A No-Tan-Line Bikini and 70 Passionate Women

What would valentines day be without some candy, but this candy is a bit different. I had an opportunity to hear Pete Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy speak at the EEC conference yesterday. For those of you not familiar with it, Daily Candy is an email newsletter that is a must-read for women (and some men) who want to be in-the-know about fashion and trends in leading cities. What makes the newsletter unique is the amazing subscriber growth and success it has experienced.

Pete gave a wonderful presentation. He shared how the newsletter got started when one of the founders heard about a no-tan-line bikini that was very cool, and sent it out to the initial 70 subscribers. In almost no time, the subscriber base grew to 35,000. There was one key to growth. Find really cool stuff, and write about it. Whether it was fashion, restaurants or food, if it was great, and you told your audience about it, they were bound to pass it along to friends, and a community formed. Not an online one, but a thriving, vibrant, real community. One where the retort, “did you read about X in Daily Candy,” is as common as “Hello.”

It is very easy to try too hard to sell online, and not realize that online media can sometimes be used much more effectively to fuel passion (and the community can then do the selling). While this is no small task, sometimes with the right combination of smarts and luck, someone really hits a home run. Daily Candy did.