For the Thrill of It: Thrillist

In 2005, two friends felt they were part of an underserved demographic–twenty- something, professional males. Seems like an odd inkling during a time when newsstands carried a wealth of men's magazines such as Maxim, FHM, GQ, Details, and so on. But Ben Lerer and Adam Rich, the founders of Thrillist, a free, daily email for guys, felt the GQ- and Esquire-type magazines were catering to a caricature of a "fancy man," and the Maxim- or FHM-type laddie mags were for college guys.

There was nothing out there for young professionals. Lerer and Rich were similarly unimpressed with online city guides, because they were all-inclusive aggregators of what was going on in the cities that they were covering. The two had an idea to develop a filter for finding the best restaurants, bars, stores, and so on, specifically for the young men's demographic. The result is a newsletter stocked with relevant, local information for young, upwardly mobile, hip young men.

Nearly four years later, it is clear that they were on to something. Now publishing local newsletters in 12 markets, plus a national edition, Thrillist provides information on entertainment, new bars, local events, and cool, new gadgets; the male equivalent of DailyCandy. "We would just say, 'City guides suck and men's magazines suck. Why isn't there something better?' Now we realize that there was this legitimate gap in the market," says Lerer.

By the end of that first year, Thrillist had 30,000 subscribers. In the second year, they grew to about 150,000 subscribers, and by the end of the third year, they had 500,000. Today, Thrillist has nearly 900,000 nationwide.

Inverting the Model

Most media companies use newsletters to drive traffic to their website, but Thrillist uses its website to drive newsletter subscriptions. "That's where we see ourselves as being very different—we flipped the traditional model on its end and decided to sell our email newsletter," says Lerer, son of Kenneth Lerer, former vice president of AOL Time Warner and co-founder of the Huffington Post.

"So many web publications sell advertising by selling web placements on their splashy front page, and then they give away the newsletter as added value. But email is far and away the more efficient place to advertise. Email is where you see the return on your investment, because you're reaching an engaged person in a much more personal setting. Our website can be a small portion of our revenue, because that's not where we're moving the needle for our customers or our advertisers."

According to Lerer, the reason their model was engaging to advertisers was because email is an easy way to quantify the audience. The nature of a subscription carried real value with advertisers, because they could easily see exactly how many people they were reaching, whereas web tracking success is dictated by search engine optimization, or strategic partnerships where sites feed off each other's traffic and it can be difficult to come up with hard viewer numbers.

By using email, Thrillist not only knows who is receiving the content, they also know the subscribers want the content and are voluntary participants, which has been music to the ears of advertisers struggling to find the right audience in a crowded web space.

Learning from Mistakes

Starting a business with no prior management experience meant Lerer and Rich had to learn as they went along. Lerer says one of the biggest mistakes they made early on was not acknowledging that they were a technology company. "For the first two years, we pretended we were just delivering content, and that we were a brand in spite of technology," says Lerer.