The Rundown Product Pivot
Plus Election Interference and Information Integrity focus, Founding Partner search and a 10k celebration run
It’s been a minute, I know. I sincerely hope you have missed your The Rundown newsletters here. Let me explain what’s been happening on our front and the MIA-ness.
United Nations General Assembly Week.
Our team was hard at work on the craziest week in NYC. Video below.
The Rundown x Founding Partners
We continue to receive a lot of interest in our Gen AI product Pressmate that can write press releases that is currently in Beta. Thomas, my Co.Founder, is building out various press rooms and systems for a head of comms anywhere to oversee the process effectively. New Pressmate Website By using Pressmate, teams and companies eliminate expensive media consultants and save huge amounts of time, and also develop new skills. The interest in Pressmate has been noteworthy. We are looking for Founding Partners we can work with to continue to shape this product. Email us if you are interested: zain@therundown.studio and thomas@therundown.studio
Pressmate build update includes:
✅ sign up
✅ add an organization
✅ invite to org
✅ create room
✅ create a release
🧱 work in progress real time text editor
We will be reworking our lean canvas and road map so look out for a few new changes, and partnership announcements. We could sure use some paid support and subs and would be super grateful for it (We take bitcoin. Solana. Sui)
The Rundown Product Pivot
We reviewed some research we had commissioned on existing learning platforms and who was making money. The answer was : almost no one. There were some great insights and trends however that we will summarize and share with you. We also commissioned some powerful qualitative data that demonstrated there was a sound use case for Pressmate.
Our discovery work showed us that what individuals and teams are interested in is how to understand, create or deploy Gen AI tools that enable different comms work flows, and that are efficient and productive. With a solid re-evaluation of the ed tech market opportunities, we decided to change (tweak) course and pivot our product. We realized that rather than creating a dedicated learning platform with a slate of instructors, heavy production and back end course building, we would lean into a Gen AI product stable.
So … The Rundown will build Generative AI communications products for emerging markets developing tooling for storytelling, productivity and efficiency.
We will have a learning and training component. In our current mix:
Pressmate: make writing press releases a breeze
Wanja AI: your comms advisor on understanding Africa
Alisha: Newsroom Tutor, Mis/Dis
Learning by Avatar
Election Interference and Information Integrity
Ahead of the US Elections we are also working on models on how newsrooms and audiences can determine mis and disinformation (MND). We are doing this in collaboration with Information Expert Candyce Kelshall of Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, CASIS in Vancouver. We will be sharing our handbook and models with journalists and newsrooms around the world. For now please check out MIT media labs on detecting fakes. It’s a pretty good overview.
Embedded
We are close to completing season 1 of Embedded, our podcast series and intend to roll it out this fall. Look out for that info. We will share our awesome line up with you. We are looking for a sponsor for this series. If you’re interested … call o. It would seriously support our bootstrapping efforts, and bring us to back to black.
Coming up on this substack and our site
Election Interference and Information Integrity Handbook brought to you by CASIS x The Rundown
Video: Aneesh Raman Chief, Opportunity Officer, LinkedIn, Future of Work and Human Creativity
Video: Marie Jose Kaasenbrood, CEO Coach, on Critical Thinking and AI
Highlights from our Tech Cabal x Rundown live event online
The Rundown thoughts on Small Language Models in Africa and the opportunity
In other news
I did a 10k run (a celebration run, no injury) and back on the saddle, I mean road !
