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Transcript
Laurel Touby on Founding Mediabistro
So I came to found Mediabistro through kind of a very circuitous route. It all started with
my own need for community and Mediabistro is a community web site so the first
customer was me. Basically, it all started offline as a cocktail party and this was in 1994.
I had been in the media for about eight years and I was lonely and I was disconnected
because I didn’t have all the tools of technology at the time that we have today. So for
example we did not have cell phones. We barely had voice mail. We did have answering
machines.
There weren’t a lot-- There was-- There were not a lot of technologies to connect people
so I started with a friend a little cocktail party to connect with other media professionals
and to meet people because I had been so lonely working from home in my bedroom with
no daily routine with other coworkers or colleagues, I was writing a column for Glamour
magazine, and this cocktail party once a month became my way of actually touching and
feeling and talking to real people because most of the time I dealt with my editors and I
dealt with other writers on the phone.
And so the cocktail party started with ten people in Jules Bistro- at Jules Bistro, a little
bistro in the East Village, and people felt the same way. I realized that I had tapped in to
a need. I had ready-made customers and they were all my friends. They were the other
people- they were the other people in the media who similarly needed to reach out and
touch someone once a month and needed to talk shop, to talk about ideas, to talk about
issues that were affecting our work lives and to really- and some of us wanted to date of
course. So there were lots of needs that were being met at the parties, that some people
got dates and some people got some extra freelance work on the side and everyone was
happy.
Question: When did you decide to develop Mediabistro into a business?
In the beginning, Mediabistro did not start as a business. It just was an offline community
but then what I realized was all of these people coming to the parties and by- within a
very short amount of time I had hundreds of people on my list and then thousands of
people. All of these people kept saying to me, “Laurel, the parties are great but they’re
once a month. I’m getting work reference. I’m getting referrals for work. I’m meeting
people that I love hanging out with. I’m hearing about opportunities.
I’m hearing about other events. I’m hearing about apartments.” So it was kind of like
Craig’s List in a party form if you know what I mean and so people would say, “You
need a web site so we could all go there all the time, 24/7. We don’t need to go there just
once a month.” And that was a very good suggestion that someone made. In fact, I know
who made the suggestion.
Question: What were the first steps you took when creating the website?
So I’m one of these people who I listen to my customers. Even though they weren’t
paying me money and they weren’t formally my customers, they were just my friends. I
thought if this turns in to something these could be my customers so I listened when
people suggest you should have a web site, you should have an e-mail newsletter, all
these things. And I basically took it all in and I talked to a programmer and he was
referred by one of the editors and this person put up the first web site in 1996. It was
basically a directory on his web site.
It was a little nothing of a web site but it got huge traffic immediately. People responded
like that. It really did serve a need. And so it started with that first little web site and then
a couple of years later I started charging for the job listings. Those became quickly the
most popular area, the job listings and the bulletin board, and it also had an events page
and it had a resources page, and so it was like Craig’s List basically for a very targeted
audience, media professionals only. And in 1999, I started charging money for the web
site.
Question: How did you maintain customers when you started charging for the site?
Well, the best customers are happy customers. Right? So I never want a customer to pay
if they’re not happy so I made that my policy very early on. If you’re not happy, don’t
pay me; only pay me if you’re happy. And I would send out e-mails every month to the
list of people who posted jobs and I’d say, “Hey, consider this your invoice. Send a
hundred-dollar check to this p.o. box if you’re happy with your job listing.” And literally
the checks started flooding in and that doesn’t mean everybody paid or everybody always
pays but the ones who are happy are happy to pay.
Question: When did you start making a profit?
Laurel Touby: In 1999, I realized that the job board was really the beginning kernels of
an actual business. Prior to that, it had been a happy social gathering. It hadn’t been a
formalized business but I was developing an audience and now this audience was paying
me back in a sense that the job listings were a valuable commodity. So I realized in 1999
that this was what was going on. I started writing my business plan and by 2000 I got
funding so I took the- I took my what had been business that I started in my bedroom
with two cats and two interns and with funding I could actually get a real office space and
start hiring, and that’s when I started hiring and I started with just a handful of people.
Question: What advice would you give to business owners hiring their first employees?
When you’re hiring people when you’re first starting out you have different needs at
different stages of the business. When you have a very small business the people have to
be very flexible and wear a lot of hats. What you can’t do is hire really senior
management people who have been in middle management for three years and are
making hundreds of thousands of dollars. You have to hire junior-level people who are
going to just take the ball and run and get things done and they’re not going to worry a lot
about getting permission or systems and processes. They’re just going to get the stuff
done and that’s the most important thing. As you evolve in to a bigger company, that’s
when you need routines and procedures and meetings and budgets and all kinds of
structure, and so that comes later on and I realized that later on when I started getting a
very- having a very chaotic workplace because all of these people were just creating
chaos. They were getting stuff done but we weren’t having- we weren’t getting a lot of-
we weren’t- we needed systems at a certain point.
Question: When did you realize the company needed more structure?
The transition to a more structured work environment once your company grows from
being a little startup in to let’s say a mid-sized company--I don’t know what that means--
a mid-sized, small company, the transition for us was very slow and gradual. As people
left the company, the next person we hired always had a little more experience and a little
more structure and so we kind of added that accretionally. We didn’t just stop business
and then hire a whole new staff. That would be crazy. We just waited until there was
attrition and then we developed the internal staff as much as we could and then
sometimes we’d have to let a person go because we realized they weren’t fitting the
needs of the company now that it was bigger.
Question: Did you make any one mistake that you felt you learned from?
The one mistake I would say I learned from-- I know not everyone has this lucky problem
but I created a pool of stock early on even when I- the stock was not valuable at all, and
in the beginning I didn’t have a lot of money to pay people so I would pay people with
stock, but since I didn’t value the stock and since to me it was just a number, it was just
millions of stock, I ended up giving a certain chunk of it to a person who did not deserve
it. He was a consultant and he went to Harvard and maybe he talked me in to it--I don’t
know--but he had a set of deliverables and he did not follow through and so when it came
time to sell the company and I did sell the company that stock was worth a lot of money
and he never gave me the value for the stock. And I feel like I was kind of hoodwinked
and I’m upset about it to this day.
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Laurel Touby on Founding Mediabistro