and life you love.

And today, I am so excited to interview two founders, people I have been fans of for a

while, so if you've ever wondered about starting a company from your couch, and eventually

having it reach millions, you're gonna love this one.

Carly Zakin, and Danielle Weisberg are cofounders and co-CEOs of theSkimm, a media company that's

transformed the way female millennials get their news.

These two former NBC news producers launched theSkimm from their couch in 2012, and now

have more than 6 million skimmers.

Carly and Danielle have been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 in Media, Vanity Fair's The Next

Establishment, and have received numerous accolades, including the Goldman Sachs Builders

and Innovators Summit as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.

Ladies, Danielle, Carly, it is so good that we're finally doing this.

Yes, this is so exciting.

Thank you for having us, we are so excited.

Oh my gosh, I have loved the newsletter for years, and I want to take it back to 2012,

and rumor has it, it started on a couch together.

Here we are.

Kind of like this, with just 4000.

For the people that aren't familiar with the origin story, how did you guys come up with

theSkimm?

How did it start?

We started it five and a half years ago from our couch, which was …

This is much nicer.

Yeah, this is much nicer, in our living room.

Carly and I knew each other since college, we went to different schools, we met studying

abroad, we had a great time, did not talk about work, but it turned out that we had

both grown up news geeks, just a real love of storytelling, started interning as soon

as we could, started working, got our foot in the door, and between us, worked in every

division that NBC news had.

Absolutely loved it, it was our dream job, so it's kind of crazy that we decided to quit,

but we just saw this disconnect between our friends, who are really smart, and educated,

and have great jobs, but their jobs require them to do other things, and to be experts

in their industry.

We just saw that we were being paid to read all day long, we were being paid to be in

the know, and that wasn't really realistic for how people lived their day-to-day life.

We wanted to create something, which made it easier to live a smarter life, and we looked

at how people were consuming information, and how we could fit into that, and that's

kind of where it all started.

Was it, "Oh my gosh, I think we can do an email newsletter," or was it a vision for

a media company, or somewhere in between?

I think we've been really public about, okay we didn't know ... We didn't have a tech background,

we didn't have a business background, but I think we don't think we spend enough time

talking about actually what we did know, which was we knew this audience.

We knew how to talk to our friends, we knew the economic opportunity around this audience,

we knew what our mission was, which is that, we articulate it better now, but it's always

been the same, which is that theSkimm makes it easier to live a smarter life.

We knew email was a marketing tool, we never intended, and nor have we created an email

company, emails a marketing tool, so we knew what we were creating.

We went through like, "Is it a media company?

Is it a lifestyle company?"

Our buzzword that we use now, is a membership company, but for us, it's like how do we integrate

into the lives of female millennials?

We believe that it's through membership, but we knew email was marketing.

That's awesome, because I think a lot of folks, when they're first starting out, they're struggling,

like I love that you just made the point “we didn't articulate it as clearly then as we

do now.”

Oh my gosh, we didn't.

No, we did a horrible job.

For years.

Right, and I think this is one of the things where I got tripped up when I first started,

well first of all, I still don't know what the hell to call myself, but I have not let

that stop me.

I'm like, I'm just going to keep doing the work, and let it all inform what happens next,

but the point I want to make here, so many of the folks that watch our show whether they

are millennials, whether they're teens, whether they're in their 60s, or 70s, we have so many

different ages that watch, but when you're starting something new, most of us put so

much pressure on ourselves, that we have to get it right, right out the gate.

We have to have that perfect pitch, that perfect log line, whatever it is.

I think we've done it 100 times at least.

Yes.

I think also one of the biggest strengths that we had was our naïveté, like we didn't

know what we were getting into, so I think that there's always this pressure to be perfect,

and to have all the answers when you're starting out, and I think sometimes the best thing

is just – we asked everyone we knew questions about what they did.

We didn't know what the right answer was, so it almost was freeing to kind of explore

all of these different ideas, and I think that's actually gotten harder as the business

has grown.

Yes.

So I think the best thing when we were starting out, was that we had no clue what we were

going to do.

Yeah, we didn't overthink anything.

Yeah.

People are always like, "How did you come up with the name?

Like the two words?"

We're like, "We wrote it out, it looked better that way, that was it," that was the big meeting.

Yeah, I love it.

If we were going to re-create theSkimm today, we would sit down, we would have probably

like 14 brainstorms, we would probably bring in a consultant, we would go to our board.

Overproduce it.

We would overproduce it, we would overdo it, and it wouldn't be as good.

Yeah, no, I can relate to that so much, whenever I find myself, or even our team, when we start

going down this track, we're like, "Wait a minute, why is this taking so long?

Why is this becoming so complicated, when whole reason this even exists, is because

I didn't give a ... I was just like “go, let's just do this?"

Another question that I have for you guys, $4,000, how did you spend that?

What was the spend on in the beginning?

That's a good question, the very first thing we spent on it, was food for our refrigerator.

We have this picture we took, we were roommates in downtown Manhattan, and we took ... It's

so funny to look at it now, and think about it, I don't know what we were preparing for,

like a nuclear disaster, I don't know.

That was like our focus.

Yeah, the night before we launched our business, we stayed up late making pasta salad.

No way.

Yeah, and cutting vegetables, because we were like, "We won't have the money to order out,

or go out, so like the pasta salad was very plentiful, and it will last a week."

Then we ordered all this food, and it was so funny, our refrigerator has never been

as full since that day.

We took a picture, and I don't think I've ever had as full a refrigerator since, and

so we definitely spent money there, but we went into a tremendous amount of credit card

debt to do this, and that was something that we decided to do together.

It's not something that like you can tell someone else, "Go ahead and do it, that's

the way."

We're by no means experts around that, but I think for us, like we agreed to do that.

First of all, the things we had to pay for, were to actually pay to send an email, you

have to use an email service provider, it's shockingly expensive, so we were paying for

that.

We were paying for transportation, like to go to meetings.

I remember we had a really kind advisor who paid for our first trip to go to the West

Coast, because we couldn't afford it, and as soon as we ever got money, it was the first

check we wrote was to pay her back.

We have to pay for our initial legal fees, and set up, that $4,000 didn't go very far,

and so we immediately were using credit card debt.

Yeah.

It was also, we were paying for rent for the apartment, and that was really the only expense.

Kinda forgot about that.

Yeah, we also had to live.

That was the big one, yeah, but I think there was no ... We didn't have a safety net, and

we didn't have anything ... we didn't want to take anything out of the company, but we

also were optimizing for growth, so that was a really hard position to be in, and knowing

that you have the right strategy for the type of business that we were building: don't just

bring in revenue off the bat, because you need to grow the brand first, and you need

to grow the audience first.

I think that was 100% the right strategy.

 At the same time it was so hard, because we didn't have time to get other jobs, because

we were writing at night, and we were trying to get the business off the ground during

the day.

And then we were trying to stay true to the brand, and not just take the first sponsorship

offers that would come, and because of that, we just didn't have another option, except

for racking up credit card bills that I didn't really look at for a very long time.

Well, that was five and a half years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it turned out really well.

I want to move on to basically what we were talking about before.

I've heard this, I have a program called B-School, it's online business school for modern entrepreneurs.

Not necessarily folks that want to go the venture-capital route, but folks that just

have an idea that they want to get it up, and out into the world.

For years, this is going to be my ninth year running this, I've been drilling into people's

heads, and they hate me for it, email, email, email, email.

I've heard, "Emails dead, it's all about social, what about ..." I'm like trust me, don't say

no, email is amazing.

When you guys have heard email is dead … I mean obviously ...

I wish we knew you then.

I know.

I would have been your champion.

I know, I mean, it's so funny, when we think about this now, for so long our initial meetings

for years, honestly even last week we had a meeting like this, where people – the

things that people have said to us it's like laughable.

“Why did you focus on a small market like women?”

That was literally said to us last week.

That would've taken at this point.

We're just numb to it, which is also sad.

Well, but I think it's also just a mark now of being like, "Thank you for telling me upfront

that you don't understand my vision, or my business," but it took us a long …

It took us a long time to develop that.

Yeah.

The second thing was email's dead, like don't do email, and we're like, "Do you check your

email?"

People would email that to us to say, "Dear Carly, and Danielle, thank you for your time

in coming in, we think you both are really smart and great, but we believe email is dead,"

and they emailed it to us.

We were just like, "Is no one else seeing the irony here?"

I'm glad whatever was in us that allowed us to just zone that part out, because honestly,

if that happened today, I'd be like, "Maybe we should be listening."

Right.

For whatever reason, we had it in us to ignore it, and we just really believed that, and

we still believe email is a brilliant marketing tool.

It is.

You can't just send 25 emails a day, and I think that's a big mistake a lot of companies

make, is they're like they've got 100 newsletters, and they just spam you all day.

We send one email to everyone Monday through Friday at 6 AM, and that's it, and that's

the beginning of our suite of products.

I think we're very respectful, we say in our website, "We respect your inbox, and we also

respect brunch, so we don't bother you on the weekend," but I think we find it funny

that people still say that.

Yeah.

I think it's also kind of been the story to our company, which is we've never been the

hot thing from a venture perspective at the right time, so when we started, email was

dead, and then after email became cool again, content was dead.

Then it was ...

Then it was all video.

Yeah, then it's all video, and then it was programmatic, and then it was native, and

then it wasn't, so I think just starting with something that everyone considered to be dead,

was such a blessing, because we learned that we just had to believe our own internal compass

for what we think the company should be.

Yeah, I mean I try and tell people, and I give them the example “I'm like look,

do you guys realize,” god bless Facebook, love them, yay Facebook, but I feel like they

pulled off one of the biggest bait and switches in history.

I mean getting all of the everybody, all of us, right?

Build up these huge pages, these huge fan pages, and then “oh, you can't reach your

people, they can't see your stuff unless you pony up.”

I get it, I understand it as a business woman, but that's my whole point when I try and dissuade

people from focusing on social.

I mean, we have never ever built, and we never want to build our company on someone else's

algorithm.

Exactly.

Whether …

Can I … this is business church.

People are going to be watching us on a Tuesday, or a Friday, or whenever you're watching this,

but this gets an amen from me, oh it makes me so excited, but it's the truth.

I think it was something that we always just kind of thought was common sense, and then

over the past few years we heard more and more people being like, "Well, I'm my moving

all of my content to Facebook, or I'm moving all of my content to Snapchat, or wherever."

Yeah.

And then for us, we always looked at it, and we were like, "Well that's interesting, it's

not – we want to have this direct connection with our audience," unless something huge

happens in society, and Gmail, and everyone else goes down, we do own that direct connection.

They know where to find us, they know we have an occurring habitual routine with where to