If you sit next to Peter Shankman on a plane, you might as well take your headphones off for the remainder of the trip. That’s how long he plans to talk to you, until he knows everything about you. The former journalist, who identifies as neurodiverse with both autism and ADHD, has built his career on making connections.
“It built me one hell of a Rolodex,” he says.
Now, he runs Source of Sources, one of the most popular resources for connecting businesses, experts, journalists and publicists. Here’s what he’s learned along the way.
Peter Shankman’s entrepreneurial beginnings
Shankman’s start as an entrepreneur began in an unlikely way: selling snarky T-shirts in Times Square. The year was 1998, and he’d returned to his hometown of New York City in hopes of launching a PR firm. But first, he’d have to make some cash. Since the movie Titanic was all the rage, he concocted a plan to sell shirts that read “Sank—get over it.” He sold over 500 shirts in 6 hours and made $5,000.
He told a reporter friend, who asked if there was a website to buy the shirts. So Shankman quickly “built the worst website in the world” and “forgot about it because… [of] ADHD.” That is, until he got a call at 5 a.m. from his website hosting provider, letting him know that his website had racked up 37,000 unique visitors in two hours. He had crashed most of their servers.
Two months later, he sold 10,000 shirts at $15 each, and his dad’s high school students spent detention packaging them for shipping in exchange for pizza. He made enough to launch his PR firm, The Geek Factory, which repped Napster, Juno and “the .com babies.” In 2001, he sold it.
HARO: A go-to source for journalists
Word got around that Shankman knew everyone, so he decided to streamline the process of connecting people he knew and helping journalists find reputable sources for their stories. He moved the queries to a Facebook group, and later to a website called Help A Reporter Out (HARO), in 2008.
“I built HARO into the first and largest online source repository in the world,” he says. A few years later, it was acquired by his largest advertiser, Vocus (which would later be acquired by Cision).
For years, HARO was a go-to source for thousands of users, which included businesses and journalists on tight deadlines. It also gave businesses a way to access DIY PR. In 2015, one business owner called it “your PR agency’s worst nightmare.” But as more companies began using AI to craft pitches, the platform gained the reputation of “a wasteland of spam and worthless AI-generated sludge.”
Shankman started hearing rumblings that the company he’d sold was being changed. Friends encouraged him to launch a new version, holding true to his original values and mission. He dismissed them until he learned that HARO was moving to a model in which users would have to sign in multiple times per day to access connections. “I said, ‘Okay, I really don’t want to do this,’” Shankman says. “And so of course, two days later, I did it.”
Reviving trust for, and in, the media with Source of Sources
Two months ago, Shankman launched under a new name, Help Every Reporter Out (HERO), but soon after changed it to Source of Sources (SOS) because he wants to “[look] forward, not backward,” as well as to prevent confusion.
Now, three times per day, an email goes out to 22,000 users for free, with a zero-tolerance policy for AI, spam and fake accounts. “The majority… of our sources are… small businesses, and [they don’t have enough to pay for PR],” Shankman says. “Hopefully [SOS] can help them get to the point where they’re big enough to hire [publicists].”
Harrison Tang, CEO of Spokeo, a people search engine based in Pasadena, California, says the service “has helped [his] business gain significant exposure.”
“Businesses like ours are looking for marketing strategies that are not a burden on the finances,” he adds. “I’m genuinely impressed by Peter’s viewpoint on ‘good karma.’ I believe this is the biggest factor that has helped him evolve SOS into what it is today.”
Shankman wants industry professionals and businesses “to know that there’s a trusted place they can go where people really care about both the reporters and the sources.”
“If a journalist positions themselves as someone who they’re not, they will no longer be allowed to use the system,” he says. To help verify legitimate journalists, he’s partnering with MuckRack, where many journalists have profiles and examples of their work, to ensure growth and legitimacy. “If we don’t have trust, we really don’t have anything,” he adds.
When Shankman started in 2007, “blatantly lying” wasn’t common in the media. “There’s always bad actors, and [we always have to be] a step ahead of them.” It’s a game of cat and mouse—but as he teaches his daughter, it’s a fight worth fighting.
Amy Kauffman, a Dallas-based chief marketing officer for the CMO Room, a networking platform for marketing professionals, has been using the service since 2008, when she had a “boutique marketing [and] PR firm, BlueBird PR.” According to Kauffman, “[SOS] specifically helped my first client garner industry recognition in the fashion[and] retail publications and ultimately move from an online shoe boutique to a brick-and-mortar store.”
Harnessing the power of his gifts
In addition to this massive pursuit, Shankman is a public speaker who has delivered over 5,000 keynotes on customer experience and other topics. He has also authored multiple books, including Faster than Normal and a children’s book called The Boy with the Faster Brain, in addition to creating an ADHD podcast. Each project has been a step toward sharing what he’s learned about neurodiversity—that his “curses” are actually gifts.
His consulting work focuses on helping companies attract, hire and retain neurodiverse team members. He says he’s still unlearning the lessons he learned as a child with ADHD in the New York Public School system, where ADHD was hardly recognized when he was a child.
“[People] who grew up with neurodiversity before it became a thing are some of the nicest, kindest people you’ll ever meet in your life because they know what it’s like to be told they’re broken and they want to help others,” Shankman says. An example of this is his website’s homepage, which says, “How can I help you today?”
Shankman now struggles with hard-to-break thought patterns, such as focusing on the one person who stays seated in a massive room of people giving him a standing ovation. But he has a system set up, as well as a key person—his assistant of 15 years, Meagan Walker. “[She] has created a world for me that works in the way I need it to,” he says.
He also has a prescription for ADHD medicine, which he doesn’t like to take, except on days with four or more meetings. Walker labels these days as “pill days” on his calendar.
He uses his ADHD tendencies as the heart of his business, bouncing between answering 15 emails on the subway ride to pick up his daughter and answering calls himself—a trick that has landed him numerous opportunities, he says. He also doesn’t have to write his speeches ahead of time. He tells stories with a purpose and connects to listeners through those tales.
“The way he has learned to fully embrace his ADHD has been wonderful to witness,” Walker says. “He has helped so many other people realize that ADHD is a gift and not a curse.”
Shankman hopes future generations of journalists get back to the heart of informing people with reputable information and that everyone does their jobs in the spirit of “do[ing] something for good.”
Photo courtesy of Peter Shankman
