Hey it's Marie Forleo, and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business
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
reach us.
Yes, I was telling you guys off camera, you're part of my routine, I love it, I laugh.
It's so much fun, even on my little ride over to the studio today, I was like “oh, and
I get to meet them today.
We're going to talk,” but it is.
Thank you very much.
I want to move on to why I have so much fun with it, and this is something, another thing
that we share in common.
One of the reasons why it was so taken, was the copy, the actual tone, and the humor,
and the connection piece, because for me – I'm part of your audience, even though I'm not
a millennial per se.
I'm someone who is very busy, focusing on a lot of different things, and not necessarily
able all the time to read every single newspaper that I want to read, or dive deep into every
single subject.
It was so refreshing to open my inbox, and have a hip-hop lyric as the subject line,
and I'm like, "You know I'm cracking that open.
There is no way I'm not clicking on that."
So much fun, and so many of the winks that are opening up to really important things.
How difficult has it been, because I'm assuming that, that tone, and that voice, and please
correct me if I'm wrong, comes from a combination of you guys, and your perspective on the world.
Yeah, well I think first of all, I mean, our names are nowhere on the site.
Yes.
We created a character together, and that character has a personality, that character
– when we created that character, we each had a few friends in mind that we were like,
"This is how I would talk to so-and-so," so every day, whether there were 100 people reading
this, a million people reading this, or the millions and millions of people that read
us every day now, we still just focus on those same people.
How would we talk to them?
We're very lucky now, we have an amazing support team, and we have a wonderful team now, but
you know for us I think what you're referencing, is that there is definitely a casual vibe
to our writing, and there's a conversational feel to it.
We write the way people speak, I remember the first few years when we started, we would
get all these emails of people being like, "Ladies, I am a copy editor, you don't know
grammar, I will help you."
We were like, "We do know grammar, but sometimes we're literally changing sentence structure,
because it's how we speak,” and that doesn't show a lack of intelligence, it makes it easier
to digest the world around you.
It's intentional, and it's artistic, and it's a choice.
It also just came from the reality of like, we're smart people, we worked in news, that
was our career, and we would have to read ... I remember sitting there, and finance
is not my favorite area to read about, and I was reading about something about the Greek
debt crisis back in the day when we started, and I had to read the same email – the
same newspaper four times to understand it.
I was like, "I'm spending so much time on this, I'm really putting in the effort, and
I'm going to have to look up terms."
That just didn't make sense, there had to be something out there that made it just a
little bit easier, that actually took the time to explain the background, to give context,
and once you do that, then you actually hook someone.
Then they feel more confident reading about the same subject, or reading about other things
that typically have been outside of their area of interest.
That confidence I think is really important, because it spills over, and it helps us then
connect with one another, and not stay silent about issues that could open up to really
meaningful discussions, or interesting changes in our perspective, and our ability to see
things in a new way.
And so I particularly love it, so as a business woman, I'm curious, has it been challenging
to find writers to embody that same tone as you've gotten bigger?
So when we think about our fundraising history, each stage has kind of been different test
of the company.
The very first raise that we did was all about, could we scale the voice, so we hired five
people, and two of them were editorial in the beginning, and the real test for us was,
could we scale this?
Could we move into a position where we were editing, and still being very involved, but
the real test to the company was going to be, can you scale that voice?
Before we did that, we talked to a lot of people who had worked for years in training
voices, and building other brands, and the biggest mistake that they said they made,
was doing things like going local, verticalizing, of trying to do too much too soon.
I think for us it was, let's make this the very first data point, let's write down everything
we know about this person.
Let's write down the whole character of the brand when it is fresh – when it's the beginning
of the company.
We actually had a 19-year-old intern who came to us, and he said, "I want to work in journalism,
but I can't get an internship in journalism, because I don't have any journalism experience."
And we were like, "Yeah, we've been there, so we'll help you out, you can be our intern,
and we will help you get you an internship at a more established company," because at
the time it was the two of us on our couch.
He would take notes about every decision that we made.
We should say he was – our couch was half the size of this, we would be in our pajamas,
he would come over, he would sit next to us, and watch us.
It's really funny to think about now, honestly we were too tired to even think it was weird,
we were just like, “sure, you sit here,” and he literally created a study guide to
us.
When you're the friend, you don't realize you have shorthand, you don't realize you
have inside jokes, you don't realize that you both rely on the same joke every now and
then, or one of you hates this word, the other hates that word.
He literally created a psychological study around what the voice was, and we used that
as a boot camp, if you will, of how to hire.
When I look at our team today, I think it's less than 10% are editorial.
No, that's not true.
It’s not ...
Math is not her strong suit.
It's a small portion.
The ratio to product, and analytics, and engineering is much smaller, and I think that's because
one, given our background, and the reason why we left to start a company, we really
believed that there is an opportunity for editorial and business to work together.
Yes.
So we would rather have a smaller team that can do a lot, and help out with marketing,
and help out with product, than just siloing them.
And I think that's given us a lot of room to be able to have a small team, and allow
them to scale.
I think the other part too has been that, we don't just think about the brand, and the
voice as specific to editorial.
So we go through the brand deck every quarter, and some of our favorite moments are when
our engineers would be like, "No, Skimm girl wouldn't use that," because they need to know
what they're building, they need to think about the audience when they're building their
product strategy.
I love that, I love that an engineers like, "Um, no, not so much, we need to change that
word,” or whatever that is.
That's awesome, I could talk to you guys about this for hours, but I want to be respectful
of time.
So when you have such a great product like you do, there's naturally going to be word
of mouth.
You guys also have been really intelligent about using community as a tool to then further
support, and expand upon that growth.
So I read that they're responsible, in terms of the Skimmbassador community for about 20%
of annual growth.
Tell us about that, like what have you learned in terms of do's or don'ts from a community
standpoint, any highlights?
Well, I think we've had a lot of companies, and people look at what we've done, and are
like, "Oh, that seems smart, I'm going to do that too."
You can't create loyalty overnight, and you can't just create ... Like there’s plenty
of companies that have ambassador programs, or brand rep programs, no one has a Skimmbassador
program.
And I think that has taken years to build, we've thrown a lot of stuff against the wall
to see what sticks, and what definitely does not.
I mean what doesn't stick, I remember like year one, we were like, "We don't need a lot
of Skimmbassadors, we need 40."
We were like, "We'll have 40 at these college campuses, and we'll talk to them all the time,"
and then people were away on fall break, and we were like, "This is a terrible idea."
That was a bad idea.
Yeah.
Then we were like, "Let's tier Skimmbassadors into these four different Facebook groups,"
and we called them super, super Skimmbassadors, and then we had super regular,
I forgot about that.
Hhonestly it sounds like tampons.
It was a terrible idea, and …
Light Skimmbassadors
Yeah, exactly, it was a terrible idea.
Regular plus.
We guarded that, and then we were like, people have different motivation of why they want
to become a Skimmbassador.
What they have in common, is that they believe in our mission, and they want to connect with
one another, or with us, and so what's evolved is this amazing community, where honestly
it's been a testing ground for us to see what happens when you put thousands of women in
an online forum together?
It gets hairy sometimes.
What happens when you do that in an especially divisive political year?
That gets real hairy.
Yes.
What happens when we hire from that pool, which we've done quite a lot of?
What happens when we provide mentorship?
What happens when we give them the first look at a new product?
In many ways they become a PR team for us, they become a focus group, they've become
the most honest feedback channel.
They help better us, I think we're in the group, our team is in the group.
They see that we're not perfect, that we make mistakes, that we own up to when we make mistakes,
and so I think it's been one of the more enlightening things of our lives, but also …
I think it's been the biggest learning experience for the company, because as much as there
isn't a roadmap for building a media company today, there really is not a roadmap for building
a community, and scaling it in this political environment.
I think we are learning from it, and I think that's been amazing to see, and I think one
of the biggest things that we've learned, is that you need to try things, and you need
to figure it out, and you need to always be innovating, because the group, how it looked
a year ago, doesn't look the same today, and there's different voices, and it's something
that's evolving.
And so I think that was a big learning lesson for us, was the things that worked three years
ago, don't work, because the community looks different.
What's great, is that it forces all of us to stay on our growth edge.
Yeah.
Which, I think is really fun.
100%, and you cannot get lazy with that.
You cannot get lazy with it, you can't get lazy with business, you can't get lazy with
a community, I love it.
So let's talk a little bit about focus, especially how to stay focused when things start going,
right?
More opportunities start coming your way, and then it almost becomes a little bit of
an embarrassment of riches, where there's like “wow, there's a lot to choose from,
a lot of these things sound good on paper.”
I'm a woman who runs – and I talk about this all the time on my show – I run everything
by intuition, even if something looks so damn good on paper, the people will be like, "Well,
I should want to work," and it's like, "I do not."
How do you guys have criteria, or like what are some of the ...
We're very similar to you, but have tried over the last year, for better or worse, to
not just rely on our intuition, and sometimes I really regret that I've changed in that
way, that I think we've become really pragmatic, and are like constantly writing out our goals,
like how does this achieve our goals?
We were talking before we started, we both hate the word balance.
Yeah.
But there is a fine balance I think with intuition, and pragmatism.
I think the biggest mistakes that we've made from like either moving too fast, or too slowly,
or hiring someone, or seeing a product blow up in our face, I think it’s – it always
in our mind goes back to intuition.
I think we've had feelings, and it's the ones that we ignore where we're like, "We knew
that."
Then I think that we've had to learn that a lot of the data can actually help strengthen
something that's there, and I think that's where we've had to evolve our thinking, especially
from the product, philosophy side.
That's great, okay, one other thing I love, hashtag failsohard.
I was like, "Okay, love the Jay-Z, and Kanye reference," because that was a couple years
back, but when that song was particularly hot, I could not help but turning that up
all the time.
That's Danielle's.
Okay, I can see that is your brain, it's like, "Oh, it's so good."
It's so important to fail, and again, it's another one of those things we have to balance
that perfectionism, we all want to get it right all the time.
Yeah.
When you're leading people, and you're in the public eye in some way, it's like, "Oh,
I don't want to fall on my face."
I hate making a mistake, and it's embarrassing.
And it's something where I think we tell our team all the time we're like, "Embrace the
failure," and I'm like, "But I hope I'm not the one failing."
I really want to use someone else as an example, and be really proud of their failure.
Yeah, and I'm really rooting you on, but like don't let me fail.
For our audience though, because I went into something that I might have not explained
so well, can you tell us what #failsohard means in your company?
Yeah, so every week we do a team meeting where we spotlight.
So the way this started, is we would spotlight something interesting that someone was working
on.
It was great, everyone claps, and it's just like here's one exciting thing, and then another
exciting thing, and then we realized like it's okay to talk about what didn't go well,
and that's actually – we read a lot about Amazon, and their culture, and they talk a
lot about like failure.
I think it's a really big inspiration to learn about how Jeff has instilled like that sentiment
in his team.
One of the things that we created was a hard hat that says failsohard on it, and every
week someone has to say what they tried, and failed at, and that's as important as spotlighting
something that's exciting.
I think the thing is, is like it's never easy.
I wish that at this point it was like everyone was competing for the biggest failure, and
we're not there yet, and I think it's really hard if you are at an earlier stage company,
you tend to have a personality that wants to get it right all the time.
I think it's something that in our company culture is definitely a work in progress.
I think also, if you fail, you can't just be like, "Okay, I tried this, and I failed,"
but it's like “what did I learn from this?
Did I not listen to my instincts?
Did I not communicate well?”
What was the lesson.
We have this in our company, so I have a virtual company, so we do it on the phone, we have
one phone call a week.
I want to interview you, you're very fascinating.
Oh, we'll have a great time, but so on our team call on Thursdays, I have three questions,
and we each get to choose, and one of them is, “what did you try really hard at, and
make a mistake?
Or what did you fail at?
Then what did you learn from it?”
For me in our company, and me as a human, the growth mindset to constantly look for
where am I learning?
How am I getting better?
And to have our whole team feel really comfortable with that, it's been transformative.
It gets us connecting on a whole different level, and people feel safe, and I know for
me, when I feel safe, I become my most creative, and my most powerful, and I feel like that's
the same in a company culture as well, if people feel safe man, they'll go to the wall
for you.
Okay we're almost – got a couple more minutes.
Again, we could talk for hours and hours, so I want to hit on something that I thought
was so brave, and I really appreciated.
You guys make it easier to be smarter, and everything you did last year during the election,
your “No Excuses” campaign.
You helped register over a hundred thousand people to vote, come on.
Thank you.
Making that happen, that is enormous, and I also loved when I was getting the email
in the morning, I loved that you covered both Republicans and Democrats, and we talked to
everybody, we heard from everyone.
I was wondering, I loved the story about the day after the inauguration, do you mind sharing
about that, because I thought it was brilliant.
I think it's very reflective, or emblematic of what we're going through as a country right
now, which is – so we wrote the day after the inauguration, it was our top story.
We wrote about what happened at inauguration, like we would – you would expect us to,
and that day we got emails like we always do from our readers, and over literally people
responding to the exact same line of text.
Someone like … a bunch said, "No wonder Fox News invested in you," which by the way,
they didn't – 21st Century Fox is an investor, but “no wonder Fox invested in you, you're
just another conservative arm.”
Then the exact same line attack someone would write in, and say, "Get over it, Hillary lost,
you're just another liberal millennial."
We were dumbfounded, and we were like, "Wow, it doesn't matter, we could say the sky is
blue, people are going to interpret it, like why are you leaning left?
What does the blue mean?"
There was also an interesting point I think – we are so proud of the voter registration
efforts that we did.
Yes, as you should be.
As a company that is our biggest achievement I think from everyone that works there, we're
really proud of the work that we did, and hopefully we can do much more in the midterms,
and for 2020, but we didn't endorse anyone.
And I think that was even a big point of contention on both sides, that we felt that it was not
at that point in our business, the right tack for us to take, and our focus was making sure
that people felt informed.
Yes.
Making sure that people felt that they were prepared to vote, and actually getting them
out there to vote, and respecting this audience enough to let them make up their own mind.
I loved that, and the reason I wanted to bring this up, is because I think it's so important.
A lot of folks that listen to, and watch this show, are also content creators.
They may have their own YouTube channel, they may have their own blog, they may do their
own podcasts.
I think especially for creatives, if you're sensitive, right?
You can put something out there, and you just get slammed for it, you get trashed, but I
wanted to tell this story, because the same line of copy could be interpreted in completely
different ways.
Yes.
You know you're doing something right, when both sides are mad at you, because they think
that you're leaning the other way.
I think that's what we’ve had to … we take away from it, which is, it's reflective
of what's happening in the country, that people are just really angry at each other, and really
hurt by one another, but I think people, they're looking to uncover something with everyone.
I think we've worked really hard to stay in the middle, and I think to show both sides.
Absolutely, and also to be a source of information, so that people can then go ahead, search out
more information if they want to, be informed, and make choices within themselves.
So let's wrap up talking about what you're excited about now.
I know there's so many things on the horizon, anything that you want to talk about in terms
of yourselves, your company, anything about what's happening now, or what's coming up
next?
Well, we're very excited, we just launched Skimm Notes, which you can find in our app
in the App Store, and it's our first real foray into audio, which is something we're
so excited, our audience has been asking us for, for years, and being able to bring the
voice to another platform is really exciting for us, so that's been a huge work in progress.
Yeah, and really just we're refocusing, and really excited about continuing to build out
our subscription offerings, which you know I think for us goes back to our membership
company.
First way to become a member is to go to theskimm.com/marie.
Yay, I love that I have my own page with you guys.
Yes, please theskimm.com/marie, we'll make sure it's on the bottom, we'll put it on the
blog, it's everywhere.
That'll introduce you to all of our subscription offerings, which you can also get in the App
Store at theSkimm.
Well, you guys are fantastic, thank you for making it so much fun.
You have a fun studio.
Oh, it's a party here.
We like it here.
We’ll talk more, we can dive deeper into business stuff too.
Thank you, keep rocking, and yeah, we'll have another session soon.
Thank you so much.
Now, we would all love to hear from you, so we talked about so many good things today.
I'm curious: what's the one stand out for you?
What's that one insight that you're going to be able to turn into action in your business,
or your life today?
Leave a comment below, and let us know now.
Now, as always, the best conversations happen over at the magical land of marieforleo.com,
so head on over there, and leave a comment now.
Once you're there, be sure to subscribe to our email list, and become an MF Insider.
You'll get instant access to an audio I created called, How To Get Anything You Want, plus
you'll get some exclusive content, special giveaways, and some personal updates from
me that I just don't share anywhere else.
Stay on your game, and keep going for your dreams, because the world needs that very
special gift that only you have.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll catch you next time on MarieTV.
Ready to find your voice, and sell with heart?
We'll show you how.
Get started now with our free writing class at thecopycure.com.
Side effects include enlarged profits.
We've never ever built, and we never want to build our company on someone else's algorithm.
Exactly, this is business church on … There are people going to be watching us on a Tuesday,
or a Friday, or whenever you're watching this, but this gets an amen from me.