During the week, I work as a publicist, pitching stories to journalists and editors. My response rates vary; good press is never a guarantee.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about branching out—perhaps inventing and launching a new product that could help others (and help me retire early, mildly rich).
I’ve already got the PR skills, but what could I sell? How might I pitch it? And could some of the AI tools I’ve been hearing so much about lend a hand throughout the process?
In my free time, I enjoy cooking for friends, which requires hosting at my Los Angeles apartment. The most difficult part is not the cooking itself (I use good recipes, and I follow them), but the cleaning that precedes these get-togethers.
I have myriad cleaning products, but one task feels especially Sisyphysean: dusting. Dust is a widespread nuisance across this sprawling metropolis, for reasons I’m not qualified to expound upon. But it accumulates in corners and windowsills, in sliding glass-door troughs and atop furniture, turning from brown to black if you let it linger for too long.
So I’ve got my problem—too much dust!—and a vague solution (something brilliant and high-tech that other dust-hating people could buy to improve their lives).
I’d heard of PRophet Earn before, an apparently first-of-its-kind platform for PR & comms pros that uses both generative and “predictive” AI to make pitching easier.
Here, I thought, was a tool that could help me address my professional challenges and allow me to sharpen a solution for the great enemy of my domestic life. Also, it's purpose-built AI, not an off-the-shelf product, which makes a big difference.
While I’m a full-time communications specialist, most of my methods so far have been pretty old-school: emailing press releases, following up, the occasional cold call.
Because of that, I was slightly worried that there’d be a steep learning curve with PRophet, but that wasn’t the case. The interface was intuitive—click a blue ‘New Project’ button on the upper-right corner of the dashboard, follow other blue buttons that act as guideposts for the user.
I created a new project titled “Avocado” because, well, who doesn’t love avocados? A text box popped up with six options for different types of content I could create: pitch, press release, bio, blog, byline, and social post.
In the real world, PR folks using PRophet Earn are already working for clients with defined products to promote. Because I was dabbling with the tool in a fantasy-baseball sort of way, I opted to start with “pitch,” deciding I’d use AI to help invent my new, revolutionary dusting device—The Avocado—as I went along.
PRophet asked that I type in a Headline / Title of at least 30 words, the raw prompt the platform would use to generate my pitch.
I quickly outlined the cleaning product of my dreams: “LA Solutions LLC Creates Avocado, the First-Ever Device to Swiftly, Easily Eliminate Dust Using Suction, Electromagnets, and Astrology. Avocado both Cleans and Prevents Future Dust from Adhering to Windowsills, Sliding Glass Door Troughs, and Other Tricky Spots.”
I knew that the more comprehensive my input, the stronger my output would be. Providing a short amount of information gives the AI more room to run wild and get creative, perhaps in directions I hadn’t intended.
But I was also still figuring out what my product was and how to talk about it. And to be frank, this is similar to an issue I face during my day job as a publicist, too—even when I’m working with real, not invented, material.
So I had the basics—the name of the product, what was new or noteworthy about it (PR 101: Outline what’s novel about your pitch!), and some details about how it functioned.
I selected “Professional” from a list of variable tones, which also include “Friendly,” “Luxury,” and Bold.” This would let me re-run and remix my drafts, making the wording more buttoned-up or casual or promotional.
Each of the resulting press release drafts were between 300–500 words. Because I had given PRophet only a barebones sketch of what my product was, the platform riffed a bit, inventing new content and angles from my sparse initial details.
This was amusing, but it also had a genuinely helpful, unexpected benefit—it illuminated the elements I’d neglected in the initial conception of my product.
The PRophet-generated press release suggested a price for The Avocado, an explanation of how astrology might aid the dusting process, and details about how to order The Avocado in the first place. It determined a way to charge the Avocado (via a USB port) and suggested benefits that I hadn’t even considered.
Dust is annoying, unsightly, and embarrassing if you’re having people over for dinner; the press release reminded me that dust is also a health issue. My product would help users’ air quality and especially benefit those with asthma and related conditions.
In addition to completing the daunting task of writing a press release in mere minutes, and confirming that I’m nowhere near ready to go on Shark Tank, this process suggested that I might want to reconsider crucial elements of what I was selling and the story behind it before I went out to journalists with the pitch (and, of course, to market).
Since writing a rough draft of my press release went much quicker than usual, I had time to go back and do that higher level, strategic thinking. PRophet was doing more than just generating text for me. It was also reflecting back to me my own assumptions and knowledge gaps.
After incorporating several key points from my PRophet drafts, I was ready to submit my press release to the platform in order to “Predict Interest.”
Here, PRophet generates a list of journalists who are likely to be receptive to your pitch. It does this by leveraging AI to comb through the output of journalists and publications over the prior 6 months, teasing out trends and topics to predict who might be a match.
PRophet categorizes its finds into “Top Tier Journalists,” “Journalists,” and “Podcasts” (if you elect to include this segment). PRophet also uses a percentage score to suggest how interested each individual might be in the pitch.
I was surprised to see PRophet’s predictions about interest in The Avocado: It thought that podcasters would be more engaged than traditional journalists would be. I skimmed the list, discovering names and outlets I wouldn’t have proposed on my own.
I especially liked PRophet’s top journalist recommendation in the podcast category: “Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News from WIRED.” This sounded like the perfect place to pitch, and PRophet predicted 82% interest from the podcast.
I clicked through to learn more about the median age, income, and gender skew of the podcast’s listeners, as well as their geographical locations and occupations.
PRophet makes it simple to scan an outlet’s “Most Recent” articles or episodes, which quickly allowed me to understand this podcast’s tone and angles. Gadget Lab favored puns, cleverness, and humor. Some recent episodes were titled “23andMe and You” and “We Robloxed So You Don’t Have To.”
It did seem like a good place to promote my imaginary, revolutionary dusting machine.
A dropdown menu suggested options for my personalized pitch to Weekly Tech News from WIRED. It could be “elaborative” (at least 250 words) or “to the point” (150 words or less). I opted for a “professional” tone and “to the point” pitch, though I also could have chosen “friendly,” “persuasive,” or “bold.”
When I clicked another blue button, “Draft Email,” PRophet took me to my Gmail account, where it generated a pitch email for me.
While I would need to tweak this message, I loved that the structure and the bones—the who, what, when, where, why—were already there. I revised the pitch, playing the role of an editor instead of writer.
In my day-to-day pitch writing at the office, I work on my own. Now, I felt I had a collaborator. As I reviewed and fine-tuned PRophet’s work, I better understood the fine points of what I was selling and trying to say.
Throughout this entire process, PRophet generated snippets of language I definitely wanted to appropriate: It suggested dusting “with a cosmic twist,” “celestial scheduling for your spring cleaning,” and the ability to “bring the stars” into a “home tech narrative.”
In the not-too-distant-future, PRophet Earn will also suggest top influencers who might be interested in various pitches, allowing me to find a dust-hating YouTube star who might appreciate being gifted an Avocado. (A related platform, PRophet Influence, already exists to streamline and manage influencer marketing partnerships—but that’s a whole different story.)
As I kept rolling, PRophet created a blog post for me and an Instagram post, suggesting possible images and videos that could accompany the text. Again, PRophet became a true partner in the creative brainstorming process. In under an hour, I found that I could create every kind of content under the product’s larger umbrella.
And with all that work done, I could move on to a more exciting task: conceptualizing The Avocado’s launch party! Maybe Erewhon could cater.
