Truesix's December: The Next Web, 2021 publicity stats, and our team's yearly takeaways

January is a great month to list your wins and dwell on lessons learned in the previous year. Here's a little something from our team.

After a bustling November, the Truesix team had a calmer end of the year. However, we still managed to make the best out of it by scoring some major media success, hosting a workshop on digital content writing, gathering our yearly publicity stats, and more. 

Besides reviewing yearly achievements, January is also a great time to reflect on lessons learned in the past year. In this article, Truesix's team shares some of their favorites. 

Read on to find out which of our clients landed an article on The Next Web, how many publications Truesix scored in 2021, and what our team's main takeaways from the past year are.

December's wins: The Next Web, Maddyness, Highway to Scale podcast & more

Getting an opinion piece or a personal story published in media may be one of the most challenging tasks of PR. However, in December 2021, the Truesix team scored two featured article publications for our clients.

The co-founder of Supliful, Rihards Piks, is a serial entrepreneur with quite the experience in the startup world. He's got many exciting business stories up his sleeve, and this time Rihards was willing to share how he secured a $100K pre-seed investment in 30 minutes.

We thought Rihards's story was astonishing, and so did The Next Web and its readers - the story featured in TNW's “Most Popular” category for over a week. Read the entire piece here.

In December, Truesix scored some publicity for our client Roibox. The startup's co-founder, Jekabs Endzins, shared his view on the freshest tendencies within digital advertising and why innovations in data analytics are a must. The opinion pitch was successful and resulted in an article on Maddyness UK.

The concluding month of 2021 was also great for our long-term client, DeskTime. Their team has excellent expertise in many fields besides time tracking and productivity. Being a fast-growing company, they have a bunch of lessons to share on marketing, management, leadership, and more. 

Truesix was thrilled to see our pitching efforts for DeskTime rewarded several times in December 2021:

Hooray to all the achievements, and here's to many more in 2022!

Truesix's 2021: the BIG numbers

Like many companies, our team had a little end-of-the-year party in December. Truesix has several must-have elements for Christmas parties, and one of them is a yearly publicity stats review.‍

So, without further ado, here are some numbers from Truesix's 2021 efforts:

  • More than 430 publications for our clients overall
  • Clients who received the most publications:
  1. LMT
  2. Fixar
  3. DeskTime
  4. 5G Techritory
  5. Tweet Deleter
  • Media outlets our clients appeared most often in:
  1. Labs of Latvia
  2. Forbes
  3. Hackernoon, Telecompaper, Drone DJ

Some BIG media names we landed publications in: 

BBC, The Next Web, The Star, ReadWrite, Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, Inc, El Espanol, Lifehack.org, Tech.eu, Thrillist, Thrive Global, and more.

Bonus: In 2021, we also added a bunch of free digital marketing tools to our online store. Various media lists, pitch templates, and more – check them out!

2021 takeaways from Truesix team members

While stats are great for yearly revision, reflecting on the most important lessons learned is also crucial for a valuable overview of the year.

I had already dwelled on my personal conclusions (both soulful and practical) from 2021 when I decided to ask my Truesix colleagues for theirs. 

Ieva shares that 2021 has made her realize that life during the Covid-19 pandemic is similar to parenting. As soon as you achieve some stability, a new crisis begins. And as a result, your life is nothing but surviving emergencies that occur:

"I guess it may get easier as the child, a.k.a the pandemic, reaches adulthood. Hopefully, we won't have to wait for that long, though."

Truesix's cofounder Krista reveals her takeaways from 2021:

"Firstly, I've understood that online meetings make me feel unproductive, regardless of how valuable their content is. And secondly – it's crucial to set a tangible goal before pitching journalists. I have to pitch ten podcasts is much better than I must get a client into a podcast because a clearly defined goal is easier to achieve. Plus – there's a good chance that 1 out of those 10 pitches will be successful."

Krista adds that even if the first pitch is successful right away, you still have to send out the other nine – a deal is a deal.

Viesturs highlights the concept of hybrid work as his main takeaway from 2021:

"Hybrid work is fantastic. It gives you the best of both in-person and remote worlds."

Honestly – couldn't agree more! 

Truesix's cofounder Julia shares her 2021's conclusion:

"This has been a year of prioritization. Of figuring out what’s most important to us, becoming more confident in saying no to what doesn’t align with us at that given moment, about building the environment that we want, and laying the foundations for the future that we hope for. Personally, this has been a year of thinking long and hard about strategy, growth, and efficiency. I’m sure this will speak for itself in the coming year."

When it comes to my lessons from 2021, I'll share two: 

a) sleep is essential, for heaven's sake, and 

b) no abs workout beats a good laugh. Take it or leave it. 

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That's all on our team's December publicity and 2021 stats. We had an amazing year despite various challenges and situations that required adjusting. Follow Truesix on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin if you haven't yet, and be the first to see how we're doing in 2022!