I've stumbled upon Jona PR from Product Hunt and at first everything seemed legit, so I decided to give it a try. I've requested 2 lists (from the available list, each costing $39 with ~250 journalists) from jonapr [dot] coThey have contacted me in about 2 weeks and asked me to pay $99 to create a custom media list containing 250-350 journalists curated from scratch, and ensuring a 48-72 hour delivery.I was surprised to see that the jump in price from their first email as I expected to get 375 emails for $78 as their website claimed (180+195 emails for 2x39). I was told they transition to a different domain and all the website info is old and such but I found the same pricing on the new website too jonapr [dot] com/pricing and they offer 4 lists for $99 (instead of just 2 in my case). Now their old website says that the list are updated as of October 21, but it seems too obvious that it's not.That should have become a red flag for me at that point, but I decided to proceed with the payment. The next surprise was that the payment itself didn't include payment processing fees so I ended up paying $106. Then they sent me a list of 174 journalists (less than the half) which were somewhat relevant. Then in 6 days they sent me another 100 emails so it began...Imagine receiving an email pitch about innovative pet accessory if you're a journalist covering only photo cameras, lenses or only high-end technological gadgets, like smartphones, smartwatches, etc. Would you be interested? Of course, not. The second list was all about these kind of people. We received a lot of replies for this email campaign, all of them asking us to stop "spamming" them. Some of the emails were also offensive, to say the least.Then I contacted them again to clarify the situation and they promised to send a new compensatory list of 200 contacts for free but that was 28 days ago already and I still haven't received the list yet.To summarize, if you're serious about your project, this is the fastest way to ruin your PR campaign. You'll also end up paying much more than initially requested. Doing the research on your own would be your best bet and if you don't have time, you might want to find someone on Fiverr or similar platforms to do the research for you. Just don't buy ready-made lists as you may experience what I had.
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