How Two NBC Producers Built One of the Most Trusted Daily News Brands for Women

In the summer of 2012, Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg were roommates in New York and producers at NBC News. They had met studying abroad in Rome and reconnected over a habit of explaining the day's headlines to friends too busy to follow the news. That July they quit their jobs and sent the first edition of a daily email called theSkimm to a few hundred people they knew. When the Today Show mentioned it on air, sign-ups jumped, and that September they raised $60,000 in seed money. Within a year, theSkimm passed 100,000 subscribers. 7 years later, it reached more than 7 million readers, had a $100 million valuation, and, in March 2025, was bought by Everyday Health Group, a division of Ziff Davis. 

Built on the Couch 

Most news organizations earn trust by knowing a subject better than their readers do. theSkimm earned it by knowing its reader better than other news organizations did. The founders pictured a smart, busy woman in her twenties who wanted to keep up but had no time to read from four outlets before work. The Daily Skimm landed around six in the morning, short enough to finish over a first cup of coffee. It explained why a story mattered to her life, skipped the jargon, and mixed hard news with a little pop culture. 

The Voice Was the Product 

The same news was available everywhere and cost nothing. What theSkimm sold was the version that sounded like it came from a friend. The voice stayed the same every single day, with recurring phrases and an inside language regular readers came to know, and that consistency turned a daily email into a continuing conversation. Readers felt like members and called themselves Skimm'rs. 

The Ambassadors 

Because the relationship felt personal, readers grew it themselves. In late 2015, theSkimm gave loyal readers a unique referral link and handed out rewards as their sign-ups climbed. The rewards were small and social, including branded merchandise, a private members page, and a title, Skimm'bassador, that readers wore with pride. The program became the main growth engine, and at its height the network passed 30,000 active members. theSkimm raised $29 million, valuing it at $100 million. Readership grew from 100,000 readers in year one to 1.5 million by 2015, 4 million by late 2016, and 7 million by 2019.

Turning Down the Money 

For the first few years, the founders refused most advertising. Wish-list brands asked to sponsor the newsletter, and they turned them down to keep the voice free of corporate obligation and let the audience grow first. When theSkimm did monetize, it used that relationship rather than interrupting it, through native advertising written in its own voice and affiliate marketing that earned a cut when readers bought what it recommended. By 2017, affiliate revenue had grown nearly 400% in six months. A paid app at $2.99 a month and a business helping brands reach the audience followed, and revenue more than doubled year over year after 2016.

Everything Built on the Same Reader 

In 2016, it launched Skimm Ahead, a paid calendar app, and Skimm Studios for video. It added a daily news podcast in 2019 and published How to Skimm Your Life, a New York Times bestseller. It expanded the newsletter family to include money, parenting, and wellness, and built a separate newsletter for marketers. The No Excuses voter campaign began in 2016 and helped register more than 110,000 people, most of them women. For 2018, it ran a microsite with state deadlines and a ballot builder, put up billboards in Arizona, Texas, and Florida, took out a full-page New York Times ad, and turned its 30,000 ambassadors into local organizers. None of it required theSkimm to become an expert in elections. It required only that readers trust the voice telling them where to vote.

The Exit 

A brand built on a single voice for a single reader has a built-in vulnerability. The voice has to stay distinct because once it sounds like everyone else, the reason to subscribe disappears, and the news beneath it becomes a commodity anyone can get for free. The audience also ages. theSkimm started with women in their twenties, and over a decade those readers moved into careers, money decisions, parenting, and health. The company followed them toward multi-generational women and wellness, which is what made it valuable to the buyer it found. When Everyday Health Group acquired theSkimm in March 2025, it was buying trusted daily access to millions of women, a fit for a health portfolio already reaching tens of millions. The founders stayed on. theSkimm won by knowing one reader completely and showing up in her inbox every morning.

Zakin and Weisberg did not set out to know the news better than anyone else. They set out to know one reader better than anyone else, and they built the whole company on that single advantage. The voice came first, the audience formed around it, and every product after that was a way to use the attention the voice had already earned.

That is the part most media brands get backward. They start with a subject and wait for an audience to show up. theSkimm started with the audience.

See you next week.

If you liked this edition of Growth Curve, forward it to a founder or marketer who needs to stop renting their audience — and start owning it.