Sami Fishbein of Betches – Growing a Successful Digital Brand with Friends

Tapping into the mindset of female millennials, building a viral social media and digital humor company that’s become a thriving creative brand (expanding with changing trends and with a huge Instagram following), and why doing it with best friends from middle school has succeeded… Sami Fishbein, Co-Founder and COO of the digital brand Betches and co-author of “When’s Happy Hour”, joins Socialfly founders Stephanie Cartin and Courtney Spritzer in the MouthMedia Network studios for a conversation about her journey to success, a surprise, and a brainstorm.

In this episode:

  • Managing people that are same age or younger
  • Going into business with close friends from middle school after going to Cornell with them
  • How Sami uses what she learned in college in the business
  • That moment of co-founding Betches
  • Running a company when no one on the founding team went to business school—how they figured it all out, and how sharing and dividing responsibilities is difficult
  • Finding the right people to hire, how to evaluate people, and how attention to detail important in considering them
  • Launching the first company site BetchesLoveThisSite.com, and how the team just wanted to do for college aged people a like list of things they liked
  • The site was originally envisioned as a dark satire
  • The simple and unassuming start of writing the first five posts in the first night, then asking someone to put on a Facebook wall
  • Staying as an anonymous presence for a few weeks, then how it all went viral fast
  • How it wasn’t long until a TV producer contacted them, then they got an agent, were recommended to write a book
  • Taking three years to monetize, working out of WeWorks, no outside funding
  • First hires, staying small for a while, most hiring in the last year or so
  • That time they considered calling it quits, but stuck with it
  • When hit their stride and kept going
  • Working through disagreements with friends you run a company with, how you have to communicate, becoming better communicators
  • Why Betches is moving into podcasting, building podcasts across several verticals
  • What’s in the works for 2019
  • The book “Whens Happy Hour”, and writing it in three months
  • A politics bus
  • A TV show in development, like a female South Park
  • If Sami ever felt like she was burning out?
  • And — a 1 Minute Brainstorm on the next big book idea

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