The Unexpected Origins of an Indiana Tech Firm: From Global Music to Augmented Reality

It might be hard to believe that Bloomington, Indiana’s leading tech PR firm grew out of a love for music and a penchant for social justice activism. It was nineteen years ago when Dmitri Vietze, CEO of rock paper scissors, inc. founded his PR firm in a spare bedroom. Today the business employs fifteen people in a modern loft-like office near the corner of Fourth and Rogers in Bloomington, Indiana. Much has changed since the early days – not just location and the size of the staff, but also the range of services and type of clients the company serves. What has remained the same for almost two decades is its deeply eclectic vibe.

This vibe, born from Vietze’s innate curiosity and creativity, is evident in the CEO’s well-known and always recognized style of dress: colorful and wildly designed “crazy pants” and mix-matched but coordinated patterned shirts. As a kid, Vietze explored his curiosity by teaching himself to juggle and walk on stilts, and then as a teenager, by fighting the racial injustice he saw in New York City in the 1980s. His interests in multi-cultural dialogue combined with his love of music. His business took off when he realized his approach to storytelling was helping to break bands with feature stories on National Public Radio and in the New York Times.

In a short few years, Vietze was handling publicity for 75 artists a year and hiring his first employees to help him pitch the press. Record labels and festivals were knocking down his door to hire his company.

At the same time, Vietze was always intrigued with using technology to help run his business. Before WordPress or MailChimp, Vietze built his own CMS, CRM and email sending tools. He won entry into SproutBox’s business accelerator program in 2011 and together they built StoryAmp.com, an ongoing self-serve website that allows independent artists to manage their concert and record PR on their own.

Vietze attracted such great music trade press for StoryAmp that other music technology companies were drawn to work with his PR company rock paper scissors. First came CD Baby, the largest distributor of recorded music by independent artists, in 2013. CD Baby was building out a full stack of services for artists, but was absent from the media until rps came along and started landing them regular stories in Billboard, the New York Times, and more. Then came Rumblefish, a company on the leading edge of licensing music for online video, and which, after its PR campaign with rps, was acquired by SESAC, one of the main three performing rights organization. Another long-term tech client is LyricFind, which helps rights holders collect money every time their lyrics are displayed in an app or on a website.

Dozens of music technology companies came over the rps publicity roster in the following years. Rarely did clients reside in Indiana, instead being based out of Portland, Toronto, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, and beyond.

After years of succeeding in music tech, rps has started to attract other technology companies as clients in recent years. The current roster includes companies in augmented reality, artificial intelligence, mobile video editing, sports tech, advertising, Fintech, IoT, and lighting as a service.

While Vietze is the creative visionary and driving force of his company, Tristra Newyear Yeager, who has been with the company for twelve years, is its voice. Yeager, a Ph.D. and novelist who speaks five languages, has held almost every position at rps, some of them at the same time. Her trademark expertise and enduring role, however, is that of interviewer and writer. Her press releases are known for being non-formulaic, for their compelling, creative headlines, and for high-level content that’s smart, enjoyable to read, and easy to understand. They have seamlessly connected the company’s musician and tech clients with the same captivating, powerful storytelling. "As cheesy as this sounds, the stories we deal with are all human stories, and humans always have fascinating quirks, epiphanies, and emotional experiences that can shift a narrative from pat and dull to intriguing and powerful," says Yeager. "The fun part is finding the stories, then keying them to the right voice for each client. We often get to learn things together, a process that can contribute positively to a business or creative project, beyond the PR itself."

After a year of establishing his first few music tech clients, Vietze hired Sheryl Woodhouse Keese as Chief Operating Officer in 2015 to help him grow the tech side of the business. A connection from peer business groups a decade earlier, Woodhouse Keese was founder of Twisted Limb Paperworks, an artisanal papermaking company that she grew for 15 years before selling in 2013. Skilled at strategy, systems, and company culture, she helped Vietze systematize and professionalize his quickly growing operations and staff so that the business could run without his daily involvement. Together, they have doubled revenues and size of the staff, increased profits, and developed more plans for the future.

As the media and PR landscape has shifted, Vietze has been good at listening to his clients, pivoting, and expanding services to meet their needs. Rps helped its first tech client CD Baby plan the first and wildly successful DIY Musician Conference in Chicago in 2015, which is now in its fourth year and relocated to Nashville. The DIY Musician event led to planning a similar even for writers, the Independent Authors Conference in Philadelphia last year. Year two planning is under way. The company is now exploring several new event planning contracts in the tech and entertainment space. In addition to two music publicists and four tech publicists, rps will soon have three event planners on staff.

At one time, “deeply eclectic” at rock paper scissors meant Egyptian Sufi chamber music, heavy metal shakuhachi, and mystic Jewish hip hop. Today, it means lyric licensing, usage-based billing, a writer’s conference, video technology rights, sports apps, and still, avant garde Ukrainian folk. Does Vietze ever miss the music, which now represents only a quarter of the company’s sales? No, he loves it all. “Our main job is to make connections,” says Vietze. “We connect products with larger trends and societal shifts to build stories. We connect clients with journalists. I see the connections between music and technology and everything else going on around us. It’s all part of how we help people tell their stories and get them amplified.”  The company’s music origins still unite the staff and fuel the culture; their clients’ eclectic global music plays through the office; music and tech publicists work side by side, offering support, ideas, contacts, and high-fives, whether they land a client an NPR Tiny Desk Concert or a profile in TechCrunch; and the company continues growing and grooving to its deeply eclectic vibe.