Episode 1313: Get More Media Coverage with Qwoted with Dan Simon

You do not need a massive PR budget to earn meaningful media coverage, but you do need to give journalists the right response at the right time. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Dan Simon, CEO and Co-Founder of Qwoted, who explains how Qwoted connects journalists, podcast producers, writers, and other media professionals with credible expert sources. He also explains how business owners and professionals can improve their chances of securing media coverage by responding quickly, building complete profiles, offering authentic insights, and providing concise, usable quotes. Dan also discusses how the platform is democratizing media access while helping journalists verify sources and find perspectives they may not encounter through traditional PR agencies. Key Takeaways: → Qwoted was created to give journalists access to a much broader and more diverse range of potential sources. → Experience in a particular profession, industry, location, or life situation can offer a valuable perspective for a story. → Sometimes journalists need personal experience and authentic opinions rather than formal credentials or advanced expertise. → Speed is one of the strongest predictors of whether a journalist will use a source’s response. → Concise, memorable quotes and unique perspectives are more useful to journalists than lengthy explanations or full white papers. Dan Simon is the founder and CEO of Qwoted, an online network connecting journalists with expert sources and used by reporters across major newsrooms. He serves on the U. S. Board of Advisors for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and has built Qwoted's work around press freedom, newsroom economics, and journalists' working conditions. Dan is also the founder and Chairman of Vested, one of the largest financial communications firms in the world. He is the author of The Money Hackers (HarperCollins, 2020), which explores how technology has transformed our relationship with money. The book was named the best small-business book by the Axiom Awards. He has been a regular columnist for Forbes, Markets Media, and CoinTelegraph, and he co-chairs the Communications Advisory Board of the Museum of American Finance. Connect With Dan: Website: https://www.qwoted.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dansimon/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host, Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to welcome back a repeat guest, Dan Simon, who today we're going to talk about his role as the CEO and co-founder of Quoted, a platform

• 1:22Speaker 01

  we use all the time that connects journalists, podcasts, writers, and producers with expert sources and PR professionals. Dan, thanks for coming back.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Seth.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  All right, so let's go back in time on the Quoted front. How did Quoted get started?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Well, I had made a good living as a PR person. PR people are essentially intermediaries. They're not wildly different from travel agents or dating matchmakers, if anyone is old enough to remember those professions that no longer really exist. They sit in the middle between people that need journalists, that need to speak to brands or experts, and companies that need to be featured in the media, what we would call earned media. And it's a very antiquated business. It's still a very lucrative business.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  We were very successful at it, but essentially, it is, to a certain extent, much overdue for reinvention. And so one day, I was sitting there and looking at our 20 clients that paid us $1 million each, and I thought, that's great business, but most of the time, you're saying no to reporters. With only 20 clients to represent, if they say, okay, I need a, have you got a female financial advisor in Wisconsin? You would say, no, but I've got a male financial advisor in Michigan. So why don't you talk to them?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  That's the job of most PR people, is to sort of squish round pegs into square holes. And I thought, if instead of having 20 clients who each pay you $1 million, if you had a million clients who each paid you 20, then the answer to the media would always be yes. Yes, would you like, where in Wisconsin would you like your female RIA to come from? Would you like an African-American one? Would you like an LGBTQ one? So that is essentially the genesis of Quoted. Now, obviously, it's much, it's easy to say and really hard to do. Creating two-sided networks is famously unbelievably difficult, but that's really it. It occurred to me that we could do several pieces of good at once.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  One is, we could start saying yes to reporters, which is a very unusual experience for PR people. Yes, yes. And all we do at Quoted is say yes. They say, do you have someone who can help me? Do you have an African-American former fighter pilot with NASA experience? Yes, we do. So that's nice. And then the other thing is that we were able to give, sort of democratize access to the media, to people who typically can't afford very large PR agencies. You know, I always used to joke that I made all my money making sure that only old white dudes made it onto CNBC. And the nice thing about Quoted is that we're elevating voices that wouldn't typically

• 4:26Speaker 02

  be featured in the media because they can't afford very large retainers.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. What makes this, how do you define who a source is and what makes them genuinely useful to a journalist? Like, what do you say to the company watching this and saying, well, I don't know if we're newsworthy, I don't know why they would cover us, type of thing?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, well, there's a few different things, as you know, as, you know, sitting as you have on both sides of this. You know, I think the difference, there's a difference between newsworthy and useful, right? You're right, you may not be newsworthy. If you are a, you know, if you are a financial advisor, and we'll keep it to your area of expertise, which is also an area I happen to know pretty well. If you're an RIA in Wisconsin and you buy another small RIA in Michigan, you know, barons may not cover it. But that's what newsworthy means. And you're absolutely right, that may not be the most newsworthy story of the day.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  That said, doesn't mean that your expertise in a particular subsector, maybe retirement, or divorce, or legacy planning, or Midwestern wealth management, might be incredibly valuable for someone. And so, you know, I think that's the slight difference. Not everyone is newsworthy, but largely, if you've spent a lot of time dedicated to a particular area, and that could be financial advice, or it could be yoga, or it could be Pilates, or it could be dry cleaning, or it could be you've been an academic, then you've probably got something of value to share. In fact, actually, the biggest thing that we have need for on Quoted, which is just candidly something that we still work to try and figure out how to solve for reporters

• 6:17Speaker 02

  every day, most of the time, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, AP, they're not actually looking for expertise, they're looking for someone who was near the scene of the accident last night. So what we would call man on the street, or someone who's, you know, lets their kids eat Mars bars, or someone who feels strongly that it's okay to give their two-year-old the iPad. Like, actually, that is the thing that reporters are looking for the most, the sort of the vox pop kind of thing. So it's not even about being an expert, it's just having a unique perspective. And that's an interesting area, because there's a tension there. People say, well, how do you define expertise? And it's like, I don't.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  We let the reporters define the expertise, which changes, some days, they may need a PhD, some days, they may not want, they may not want someone with a PhD. So we're not here to kind of enforce what expertise means. I think the biggest role that we play at Quoted, which is important, I think, in 2026, is that we're here to make sure people are who they say they are. So that is the difference. It's like, we're not here to, we're not the police enforcing what constitutes expertise, but we are going to be ruthless about making sure that you didn't just make that up with AI, you say you're sitting in Bangalore, Maine, but you're sitting in Bangalore, you

• 7:41Speaker 02

  know, and that you are the person that you represent to be, which I think in 2026, with so much misinformation, AI slop, like, you know, people meddling in elections, this stuff is going to be authenticity and trust. We want to be the safest place for the media to do their jobs on the internet.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So that segues perfectly into my next question. As a business owner or professional trying to get media coverage, what are the biggest red flags that would make a journalist ignore a pitch?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Well, there's a tension there, because if you look at the data inside Quoted, the number one determinant for success, if you are, let's say you see a request on Quoted, and maybe we should just back up a scooch, just to say, you know, most of what happens on Quoted, it's entirely free for you to put your expertise on there. If a reporter reaches out to you, you know, we will navigate that interaction. So if you're a financial advisor, you put your profile up on the platform, a reporter finds you, they reach out to you, we will navigate that interaction. Most of what happens, though, on our platform, is the other way around. Reporters will say, I'm looking for a financial advisor, and then, you know, our AI will match

• 8:56Speaker 02

  that request against your financial advice expertise, and then send you that and say, hey, you might want to throw your hat in the ring to respond to this request. And so the number one determinant, interestingly, for what, you know, for whether you achieve success or not, is speed. It's actually speed. It's actually like the quicker you can get back to that person. Because reporters, you know, are rarely on our platform thinking about something they're going to be writing in two months. It's more likely they're thinking about something they have to get done by 2 P M. So, you know, they want speed, but I do, but the flip side of that is that, you know, you know what the quickest way to do something is with AI.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  And then we have AI trackers on the platform that says, you know, you might want to be thoughtful about using this because this person's used AI. So I think there's a tension between speed and trust, speed and authenticity. And so, you know, I think fleshing out your bio and your profile pages so that you've got everything ready for the reporter, you're not making, if you've been featured, we give you the ability on your profile pages to like feature where you've been featured in the past. If you were embarrassed, if you did a video interview, even if it was for a smallish podcast, like upload it so that the reporter can get the, you know, the best picture of you quickly. And then, you know,

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I would personally avoid just dumping everything into G P T. And, but also at the same time, don't spend two days thoughtfully writing out a small white paper because the story will be filed by then. So some, you know, some navigation of that, of that tension between speed and authenticity, I think is, is, is how you achieve maximal success. And the good news about the speed is that speed matters more than brand. So if you are an independent RIA, you have a, you know, it's a good level, if speed is a good leveling playing field, the reporter isn't necessarily waiting to see who's writing from Morgan Stanley, who's writing from Schwab. They, they, you know, if, if Morgan Stanley is filing 10

• 11:07Speaker 02

  minutes past deadline, it doesn't matter if it's Larry Fink himself writing, the story's been written and done. So that, that has a nice, like, equalizing effect. And we see plenty of, I mean, we stick on the idea of financial advisors, obviously quoted is for everyone. But I often have financial advisors who, who are achieving wild success on the platform and write to me and say, my clients think I'm Warren Buffett, you know, I'm in Barron's, I'm in, you know, Financial Advisor Magazine, I'm in all of these places. And, and I never thought I would be featured in this way. And it's just because they figured

• 11:50Speaker 02

  out the machine, they're quick off the bat, they filled out their profiles, they give the reporter what they need.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Those are great examples. What are some other things that make somebody worth quoting?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I think having a, you know, I think it's the man bites dog, dog bites man. I think if you say the same thing as everybody else, I think, you know, and, and again, I want to be careful about that because often reporters are, are looking, it's confirmation bias, right? You know, if you think about an average story, it usually says, on the one hand, X, and Professor so and so says, yeah, it's like that. But on the other hand, Y, and financial advisor, Dave says the opposite, right? So often they have mentally these sort of frameworks where you, you, you, you, you know, they, they're looking for someone to just confirm the bias of the piece, or the inherent kind of direction of the piece,

• 12:43Speaker 02

  right? And, and so I want to be careful when I give the advice not to say the same as everybody else, because sometimes a reporter is just looking for someone to say, you know, active investment is on the rise, or, you know, more wealth, more wealth managers are interested in private assets, and more clients want to get into private assets. And, you know, you're not trying to have to always have the opposite take. But I do think that if you, you know, strive to come up with at least some unique angle on a well trodden story, I think is, is, you know, is something people should strive for. I think brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare said, I think that if, you know, again, it's about that

• 13:28Speaker 02

  speed, it's about making it comprehensible for the reporter. If you dump your white paper and you say, oh, there's a lot of good stuff in here, you may be right. But who has the time to parse all of that? And to, you know, so you're better off taking an extra second to kind of, here's a couple of quotes, here's a couple of real zingers or real nuggets. You know, the average written quote is somewhere in the region of about 15 to 20 words, you know, and the average on air quote is somewhere in the region of like eight to 12 seconds. Right? So keep that in mind in terms of what you give, right? That's all they can use. So, you know, if you make them try and condense war and peace

• 14:13Speaker 02

  into that, they're going to be less inclined to use it than if you came ready with those 15 pithy words. So I think getting into the habit of writing good bumper stickers is a, it's a good habit to form if you're going to be a, if you're going to be a user of quoted.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Makes great sense. We know your time is incredibly valuable. We greatly appreciate you talking about quoted today. For our folks who watch, watching and listening and want to learn more, maybe get some PR coverage for their business, their RIA, their practice, whatever business they're in, where is the best place for them to go to sign up?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  qwoted.com. It's Q W O T E D dot com. And it's free to sign up. It's free to put your profile on the platform. And it's free to engage with these reporter requests. Some people do, we do have a, a paid option. It's very cost effective. It's, it's designed to be significantly cheaper than any PR agent that you might hire. So you can do it for yourself. But it's free to, it's free to get, it's free to get started. It's free to answer. About 80% of our users never hit a paywall on the platform. So there's really no downside.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  All right. Well, this has been Seth Green with Dan Simon from qwoted.com. Dan, thanks again for joining us.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Thank you, Seth. Great to be here.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Likewise. Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 15:42Speaker 03

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