The future is bright for creators. For thoughtful people with the unique ability to entertain and educate through modern storytelling. For creatives from all walks of life who are capable of building a true audience.
To capture the value they create, creators are faced with the challenge of scaling beyond their most finite resource: time.
To go beyond operating as solo talent, creators have the opportunity to build businesses that are intertwined with and benefit tremendously from their personal brands—but can also extend beyond that. By creating a media company that can employ additional writers, producers, editors, etc., creators can invest both their time and their talent into an equity-building entity…a creator-led media company.
This allows a creator to expand beyond the confining grind of content creation, to alleviate some of the pressure and perils of burnout, to build something that becomes bigger than them. This is where we believe the largest opportunity lies for creators and at Smooth, we work with creators to make that a reality.
The founding team at Smooth is a ragtag bunch of misfits who...wait, that’s not it. We’re actually ex-Morning Brew teammates who learned the ropes of the modern media world by building and scaling a newsletter company into a full-fledged multimedia juggernaut that notched a $75 million exit in 2020.
After a year of writing the Brew’s daily newsletter to millions of people every morning, Kinsey transitioned into the audio world. She created and hosted Morning Brew’s Business Casual podcast, its first foray into anything outside the email inbox. Today she’s Smooth’s Chief Content Officer.
There would have been no podcast (or Star Wars references) without Josh, Smooth’s CEO, who single handedly got Business Casual off the ground as the show’s strategy and operations lead. Josh was also responsible for bringing other new media products like industry-specific newsletters and live events from half-baked idea to wildly successful reality.
As the team’s head of growth, Jenny took the Brew’s ecosystem from 200,000 subscribers to 3 million in the span of just two years. She’s obsessed with building systems and processes that drive efficiency and creativity, growing profitable media businesses and reviewing craft beers—most of which make her a decent Chief Operating Officer at Smooth.
Ali is the team’s in-house Gen Z correspondent and Operations Associate which is code for “she does it all”—manages partnerships, builds out new projects, keeps operations smooth, andsn’t afraid to sneak a handcrafted meme into our weekly kickoff emails.
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