We’re fortunate to have become a trusted go-to source for journalists & bloggers who regularly call us for venture capital data, industry trends, etc.
For some time, we have had a press page on our website which highlights where our data has been featured and the perspectives and insights of others who are using or featuring our data. In addition, the press page offers a way for journalists to easily reach out to us for stories or get onto our press list.
The problem we encountered given the number of press mentions we get is that this page needs to be updated frequently or it defeats the purpose of having the page. We can’t be bragging that we were mentioned in the New York Times a year ago and since then, nothing. This means we needed to find a creative solution to this content management problem and specifically, one that would provide an easy, efficient way to update this page without involving the dev team every time.
The traditional method would be a Content Management System that would invariably be too complicated to use which means folks would ask the dev team to update the page with new press links. That is not what we want.
And so we came up with something simple and clever.
We found a very simple Javascript library called Tabletop.js. Tabletop gives “Google Spreadsheet legs”, meaning it turns a spreadsheet into a beautiful json file. So this:
Turns into this:
And this is it. We now have a spreadsheet for all our news mentions and anyone who spots a press mention on the team can update the spreadsheet when they want and see the results instantly on the press page.