😸 How to Pitch The Wall Street Journal

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

In this edition: 

• How to get your seed-stage startup spotted by mainstream media
• A short history of Vimeo’s evolution from YouTube competitor back to private company
• Watch out, Miyazaki — AI is coming for your feature-length films
• The most popular new products this week 

Get the carafe, grab a seat, and go on reading.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Tired of being bombarded with to-do items, notifications, and other nonsense like “pick up the kids”? On this day in 2020, the sun rose on version 2.0 of this “minimal calendar to organize everything.” It was #1 Product of the Day and is still lighting up iOS screens.

Lessons from Athena’s surprising coverage and what founders can learn about finding the right reporter, framing stories, and pitching press.

By Lindsay Amos, former communications head at Y Combinator

The Wall Street Journal rarely covers seed-stage startups — let alone one raising just $2.2M. That’s why I was surprised to see Athena, an early-stage company working on how large language models surface brand-related content, featured in Katherine Blunt’s article about the demise of traditional Google search.

Instead of dismissing it as a blip (and because I’m a nerd), I dissected the bigger-picture story: what the founders emphasized, how the reporter framed it, and the pitch that might have landed them coverage. It turned into a case study I shared throughout The To Do List Summit, a one-day event for startup founders on reaching audiences across press, video, social, and events. (The next one is November 8 in San Francisco, and I hope to see you there.)

Some attendees even asked if Athena was a client of mine. Nope.* This was just me geeking out on the puzzle of storytelling — the way a narrative gets pieced together, why a journalist pauses, and how founders can learn from it. Because the better you understand the anatomy of a story, the better you can tell your own.

So let me walk you through how I think Athena landed in WSJ. The hope is that you, as a founder, can reverse-engineer the same playbook and become a better storyteller.

This week, Bending Spoons — the Italian software conglomorate that’s gobbled up Evernote, Meetup, and WeTransfer — agreed to buy video hosting platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion.

Bending Spoons, which already bought video platform Brightcove last year, has a reputation for slashing workforces, and it will take the publicly traded Vimeo private as part of the deal.

Judging by the price tag, Vimeo’s definitely still relevant, but the sale marks another step in its evolution. Here we note every twist and turn from the one-time YouTube competitor:

Remember when everyone started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o image feature to make Studio Ghibli knockoffs, and the internet went nuts? Well, hold on to your butts.

OpenAI is trying to get animated film Critterz released at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026. It’ll have to make it — or, I guess, prompt it — first, though. The script is reportedly human-made, coming from the Paddington in Peru screenwriters. After drawing the characters, OpenAI tools will animate the movie, with actual actors voicing the characters.