Last week I told my mom that The Hustle’s 17th employee was starting today. Her response: “What do you need 17 people for… don’t you just write a daily newsletter?”
We get this question a lot. Why do you need so many people, aren’t you just a newsletter? Well, kind of.
While it’s looking like we’re going to continue to increase the team size significantly over the next 12 months, I wanted to take a minute to explain what our team does now, with 17 people.
Our team is spread across 5 teams: editorial, growth, tech, events, sales.
Editorial
Editorial works tirelessly to write the news and ads for the daily email, plus create content for our blog. It’s a very difficult job because they constantly have to be smart, funny and have a deadline each day, but they’re extremely talented and well trained.
Growth
The growth team uses our custom analytics to find and retain new users for our email, events, and other products that we’ll soon be announcing. They spend most their days creating processes, content, and tech that make growth predictable.
Tech
Tech builds and maintains our internal tools and software. While we produce amazing content, the tech we’ve built is equally impressive. This includes our email management system, our ambassador program, analytics, our own ad serving system, and much more. See, our media company is built on email, an old piece of technology that’s been mostly static for decades. Our email is the Business Insider and HuffPo’s website…it’s where we put our content, serve our ads, and more. And, because there is not a lot of tech out there for people with large email lists, we’ve had to build our own from scratch, giving us a big advantage.
Events
The events team hosts our 20+ events each year, from 50-person before-work events to 3k-person conferences, like Hustle Con and Con Con. The Hustle actually started as a conference. Now, our events team produces meaningful profit while also helping us meet our community in real life.
Sales
And finally, our sales team finds brands we think you’ll love, gets them to advertise in the daily email, and makes sure our readers and our clients are happy. We get a lot of inbound interest from advertisers. They comb through who fits our values then comes up with solutions that make our readers happy.
So, there you have it, mom.
Any other questions? Comment here on this Facebook thread, and I’ll try to answer them all.
Talk soon,
Sam, CEO of The Hustle
PS: We’re always hiring more…click here.