TheSkimm fixed email newsletters -- now it wants to fix your calendar
It's the modern morning routine: Wake up, rub eyes, check phone -- usually your email and/or calendar.
Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg know it all too well. Their emails tell them what they need to know. Their calendars tell them what they need to be ready for.
"It's sad but it's true that when I wake up in the morning, my calendar tells me where I need to go first," Weisberg said in an interview with Mashable.
You May Also Like
Granted, their calendars may be a bit busier than ours. As founders of theSkimm, Zakin and Weisberg are leading one of the trendiest media companies around. The company's first product, the Daily Skimm newsletter, has more than 3.5 million active subscribers and counts Oprah, Lena Dunham and Michelle Obama as fans.
Now, it's time for the second act.
Skimm Ahead
On Tuesday, Zakin and Weisberg are launching the next phase of their company with Skimm Ahead, a subscription service that looks to do for calendars what they did for inboxes -- "make it easier to be smarter," as Weisberg put it.
For $2.99 a month, users will have access to an app that provides a curated events listing that can be integrated into a user's existing calendar. The newsletter will continue to be free.
What might appear on this calendar? One day you might get a notification that Adele tickets will go on sale soon or a good show will be leaving Netflix. The next could be a reminder that the State of the Union is next week along with how to watch it.
The goal is to provide a service similar to its newsletter. Email is part of everyone's life, so is the calendar.
"It made sense to tap into that routine and infuse news into that. I think that is really plugging information into the digital daily lives of this audience," Zakin said.
The screenshot below shows how Skimm Ahead integrates in with a person's regular calendar. The emjois indicate calendar events from theSkimm.
To access the calendar, users must download the company's new app, which is key to theSkimm's future plans. The new app and service are only available on iPhone for the time being. Users can try it out for a month for free before the fee kicks in.
The calendar is meant to bring theSkimm's curation of the news to future events, keeping its users informed and prepared.
"What are the events or cultural zeitgeist moments that you want to plan around or just be aware that they're happening?" Weisberg said.
The calendar is the fun new feature, but the app is the key to theSkimm's future. Zakin and Weisberg said that there's more features and services coming that will be accessible through the app.
"It's really a gateway for us to have a hub to our company," Zakin said.
The road less traveled
Right now, theSkimm is one of the more interesting zigs among the common zags of most media companies.
Zakin and Weisberg started theSkimm in 2012 out of their shared apartment, right around the time that social media (primarily Facebook) was starting to drive major traffic to media websites.
Plenty of media startups took advantage, riding the Facebook wave to reach massive audiences. Social seemed to be the future. TheSkimm reached back into the past, launching an email newsletter.
"When we launched, email was dead," Weisberg said.
Both remember receiving rejections from investors and partners -- all via email.
"No one wanted to talk to us," Zakin said.
By virtue of its user growth, theSkimm was able to attract some funding. In December 2014, they announced a Series A funding round of $6.25 million, adding to a $1.1 million seed round in 2013.
Along the way, newsletters suddenly came back in vogue. Lena Dunham has followed a similar model with Lenny, and Bill Simmons has started his post-ESPN career with a newsletter for his startup, The Ringer.
Like those startups, the newsletter is just the start.
"We definitely are not a newsletter company," Zakin said. "We used it to ground our first product and from there we are building a very big business."
Weisberg and Zakin were mostly mum on what other services theSkimm could expand into with one noticeable exception -- video.
Both worked at NBC before starting their company, talents they are planning to tap.
"We see huge opportunity for what theSkimm video looks like," Zakin said.
"I think it would be a shame if we didn't use our training one day," Weisberg added.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Jason Abbruzzese is a Business Reporter at Mashable. He covers the media and telecom industries with a particular focus on how the Internet is changing these markets and impacting consumers. Prior to working at Mashable, Jason served as Markets Reporter and Web Producer at the Financial Times. Jason holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University.
