mediabistro Founder Laurel Touby Shares Her Experience Building One of the Hottest Online Communities
October 21st, 2010 | 
Author: Laurel Touby – Your Invisible Mentor
This interview is very different from the other interviews that I have conducted. Some of the questions are similar, but today we get the opportunity to get into the head of someone who built one of the first online community. As the case with many successful businesses, Laurel Touby built a business out of her own need. She wanted a community of her peers to network with and mediabistro was born. For a few years I have admired what Laurel created from afar. I asked her if I could interview her and she said yes. One of the lessons that came out very loud in the interview, is that persistence pays. Don’t take no for an answer, the more comfortable you become with hearing NO, the easier it becomes to work through what you perceive as rejection. As you read Part One of Laurel’s interview, think about what you have in common with her. What lessons can you learn from her?
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Laurel Touby: I started out as a journalist and made a living as a journalist. Somehow I found myself forming a community of professionals because of my own need. If you start any company, you quickly learn that your own need is often reflective of the needs of others. So once I discovered that I had this need to commune with other people who were like me – fellow journalists, media professionals. Other people came out of the woodworks and told me that they wanted to attend more parties. In the beginning, I didn’t realize it was a business, I just knew that I was filling a need. The need was community, and back then we didn’t have Facebook, we had bars and restaurants, we had local watering holes.
Walk me through the evolution of mediabistro.
Laurel Touby: I started out at a bar with some friends, and we just called it a cocktail party, which happened once a month. People would bring their friends, and eventually, the party grew to be bigger and bigger so we started collecting business cards and entered the information into a database. The big transformation happened when email came along, because once there was email, it made life a whole lot easier. We were able to leverage the technology to invite hundreds of people quickly and easily.
Today, Meetup.com is creating a whole business around the ease of organizing people within a vertical, an interest group, an enthusiast of one kind or another, and they are not the only one. Eventbrite, Evite, and all of the invitation software platforms are making it easy for people to self organize. Back then, I was doing it all by hand, so I would send out postcards and make phone calls and fax people and invite them to a cocktail party. Once they came, the magic happened, that’s when I figured out that these people really didn’t want to stand there by themselves drinking a cocktail. They wanted to be introduced, and it was a simple gesture of kindness to force people to meet. I would grab somebody by the hand and pull them over to another person and I would say, “You guys have something in common, why don’t you figure out what it is and meet each other.” People loved that, so I became like a Party Event Dominatrix.
I started wearing a feather boa so people could find me in a crowd, and they would say to other attendees, “You have to meet Laurel, she will introduce you to everybody.” Even though I couldn’t remember anybody’s name, I would force people to meet, and so that’s what I did. It could have just been that, a good, old-fashioned party, but in the mid 1990s, I figured out that there was this thing called the Web. So after email, someone suggested that I should have a website where people could meet 24/7, where I wouldn’t have to introduce them once a month, but all year round on this website. I thought how nifty. The person who suggested I get a website, her boyfriend was a programmer. He had a similar site so we copied the programming from his site, and that was the beginnings of this media community online, mediabistro.com.
Now that you have an online presence, what did you do next?
Laurel Touby: In the beginning, everything was free, and it was a way for people to organize and meet each other. We had a bulletin board online, event listings, both of which we still have today. We also had job listings online, and we didn’t have much else. There was no content, it was very static. A couple of years later, I realized that – the job listings were doing really well, the bulletin board was doing well – this could be a business.
I noticed that Monster and Hot Jobs were making money off their job listings so I thought maybe I should start charging for this service. The first time I tried, no one wanted to pay, and they told me to keep it free. Eventually people agreed that it was worth their money so they paid $100 for each job listing, but only if they were happy. I didn’t want to charge any unhappy customers.
I had a real business and started making money every month, and that’s when I wrote a business plan and went out and tried to find investors. That’s always fun when you have no business background. I was still considered a journalist. I found someone who would take a chance on me in early 2000. That person suggested another person so there were two people invested in me. By March 2000, I had raised the money, and boom you know what happened in March 2000, the internet crashed, the stock market crashed, everything went downhill so I had to survive that.
I had some money in the bank, but it wasn’t going to last forever because we had no real revenue. We survived that and added classes, seminars, and membership very soon after. We had to figure out a business model that didn’t rely only on job listings. It included it, but it wasn’t just job listings, and that saved us in 2000, and again when 9/11 hit in 2001. Luckily we had the other revenue streams and we just slowly pulled out of it.
After you started paid membership, did you lose many subscribers?
Laurel Touby: No, because not everyone had to pay. You only paid if you wanted to use certain features of the website. If you wanted to get premium content on the website like How to Pitch, you had to take out an AvantGuild membership. If you use one of those articles you can possibly get work. A lot of people get work because of those articles – they are really helpful.
What’s a typical day like for you?
Laurel Touby: Now I work at mediabistro two days a week and I also work on my own. I sold the company in 2007 for $23 million. I decided I wanted to work on mediabistro part-time, and work on other projects for myself. I am the ambassador for mediabistro. I talk to the press, speak at events and attend conferences. I am still the face of the company. And on the other few days of the week, I give advice to start-ups, sit on advisory boards, and I have a lot of meetings. I’m always in meetings. Those are my days, they are mixed up, there are so many different things that I’m working on at one time. Every day is different. It’s hard to have a typical day.
How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Laurel Touby: I have never had a problem with motivation. I think I was born trying to prove myself. It’s like that in New York. There are a lot of people in New York City struggling to be better than the next person. There is so much competition, and you feel it in the energy in the air. You can’t sit still because if you are sitting still, people are asking you, “What are you doing, what are you doing? What are you up to? What are you working on?” It’s impossible to live here and not do something. In terms of what motivates me, probably watching everyone around me doing better and working harder, that’s what motivates me. I think I should be working harder and doing better. It’s hard for me not to be motivated.
If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Laurel Touby: That’s a tricky question because everything is so much easier now. If I had to look back to then, it’s funny because I’m not one of those people who look back and say a ton of things they would have done differently. I could have been more “Craigslisty” and gone broader and not be just for media people. I ended up specializing in a niche, whereas Craig’s List went broad – he is doing it for everybody. We started at exactly the same time, so when I look back, I might have gone a different route, I might have gone broader and worth a billion dollars instead of where we are, but I like the audience that I’m serving. In that sense it was a very conscious decision. So I don’t know if I would have done things differently.
What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?
Laurel Touby: That’s hard because I learn things every day. I wake up and it’s a discovery, and I meet people who are doing really interesting things. I learned two things today, they are not big things, they are small things about certain industries, so I wouldn’t say that there is anything huge that I’ve learned that I could put into practice right now. There are just tons of small things.
What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?
Laurel Touby: The iPad and mobile stuff are going to be huge, and these are the things that are going to change the landscape for everybody else. These are areas to watch. Everyone is talking about how everything is going to be video, but I personally don’t think that everything should be video, and I don’t want to sit there and watch everything on video. I don’t want to read the New York Times on video. I want to read text and occasionally look at video.
What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Laurel Touby: I’m not in charge of the business anymore, but I feel that we’ve established ourselves. We have been doing this for over 10 years. We started as a cocktail party in 1994, and in 1996 on the web, so it would be really hard for anyone to catch up where we are at in terms of visibility. Everyone in the media is aware of us, we have a good track record and reputation, and we are constantly innovating so it would be very difficult for me to say that there is a big threat coming up.
You are not going to get any entrepreneur telling you that there is a threat first of all. Nobody will ever admit it if there is. No entrepreneur believes ever that there is a threat because we are all so positive. Entrepreneurs by nature don’t feel like there is a threat ever, they always feel like they can accomplish anything. They believe that they can overcome anything so this question is really tough. I personally do not believe that there is ever a threat.
Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it.
Laurel Touby: The biggest challenge was getting through the internet crash and 9/11. Getting through 9/11 was a huge challenge living in New York. New York was coming apart at the seams, everybody was upset and worried, and hosting a community website felt really silly. You didn’t feel like you were doing anything really important, so it was a challenge to get past that reaction and feel like you were doing something that helped, that mattered. I didn’t get over the challenge myself. I looked around for role models and I saw them, I heard people in the government telling us to get back on your feet, go shopping or what have you. They told us not to stop doing business, but to keep moving.
My investors were very aggressive about moving forward and not stopping, so I looked around at these role models and said, “You know what, I cannot let my staff be “mopey” and depressed, I have to lead.” I took the advice of those role models and tried to lead, put up a good front and said, “Let’s fake it till we make it.” You pretend that everything is okay and that everything is going to be fine and plough forward. We scheduled cocktail parties and events that played off the worry and depression. We scheduled an event called, “How to Laugh When You Want to Cry,” and it was humor in a time of tragedy. It was an event talking about what everyone was feeling and talking about, and it was hugely successful. People came to the event because they wanted to talk about what they were feeling. We basically capitalized on our own upset, our own depression and turned it into an event that other people could feel good about coming to. You can’t ignore this hugely upsetting thing, but you can’t stop business either. And our business was having a lot of events and online stuff at that time. As they say, the show must go on.
What lessons did you learn in the process?
Laurel Touby: I learned that you can’t just be in your own head worrying. You have to reach out to people and listen to what they have to say. A lot of times when you are in your head, you are alone. You are running a company and don’t have anyone to turn to so you have to create a mini advisory board of people who are outside of your company that have nothing to gain or lose from your success or failure. You go to those people to seek their advice, their counsel and wisdom. Get a cup of coffee with them, and turn them into your informal advisory board.
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