff that the reporter gives us their name, what media outlet they're writing for, their data, their deadline, what queries they have. But if you look at my inbox, none of this information was organized. Like, yeah, this is just from last Wednesday. Like, and no one was compiling all of this information. You could see like cool outlets like Fortune or posting in here looking for credit card experts to speak on, getting a cash advance, like all sorts of stuff.

Right? So that's why we went and We built our tool because we were like, Hey, you know, people should be able to pitch more effectively on these applications. They should be able to save pitches. So that if you're a PR person, your job is to get, you know, clients written about in the press. Like you can have a tool Yeah.

That allows you to like, share and have more actionable metrics. So, you know, we upload all of the hos, you know, from, you know, previously, and I can put in a search like real estate or inflation. Whatever it is. And then you, you can see all of the you know, articles that are about real estate. So, you know, you can see, I put in real estate that brought up almost 1200 results right in our feed.

And if you're a public relations person and you're like, Hey, how do I come up with the most interesting storyline possible? It's really effective and useful to have a tool that allows you to kind of like go through all of this stuff and see what different reporters are asking and save it and test different headlines and get a sense of what's hot and what's not.

So if you can see, oh, like this storyline, you know, related to inflation is interesting, or, you know, this one's not. If you also have a journalist that you really like, like I know Leslie Cook very well from money.com. I can go type her into our feed and see what articles she's recently posted about what questions have been on her mind.

As a public relations person, you're always wondering what reporters are thinking so that you can get on their good side and have them write something for people that you represent. And what better way to figure out what reporters or want or. What questions they've been having or what data they're really interested in.

Then organizing all of the information from HARO in a way that it can be more easily accessed and read.  

Julian: Incredible. What, what's been the transition like going from obviously extremely PR focused and, you know, in, in creating a tool around. The experience of a PR agency or a company that, that's looking to, you know, be way more efficient in the process of submitting or, or pitching their, their clients.

What's been the, how, how is the transition? What were you not good at then that you're, you're better at  

Nima: now?  

so I mean, like, I would say like, just. One of the things that took us a while to figure out was figuring out how to index press releases. and I would say like, we didn't even figure that out until like, You know, early 2022 which is embarrassing to admit, but it's just like we didn't know, right?

And like before we would take press releases and we would just blast them to the media. And I thought that was how you like, automatically index the press release. But no, there's a way that we figured out after that you just, you know, push it in and then you automatically produce 700 links for one article, for one press release.

So little tricks like that were really. from our SaaS, you know, developing our SaaS product and building out some of the other features like the journalist Tracker, which is my favorite feature. It just came by, you know, asking different public relations companies, you know, what kind of, what kind of problems do you guys have?

Like, you know, how, how do you want, how do you, how could you view yourself, like increasing the efficiency of, you know, the services that you offer. You know, pr people write more than journalists. Like there's seven public relations people for every journalist in America. It's pretty crazy. So there's seven professional convincers trying to convince every journalist in America to, you know, write something, you know, for what they want.

So there's a lot of money in a, in a space. It's a pretty hidden industry of hidden persuaders. You know, we're not supposed to exist, so a lot of people don't wanna. Build software that enables us to do our jobs effectively. But, you know, public relations is a college major in America. I mean, it's a very, very big industry.

A lot of people do it professionally.  

I'll show you the the other like tool too, if you wanna check it out. Yeah, this is the journalist tracker. So pretty much you just enter your email and you upload a CSV of names of journalists that you know. So, like I know 400 journalists personally that I've worked with on a bunch of different articles.

I enter. List of 400 journalists that I know. And then what we want to do is enable with this the journalist tracker to enable public relations, people to utilize the warm relationships that they have more effectively throughout the journalist community. So if you know a journalist personally, it's much easier for the you to convince them to write on the topic that interests you you know, depending on the people that you're representing.

So the way this tool works is like, like I upload 400 of the journalists that I. And then, you know, let's, you know, today's Monday, so Friday was a workday. Of the 400 journalist that I know, let's say 82 of them wrote an article that was submitted on Friday. Monday morning, I get an email that's like, Hey, NEMA, good morning.

Of the 400 journalists, you know, 82 of them wrote an article. Here are the links and titles of, of their articles with their subheadings for you. Like all organized one by one. The way that like a HARO feed was organized one by one with just headlines here, so that like the person can go through their warm list of journalists that they know.

In an effective manner without having to look up, you know, the individual profiles for 400 people and see whether they wrote something or not. That's how, that's how public relations people are, are, are currently doing it. And it's not super. effective.

Julian: Yeah. I I can also see how much that makes you just better at creating titles and creating content around those, you know, people, you have relationships already. It's a, it's a hack to kind of know them better and better and, and if you're assuming pitching something on another query that they're asking you, go back to that data and.

What probably got them excited about that particular publishing that, that they just had. What's, what's some of the biggest challenges that you face today?  

Nima: Some of the biggest challenges that we face. I would say my personal biggest fault would be like not being super organized. But we've been very fortunate to be able to hire team members that.

You know, fill in spots that, that I, I don't do. So, you know, very design oriented, very organized, sort of, people have helped kind of fill in a lot of the holes in our, in our business that are around organization, making sure we get client reports out on time and stuff. So that has been a godsend in terms of, you know, removing anxiety and, you know, problems from my.

You know, something we're, we're hoping to do in, in 2022 or very early 2023 is go after a serious capital erase. So I wouldn't so much call that a problem. But it's something that, that we're doing. I mean, we've, we've gotten to $700,000 of ARR without any in outside investment, without a loan from the bank without any funding at.

And the reason for that was very calculated. It was done so that I just felt like before taking anyone else's money I wanted to figure out all the problems in the kinks in our business model. Make sure that we weren't losing customers anymore. You know, make sure that. We didn't waste, you know, other people's money before I had wasted my own.

And you know, we were very fortunate that we had a lot of people that liked what we were doing. You know, liked our approach when it came to public relations and they were willing to believe in us from an, from an early stage. And we learned a lot throughout that process. I'm very grateful for the opportunities that we were given.

Julian: Yeah. Incredible. Long-term vision wise, what is the long-term vision for. , like your ventures and, and overall with, with the product as well. If everything goes well,  

Nima: of. Yeah, I, I mean, look like our, our rallying cry for, for PR monkey right now, it's called NY Strategies. That's, that's the server it's available on, but eventually it's gonna be rebranded as PR monkeys is to build the best public relations tech stack, in the entire industry.

Cision is a 2.5 billion company. And they have a basic SQL database with some people's freaking contact information that they sell for like eight grand a year people. So, you know, like I really like. love building software. I have a background in software development. I've taken about 240 hours of software development courses.

So I'm by no means like coding every day. That's not my day to day job, but I, I understand, you know, how to use an editor. I have a background in front end development, so in Python, which has been very useful to figuring out how to build, you know, applications that are like able to be built, like knowing the difference of what's possible and what's not.

But the goal is just, You know, get, get a funding round, which will allow us to scale more. I mean, we're very cash positive and, and we're, we're taking the, the risks like, you know, immediately because we're confident in what we're building. But just, you know, getting the software in front of people.

Really enabling other public relations people to feel empowered by the work that they do. I, I think is really important to me. when we get an email as a public relations person, when we get an email back from a reporter and they say they want to interview our client, it's like sweet serotonin. you know, in our, in our brains because that's, that's like anxiety relief.

Like as a PR person, you don't know what reporters are going to want. One week from now. You can have guesses and like inclinations and stuff, but you can't know for sure. So, you know, like today we got our clients written about in, it was in Washington Examiner, you know, Bloomberg. And what was the other one?

Was Examiner Bloomberg and, yeah. Forbes. And, and you know, like when we get those article placements for people, it's just like, it just relieves anxiety because people are like, oh, Nima you guys are doing a good job. Right? And it's like, sometimes we have a bad couple of days. Sometimes we have a bad week, and.

You know, all you can control as a public relations person is the storyline, the quality of your warm relationships and, you know, putting it out in front of the right people with the right copy, with the best storyline possible. I mean, the number one things that journalists say that they look for is the storyline.

So our software enables other PR people to come up with. More high quality storylines that will not only save their lives and make them feel better, but it will, it will contribute to creating more quality journalism for the world. And that, that's something that I'm, I'm very passionate about. I love that.

Julian: I love that. I always like to ask this question, but you, in particularly, since you said you read every day and you're always diving into books what books or people have influenced you the most, whether it was early or even currently now in your.  

Nima: I think the best book everybody should read if they want to, you know, you know, get involved in entrepreneurship and stuff like that.

The number one book is The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Anyone who hasn't read that book definitely go out there and get it. I'm a big fan of like reading philosophy and, and economics, but The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is a whole book about how to print money for yourself. So if you don't go read that you're just losing out.

That's one I would recommend. I really like this guy Christopher Locke. Reading his book right now. I dunno if you heard of him, but he, he died. But he has a few books I recommend called The Culture of Narcissism. This one's pretty good too. It's a little long, but it's called The True and Only Headed.

And then one called The Revolts of the Elites. And then I, I really like anything by Ray Dalio. So I think his like economic analysis It's just spot on. He's the CEO of Bridgewater. He's written principles of course, and also the changing world order. And then anything by UAL, Noah Harry probably said his name wrong, but he, he wrote Sapiens, he wrote Homo Deuce and 21 Questions for the 21st Century.

I think he's a phenomenal writer. I, I just think books are like, the, like books just have a lot of really cool hidden secrets you know, in them. And, and if you want to figure out, you know, things that are useful to you, you should stick your face in the mud and read as much as you can.  

Julian: I love that I always like to ask this question usually sparingly, but is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have?  

Nima: No, no, I, I, I don't think so. You know, I hope, you know, what, what we shared was, was useful you know, to to general audiences. And a lot of people typically are, are curious how public relations works.

Because they know it's valuable for their business but they're not really sure how it works. So, yeah. I'm, I'm always down to be very transparent with the way that we drive press for people share that information and answer any questions that, that people have.

Julian: Amazing. Well, last question. I, I know we're at the end of the show, but I always give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. You know, what are your LinkedIns, your Twitters, your. We obviously saw ally strategies.com where we can go use the app, but where can we get involved then if I'm, you know, a potential client looking for PR and, and looking to get my brand out there, where can I find you and, and where can I be supporting?

Nima: Yeah. So our website is lightyearstrategies.com. My email is nima@lightyearstrategies.com. You can message me. Or you can find me on LinkedIn SMO Lumi, founder of Lightyear Strategies on LinkedIn. You can hit up our sales team, which consists of Madeline and, and Moritz. Or you can hit me up and we'd be happy to give you a demo and, and give our our recommendations on, on how we can increase quality media placements. For people's business.  

Julian: Cool. Well, Nima thank you so much for not only sharing your expertise and, and your journey in public relations, but how you're looking to enable other companies to you know, be more efficient, be better, and even, and scalable at, at creating better content for all of us, the audience to read and, and be a part of. And I hope you enjoyed yourself and thank you again for joining the show.  

Nima: Of course. Thank you.  

Julian: Of course.