[upbeat music] We felt like we understood this audience better than anyone and wanted to trust ourselves to know how to build the business.
It was just really important to us that the company be profitable and that it have a model that worked. And so we have continued to bootstrap it for the past fifteen years.
We have been growing and profitable every single year. We have no debt, no loans. We've never drawn down on a line of credit. We've never missed a payroll.
We have been incredibly thoughtful and intentional and really disciplined in operating the business, and it's a really profitable business.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. This week I spoke to Stephanie Kaplan Lewis, who founded Her Campus as an undergrad in two thousand and nine.
Over the years, Stephanie and her co-founders have grown Her Campus the old-fashioned way, through cash flow. It's bootstrapped.
It is now eighty-five employees and grew a hundred percent over the last year with a unique community model that is part influencer agency, part content platform.
You know, we're coming out of an era where a lot of the focus went to large digital media companies that raised a fair amount of venture capital.
But in truth, they were always the minority, and there are many media companies that are both successful and profitable, and yet they aren't massive. And I don't think that those things are unrelated.
And I also think that's mostly okay.
Nobody said the media business was supposed to be a gigantic business as VCs have learned, and the sustainable media businesses of the future are already being built right now, and perhaps slower than the rocket ship growth seen in tech, but with sturdier foundations.
Stephanie and I discuss why Her Campus has stayed focused on ad revenue at a time when many are fleeing from it using a community model, and also her advice to aspiring media entrepreneurs.
If you like this episode, hope you do, please leave it a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts, and also consider becoming a member of the Rebooting. You get access to all content.
We are going to have unique events for members, uh, in New York City and other places, and you also get to support the Rebooting. So check it out on therebooting.com. Hope you'll consider becoming a member.
Now here's my discussion with Stephanie. [upbeat music] Stephanie, thanks so much for joining me. This is long overdue. Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. I'm psyched. Yes. No, we, we finally made it happen.
So you and your co-founder started Her Campus, totally different era, two thousand and nine. You were in a different part of your life, right?
And now you're, now you're catering to a Gen Z audience that is, you know, at a, at a different stage of their lives. Explain just first for, for people like what Her Campus was th- when you founded it.
What, what was the opportunity that you saw that existed? Obviously, Facebook was, was, was taking hold, I believe, at that time. Yep. And what, what did you see?
Yeah, I don't even think Instagram was even really in existence. Yeah. It was a completely different time.
My co-founders and I met as Harvard undergrads running Harvard's Women in Life-- Women's Lifestyle publication on campus. We moved it from a print publication to online, which was a big deal at the time.
We wanted to cut down on printing costs, publish content more frequently.
And basically, once the magazine was online, even though it just catered to a Harvard audience, it really took off with college women all over the country. And we started hearing from them in two different groups.
We heard from college women who said, "I want to be able to read something like this on my campus. I really like reading your Harvard one, but it doesn't feel personalized to me.
I wish I had content like this to consume for me." And then there was this whole other group of students who said, "I wish I had something like this to write for on my campus.
I want to go work for Glamour or Cosmo or Vogue one day. The only opportunities we have on campus are the school newspaper. Can you give us advice to start something like this at our school?"
And so we kind of looked around at the landscape and the fact that, for one thing, there really wasn't content speaking to women at that point in their lives.
When they're in college, they weren't looking to read a teen magazine. They also weren't a twenty or thirty-something-year-old woman out on their own with, you know, different interests and needs.
And at the same time, there really wasn't a platform for aspiring journalists to get their start, get clips, get experience with something that was attached to a national brand, but that was accessible to them from where they were on campus.
And so we took those, those needs that we saw around us, we were college women ourselves, we understood this problem intrinsically ourselves and entered and won the business plan competition while we were twenty-year-old students and, and launched the company in two thousand and nine, back when there was a whole other media upheaval around this idea of can media exist online?
Can it be profitable online? Can it thrive online? It was this whole topic of conversation, and people were doing these, like, online magazine flip book things that I'm sure you remember. Oh, yeah.
And it was this whole question of, of can media, you know, exist online? And, and that was two thousand and nine. Yeah. Okay. So you graduated, and y- you were gonna make this a business, right? And- Yeah...
and you decided to... You bootstrapped it, right? You didn't, you didn't take the funding. I mean, at the time, you know, it became popular. I guess it was a couple years later.
But a- tell me about that decision sort of looking back fifteen years later. Obviously, a lot of the, the VC-funded publications have, have hit a wall to some degree, so you must be happy. [chuckles] Totally.
I mean, it was definitely the road less traveled, and we've always kind of stood out in the landscape because we did bootstrap the company and we didn't raise money.
But my co-founders and I always believed that a business should make more money than it spends.
And so from the get-go, we were really focused on not just creating great content and building a great brand, but having an actual, sustainable, profitableBusiness that wasn't relying on anyone else and had, had a business model that worked.
And so literally from the get-go, we were profitable by the time we launched. Our startup costs were next to nothing, you know, filing as an LLC, some web hosting and domain costs.
We had our launch sponsor locked in, who was Juicy Couture, that had signed on to be our sponsor at launch and that had more than covered our kind of startup costs.
So literally from launch day on, we were profitable and, and we have truly operated on our cash in the bank ever since.
At every single juncture when we could have raised money, and, you know, we had ample opportunities to.
I think we won Harvard Business Plan Competition, we went on to win Mass Challenge, been on various lists and things like that.
And so you get all the emails, you know, once you end up on those lists and things of people reaching out, investors, VCs, whatever it may be.
And at every juncture we said, you know, we really want to control our destiny. We felt like we understood this audience better than anyone and wanted to trust ourselves to know how to build the business.
And again, it was just really important to us that, that the company be profitable and that, that it have a model that worked. And so we have continued to bootstrap it for the past 15 years.
We have been growing and profitable every single year. We have no debt, no loans, uh, we've never drawn down on a line of credit. We've never missed a payroll.
We have just literally been incredibly thoughtful and intentional and really, been really disciplined in operating the business, and it's a really profitable business. Yeah. So the product began as a website, right?
It did. It began as a website- Which you started as a we- I mean, it's very different now, but like [laughs] Totally. That's why I'm interested by... Walk me through the sort of evolution of the product.
So you gotta start- Yeah... you gotta start somewhere, and in 2009 you start with a website. I don't know if you start, probably start with a newsletter these days, I don't know. I, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
At least I'm biased, that's what I did. [laughs] I, I wonder why.
So I will say we started as a website, but there was always that on-the-ground community element from the get-go, and that is really kind of like the heart and soul in what drives our brand and our company, and now what are a portfolio of brands that we've built are all driven by this community that's at the core of them.
So the, when we launched, we had a website that was hercampus.com. It featured national content relevant to college women everywhere, and then we started with just one campus chapter that was at Harvard.
And what a campus chapter is, it's a student organization on campus of students who are creating content, they are hosting events, they're getting together, and they're really kind of like, almost like a professional sorority of sorts of students that are like-minded and have similar interests and also really wanna foster this community.
So from the get-go, we were this website, but with an in-person, on-the-ground, actual participatory community element, and that's, that's core to everything we've done since then.
And so what all of the different platforms are has evolved and has turned over so many times over these years. Again, Instagram really wasn't even a thing when we launched.
We've seen so many different platforms come and go since then.
But what the common factor has been, has been that there's this community of students at its core, and because the company is really kind of powered from within by that community, we are able to naturally evolve and adapt as that community itself is turning over, is regenerating, is evolving, uh, because they're, they're informing what we do.
Mm-hmm. So give me the example, like you've added other services and business lines, the, and some organically, some through acquisition.
But like how has the product evolved, particularly as the needs of this audience have evolved? Because like you said, like 2009 was, was totally- It was a different era. It feels like yesterday to me. Yeah.
[laughs] But I mean, if you're Gen Z, it feels like I was- They were, they were like babies... they were 12 or something. Yeah. So [laughs] it was very long ago for them. 100%.
So over these past 15 years, what we've really built out is this entire what we call media and marketing ecosystem of a portfolio of media brands, of own communities, and then of integrated marketing services.
And what's really special that what, about what we've built is really the intersection of those three kind of spheres or sort of like Venn diagram circles of the owned and operated media brands, which again started out as dot-com, but really manifest themselves in so many ways, whether it's through the website, through social platforms, through in-person events that we host.
As you mentioned, we've grown both organically and via acquisition.
So in late 2019, we acquired two other really like-minded media brands that were also community-driven, also serving a similar demographic, CollegeFashionista and Spoon University.
And both of those were companies and founders we'd known for a very long time. Both had actually gone through a prior acquisition by a larger media company.
And so then in 2019, we ended up with the opportunity to acquire them and add them to our portfolio and did that, and really became this kind of portfolio of the leading Gen Z media brands with Her Campus, CollegeFashionista, and Spoon.
In the meantime, alongside that, we have been really focusing more and more on this community aspect of it. And as you said, those needs have evolved.
So what our community members were looking for and what they were interested in from a career development perspective, from a student organization, extracurricular perspective, was evolving alongside it. Mm-hmm.
So again, as I mentioned, when we started, it was all the kind of student journalists, these aspiring editors and marketers who wanted to work for a Hearst or Conde Nast one day.
A few years in, we noticed that, you know, oh, wow, there's this whole other cohort of college women that don't wanna go work for, you know, Glamour or Vogue one day.
They wanna have their own blogs, and they wanna be bloggers, which was the big thing at the time.
And so we created something called the Her Campus Blogger Network, which was a community of college women with their own blogs. We'd foster community, professional development, bring them brand opportunities.
Over time, that has evolved- Okay. When, when, when was that? Yeah. When was, when was this? Because I, I was like- I think 2013. I wanna say 2013. Okay, 'cause I was wondering. I was like, this is, this is... Okay.
It's, it's still pretty ancient. It was a 10 plus years ago. Blog network, I was like, I'm like, look, I'm nostalgic, but when I was like- Totally...
oh, that's very- Well, there were so many of those back then, whether it was like Glam.com- Glam... we were part of at one point. Oh my God, Glam. That was a huge deal.
But even the Her Campus Blogger Network, that's an example where it was spun out of us identifying kind of an evolved need with our audience. They didn't wanna be...
Some of them didn't wanna be editors, they wanted to be bloggers, and that was still dot-com first, in that people were having their own blogs, which were websites.
Now, that's transformed from the Her Campus Blogger Network to what we call our Influence Her Collective, which is, you know, totally social first. Most of our members don't even have a blog.
If they do, it's a professional website or portfolio and, you know, their personal brands and what they're doing, their content creation is existing on social obviously.
And so that's one example of a, you know, another platform and, and community and brand of ours that we stood up ourselves, but even in that, it's evolved many times over and, and it's gonna continue to evolve.That to me is really interesting because where you started it was about aspiring college journalists.
I hope they, I hope they still exist. I hope they- They do, they do. They do in droves. But they're probably a smaller number. I think over...
I mean, we have over 50,000 community members, and I think over 10,000 of those are in our campus chapters, so they exist. But, you know, like it's shifted. But it's different. It has shifted to- Yes...
I mean, you know, look, I have no idea how accurate it is, but, you know, it's, it's gonna get picked up everywhere like, oh, the number one job career aspiration of Gen Z is to be an influencer.
Yeah, is to be an influencer or be a creator. Creator and all that stuff. It's generally it is not like I wanna be a reporter. I don't think that's in like the top three or five. Right.
But I think the common through line is that they want to create content that's serving an audience. Yeah.
And so it's a matter of the platform that that manifests itself on is, is what has changed, but it's kind of the a central need that has remained the same. Yeah. So is that the way you look at it?
'Cause I mean, I would, I would guess that your business is less tied to getting people to, uh, hercampus.com- Mm-hmm...
and showing them programmatic ads, and that the business itself has shifted more towards Instagram and where... I just don't...
I, I think what I wonder is like with Gen Z habits, and I'm getting into deep waters here when I- [laughs]... talk about Gen Z habits, so help me. I- is that going to like a website to read an article would be strange.
Right. I mean, it would be something that their, their parents do. It, I mean, I'm, I, I know that like, you know, obviously websites still exist. It's just hard for me to, to believe that that is the go-to anymore.
It's not the central platform anymore. Okay. For sure. And I think something people are surprised about to learn about us is that we only generate about 10% of our revenue from display.
So it's a really small portion of our revenue, and that display revenue that we're generating, that's all direct sold. So we're really not even doing programmatic, very, very minimal programmatic that we're even doing.
But really it has evolved, like you said.
And so when we think about our revenues, again, we- the main revenue stream overall, it's advertising, it's, it's revenue that we're generating from brands who want to market to the next generation of women.
It, it's, it's brand partnerships, I would say. It's brand partnerships. I mean, you'll do like Her Campus X Maybelline, you know, that kind of thing. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
We're doing, yeah, we're doing fantastic program right now for, for Amer- American Eagle that we just got off the ground, a campus brand ambassador program.
We're doing a great program with Nike right now around, around Women's History Month.
But we think of our revenue within advertising in these three buckets of digital, which is like our owned and operated, could be.com, could be social, but kind of our owned and operated media brands driving the revenue, could be the tentpole events that are affiliated with them as well.
The second bucket that we think about is what we call campus and influencer.
So that's really activating members of c- our community as individuals, so as influencers, as ambassadors, or they're receiving samples, or, you know, we're doing something with them on campus.
And then the third bucket is experiential of, you know, obviously events that we're hosting. And so about half of our programs are integrated, meaning they'll tap into two or more of those three buckets.
And then of the remaining half, it's about split, digital and campus and influencer, and then the remainder piece is experiential.
But what we've seen is kind of that shifting of it used to be more heavily digital, lower on the campus and influencer side, and that scale is kind of shifting where the campus and influencer revenue is really, you know, catching up to and, and now going to exceed the, the digital side.
But what's really powerful about what we do is that we're able to bring all those pieces together.
There are other players in the market that might be a media company, they might be an influencer marketing company, or they might be a, a college marketing company, but they're not able to kind of- Yeah...
approach this generation and reach them in a really comprehensive, holistic way that brings together these different pieces, and that's what our clients come to us for, is that really kind of integrated 360-degree approach that, that they can't get anywhere else.
Yeah. And it's funny because I was, I was talking about this to someone like the other day about how the competitive set has just exploded for everyone, right?
And because particularly when you start to evolve these businesses beyond what the "traditional publishing business" was, which in many cases was drawing people to the website to expose them to advertising- Right...
you start to compete with agencies. I mean, you're, you're com- you're doing like agency services, you're, you're doing like- Totally...
tour events and stu- because particularly, and I was talking with, you know, one of the publishers that was always touting their, like, page view statistics, and all of a sudden- Mm-hmm...
they just wanna talk to me about their events business now. About their events, yep. It's like strange. I'm like- [laughs]... are we gonna pretend that that decade didn't, didn't happen? Right.
But okay, fine, we'll move on. And you know, the, the... it, it puts you into different categories, and you need to compete, you know, with different...
I'm sure your competitive set for a while were a lot of, like, legacy players. Other publishers. Hearst- Exactly... or, or whatever, and now you're probably going up against influencer agencies and, and others too.
Exactly. Exactly.
But what we find even within that is, while of course brands come to us for their marketing, even those other players come to us as well to help with the strategy and help solve their problems, where you have other media companies that end up being our clients on behalf of their brands because they wanna reach Gen Z or they wanna activate Gen Z, and they don't have the abilities to do it in-house, even if they have a whole portfolio of media brands.
Same thing for influencer marketing companies, they will struggle to really stand up a Gen Z influencer marketing program that- Yeah...
is targeted at Gen Z and that is doing it in, you know, kind of a nuanced, authentic way that you need to.
So we find that those other players even themselves end up coming to us as well because what we've really tried to do that, that we feel is really unique is marry those different...
pieces of the pie and do it in a 360-degree manner- Yeah... of comprehensively. Yeah, because that's how I'm, how you're gonna win at the end of the day. Exactly. 'Cause I always think that as...
If you're competing on, like, an agency's terms- Yeah... without they're an agency, why wouldn't you want to compete on your terms? You can bring distribution, you can bring things that they ha- they do not have. 100%.
And a tie- 100%... with an audience and a community.
But yeah, that's- 'Cause we really have their services tied to our media brands, and so the media brands are incredibly important that they're bringing the, the expertise, the credibility, the authority, but then marrying those with the services that we're able to execute, kind of built on the backs of those media brands.
And, you know, the business is performing incredibly well. We, we grew over 50% last year and are very profitable. Is that organic or did you buy something? No, that's organic. Okay.
And so with the acquisitions that we've made, none of them have come with kind of built-in- Wait, you grew 50% last year? We grew over 50% last year. Did you, did you double check the numbers? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
[laughs] I just don't hear that a lot, I'll be honest with you. Like- Yeah... not a lot of people grew 50% last year, particularly- Yeah... um, how many years? They didn't. They didn't. 17 years in.
Why, why did this happen? Not that I'm suspicious, but what... I'm a little bit suspicious. [laughs] No, I, I mean, it... We had a massive year last year. We really kind of hit a tipping point in 2022 heading into 2023.
You know, made some investments in our team in '22 that really paid off to be able to meet the just huge demand we were seeing in the marketplace that came to fruition last year that we're seeing continue into 2024 so far.
But, you know, there's three things that I think we do better than anyone else are, one, building community.
That, again, has been our ethos from 2009, that we've always felt that, you know, being driven by community was the core to success.
And now these days you hear everyone talking about building community or claiming they have community. They might just mean their social followers or their newsletter subscribers.
We have actual community members that really feel that being a part of one of our communities and our brands, it's a part of their identity. They're putting it in their Instagram bio.
They're putting it on their LinkedIn. They are doing... The biggest way that we grow our community, we grow it completely organically.
We do zero paid marketing to grow the community, and it, it's 50K-plus members strong. We...
They will have viral social posts that they publish totally unsolicited on their own platforms, talking about how life-changing it's been to be a part of our community because of the opportunities it's afforded them for professional development that they've got, the community that they've been able to make, and the connections.
So that's huge. So we build community better than anyone else. It's, it's just literally, it's part of our DNA. We're really adaptable and flexible and nimble.
We, partially from a strategic perspective, partially from having to be incredibly disciplined because we're a bootstrap business, we've never chased trends. So we never went all in on, you know, the pivot to video.
We never set up a Snapchat team. RIP. Those were a good couple years. Thank you. We never, we never went down those paths. We never... We didn't kind of built a business...
We didn't build a business for a certain set of conditions.
We built one that's able to be, you know, naturally evolving and kind of not just able to be successful when the ground is constantly shifting beneath you, but, you know, thrives in that kind of an environment.
And the third thing is we're just incredibly disciplined operators. We watch every dollar that we spend. We've been profitable every single year for the past 15 years, again, with no debt ever. Never missed a payroll.
So we are just incredibly disciplined, and part of that is that we've had no outside investors. We have no external forces pressuring us to make certain decisions.
We have been able to just make the decisions that we felt served our mission, served our audience, our community, and our clients.
Those are our three main stakeholders and then, of course, our team members and employees as well. And that we're going to allow us to continue to run a sustainable business.
So we are really, really good at just super basic business fundamentals, like hitting our sales goal, budgeting down to the penny, staying under budget, collecting on our receivables.
We're just, we're really good at doing those things, and so we've- Yeah... we've built a, a profitable business. Okay.
I was like just thinking when you said collecting your receivables, I was, like, thinking about what's sitting in bill.com. Those of you who are listening who owe me money, I'll be talking [laughs] to you later today.
Well, we, we can chat after 'cause we've, we've built a really- Yeah, do you have any secrets?... a really good process for our receivables. I'd be like, "Okay, we're gonna highlight the payment terms in the contract."
Yeah. And then I'm like, no, people are just gonna kinda pay when they sorta wanna pay. [laughs] Yeah. God's gonna.
I, well, we were in that position for a while, and at some point, you know, the business was big enough that, that we, it wasn't, it wasn't working. Right. Okay. We need to tighten it up. Okay.
And what we built is essentially, like, collecting on receivables is its own sales process, and we built out what's essentially like a, a sales process- Yeah... on the receivables.
Whereas before that we would just send out an invoice, you know, through QuickBooks. No one's gonna pay that. They don't, they don't- Yeah... they're no, they don't care about that. I hate the automate.
That's what I said. Thank you for saying that- Yeah... 'cause I said that to Just- Justin, my accountant, who's probably not listening to, to this. This is- [laughs]... this is, this is fine.
Anyway, we can talk all about receivables. We can talk about it after, yeah. And, and, and, and- I mean, a signed contract is great, but, like, you need cash in the bank. Yeah.
You know, you can't- You probably get, like, the-... you can't pay your payroll with signed contracts...
people, because you're doing consumer stuff, so they're probably trying to do the, the insane stuff to you, like the net, like, net 30 days- With the payment terms?... stuff.
[laughs] Yeah, it's like, we'll pay you, like, in like 2030. Yeah. Anyway, we can- I mean, we, we have re- we have really good payment terms too.
So again, it's, it's stuff like that that we've just, we were always smart about because we had to be and because we wanted to be. Like, we, we have just...
We, we think more conservatively about, about how a business should run. Yeah. That's great. So tell me about focusing on a demographic.
If you think about it, a lot of media brands that focus on a demographic have gone sideways, right? And because there's an inherent tension there between focusing on a demographic. You started this in 2009. Mm-hmm.
And I'm sure it was, you know, by college women, for college women. You are not a college woman. Literally, that, that was the tagline. You are not a college woman anymore. [laughs] Right? We are not.
I've seen this, you know, a lot in people aging. To me, you either have to age with the audience- Mm-hmm...
and then it becomes something different, and I think it's a real challenge when it's tied to a, an individual and a, and you- Yeah... set this up in a different way. It was also done at a different time.
There was less of that individual type stuff.So then it's really hard to transition because how are you gonna be [laughs] like You know, I think, like Bill Simmons- Right... like he, he's, he's aged with his audience.
He's added some people, but he can't act like he's the, he was like the 20-something-year-old guy in- [laughs]... Boston anymore. He's 50-something in LA. He's walking around trying to get his- [laughs]...
kids to settle down. Well, the equivalent of that is, you know, my co-founders and I, we were 20-year-old college students when we started it. We're all now 35-year-old moms of two who live in the suburbs. You know?
So if the business was- Yeah [laughs]... was evolving with us- We think of all this... we would be doing a terrible job [laughs] reaching out- Yeah...
the very stylish, on-trend, you know, on, on the pulse moms of two who live in the suburbs. But, but- But you wanna stay, you wanna... You obviously you chose, I mean, it's Her Campus, right?
So what's interesting to me is, like distribution is really difficult, and that's why I think these community models are, are really great. But you have a window. You've got a short window. Mm-hmm.
I hope to, I hope to age with my audience. [laughs] You know, all age together. But, you know, you have a short window, and then you basically, I don't know, you wave goodbye to them when they graduate? Right.
Yeah, no, that's such a great point.
It, I mean, it's, it's kind of a, a crazy life stage to be targeting and working within because the audience naturally turns over every four years, and we're really intentional about that too.
Our other than our- But you want them to turn over, right? We do. We do. And we, we do what we call we alumnify them.
So our community members, once they graduate from college, they're a part of our alumni network, but they're not in the communities anymore except for the influencer collective.
That's our only one that, that you can, you can be already graduated from college and remain in. So we chose really intentionally to stay super focused on this demographic and really this life stage of college women.
Right now we call it Gen Z. You know, as you said, it was millennials, then it was genzenials- Yeah... now it's Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen Delta. I keep getting older. The new generations get new names. It's great.
[laughs] Yeah. Oh, we keep buying up domain names to, to be relevant to them.
So we run a, we run a B2B series right now called GenZology that's all about reaching Gen Z, marketing to Gen Z, leveraging these insights that we have. Great.
We're able to, again, 'cause of this community, survey our audience and get, you know, really fantastic research data and insights, and, and we run B2B events sharing it with clients and potential clients.
But I said recently, you know, people are already asking about Gen Alpha and Gen Alpha. We can't call this GenZology forever, so we bought up some good domain names for the next iteration of that.
It's gonna be Alphaomics- GenAlphaology?... is the next one. So but yeah, so we really wanted to stay focused on the demo, understanding who is within that is going to turn over and is going to cycle through.
We felt like this- Yeah... is this niche that we can completely own and dominate. It's one that advertisers across verticals really want to reach, but it's incredibly difficult for them to do so.
And you usually need this incredibly kind of cultivated, developed ecosystem that we've built to be able to do it right, and that's something that we knew we were able to do better than anyone else. And so- Sure...
we decided to stay super focused on college. We felt like there was a lot, a lot of women's media reaching 20 and 30-something-year-olds already.
But with that, it means that we are constantly churning out our, our community members and adding new ones, and even with that we've, you know, been able to grow it really steadily, in part because, again, they become our own best ambassadors.
We are pouring into them, we are investing in them, and they're, they're spreading the word for us. It's, it's grown completely organically. So how... r- what is the onboarding? So like I arrive on campus- Mm-hmm...
a, a campus a- a- as a 18-year-old, I guess, how do I discover... I didn't know it before. So like I don't know.
There's always just an essential distribution challenge, um, that's getting even harder now for media of how do you accumulate this audience? And you're- Sure...
churning through your audience by design, so how do they discover you? How can you be sure that you're gonna keep this treadmill going? Yeah. No, it's a great question.
And again, we don't do any paid marketing at all to reach them, so it's... and it has been, you know, growing incredibly steadily and bigger and bigger every year.
But for one thing, we actually find people get to college with a lot of knowledge and awareness of some of our brands already. It's a very... Just like, you know, Seventeen was a very aspirational brand.
When you're 13 years old, you wanna read Seventeen. Right. When you're in high school, you know, you wanna read Her Campus or College Fashionista or Spoon University.
And because we have this kind of national local model, even when people are researching different colleges, they'll come across our pages.
And so a lot of people will get to college being like, "I can't wait to join my Her Campus chapter already," or, you know, "I read my school's," you know, "Her Campus chapter content to see what, what the culture was gonna be like on campus."
But once they do get there, then the ways they're hearing about it are in terms of something like Her Campus or Spoon University that have on-campus chapters.
These are registered student organizations on campus that are, you know... They're tabling at the club fair. They're, they're spreading awareness just like any other extracurricular you can get involved with on campus.
And then from an influencer community perspective, that's our influencer collective, our College Fashionista community. Campus Trendsetters is our more kind of micro and nano influencer community.
They're hearing about it on social, and really that growth is due to the community members themselves.
Again, having these truly viral TikToks and Instagram, Instagram reels that we will see from our community members on a daily basis that will say things like, "Hey, if you wanna get started in influencer marketing and you don't know how, here's how to do it.
You need to go right now to collegefashionista.com and you need to sign up." You know, "Hey, look at this amazing box of free samples that I got from being part of the influencer collective." You know- Mm-hmm...
"Here's how you can sign up, too." And so that is really how we've been able to, to grow is investing in the community, making sure they're having great experience, and they, they take care of that piece for us.
So are you able to sort of segment out where your engagement is happening? 'Cause I would just imagine- Sure...
the, the, the engagement that you have with the community that's happening on, say, Instagram and, and TikTok is g- is, you know, the arrow is up. You know, it's- Mm-hmm...
slightly less up maybe it, with Snap, but it's still up, and it's down on the, the dot com. It's like, okay, it's, it's ra- rising a little bit through email. I don't know if, if, if-I know email's been- Yeah...
to die like a million times, so I don't believe that. [laughs] I don't know. Wait, how do you, how do you think about that? How do we think about it?
Because I, I'm just, like, obsessed with, with how so many media companies need to retrofit a lot of things, because the structure of the internet obviously is going through a big, big change, shift right now. Mm-hmm.
But just habits are different and expectations are very different, particularly for a younger demographic, I would assume in 2024 versus 2009. Totally. Even versus 2020 versus 2015, it's, it's constantly shifting.
And so I think one thing that's been core to our approach is we've, we've always said that we're very platform agnostic.
We're really focused on building brands, building relationship with our audience, and that's what can really kind of transcend the tides of the industry, and platforms come and go and, like, who knows if TikTok will even continue to, you know, be legal or whatever, but we- [laughs] We don't wanna have to s- That'll make it more popular.
If you may, if you make something illegal- Right, right... that's usually... I know that- Young people- Then they'll be like, "Oh, we're into this now, or even more into it." [laughs] Total- I know. So, so we'll see.
Though we do have, we do have some schools, you know, where it's been banned on campus on their Wi-Fi already in certain states, so that's been- Yeah... interesting to track.
But yeah, no, we're thinking about, you know, all of our metrics across these different platforms, tracking the reach, tracking the engagement.
Our, our traffic was up on our campus last year, year over year actually- Oh, yeah... compared to the year before. Again- Great... it's not exponentially, but our, but our traffic did continue to grow last year.
And then what is climbing exponentially is the social reach of our community members.
So across our community, they're reaching close to 1 billion followers, and I actually think it's, it's much more because some of it's under-reported, but they're reaching close to 1 billion followers that they've reported across their own social channels that we're able to activate for brands and bring brand opportunities to.
And so the reach is shifting where it lives, and it's, it's shifted many times already and, and is gonna continue to.
But certainly there's, you know, there's website, there's social, there's email for our owned and operated that we're thinking about, and then we're thinking about the community members' own platforms, and all of those are vehicles both to continue to spread awareness and, and grow our community and our reach.
But of course, what's key and what's huge is that we're able to activate all of those en masse at scale for brands, which is incredibly difficult for- Yeah... people to do. Do you track that?
Is that like a KPI as far as, you know, looking at the business as far as n- both the size of the community, but- Yep... being able to activate- The activation... like, what percentage- Oh, yes...
you act- are able to activate? Huge. Yeah. So for example, so we have over 50,000 community members.
Last year we, we activated them over 15,000 times, so about, you know, 15,000 relative to 53,000 in terms of activations. And we activated over 1,000 student organizations last year.
And, you know, I, I wanna emphasize kind of how huge those numbers are, that we did over 15,000 community member activations, over 1,000 student org activations.
Another brand or company will struggle to do just a, a small scale program of activating with a few student orgs, maybe activating 100 ambassadors would be a big program for someone- Yeah...
to be able to even try to do it themselves, and we have a model to be able to do it en masse at scale. And so that's- Yeah... that's huge for us.
And even within, within our communities, it's actually very selective to be selected for campaigns. Yeah.
So one thing about our model is that when we work with brands and have these campaign opportunities, we send them out to our communities, and then people apply to be selected on a campaign by campaign basis, and we are then able to vet through, again, a, a huge number of incredibly qualified, fantastic creators, influencers, community members for them to get selected campaign by campaign.
Yeah. It's funny that you mention that, 'cause I like that you, you sort of underlined that these are actually big numbers. These are the new big numbers. Like 15,000- Right, right... is a big number.
Like, whereas the- Traffic numbers you used to hear about... Ben- Right... Ben Lerer has moved on to, to more lucrative pursuits, but, you know, Ben would like- [laughs]... come on podcasts with me- I do...
Ben's a nice guy. I know him. And he would be ta- Yeah... he would be talking like, you know, about his billion now this, like, views and stuff like this, and I'm like, "Well, how much money are you making off this?"
And- Yeah... you know, the reality is that, that that's a totally different mindset of being, what, what big numbers truly are.
I mean, there are still different types of big numbers that people go out to the num- the market with. For instance, I was talking with one former, former scale VC publisher- We shall not name names.
[laughs] The other night. Yeah. I, I like to protect the identities, but they exist. I'm not making it up.
And, you know, this person was, was talking about how their programs, their new big numbers are not like page views and stuff.
It's getting, it's getting other publications to write about it and getting things posted on Instagram about the activation and the, in their case, the star, you know, wearing the, the brand's- Right...
clothing and stuff. It's, that's the big number is, is the... it's almost, it's a PR metric, it's not a ad metric. Yeah.
No, I think that's a great point, and I think this ties into with kind of the power of events and the reason for doing events, and I know you've been saying that so many publishers have been talking so much about events recently, and, and we do these- Oh, my God...
you know, fan- fantastic tentpole events we put on, but what we find is a huge amount of the value to our clients for sponsoring the events and for us putting on the events as well, is the social reach and the content creation that comes out of the event.
So it's not as much about how many people are in the room. Again, you know, we'll do a conference for 250 people. We could easily fill the room with much more than that.
But it's, you know, it's about what is someone, what is a brand willing to pay in terms of kind of that in-person presence? Are they willing to pay differently to reach, you know, 250 people in a room versus 550...
500 people in a room?
Not necessarily, but it's about what is the reach that's going to come out of that and how are they gonna be able to leverage what happened, the, you know, the photos, the videos they were able to create, the social reach of the attendees is, is what's really powerful there, rather than, like, just the sheer number of, you know, people in person at that one day.
Yeah. How do you differentiate the brand from something like Skim, the Skim? Oh, I mean, the Skim is, you know, I would say a more millennial brand, whereas we are very much kind of reaching a Gen Z audience.
We're also not kind of a, we've ne- we have a newsletter, but we're not a newsletter first.Brand.
So where we've been less focused on, you know, delivering news or delivering content via one platform, we're again just focused on service driven, mission driven, reaching this audience, supporting them, and there's this huge career development aspect to everything that we do as well.
Yeah. That's what the underpinning is of these communities. Again, starting with Her Campus and- Well, you have a hiring service, right? Didn't you... Did you acquire that or did you just build that? Yeah, we built that.
So that was actually- Yeah... so Generation Hired is the fifth kind of brand in our portfolio. It's Her Campus, CollegeFashionista, Spoon University, our influencer collective and Generation Hired.
And that's one we launched during the pandemic because we had seen that college students were obviously really struggling to find job and internship opportunities. Mm.
At the team, at the same time, a lot of employers were coming to us for help recruiting more female and diverse entry level talent.
And we found that even a lot of our existing clients who we're working with for general marketing and brand awareness campaigns were coming to us for help with their employer branding as well because they said, "Wow, you guys have the most incredible community we've ever seen.
How do we get these people applying for our jobs and internships?"
And so we, we launched Generation Hired, which is kind of your, your Gen Z campus career center online connecting, you know, female diverse entry level talent with, with employers that, that they wanna work for. Yeah.
So how do you end up thinking about the, the revenue mix? I mean, I, I would think commerce would be enter- but it's mostly a "advertising business", right?
I mean, there's, there's no, there's no direct payment like- Right. Right. Um. Yeah.
Right now, less than 1% of our revenue is from any what we call like alternative revenue streams of an affiliate e-com, ticket sales, something like that.
We have all of those kind of sitting there that could be turned on, again, if we wanted to, you know, do the affiliate e-com thing. We just haven't done it yet.
And we think there are a lot of other opportunities that, again, we could tap into. Brand licensing has so much potential for us. We built these brands that would lend themselves really naturally to licensing deals.
We actually, we had a licensing deal for a, a Her Campus branded line of school supplies actually that would've come out in 2020.
One of the biggest school supply companies approached us that they wanted us to do a, a licensed line with them, and it was a lot of fun, but it was 2020, so obviously we decided not to, not to have it come out then when no one was going in score, in store to shop for school supplies.
But licensing has, has a lot of potential for us.
We did another program right before the pandemic that with a travel company that was actually Her Campus spring break trips where the travel company powered it, you know, running the trips like they always do, but you had to be a member of the Her Campus community to go on these certain trips these certain weeks.
Yeah. And we ran a couple of them. They were like, you know, fully sold out.
So there's a lot of, a lot of cool brand extensions and other revenue streams that, that we could do, but again, we've been, part of it is being bootstrapped. We are so- Yeah...
we are so focused and just fiercely prioritize whatever, whatever feels like we, you know, has the most potential in the moment. Yeah. I have a collaboration idea for you. Oh, yeah? Stanley, Stanley water bottles.
They're, they're, they're everywhere. They're the, the, there's the new Nalgene. I see them. I live near Pace University. I see the kids. Oh, there we go. This, this is our Her Campus Media Stanley.
So everyone on our team just got a Her Campus Media Stanley water bottle as our gift to them. So yes, if you look, there's, we have a lot of Stanley content- Yeah... on our sites as well 'cause it's, it's huge.
So yeah, no, we, we love Stanley for sure. Yeah. I think I, I don't know. Okay.
I might get like a, a distorted view of Gen Z habits 'cause I can only just study the Pace University kids that are around my, my apartment [laughs] here.
[laughs] Um, and I think that's a little- It, it's a certain subset. Yeah. Yeah.
And well, I think that like, I think that ties into it's something I've, I feel like I heard on, on your episode with, with Mo News recently of this kind of like elitist news bias.
You're only kind of serving a certain- Yeah... part of the country in a certain demo, and, you know, we really, we're serving college women all over the country.
It's not just kind of like your New York City, you know- Yeah...
type of college student or, you know, and I think, I think sometimes you can see other media brands kind of fall, fall prey to serving kind of who they see around them rather than like actually the- That's true...
the demo as a whole across the country. Although I will defend Pace to this. I used to hire a lot of people out of Pace because I really like- Oh, yeah...
hiring Pace, Pace people because my former colleague, Hope, who, Reichard, who went to Pace, she described Pace students as NYU kids who can fight, and [laughs] I found that very attractive- [laughs]...
as a profile of the kind of people I would like to bring into the organization [laughs]- Oh, absolutely... early in their career.
But yeah, so but let's just, let's just actually say on that, I don't like generational generalizations, but I'll dabble in them. What are some things that like you find n- noteworthy about...
'Cause, I mean, you're, you're up against Gen Z a lot. You're not obviously in the demographic of Gen Z, but, you know, your business is built around it. Yes. What are some of these sort of also maybe misunderstandings?
Because I feel particularly nowadays with things going on at various campuses, uh, the reality is, particularly media like The New York Times, you know, they're just obsessed with Ivy League.
Uh, you would think that everyone goes to, like, Ivy League colleges. Right. Right. It's kind of nuts, but 'cause very few people do. It's true, yeah.
No, and certainly you're s- you're seeing the extremes and you're seeing the kind of like caricatures and the stereotypes with what a, with a lot of the stuff that, that makes it out there, and we definitely try to kind of shed a light on just all of the nuances and diversity of perspectives and everything that does exist within this audience.
So there are certain certainly kind of like generational themes that we see that are common of, you know, Gen Z is much more activist than any previous generation.
They're much more focused and aware of mental health than ever before.
Right now, obviously, with it being an election year, we're doing, we do, we're doing a huge initiative around the election where we, um, publish survey data that we get from our community. We're doing events.
We're actually doing a tour on campuses across the country talking directly with students and a number of other different things. But there is a lot of, there is diversity of perspective there. But- Mm-hmm...
they carry a lot of that- Do you shy away from politics a- as, as far as... Obviously, I mean, I, everything I see out there, it's a, it's a largely a, a far more progressive-...
generation, I think that's normal, I think usually [laughs], usually young people. Right, right. Outside of Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties, usually younger people are less aggressive. [laughs] Yeah.
No, I'd say we, we, we do not shy away from politics, and we are really good at approaching it in, I think, a thoughtful way that's all about highlighting and amplifying college women's voices.
Everything that we do is about sharing college women's voices, and so that's the same lens and approach we take when it comes to something like the election or politics.
For an example, four years ago- Like, the abortion laws are, like, a big issue- Oh, yes... in general- Yeah... but they're a particular issue for this demographic. Yes.
But it's not, like, something you're like, well, you know, Maybelline's not super great ab- uh, crazy about [laughs] this stuff, so maybe less about the, the, the abortion. Right.
I think, so we do a really good job striking a balance of, you know, serving the needs of our audience, being there for the topics that they expect us to show up on, but in a really brand safe environment, and that's actually a, a...
I'm glad you brought that up, because that is something that clients come to us for a lot, is we can... We, we've created a brand that has a lot of comfort and can provide a lot of brand safety.
And so they're, they're comfortable, you know, living within our sites and our platforms. But for, for example, something like reproductive rights is a super, you know, impassioned topic for our audience. Mm-hmm.
And we actually, again, we did a, we did a program that we initially did, uh, five plus years ago that was called Our Bodies, Our Rights, where we surveyed college women, um, all about their feelings on abortion in the wake of Trump being elected.
We published the survey data, uh, both quantitatively with other qualitative elements, a whole kind of, you know, integrated, you know, content program, interactive content program. Won a bunch of awards for it.
What we did then more recently is five years later, we ran the same survey in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
We surveyed college women around the country on their feelings on that, abortion, reproductive rights, all of it, published it again, you know, as a follow-up, and we basically were able to do this kind of companion piece that we had the data from five years ago, we were able to come out with it again five years later and show how this audience had evolved and shifted, how their views had evolved.
It was this, again, award-winning program and done in a way where it was putting college women at the forefront and, and sharing their voices on it, and we'll be coming out with our third installment in that this year in connection with the election.
Another program we did that I think highlights again the, the way we've been able to foster just very kind of productive, thoughtful, respectful dialogue is last year...
Uh, sorry, four years ago, I think on literally October 30th, so a few days before the election, we hosted a program called Elect Her, and it was in partnership with Running Start, which is a nonprofit all about getting more women to run for office.
It was sponsored by Edelman, and it was a program that we did that you had to apply for. It brought together college women who, again, we were able to find via our community.
They applied en masse to be a part of the selective program we were running, and it was all about hearing from different elected women all across the country.
We had incredible speakers from, again, both sides of the aisle speaking to this group of 125 women that we selected to be a part of this program.
They got to hear from these incredible elected women, you know, in, in office around the country, and then had a workshop by the, the experts at Running Start all about here's the toolkit and the training to lay the groundwork for you to run for office one day.
And we did that a few days before the election, and it was, it was incredible, and it was thoughtful, and it was respective, respectful, and it's something I don't think that many companies would be able to do in, in such a charged environment.
Mm-hmm. But do, do you consider yourself a news publisher? More of a lifestyle publisher.
We will, we will do some news and entertainment, but we, we are certainly not ones to try to be breaking news or anything like that. Right.
I mean, it's important just from a business perspect- I mean, look, I, I obviously, I like the news business, right?
It's, it's a difficult business, obviously, and it's particularly difficult with advertisers, and I blame a lot of the brand safety vendors, and I also blame a lot of activists who went out there and said, "You need to..."
And used brand safety as a political tool, uh, to further their own agenda, and they actually, you know, succeeded, and they also got a lot of marketers to just shut off news entirely. So thank you, activists- Right...
people. [laughs] 'Cause sometimes that blows back, and I don't think it's talked about a lot, and I don't... Like- Right...
they certainly are not taking responsibility for it, so, but maybe I'll write so they, they can do that. Advertisers wanna stay away from that stuff, right? I mean, so you, you wanna be- Yeah...
in a, like, a lifestyle l- like, category.
It's interesting because I don't know how, uh, if, if you run into this, but if the audience is, like, very impassioned by issues like Gaza and, and, and, and the war there, but, you know, the reality is from a business perspective and also from a brand perspective, you're like, "I don't know if I really wanna be in that, in that fight."
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, again, we haven't really positioned ourselves as a news publisher, so we don't need to be reporting on that, on exactly what's going on there.
Certainly, you know, you'll see it show up on our site. It would, it would be odd if we weren't addressing it in some way. Yeah.
But we're doing it from the perspective of sharing college women's perspectives, and again, we're not, we're not leaning into it as a news publisher, where people aren't looking to us to be the ones kind of covering it from a news perspective.
What we're bringing to bear on any of these kind of charged, charged topics is how are college women feeling about it and, you know, what are, what are their voices and perspectives. Mm-hmm.
And so that's something that, you know, we certainly are really intentional about doing in, in a thoughtful way.
So final thing is, you know, uh, obviously the, y- you, you tend to wave goodbye to, to your college Gen Z audience when they graduate. What are, you know...
They're going into an uncertain world at this point, and particularly with careers, it's, it's unclear which paths to go on. What, what do you end up, you know, giving as advice?
'Cause I mean, you made your own path, but, like, not, not everyone's gonna start, start their own businesses i- in college, but what, what kind of advice do you end up giving these, these college women who are, you know, leaving college and, and making their way in their careers?
Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a great question.
And so everything that we're doing is really about equippingCollege women as a whole are community members specifically with the skills that they'll need to go on and, and succeed in whatever that path looks like.
And so while again, as you said, exactly what types of jobs and internships maybe they're going for or even exist at all may have shifted, they're just using those skills in other ways.
And so what we're really focused on doing is, again, making sure that they have the skills to succeed. They have...
Again, what they're able to do is leverage their participation in whether it was their Her Campus chapter, College Fashionista, whatever it may be, we literally help them of here's how to put this on your resume and explain it in a career facing way.
Here's how to put this on your LinkedIn.
We do a lot of kind of internal awards and incentive programs and things like that, that are basically items that they can then put on their resume to say, "I was a gold level chapter," or, "I was a platinum level chapter.
You know, my, my chapter got the award for doing the most X, Y, Z." Yeah. So we're basically trying to set them up for success in that.
In terms of what they actually go on to pursue, there is a, I mean, such a myriad of, of paths and interests and things they want. Obviously there are some that are trying to, you know, make it full-time as a creator.
There are many that wanna just leverage those skills to go work in marketing somewhere or go work in media somewhere, grad school, whatever it may be.
So this year is actually a really interesting year in that Her Campus is turning 15 this year.
And so we are doing a huge initiative this year all around our alums because we now have 15 years of alums that have gone through our programs and are all throughout the media and marketing industries and beyond.
So we're doing something big this summer leading into September, which will be our actual 15 years of when we launched the site, showcasing our alums, where they've gone to be, you know, how many, you know, editors in chief, CMOs, founders have come out of our program.
And we have just amazing alums that are in just such- Yeah... high profile, cool and impactful jobs all throughout. And what they're able to do then is, you know, pay it forward.
And what we've really built with our communities is that when you have Her Campus on your resume, you have Spoon on your resume, College Fashionista, it's a stamp of approval when you're going into- Yeah...
a job interview. So- Well, I, I wanna try this at a different angle though. What do you personally, what is your advice to young women who say, "You know, I wanna follow a path like yours. I wanna own a business.
I wanna start a business. I wanna be an entrepreneur"? And, you know, there's always this gap between, you know, wanting to and wanting to want to. [laughs] Yeah. Right?
And because, you know, you've been through it, right? And what do you tell them that they need to know? Yeah.
So I think this is advice that you'll agree with, but I think it's really about kind of finding your passion and your niche and something that you're able to do better than anyone else.
And when you lean into that, whether it's, you know, through your own personal platforms or through the career path you're pursuing, you know, find something that, that is less general and is something where that you over-index on, you can bring unique value to the table on and can really succeed with that.
From an entrepreneurship perspective, I mean, we will always tell people to go for it. Don't wait to get started.
You know, you can plan and plan forever, but once you get launched and off the ground, like, there's so much just feedback and information and momentum that will help inform you and carry you forward.
And so, and I think in many ways there, there have never been more, more opportunities, more resources. Mm-hmm.
Not that I would suggest everyone take funding, and it's, we're really, really glad we didn't, but more funding available for, for entrepreneurs- Yeah... and for female entrepreneurs. So just, just go for it.
But I think when you align what you're doing with your, your passion, that is when you are going to be- Yes... set up to excel.
And y- you might not know how that, what that's gonna look like, but you'll be, you'll be playing in a lane that, that you're uniquely positioned to succeed in. Yeah. That's great advice. Get to start.
That's what Troy tells me. You gotta get to start. [laughs] You can plan forever. [laughs] Exactly. Oh my God, yes, 100%. Yeah, you just gotta... We're working with Nike right now, so, you know, just, just do it.
That's, that's the advice. Yeah. Perfect. All right. I like that you slipped that in there. [laughs] See, it's all about...
Yeah, that can be, that can be, you know, the tens of thousands of impressions in this podcast if we put it on the right one. [laughs] Awesome. Stephanie, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
This was great. Thanks for having me. [outro music]