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Hey it's Marie Forleo, and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business
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and life you love.
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And today, I am so excited to interview two founders, people I have been fans of for a
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while, so if you've ever wondered about starting a company from your couch, and eventually
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having it reach millions, you're gonna love this one.
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Carly Zakin, and Danielle Weisberg are cofounders and co-CEOs of theSkimm, a media company that's
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transformed the way female millennials get their news.
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These two former NBC news producers launched theSkimm from their couch in 2012, and now
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have more than 6 million skimmers.
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Carly and Danielle have been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 in Media, Vanity Fair's The Next
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Establishment, and have received numerous accolades, including the Goldman Sachs Builders
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and Innovators Summit as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.
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Ladies, Danielle, Carly, it is so good that we're finally doing this.
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Yes, this is so exciting.
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Thank you for having us, we are so excited.
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Oh my gosh, I have loved the newsletter for years, and I want to take it back to 2012,
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and rumor has it, it started on a couch together.
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Here we are.
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Kind of like this, with just 4000.
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For the people that aren't familiar with the origin story, how did you guys come up with
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theSkimm?
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How did it start?
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We started it five and a half years ago from our couch, which was β¦
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This is much nicer.
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Yeah, this is much nicer, in our living room.
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Carly and I knew each other since college, we went to different schools, we met studying
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abroad, we had a great time, did not talk about work, but it turned out that we had
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both grown up news geeks, just a real love of storytelling, started interning as soon
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as we could, started working, got our foot in the door, and between us, worked in every
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division that NBC news had.
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Absolutely loved it, it was our dream job, so it's kind of crazy that we decided to quit,
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but we just saw this disconnect between our friends, who are really smart, and educated,
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and have great jobs, but their jobs require them to do other things, and to be experts
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in their industry.
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We just saw that we were being paid to read all day long, we were being paid to be in
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the know, and that wasn't really realistic for how people lived their day-to-day life.
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We wanted to create something, which made it easier to live a smarter life, and we looked
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at how people were consuming information, and how we could fit into that, and that's
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kind of where it all started.
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Was it, "Oh my gosh, I think we can do an email newsletter," or was it a vision for
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a media company, or somewhere in between?
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I think we've been really public about, okay we didn't know ... We didn't have a tech background,
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we didn't have a business background, but I think we don't think we spend enough time
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talking about actually what we did know, which was we knew this audience.
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We knew how to talk to our friends, we knew the economic opportunity around this audience,
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we knew what our mission was, which is that, we articulate it better now, but it's always
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been the same, which is that theSkimm makes it easier to live a smarter life.
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We knew email was a marketing tool, we never intended, and nor have we created an email
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company, emails a marketing tool, so we knew what we were creating.
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We went through like, "Is it a media company?
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Is it a lifestyle company?"
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Our buzzword that we use now, is a membership company, but for us, it's like how do we integrate
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into the lives of female millennials?
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We believe that it's through membership, but we knew email was marketing.
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That's awesome, because I think a lot of folks, when they're first starting out, they're struggling,
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like I love that you just made the point βwe didn't articulate it as clearly then as we
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do now.β
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Oh my gosh, we didn't.
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No, we did a horrible job.
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For years.
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Right, and I think this is one of the things where I got tripped up when I first started,
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well first of all, I still don't know what the hell to call myself, but I have not let
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that stop me.
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I'm like, I'm just going to keep doing the work, and let it all inform what happens next,
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but the point I want to make here, so many of the folks that watch our show whether they
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are millennials, whether they're teens, whether they're in their 60s, or 70s, we have so many
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different ages that watch, but when you're starting something new, most of us put so
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much pressure on ourselves, that we have to get it right, right out the gate.
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We have to have that perfect pitch, that perfect log line, whatever it is.
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I think we've done it 100 times at least.
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Yes.
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I think also one of the biggest strengths that we had was our naΓ―vetΓ©, like we didn't
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know what we were getting into, so I think that there's always this pressure to be perfect,
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and to have all the answers when you're starting out, and I think sometimes the best thing
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is just βΒ we asked everyone we knew questions about what they did.
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We didn't know what the right answer was, so it almost was freeing to kind of explore
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all of these different ideas, and I think that's actually gotten harder as the business
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has grown.
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Yes.
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So I think the best thing when we were starting out, was that we had no clue what we were
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going to do.
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Yeah, we didn't overthink anything.
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Yeah.
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People are always like, "How did you come up with the name?
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Like the two words?"
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We're like, "We wrote it out, it looked better that way, that was it," that was the big meeting.
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Yeah, I love it.
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If we were going to re-create theSkimm today, we would sit down, we would have probably
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like 14 brainstorms, we would probably bring in a consultant, we would go to our board.
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Overproduce it.
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We would overproduce it, we would overdo it, and it wouldn't be as good.
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Yeah, no, I can relate to that so much, whenever I find myself, or even our team, when we start
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going down this track, we're like, "Wait a minute, why is this taking so long?
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Why is this becoming so complicated, when whole reason this even exists, is because
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I didn't give a ... I was just like βgo, let's just do this?"
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Another question that I have for you guys, $4,000, how did you spend that?
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What was the spend on in the beginning?
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That's a good question, the very first thing we spent on it, was food for our refrigerator.
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We have this picture we took, we were roommates in downtown Manhattan, and we took ... It's
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so funny to look at it now, and think about it, I don't know what we were preparing for,
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like a nuclear disaster, I don't know.
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That was like our focus.
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Yeah, the night before we launched our business, we stayed up late making pasta salad.
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No way.
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Yeah, and cutting vegetables, because we were like, "We won't have the money to order out,
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or go out, so like the pasta salad was very plentiful, and it will last a week."
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Then we ordered all this food, and it was so funny, our refrigerator has never been
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as full since that day.
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We took a picture, and I don't think I've ever had as full a refrigerator since, and
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so we definitely spent money there, but we went into a tremendous amount of credit card
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debt to do this, and that was something that we decided to do together.
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It's not something that like you can tell someone else, "Go ahead and do it, that's
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the way."
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We're by no means experts around that, but I think for us, like we agreed to do that.
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First of all, the things we had to pay for, were to actually pay to send an email, you
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have to use an email service provider, it's shockingly expensive, so we were paying for
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that.
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We were paying for transportation, like to go to meetings.
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I remember we had a really kind advisor who paid for our first trip to go to the West
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Coast, because we couldn't afford it, and as soon as we ever got money, it was the first
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check we wrote was to pay her back.
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We have to pay for our initial legal fees, and set up, that $4,000 didn't go very far,
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and so we immediately were using credit card debt.
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Yeah.
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It was also, we were paying for rent for the apartment, and that was really the only expense.
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Kinda forgot about that.
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Β
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Yeah, we also had to live.
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That was the big one, yeah, but I think there was no ... We didn't have a safety net, and
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we didn't have anything ... we didn't want to take anything out of the company, but we
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also were optimizing for growth, so that was a really hard position to be in, and knowing
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that you have the right strategy for the type of business that we were building: don't just
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bring in revenue off the bat, because you need to grow the brand first, and you need
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to grow the audience first.
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I think that was 100% the right strategy.
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Β At the same time it was so hard, because we didn't have time to get other jobs, because
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we were writing at night, and we were trying to get the business off the ground during
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the day.
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And then we were trying to stay true to the brand, and not just take the first sponsorship
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offers that would come, and because of that, we just didn't have another option, except
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for racking up credit card bills that I didn't really look at for a very long time.
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Well, that was five and a half years ago.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, so it turned out really well.
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I want to move on to basically what we were talking about before.
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I've heard this, I have a program called B-School, it's online business school for modern entrepreneurs.
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Not necessarily folks that want to go the venture-capital route, but folks that just
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have an idea that they want to get it up, and out into the world.
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For years, this is going to be my ninth year running this, I've been drilling into people's
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heads, and they hate me for it, email, email, email, email.
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I've heard, "Emails dead, it's all about social, what about ..." I'm like trust me, don't say
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no, email is amazing.
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When you guys have heard email is dead β¦ I mean obviously ...
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I wish we knew you then.
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I know.
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I would have been your champion.
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I know, I mean, it's so funny, when we think about this now, for so long our initial meetings
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for years, honestly even last week we had a meeting like this, where people β the
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things that people have said to us it's like laughable.
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βWhy did you focus on a small market like women?β
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That was literally said to us last week.
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That would've taken at this point.
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We're just numb to it, which is also sad.
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Well, but I think it's also just a mark now of being like, "Thank you for telling me upfront
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that you don't understand my vision, or my business," but it took us a long β¦
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It took us a long time to develop that.
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Yeah.
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The second thing was email's dead, like don't do email, and we're like, "Do you check your
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email?"
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People would email that to us to say, "Dear Carly, and Danielle, thank you for your time
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in coming in, we think you both are really smart and great, but we believe email is dead,"
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and they emailed it to us.
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We were just like, "Is no one else seeing the irony here?"
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I'm glad whatever was in us that allowed us to just zone that part out, because honestly,
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if that happened today, I'd be like, "Maybe we should be listening."
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Right.
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For whatever reason, we had it in us to ignore it, and we just really believed that, and
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we still believe email is a brilliant marketing tool.
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It is.
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You can't just send 25 emails a day, and I think that's a big mistake a lot of companies
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make, is they're like they've got 100 newsletters, and they just spam you all day.
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We send one email to everyone Monday through Friday at 6 AM, and that's it, and that's
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the beginning of our suite of products.
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I think we're very respectful, we say in our website, "We respect your inbox, and we also
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respect brunch, so we don't bother you on the weekend," but I think we find it funny
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that people still say that.
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Yeah.
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I think it's also kind of been the story to our company, which is we've never been the
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hot thing from a venture perspective at the right time, so when we started, email was
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dead, and then after email became cool again, content was dead.
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Then it was ...
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Then it was all video.
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Yeah, then it's all video, and then it was programmatic, and then it was native, and
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then it wasn't, so I think just starting with something that everyone considered to be dead,
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was such a blessing, because we learned that we just had to believe our own internal compass
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for what we think the company should be.
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Yeah, I mean I try and tell people, and I give them the example βI'm like look,
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do you guys realize,β god bless Facebook, love them, yay Facebook, but I feel like they
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pulled off one of the biggest bait and switches in history.
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I mean getting all of the everybody, all of us, right?
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Build up these huge pages, these huge fan pages, and then βoh, you can't reach your
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people, they can't see your stuff unless you pony up.β
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I get it, I understand it as a business woman, but that's my whole point when I try and dissuade
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people from focusing on social.
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I mean, we have never ever built, and we never want to build our company on someone else's
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algorithm.
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Exactly.
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Whether β¦
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Can I β¦ this is business church.
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People are going to be watching us on a Tuesday, or a Friday, or whenever you're watching this,
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but this gets an amen from me, oh it makes me so excited, but it's the truth.
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I think it was something that we always just kind of thought was common sense, and then
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over the past few years we heard more and more people being like, "Well, I'm my moving
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all of my content to Facebook, or I'm moving all of my content to Snapchat, or wherever."
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Yeah.
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And then for us, we always looked at it, and we were like, "Well that's interesting, it's
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not β we want to have this direct connection with our audience," unless something huge
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happens in society, and Gmail, and everyone else goes down, we do own that direct connection.
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They know where to find us, they know we have an occurring habitual routine with where to
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reach us.
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Yes, I was telling you guys off camera, you're part of my routine, I love it, I laugh.
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It's so much fun, even on my little ride over to the studio today, I was like βoh, and
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I get to meet them today.
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We're going to talk,β but it is.
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Thank you very much.
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I want to move on to why I have so much fun with it, and this is something, another thing
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that we share in common.
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One of the reasons why it was so taken, was the copy, the actual tone, and the humor,
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and the connection piece, because for me β I'm part of your audience, even though I'm not
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a millennial per se.
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I'm someone who is very busy, focusing on a lot of different things, and not necessarily
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able all the time to read every single newspaper that I want to read, or dive deep into every
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single subject.
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It was so refreshing to open my inbox, and have a hip-hop lyric as the subject line,