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