Entrepreneur Profile: Peter Shankman of HARO

Help A Reporter Out, or HARO is the brain child of serial entrepreneur (and skydiver) Peter Shankman.

Here is a hypothetical: You are an entrepreneur and you want to connect with Press and Media to promote your brand. Or, you are a journalist on a tight deadline and need to find an expert in an obscure topic. You also have a major event coming up and want to connect with companies to solicit gift bags of swag. How would you be able to get your information out to the world to connect with others using the power of the internet? Oh, and you want to do all of this for free.

You would use HARO.

I recently interviewed Peter.  He is straightforward. Generous. Focused and smart.

From Shankman.com “Peter is perhaps best known for founding Help A Reporter Out, (HARO) which in under a year has become the de-facto standard for thousands of journalists looking for sources on deadline, offering them more than 100,000 sources around the world looking to be quoted in the media. HARO is currently the largest free source repository in the world, sending out over 1,200 queries from worldwide media each week. HARO’s tagline, “Everyone is an Expert at Something,” proves over and over again to be true, as thousands of new members join at helpareporter.com each week.

In addition to HARO, Peter is the founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc., a boutique Marketing and PR Strategy firm located in New York City, with clients worldwide. His blog, which he launched as a website in 1995, (www.shankman.com) both comments on and generates news and conversation.”

You can listen to my Interview with Peter Shankman of HARO.

You can also listen here Peter Shankman of Haro on How I Changed Careers

Below are interesting quotes from the interview.

Peter Shankman, the brains behind HARO

“I [built Haro] with one computer, a coffee maker and two obese cats.”

“I think growing up is what people say then they are not having fun.”

“I think the beauty of what happened with HARO is that I came up with something that people immediately understood…we offered a product that everyone could use and want to use.”

“Have such great customer service that people want to use it and share it with their friends”

“Everything I do involves technology…I can work from anywhere..so I’m not stuck behind a desk.  I might be at the drop zone about to go on another sky dive answering emails.”

“The biggest problem for entrepreneurs when they start a company..is that they tend to listen too much to friends. For every one person that says this is great there will be  a thousand people who are jealous and tell you this is terrible and it will never succeed. Don’t listen to them. Just do your thing.”