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Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference

From Y Combinator · Published Jul 22, 2018 · Watch on YouTube

TL;DR

Morgan DeBaun founded Blavity in 2014 after working at Intuit, bootstrapping for a year with unpaid team members and later raising over $1M. The company grew from a curated email newsletter to a media and lifestyle brand for Black millennials, reaching 7M+ readers.

Key insights

  • Black people overindex on television (8 hours/day vs. ~5 average) and are huge content creators (memes, Twitter, etc.), but lacked a central platform aggregating that content.
  • Blavity initially built a video-focused website (after the newsletter), but users rejected it and preferred YouTube; a WordPress blog (set up in a weekend) drove 1000x more traffic than the custom-bui
  • DeBaun tracks Google Analytics religiously (every hour, real-time) and pivoted based on data without attachment to “darlings.”

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