Web Exclusive: It’s Not What You Say, But How You Say It: Thrillist

While most media companies use newsletters as a marketing tool for their print or web content, Thrillist—the young man's answer to DailyCandy—found success with the opposite model. In just four years, Manhattan-based Thrillist has amassed an e-newsletter mailing list of nearly 900,000 subscribers. The entertainment and nightlife guide is the young men's answer to DailyCandy.

Thrillist co-founders Ben Lerer and Adam Rich built the value of their business on their brand. By building a unique voice for their product, and investing time and energy into developing a comprehensive brand, they attracted investors and clients.

An Unusual Stipulation

Lerer knew the content and the voice he and Rich developed had legs. He took his idea to the Pilot Group, a consumer brand–focused investment firm founded by Bob Pittman (founder of MTV, co-creator of VH1, and former president of AOL). Lerer admitted that the two twenty-something friends had no idea how to run a business, and even less of an idea how to create a business plan and do financial projections. "We felt that we were hard working enough and generally intelligent enough to figure all of that out if we had some really good guidance," says Lerer.

At the end of 2005, the Pilot Group agreed to give Thrillist some money with the stipulation that they couldn't spend any of it on marketing. "That was fine with me, because we didn't know what marketing meant anyway," says Lerer. "But their reason for the stipulation was so we couldn't buy an audience. We had to build an audience. We had to focus the limited funds we had towards building a product that people actually like; creating content that people want to pass along."

Finding Their Voice

The two partners attempted to, and succeeded in, building an audience by carefully crafting an editorial voice. Thrillist has newsletters in twelve markets: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, as well as a national edition. They originally created Thrillist for the New York market, then created a national edition to plant seeds in other markets to test if the unique voice they developed for New York could work elsewhere.

The national edition was also a test to see if the Thrillist voice could be consistent with more than one person writing it. "It was a really big struggle for a long time to figure out how to make the voice something that you could kind of spin out again and again," says Lerer. "But eventually, we figured out a way to do it and built a senior team that's able to work with all the other city editors to make sure that everyone stays consistent."

Lerer considers that voice to be branding gold—and the advertisers do as well. "If you copy one restaurant review out of ten city guides on ten napkins, mix it up on the table, and pick one up, you won't be able to tell who the hell wrote it," says Lerer. "With us, for better or for worse, if you pick up the Thrillist, it doesn't sound like anybody else. You might think we're morons, we're snarky, and we're sophomoric, but we're different, and I think that that's why advertisers come to us."

For more on Thrillist and how they grew their business, read "For the Thrill of It."