NewsUp — PR and corporate communications platform
From an idea ahead of its time, stuck in a prototype, to a PR platform in production that keeps growing.
Gerard’s idea
In 2019, Gerard Gil saw what his industry didn’t see yet. Brands and communications agencies were still working the old way: press releases sent as PDFs by email, press contacts in Excel spreadsheets and tools that didn’t talk to each other. The press release reached the journalist and stopped there: there was no place to go back to and download the press kit or high-quality photos, and no way of knowing who had read it. Gerard looked for a product that solved all of it together and couldn’t find one. Instead of waiting for someone else to build it, he decided to build it himself.
When we arrived
Two providers and almost two years later, Gerard still believed in his idea. In summer 2023, NewsUp came to Nimbel. The first provider left the project a few months after starting. With the second, the team kept changing, with junior profiles rotating in and out, and Gerard didn’t get the follow-up or the support he needed. When we reviewed the code, we found a prototype: no architecture, no design of its own and none of the basic security measures needed to go into production. It wasn’t built to grow.
How we did it
Gerard arrived wary. After two providers, he didn’t want to start from scratch with a third: he wanted to see how we worked before trusting us. So we started with small jobs: fixing, one by one, the parts of the prototype that didn’t work. Gerard knows the communications industry like no one else and knew exactly what he wanted to build; what he needed was someone who understood him and could turn those ideas into technology. With trust came the big changes. Piece by piece, we replaced the legacy code with a new architecture, until NewsUp went into production. Today nothing is left of the original prototype. The vision is his; we turned it into a product.
What we did
A platform that brings all the work with the media together in one place: a digital press room on each client’s own domain, press release distribution, including embargoed information, press contacts, high-quality photos and videos, and analytics for every campaign. Brands and agencies can work together on the same platform.
With artificial intelligence, NewsUp takes care of tasks that used to be manual, such as translating press releases or organizing and describing images. That way, brands, agencies and journalists find what they need sooner.
Today
NewsUp is in production and keeps growing, with the same vision Gerard had in 2019. We keep working with him on the platform.
“We found someone who understood us. We know the communications industry, and Nimbel helped us turn those ideas into technology. On top of that, they leave you with something that’s yours, not a black box.”
— Gerard Gil, founder of NewsUp