The Accidental Entrepreneur: Interview with medibistro.com's Laurel Touby

Filling a need is what a successful small business is all about. That’s how mediabistro.com got started. The company’s founder and president, Laurel Touby, a freelance writer who wrote for magazines such as BusinessWeek, Glamour, Travel & Leisure and New York, saw a need for herself and others like her: a way to network. The business began as an afterwork cocktail party in 1994. She steadily added products and services to service the media community. mediabistro.com started as a community of 10 people; the company’s database of those attending events is now more than 700,000 strong. The company has 30 employees.

In June, Laurel Touby reached a milestone that many small business owners dream of: she negotiated the successful sale of her business. The buyer was Jupitermedia Corp., a Darien, Conn.-based provider of information and images. The sale price? A cool $23 million for the company ($3 million of which is subject to a two-year earnout period). Touby, who owned 62% of the company, will stay on as a senior vice president at Jupitermedia. NY Report Editor-in-Chief Rob Levin sat down with Touby to discuss mediabistro. com, from its beginnings through its sale.

RL: Is mediabistro.com a company that was really founded by its customers?

LT: That’s a great way of putting it. Yes, I was the first member and I had a need to meet other people like myself and to commune with them, to hang out with them, and to have a connection with other people who were doing similar work. This allowed us to trade war stories, commiserate with each other, meet each other for drinks to share business information, etc. So I was the first person who was the customer. But quickly I realized that there were others like me. They came to the parties, and as more of them came to the parties, the bigger my database became. It started with 10 people and today the database is about 700,000.

RL: How does the company make money?