PressPulse’s Genius Substack Play for Brand Awareness

PLUS: Correcting Bias in LLMs with DSPy

Author

Startup Spells 🪄
May 25, 2025

PressPulse’s Genius Substack Play for Brand Awareness

Elvis Sun, the founder of PressPulse AI, didn’t just build a smart PR tool—he executed one of the cleanest, no-budget distribution plays in the early-stage SaaS space.

If you haven’t heard of it, PressPulse helps founders get featured in the media by sending them curated press opportunities daily, plus AI-drafted responses to journalist requests. It’s essentially HARO without the noise or inbox overload.

But what makes this story worth sharing isn’t the product—it’s the placement. Let’s talk about the low-cost, high-impact growth hack that got PressPulse in front of exactly the right audience, without buying a single ad.

The Substack Leaderboard Hack

Substack has a referral leaderboard system. Newsletters that refer the most subscribers to others rise up the ranks, gaining visibility within Substack’s discovery system.

Elvis Sun's Mailing List

Elvis used this leaderboard as a Trojan Horse by sending it to his 5000 people mailing list who signed up to PressPulse's mailing list. Here’s how:

  • He subscribed to and promoted other newsletters in the PR and media space—ones that his target audience (startup founders and indie creators) already read.

  • He added “PressPulse.ai” right next to his name, like this: Elvis Sun | PressPulse.ai.

  • As he climbed the leaderboard, 100s of newsletter readers—curious about who was referring them—checked his site. (Sidenote: This is known to work for me as everytime I promote an influencer's new startup and send them 1000s of visitors, they follow me on X. Its a very easy way to connect with 6-figure & 7-figure entreprenerus this way. This specific article sent 1000s of potential customers (courtesy of Google Search Console where I see 17,000+ visits) as it ranked on Google's Trending and got me a follow from the founder)

  • From there, they discovered PressPulse.ai. No ads, no pitch. Just organic attention.

Presspulse AI - Substack Leaderboard

These are the Substacks newsletters he recommended and got a top ranking on their leaderboard:

This worked because he wasn't interrupting anyone. He was showing up exactly where curiosity was already peaking.

Elvis isn't the only one doing it. If you look closely, you can see other PR practitioners too using this strategy like Gloria Chou PR.

The Curiosity Loop of Substack

Substack leaderboards aren’t just gamified vanity tools. They’re actual discovery systems. People check them to see:

  • Who’s growing fast?

  • Who else reads what I read?

  • What’s trending in my niche?

By getting on the leaderboard, Elvis inserted his startup into an organic curiosity loop. And because he was promoting newsletters in his niche—media and PR—the people clicking were highly aligned with what PressPulse offers.

This wasn't a mass marketing play. It was surgical.

Inspired by IndiePage + Shipfast and the Indie Hacker Distribution Stack

Elvis was inspired by the Shipfast and IndiePage hack shared by Startup Spells late last year that Marc Lou pulled off with IndiePage and Shipfast.

If you’re in the IndieHacker world, you’ve probably seen these:

  • IndiePage lists top indie products by verified Stripe revenue where makers can buy a $45 lifetime deal and instantly appear on the leaderboard.

  • Shipfast is a sister leaderboard where makers using Shipfast successfully for their startup appear on the leaderboard.

Marc drives a ton of traffic to these pages via his:

  • 182K+ X (Twitter) followers

  • 128K+ YouTube subscribers

  • 36K+ newsletter list

What makes it work:

  • Thousands of makers link to these sites from their own pages, driving SEO juice.

  • Being listed at the top signals trust, traction, and social proof.

  • These leaderboards are sticky—people return often to check what's new or trending.

TL;DR: The top of the leaderboard gets outsized attention. It’s Zipf’s Law in action—winners win big, and second place is often a distant second.

PressPulse’s Twist: Substack Instead of IndiePage

Elvis bought an IndiePage deal last year and got himself SEO juice from Indiepage plus visibility in front of startup founders and indiehackers. And now he used an adjacent tactic on Substack.

Instead of building a leaderboard (which might make sense to attract more backlinks for PressPulse), Elvis leveraged one that already existed, already had traffic, and already attracted the right readers.

It’s a simple equation:

  • Audience–Channel Fit: Substack readers = PR-curious founders.

  • Leaderboard–Discovery Fit: Top referrers = curiosity clicks.

  • Name–Startup Fusion: “Elvis Sun – PressPulse.ai” = seamless brand drop.

No forced virality. No cold outreach. Just placement with intent.

The Real Lesson: Smart Distribution Isn’t Loud—It’s Well-Placed

This PressPulse campaign shows:

  • You don’t always need to build something new. Sometimes, it’s better to insert yourself into something that already works.

  • Substack’s referral system was never built for SaaS exposure—but it became an engine for it.

  • Getting ranked on a leaderboard isn’t just about ego. It’s visibility, SEO, and discovery rolled into one.

For zero dollars, Elvis turned a referral program into a warm inbound funnel.

PressPulse didn’t hack the product. It hacked the context in which the product was discovered.

If you're building in public, launching something niche, or trying to get attention in a crowded space—look for the places where people are already looking. Then, find a clever way to show up there.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Claude 4 now does a task for 7 hours autonomously without human oversight.

2/

Real alpha is in knowing how to use these agents.

Lots of people get bad output and lots of them get good output. The difference is one of them knows how to prompt.

The Claude 4 model needs less hand-holding as said in their best practices guide. The way to get good at prompt engineering is reading lots of these docs, reading lots of real-world prompts by others, and doing lots of experimentations.

I've gotten a little bit better than previously if you've noticed the past few newsletters. Purely from using the right words in the prompt and mostly speech-to-text.

3/

People work with people they like. People hire the people they like.

Rabbit Holes

What’d ya think of today’s newsletter? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know.

Do me a favor and share it in your company's Slack #marketing channel.

First time? Subscribe.

Follow me on X.

More Startup Spells 🪄

  1. Building Feedback Panda, a SaaS for Teachers, to $60K MRR to Reclaim Time from 12-Hour ESL Shifts (LINK)

  2. Oreo's $4B Marketing Playbook: Always Be Launching (LINK)

  3. Amazon SEO, Ads, and LTV — Taught by a $100M+ Strategist (LINK)

  4. AI-generated Podcasts with NotebookLM (LINK)

Reply

or to participate.