Scoop

Bill Hanks had spent over 20 years in public relations, culminating in senior roles at major tech companies like Real Networks and Microsoft, where he helped double Bing's search market share from ~10% to nearly 19%. Yet despite this corporate success, something was missing. "It was probably the only job I've ever had, Nathan, that I wasn't absolutely thrilled to go to every single day," he recalls. When he came home and explained to his wife why taking another big PR agency job was a bad idea, she stopped him short: "I can't believe in this internet age, all this stuff is not lying anyway and automated." That single comment—a wife's observation about the absurdity of a broken process—sparked the entire Scoop idea. Bill took out a legal pad and sketched what would become the core of his business.

Scoop launched as a free tool for journalists, solving half the two-sided marketplace problem first. The platform taps into public data sources—SEC filings, patent office records, federal court filings—to surface company news that reporters might otherwise miss. This appealed to journalists tired of spam; they could discover real signals instead of promotional noise. After seven months, Scoop had signed up 630 journalists, representing just over 6% of the business journalism market. The free offering gave Bill a supply-side moat before monetizing demand.

Bill's first paying customer was a Seattle-area health tech company using AI and human coaching to help diabetics manage diets through photo logging. "They didn't want to spend a bunch of money for a PR agency or even a press release," Bill explained. So Scoop offered them an alternative: $250 to create a modern press release-style page and algorithmically match it to relevant reporters—not automotive journalists in Philadelphia or investigators in Fort Wayne, but medical tech reporters in the Seattle region. The bet paid off spectacularly. Of the ~78 relevant journalists in Scoop's user base, over 30% clicked through the message. One reporter wrote a story that appeared in GeekWire, a TechMeme Top 20 publication. For $250, the startup got coverage in a tier-one tech publication.

The core insight—automating journalist-newmaker matching—proved powerful. Rather than traditional PR's thousand-dollar press releases that reporters ignore or $15k/month agency retainers, Scoop offered a lean alternative. Bill was explicit about what wouldn't work: large enterprises with established crisis comms teams and relationship networks would stick with traditional agencies. Scoop's sweet spot was smaller companies that needed credibility but lacked huge budgets. Revenue was tiny ($1,000/month) but the model was validating. The next phase involved deepening the moat on the journalism side—building intelligence tools that translated SEC filing data, did math on executive compensation, ranked results by news value. This would create leverage for pricing.

With $250,000 raised from angels, a Seattle angel group, and 500 Startups, Bill was hyper-focused on one goal: grow the journalist side aggressively while carefully managing company demand. "We're going to manage that very closely so that we don't outstrip the supply side of the market," he said. The strategy was sound—own the supply (journalists), and demand (companies) would follow. Bill was 50, remarried to a creative and supportive wife, and carrying the hard lessons of a failed startup from years past. This time, he wasn't running back to corporate. He was building something that solved a real problem that had nagged at him for two decades.