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Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now, let's join your host, Phil Better, and your special guest today on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your host with The Most, and today's guest is the founder of Ereleases, which was created over 25 years ago, 24 years ago, sorry, to help small businesses, authors, and start ups increase their visibility and credibility through press release marketing. He lives in the Baltimore area. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Micky Kennedy. Micky, thank you so much for being here.

Oh, thanks for having me.

So Micky, you started, I guess you started your entrepreneurial journey about 24 years ago with creating this e releases. Was this your first business you founded or did you have an entrepreneurial spirit beforehand?

I did have an entrepreneurial spirit beforehand. I had launched a consumer newsletter, little business, during the dotcom era. And, I I sent out, you know, movie reviews, horoscopes, trivia. I had writers who who wrote for me and, most freelancers. And, I had, 3 lists that had over a 1000000 subscribers, and it was generating good revenue. And I sort of saw ereleases as a natural progression of email distribution, just, you know, building lists of journalists according to their beats, and just emailing them press releases and charging clients for that as a for a fee. And I I I knew it was a separate business, but it was also being run very similar to my my consumer newsletter business. And when the dotcom crash happened, my advertising revenue for the consumer newsletters went with 0, and, the E Release business maintained.

And so it actually grew through, that that period. And so I decided to focus my energy on that and give the consumer newsletters up. I I felt like the the money that was coming from the dotcom era was enormous. And the the amount that people were paying me to go out to a a a list of a 1000000 consumers for a joke list was embarrassingly high, and all of a sudden, it just vanished. So, I I've I've focused more on ereleases. I, had been interested in the press release arena because I had worked previously as a research analyst at a telecom research firm. But being employee number 3, that means you're a lot more than a research analyst. I was also their PR guy and I would, look at our telecom traffic numbers and pick out anomalies like, hey.

Why is this country in the Caribbean generating more telecom traffic than all other countries combined, in that area? And it was because it was the, main call center for 1 900 numbers at the time. And so I was like, oh, that's an interesting story. So I put that story in a press release, shared the the numbers, the traffic, and sent it out, and we would get picked up in, like, The Economist and, Financial Times, Washington Post. I got really good at, fleshing out stories behind the numbers and just sharing it with the media. And, that was one of the reasons when I launched day tips that I still wanted to feed the press release thing. And what had happened was I was faxing all of this back 26 years ago. And Wow.

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