Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:08
That’s also like a whole different animal building this infrastructure. Can you talk about maybe the evolution of the team at that point, like were there different hires that you had to make when you went to?
David Rothstein: 13:22
Yeah, when we first got started, nobody knew what they were doing at all because essentially, nobody you couldn’t there weren’t any web engineers who, you know, were working with a lot of databases and the tools to make websites. So, in the early days, it was just a whole bunch of young, recent, you know, college graduates finding their way to Prague, looking for something interesting to do. And now, it evolved into some of these people going off to, you know, over time, to have career successes in other ways. We had a Chief Operating Officer, Peter Staniek, who went and started one of the, well, the first Czech online travel services. For example, our first editorial director went off and found himself in the Prague city government.
And then one of our engineers went off to work with a much larger company. And the core leadership team that I have right now are actually people who worked with us over at some point over 30 years, then came back. So, so when. So it’s a high compliment. Yeah.
We’ve been able to actually keep relationships with people, and you know, and, you know, have valuable opportunities to work together at different stages in their, their career. And so now, as we’ve gotten much larger, you know, everybody’s matured in a way. But at the core of all this is still a sort of a constant flow of young people coming and working their, their, you know, working their way through building some skills. And in fact, we’ve really never hired any outsider, senior-level management. We’ve always built from within.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:19
So I want to talk about EIN Presswire. It sounds like you’re listening to the customers. They’re saying, hey, we want to kind of mix our marketing with our messaging. And EIN Presswire was born. Can you talk about how you came up with the pricing model at that point?
David Rothstein: 15:41
The pricing model we’re a we’re a easy to use, pay-as-you-go self-serve model. And we were competing against free and really, really expensive. And so you know, PR Newswire is really, really expensive. Some other unnamed sites, or you know, free. And they can get you into trouble in various different ways. You know, you’re co-mingling with a whole bunch of, you know, less quality content. So we came in with a market-disrupting price point, but with an ability to actually build a self-serve, pay-as-you-go, low-touch platform.
So we’ve never had, in fact, we don’t have a sales department. We have a sort of, we do some online marketing, some we do some Google advertising, and so forth. But this is word of mouth. And it’s it’s it’s it’s return clients, and it’s it’s low touch, but these price points are well below what the larger players. So we’re kind of in a sweet spot. You know, we’re so we’re the pricing works. And in fact, one of the challenges we have is that a lot of our clients are wondering why the price is so low.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:04
How do you answer that?
David Rothstein: 17:05
Yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s difficult. We tell our clients that, you know, we get them 90% of where they need to go for 10% the cost. But also, our larger legacy competitors have a lot of bloat. You know, they’ve got some, you know, they’ve got older, you know, they’ve just got you know, maybe not as many now have a lot of office space, but they have more traditional legacy, I think, cultures that require more expensive salespeople, more expensive office space. You know, they’re doing some things, we stay focused just on this one low-touch, low-cost service.
And it’s really worked well for us. So we’ve been actually growing our sales for EIN Presswire grow at about 20 to 40% per year consistently. And in fact, we’ve we’re not backed by any private equity. We’re just essentially, this is still Founder Capital. That was 30 years old. So we’re just running a self-sustaining, growing business, investing in all the things that we do with the capital that we’re generating from the sales of these press releases, EIN Presswire.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:21
Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. As we’re looking at the page, you can check this out to EIN Presswire.com slash pricing. And we’re on the pricing page for people who’ve never sent, I want to dig into. Is there something else you did besides word of mouth? Like to get people to hear about you over the years.
David Rothstein: 18:42
Well, yeah. Well, we monitor our competitors. We track who’s sending press releases. So we try to reach out and say, hey, try us. We we’re using Google advertising.
You know, anybody searching for press release distribution, you know, we’ll see links to us that way. And but it’s we’ve we’ve we’ve done some limited advertising in print in trade publications. But for the most part, we’ve been able to build this without a substantial sales and marketing department. You know, one of the weaknesses I would say that we have is we’ve never, in fact, I think a lot of people still don’t know who we are. You know, our clients know who we are, but, you know, general market awareness. But that’s changing now with the news. About four years ago, we decided to rebrand from Ane to Newsmatics, and data science and big data are actually kind of moving us forward even faster. Now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:57
Why the rebrand? Because like, to me, honestly, if Ane is recognizable to me, like yes. So I identify that. And that’s been around for many, many years, obviously. Why the rebrand?
David Rothstein: 20:13
Well, on the corporate side, we’re rebranding mostly for the new products. But for the EIN Presswire will always be EIN Presswire. I think what you’ll start seeing there is by Newsmax, you know, as a, and all of these products are essentially the same way they’ve been driven from, you know, the market telling us what they want. The Affinity Group Publishing, because we’re sitting on, you know, 400 million articles indexed and indexing 100,000 a day or so. Affinity Group Publishing was essentially born out of our clients wanting more distribution, so we couldn’t find enough distribution. So we made it. So we spun up 3900 websites. We’re populating all of them with news, and they’re more data points than that. Give our clients more distribution points and more access to the large language models and into AI. And on their own.
We’re building those out as real publications, and we like to think of them as filling news deserts. So this ecosystem that we’ve been building, actually, kind of EIN Presswire is an entry point of content originated from us. And then we’re we’re we moderate it very carefully. We don’t just run anything. We’re actually validating the transparency of the clients that we have. We don’t research all the content, but our feeling is that if we can trust the client, we can trust the content. We do take content down if there are ever complaints, but we’re really very careful with it. So that creates a sort of a value chain of vetted content feeding into not only other people’s websites or downstream distribution partners, but also onto our own publications.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:05
I’m curious, David, what’s what are some of the benefits of a press release, maybe that people don’t realize? Because to me, there are like obvious things you can get across these 22 platforms, which is good for search engines. It’s good for the language learning models, and it’s good for authority and credibility. You know, getting on USA Today or CBS or wherever. So what are some of the maybe benefits people don’t realize until after they do one of these?
David Rothstein: 22:38
Well, you know, there’s a perception that press releases are old-fashioned and that, you know, you might not need to, you might only need to run a press release once, but it’s a it should be a standard toolbox for any marketer. Essentially, you get to write your own message, you get to control the narrative. And we do have clients who will be contacted by journalists a lot. A lot of press releases don’t rise to the, you know, the journalists aren’t going to write a story on it. And there’s this balance between, you know, expectation and reality. And the reality is that if you’re not issuing content, you’re invisible, and you need to push it out.
And you can’t just put the content on your own website using services like ours. Or we are a Google News publisher. We do have high domain authority. We do have journalists who are monitoring our press wires. And so when a very interesting press release does show up, it does get traction. And so, you know, whether you’re a self-published author and you want to show up in Google news or you want to say, show the logos of your distribution on network branded sites because it’s part of your marketing or, you know, whether you’re interested in another pathway to get into ChatGPT, you need to run content through services like ours.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:14
So, David, I could see kind of the trajectory where the customers are asking for this. You create this, you know, company service. EIN Presswire. What was next? And I could see how News Maddox is kind of a rebrand because you have these umbrella companies.
What was next after EIN Presswire, as far as the offerings go? Because I know you have Perspectify. You have Affinity Group Publishing. What was next?
David Rothstein: 24:42
Yeah, we the Affinity Group Publishing was born from us needing more distribution. So we were able to provide this. And so with Affinity Group Publishing, you know, we not only do we have our own press releases, but we’re we’re indexing tens of thousands of other news services. And so we’re building a comprehensive news index similar to Google News. And then we link to the original articles.
So Affinity Group Publishing is a mixture of all the press releases we’re originating, but also links to news from thousands of different publishers. So the globe that you were just spinning, you could spin, pick any country, pick any state, and drill in. And it’s like, for example, if you click on 50 states today, you’re over there, but you have news for the US. And the color coding that you’re seeing there allows. So we have media researchers who catalog different publishers based on political biases. There may be left or right or their government institutions.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:59
Or.
David Rothstein: 25:59
Or just propaganda. And what you can do here is you can actually use those filters. And if you want some, you know, government propaganda to go away, you just deselect it and apply. So we’re not we’re not sort of censoring people’s ability to see what they what’s available we’re doing is we’re giving control to the user so that they can self, you know, select what they might be interested in.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:28
So it’s also an awareness thing, it seems like too because some people may not even realize me, you know, behind what’s, you know, what’s going on. So it’s you know, it’s a categorization. It’s like, okay, well, when I’m reading this, I should be aware of here’s, here’s what I’m, you know, maybe behind the scenes, what’s happening, you know.
David Rothstein: 26:46
Yeah. If you want to just read government propaganda, this is your place. You just selected government propaganda.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:51
So I was just curious. Yeah. Exactly.
David Rothstein: 26:54
Right. So. So here, here we have all the, you know, world’s news organized into our sandbox, so to speak. And, we’re feeding them out on these 3900 sites that it’s a total map of the whole world with 10 or 12 publications for every state, country, and continent. And, I think it provides us with more distribution for our press release clients, but it also allows the user to regulate the content that they want to consume.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:27
So why create this? Tell me about it.
David Rothstein: 27:30
We created it for distribution.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:33
Because it’s completely free, right, for people. So yeah.
David Rothstein: 27:37
Well, it’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:39
It seems like a lot of work to put this together.
David Rothstein: 27:41
Well, actually it was, but now it’s just a software application that is actually very easy for us to manage. It’s it lives forever, 24 hours a day, taking content from all the, the, the hard work that we did was setting up the scanning and indexing infrastructure and then feeding press releases, and and people don’t pay for publications anymore, really. You know, once you lock it, you narrow your scope. And for us, you see the you know, there’s a lot of our own ads on here. So, this serves as a platform for us to promote our other ancillary services, but also as a point for all of our press releases. Now the door is open for a lot of other ways to monetize those apps. So we’re very excited about, you know, some of the things that we will be able to do with those going forward.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:37
Can you talk about partnerships? I know, like even when you started EIN Presswire, you had to. What are those conversations like, so you can actually build the network over time?
David Rothstein: 28:50
Well, we’re very unusual in that, that we’ve actually gone through 30 years or so without a lot of partnerships. We, you know, we’ve built most of the software that we use. You know, you know, we’re using the typical tools that a lot of people use, Slack, for example, or, you know, Google Meet and so forth. But almost everything that we use, we’ve built, and we’ve had this, this opportunity. To have a network of software developers, you know, who’ve worked with us, who and it’s easier to build than to buy for us. And we’re not locked into you know, most companies don’t have that choice. They don’t have the, the expertise to be able to write their own code to manage certain things and so forth. But we’ve been able to, to do that.
So everything that we have, we’ve been and then we’re, we do a lot with, well, younger people, as I was mentioning, were an industrial partner with Masaryk University and the Czech Republic. So we get this flow of data, young data science people, you know, coming through that are kind of working with us. And in fact, in the middle of next month, we’re having our second annual hackathon in Brno, in the Czech Republic, where these teams come, and then they take our data, and then they inspire us with their brilliant ideas on how it can be applied to real-world situations. So, and then from that, it leads to a hiring opportunity for us and an educational opportunity for them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:33
I love that idea. The hackathon. At what point did you start to introduce that? Is there some how do you attract people to something that is just like the advantages? Oh, you know, maybe you’ll get hired on. I’ve seen people do some kind of reward, or I don’t know how does how do you run the hackathon?
David Rothstein: 30:51
Well, the, the, the winning team gets a €1,000 grand prize, and then we have second and third place prizes. But the students want to code, and they’re excited about working on things. And and we’re we’re giving this kind of mission, social-driven goal of, you know, if you’ve got all this news and you’ve got all this metadata and all these labels, what can you do with it? And so.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:16
24 hours. They have to set it up. Like, what can you do with this data? What should we do? Go. And then they just.
David Rothstein: 31:23
More or less we we give there’s we give some general guidelines. We give access to our news index through an API. And there are some instructions on how it’s all, you know how to get started. But essentially, they go in at 6:00 one evening, and by 8:00, they’re coding, and then they’re staying up all night long. And then about four o’clock on the following afternoon, they’re putting their proposals and their presentations together. And then we’ve got a team of judges to watch it. But last year we were oversubscribed. There are too many teams of people wanting to do this. And so this year we’re going to do it again. And it’s always a lot of fun.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:14
It’s fascinating when you look back over the years, what innovations or what sticks out to you have come out of one of those hackathons, right? Because you always hear, you know, with Google, they, you know, have whatever 20, 25% of their time they can work on other things, and things like Gmail have come out of that and other things. I’m curious what sticks out to you that’s come out of one of the hackathons. It could just be an idea that maybe it wasn’t solidified and just helped the company.
David Rothstein: 32:41
The newest product that we’ll be introducing in the first quarter of 2026 is our pneumatics data studio. And the, the, the modules within that were often inspired by some of the ideas. You know, one of the teams last year took the news data, parsed it with US election data, and set up a predictive model to say who was going to win an election. Right. And those are really good ideas. And it’s just young people coming in with an interesting idea on how you can apply news data to different real-world situations. And then we can also take a press release, for example, and use an AI model to convert it into. Into an AP style article.
For example, you could take that AP article and convert it into Spanish, or German, or anything else. And so all these tools are available, and you know, the idea is, you know, the, the really the inspiration is with the young people coming in and saying, okay, we’ve got these tools. What can we do with it? So it’s led to creating an AI model to help us make decisions for our Google advertising. So essentially, our AI is kind of thinking through the AI that’s used in, you know, other AI models to help us, you know, manage it. So, you know, some of the data sets and challenges are so big, the only thing you can do is set up one AI model to work with another AI model to try to optimize, you know, what you’re trying to accomplish.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:31
It’s so interesting because there’s so much you could do with data. And so it’s really infinite. It’s yeah, I’m curious to hear what happens in the next hackathon. At what point, David, does Perspectify AI come about?
David Rothstein: 34:47
Well, Perspectify, I, you know, these are actually all kinds of toys, right? So we’re we get to the fun. The fun thing about Newsmax is, is that you know, we just keep innovating. We don’t stop. So if we’ve got a news index and we have Metadata. Then we want to put that out there in some form. And so we want to create the search engine, and we want to present it. So, each one of these ideas is a step toward another idea. And every door that you open opens up a whole other series of doors. And so this is simply just a way to compare and frame any news event from left or right to government propaganda. So you can click on any of these topics, like Alex, for example, and you can see how left, you know, within columns, how to compare how left media might be covering a story and how right-wing media might be covering it. And so what this does is it just generally surfaces media awareness.
And so right now, you know, it’s a free public service. We’re just we’re just we have it out here. We’re seeing how people relate to it. We’re collecting feedback on it. But I would hope that this, you know, really leverages as a tool for media educators and generally media awareness. You know, one of the things you can do is if you scroll to the top and you turn off the labels, there’s a little button there that says labels off. Now scroll down. This is the way that people see the news. Yeah. Now you know, they just see Fox News or the Independent. They don’t know. And they just say, oh, it’s an article, but what we’re doing, and then turn it back on. And then what we’re showing here is who owns it and whether there’s a political orientation to it. And I think a lot of people would be really interesting.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:00
It is really interesting from a political advertising perspective. They should probably go to your site and see how the headlines, you know, what the difference of the headlines. Yeah, you know, when you turn the labels on, right?
David Rothstein: 37:12
Or you don’t want to, if you’re a politician, you don’t want to quote from a government Chinese propaganda source.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:20
So. Right, right.
David Rothstein: 37:21
You’ve got to be careful where you take the content that you’re citing. And so these types of tools, you know, it wasn’t that long ago that, well, it’s been a while now, but product labeling on consumer packaging and grocery stores and so forth.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:36
Totally.
David Rothstein: 37:37
So, you know, we’re here, we’re not trying to say that something’s bad for you or 50% healthy, you know, what we’re doing is here’s a little information so that you have it available to you. And I do think that, you know, the concerns now globally over, you know, where information is coming from is, is such that that in itself is a forward-leaning new opportunity for us. So just just having this is And a lot of the younger people working for us, they probably wouldn’t work for us if we weren’t doing interesting things like this. They just like projects like this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:12
This is fascinating. Everyone should check out prospective com to play around with that and go on there. You I want to hear if innovation you mentioned innovation I think all companies are always thinking about. Not all companies, but a lot of companies are thinking about innovation. Like what’s next, you know, especially with, you know, AI is hot right now and there’s always something that’s top of mind and people want to stay ahead of the curve.
I’m curious if you have a process or how you have certain meetings about talking about innovation. Before we talk about that, though, you mentioned product labeling. I think that’s, you know, David, a genius idea. I’m not sure. You know, I know the companies will put, you know, whatever GMP certified or they’ll put organic or whatever. And every one of those companies pays a yearly I don’t know what it is yearly subscription to make that on their label. Yeah. I’m curious. All sites should have your label. Like this is.
David Rothstein: 39:15
I would hope so.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:16
This is, you know, labeled, and now it has the labels on there. Right. This is certified by blank. And then they can people can actually turn on and off the labels. That’d be really interesting.
David Rothstein: 39:27
Yeah. Yeah. Those are the types of things that come, you know, in the forefront of all of our thinking as we’re and, you know, in all of these are iterative.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:35
You’re like the product labeling of the internet for where the news source is coming from.
David Rothstein: 39:41
Yeah, it’s product labeling for your mind.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:43
Right. We’re calling it Newsmatics certified.
David Rothstein: 39:46
Yeah yeah. That’s right. Like the underwriter, you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:48
Gotta pay for. Yeah totally. Yeah I love that. Well hopefully when we talk in a couple of years you’re like, yeah we made another billion dollars. Also more importantly just made people aware and there was more transparency. You know.
David Rothstein: 40:05
We’d like to think that what we’re doing actually has that ability to change the way that people are, you know, kind of relating to the news they’re consuming now. And I think that there’s that that’s good business. You know, I think that there’s such chaos and such, such a low, you know, you know, the. You know, the people are just angry at the media. They don’t trust it anymore. And I think this is these types of tools could bring more trust. I think back.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:36
100%. Yeah. So people check out and play around with it. Innovation. Talk a little about innovation. Do you have a process for that, or are there certain meetings throughout the week or month that allow you to, you know, get that collective knowledge from the team?
David Rothstein: 40:53
Well, you know, it’s in our DNA. We’re. Everything we do is new product development. Every every day is a new day where we’re we’re we’re we’re exploring a new idea. Like, for example, now with the new data studio that we’re building, we’re building a new.
Newsmax, Newsmax applications managers for that. So we need to not just build an application, but all the the tools around it to manage the application. And so everybody in our company is, is in a meeting with me at least once a week. So there’s really nobody in the company that doesn’t have an opportunity to to be in a discussion, whether that’s a weekly customer service meeting where we’re talking about, you know, what’s working, what’s not working, you know, what needs to be done to to, you know, the. you know, advertising meeting where we’re talking about metrics and how to measure and what AI could be used for that. So there’s a lot of crossover with, say, a Ruby developer and a data scientist with customer service staff. All, you know, we’re not siloed. So innovation happens really with everything that we do all day long.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:22
David, first of all, I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey and stories. This has been really valuable. Everyone can check out newsmax.com. All of the sites live there that you can click on Affinity Group Publishing. We talked about EIN Presswire‘s Perspectify and then whatever else they have to come in the future, so check that out. Last question, David, I’m curious, what are your some of your favorite resources that you’ve used or consumed? It could be books, it could be apps, it could be software, it could be tools. What resources have been, you know, influential and important to you over the years?
David Rothstein: 43:04
Oh, that’s a really good question. You know, the the last couple of years, I, I’ve had to spend more time learning about AI, of course. And you know, the, you know, there was a book I wish I had it here. You know, it’s AI for executives.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:30
Is that the one with Geoff Woods?
David Rothstein: 43:33
Yeah, I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:33
AI for leaders.
David Rothstein: 43:35
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:35
That’s The AI-Driven Leader.
David Rothstein: 43:39
Let’s see. What was it? I don’t have it. I don’t want to get up and walk and go to my.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:44
I’ll pull it up on my screen. You’ll tell me if this is the right one.
David Rothstein: 43:47
You know, I’ve been reading. You know, I’ve been inspired now by reading what I can about executives needing to. What they need to know about.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:58
Is this the one?
David Rothstein: 44:00
No, that’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:00
That’s no, that’s not.
David Rothstein: 44:01
That’s not the one. Okay, I’ll send you I’ll send you a link after this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:04
Okay.
David Rothstein: 44:05
But the but there’s a few about, you know, you know, AI and what you need to know. And the all companies need to be AI driven, you know, and it has to start at all levels and sort of everything. And, and then also, you know, being able to just use ChatGPT as a resource for discovering, you can just ask ChatGPT, what should David Rothstein, the, you know, the CEO of Newsmatics, know about, you know, AI to, you know, manage a, you know, a company in the modern era using AI. You’re just.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:51
Asking AI How are you going to get it?
David Rothstein: 44:53
Brilliant stuff back, you know? I mean, there’s just it’s been it’s it’s allowed us to feel like we’ve got teams of experts, you know, working with us now. So it’s there’s a real renaissance going on when it comes to, of course, you need to sort through the hallucinations and all that. You still need to know your stuff. So to understand what’s not real or you know what, it might be wrong. But anyway, I’m kind of inspired every day by all the things that are happening.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:21
I love it. David, I’m gonna be the first one to thank you. Everyone. Check out Newsmatics.com and the other sites and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. David, thanks so much.
David Rothstein: 45:30
Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, everyone, for watching. Have a nice day.
