We’re ramping up the number of guest posts we publish on Extra Crunch so we can expand our coverage of fundraising, growth, hiring and emerging technology trends. As we’ve grown, we’ve noticed that subscribers love expert commentary from people actually doing the work of building companies, and we want to make a home for valuable how-to content from great founders, engineers, growth experts and more.
We also want to help recurring columnists improve their writing so they can reach more people on an ongoing basis. To this end, we’re offering additional editing support and consideration for publishing applicable columns on TechCrunch as well as Extra Crunch. Regular columnists will also see consideration for stage time at Disrupt and other TechCrunch conferences. Going forward, the main way for any contributor to publish on TechCrunch will be to also publish on Extra Crunch.
To submit a guest post or query, or if you have questions, email guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.
We’re still happy to run one-off columns on Extra Crunch if they are compelling to startup founders. And, we will still run one-off guest columns every so often on TechCrunch (in front of the paywall), but these are intended to be of a clear public-interest nature. While we’ve experimented with a wide range of approaches to columns over the years, the core value we provide is from our own work.
Why submit a guest post?
Authors have a lot of leeway to explore topics in depth. And because we’re writing for an informed and highly engaged audience (our readers actually read TechCrunch for the articles,) we encourage more length than may be normal on other sites, so 1,000 to 2,000 words is average.
If you have experience that might help someone else in your situation, consider turning it into a guest post — it’s good to share what you know, and it’s a solid way to establish yourself as a thought leader.
Please note that our contributor program is for industry experts and is unpaid.
How to pitch a story
Email a complete draft of your guest post to guestcolumns@techcrunch.com, or send us a detailed summary that explains why your post would be of interest to our audience.
We receive a high volume of submissions, so it may take some time to respond; generally speaking, you can expect to receive a reply within a week.
It’s fine if you work with a PR agency or are submitting a post on someone else’s behalf, but the post’s author needs to be copied on our email communications.
Things to keep in mind when writing a guest post
Please link back to external sources to make it easier for us to fact-check. It’s okay to mention your work, but don’t make your guest post too self-promotional — talk about your experience, not your company.
For Extra Crunch articles, a paywall is placed after the first few hundred words of the article body, so give the reader a summary of the key information in the beginning of your post.
If we publish your article
Each post we accept is edited before publishing to bring it into our house style, but most changes are minimal. We’ll also ask you to update your Crunchbase profile (if you have one), and will request a one-sentence biography that will appear at the top of your post.
What happens after your story runs?
Authors are free to republish the full text of their guest post anywhere one week after we run it, as long as they link back to and mention the original story. Because photos and images are licensed by TechCrunch, only the text of your guest post can be redistributed unless you’ve supplied images you own the rights to.
After we’ve published your article, we’ll send you a link. If your post appeared on Extra Crunch, we’ll send you a PDF version with the full text.
Expect to hear “no”
Don’t be discouraged, but we’re very selective about what we publish, which means we turn down the overwhelming majority of submissions and queries.
To submit a guest post or query, or if you have questions, email guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.
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