Case study: how Carimmat earned its press coverage

The challenge: a quirky app, no agency, no budget

I built Carimmat, a French dating app that connects people by their car license plate. You spot a car in traffic, look up its plate in the app, and message the driver. It launched in October 2019 on iOS and Android, and it was the kind of product the press does not naturally cover: an unusual idea from an unknown solo founder, with no agency on retainer and no money to spend on distribution.

That is the exact situation most founders face. You have something genuinely new, but no access, no list of journalists, and no budget to buy your way in. The good news is that earned media, coverage a journalist chooses to give you rather than coverage you pay for, does not require a budget. It requires a real story and a method. Carimmat had to win on the story, because there was nothing else to win on.

Finding the angle: the Tinder of traffic jams

The product was a dating app keyed to license plates. Described that way, it is a feature, not a story. The angle that earned coverage was the one journalists themselves reached for: "le Tinder des embouteillages", the Tinder of traffic jams. That single line does the work. It is concrete, it is funny, it slots Carimmat next to a name everyone already knows, and a reporter can retell it in one breath to an editor.

This is the whole point of an unusual angle. A journalist is not looking for your feature list. They are looking for a sentence their audience will remember. An angle that is easy to summarize and easy to picture lowers the cost of saying yes. The strangeness of "dating by number plate" was not a problem to explain away, it was the asset. Chapter 1 calls this the newsworthiness test: would a stranger care? With Carimmat, strangers did, because the idea itself was the headline.

The method, applied: a quick recap of chapters 1 to 6

None of the coverage was luck. It was the same sequence this course has walked through, executed by hand, release after release. Here is how each chapter mapped onto the real campaign.

• Real news (Chapter 1). Every send was anchored to a genuine event: the launch, a new version, the expansion abroad, and the 500,000 EUR raise. No news, no send.
• A sharp release (Chapter 2). The angle sat in the headline and the first sentence. One page, third person, a usable quote, a boilerplate. A reporter could lift it straight into a draft.
• A targeted list by beat (Chapter 3). Tech writers got the product angle, regional desks got the local-founder angle, and business and startup desks got the funding angle. Same news, framed for each beat.
• Good timing (Chapter 4). The Valentine angle went out around Valentine season; the raise went out the week it closed. The news matched the moment, which gave editors a reason to run it now.
• Follow-ups (Chapter 5). One short, polite follow-up to the journalists most likely to care, never a nagging blast. This is ordinary media relations: a relationship, not a transaction.
• Measuring results (Chapter 6). Pickups were tracked outlet by outlet, which showed which angles travelled and which fell flat, so each round got sharper.

The outcome: real coverage, a raise, and a Wikipedia page

Over its run, Carimmat earned coverage across national broadcast, national and regional press, and tech and creative web, in France and beyond. Below are real outlets that covered it, with the type of media and the angle that landed. These are documented pickups, not estimates, and they are the kind of proof a measurement chapter tells you to keep.

The French Wikipedia page on Carimmat also references coverage in 20 Minutes, France Bleu, Le Bien Public, L'essentiel in Luxembourg and La Vanguardia in Spain, which is itself a signal: a company gets a Wikipedia page when independent sources have written about it, so the page is downstream proof of earned notability. Alongside the press, Carimmat raised 500,000 EUR in November 2021 and gathered 608 reviews on Google Play. It shut down in January 2025, which is the honest end of the story and a reminder that press builds awareness, not a business. The coverage was real; the company still closed.

Press does not make a product succeed. It makes a real story findable. The angle earns the coverage, the coverage earns the credibility, and what you do with that attention is on you.Tristan Berguer, founder of PressPilot

What made it work

Three things, none of them money. First, a genuinely fresh idea, so there was something to talk about. Second, an angle a journalist could retell in one sentence, which is the single biggest lever in earned media. Third, discipline: only sending when there was real news, framing it for each beat, timing it, and following up once rather than ten times. The strangeness of the product was the advantage, and the method made that advantage land in print and on air instead of evaporating.

How to repeat it for your own company

Strip the story down and you have a checklist you can run yourself:

1. Wait for real news. A launch, a release, a partnership, a raise, original data.
2. Find the one-sentence angle. If you cannot summarize it in a line a stranger would repeat, keep working on it.
3. Write a one-page release with the angle in the headline and the first sentence.
4. Build a small list by beat, not a big list by volume. Match the angle to each desk.
5. Send at a moment when the news is timely, then follow up once, politely.
6. Track who covered you, so the next round is sharper.

That is the entire method, and it is what the rest of this course teaches in detail. Start back at Chapter 1 if you want the full sequence, or open the course overview to jump to a specific step.

Why this became PressPilot

I ran the Carimmat press myself, by hand, every release. It worked, but it was slow: writing the angle, building the list, finding the right journalist for each beat, sending, tracking. Doing it once taught me the method. Doing it repeatedly taught me that the method is repeatable and that the manual parts deserved to be automated. That is why PressPilot exists: it takes the exact sequence behind Carimmat's coverage, the writing, the targeting by beat, the send and the tracking, and turns it into one tool any founder can run. If you want to apply this method without doing every step by hand, that is what we built. See the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Does a press release guarantee coverage?

No. Nothing guarantees coverage. A press release earns its place when the news is genuine, the angle is sharp and the list is targeted to journalists who cover that beat. Carimmat earned national, regional and international press, but it earned it, one relevant pitch at a time. The release opens the door, the story decides whether a journalist walks through it.

Can a press release go viral?

A press release itself does not go viral, but the story it carries can spread fast when the angle is unusual and easy to retell. Carimmat travelled because "the Tinder of traffic jams" is a hook a journalist can summarize in one line. Viral reach is a side effect of a memorable angle, never a goal you can promise.

Do press releases still work for a startup?

Yes, when they are targeted rather than blasted. A solo-built app with no agency and no budget earned coverage on BFM TV, France Inter and Nice-Matin because each outlet got the right angle for its audience. A generic mass send would have earned nothing. Targeting by beat, not by volume, is what makes a press release work for a small company.

How did Carimmat get press without an agency?

Its founder did the work himself: he found a strong, repeatable angle, wrote a short release a journalist could use, built a list by beat, sent it at the right moment and followed up. No agency, no budget, just the method this course teaches. That experience is exactly what PressPilot now turns into a repeatable tool.

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