How I Did It: Dany Levy

Marrying the immediacy of the Internet to the ephemera of what's hot created one sweet, and profitable, company.

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As told to Bobbie Gossage

Dot-commers of yore believed that if you could draw enough traffic to your website, you could make a killing selling banner ads and pop-ups. History, of course, proved otherwise--with a few exceptions. Thirty-one-year-old Dany Levy, a journalist turned entrepreneur, runs a profitable, popular, ad-revenue-based Internet company called DailyCandy, which every morning, via e-mail, feeds its reported 90,000 subscribers their regimen of what's hip at this very moment, including sample sales, boutique and restaurant openings, the latest book, and the hottest trend. Levy's website is all about stylish consumption, and fashionable enough to reportedly draw the investment dollars of MTV founder Bob Pittman. She's always operated her four-year-old company, however, on the basic principles of thrift.

I always had a knack for marketing. That's the reason the Internet fascinated me. It's so different from magazines or newspapers. On the Internet, that Forward button is a built-in marketing tool. Sometimes I'd get the same forwarded e-mail from three different friends in one day, people who didn't even know each other.

I began my career at New York magazine in 1994, and I worked there for four years, moving through the ranks from intern to the Sales & Bargains column, to the Gotham Style page, which I started. I freelanced for a while, then went to Self magazine as beauty editor, and then to the prototype of Lucky. Going from a weekly to a monthly to a prototype was frustrating, because the lead times were getting longer. I was used to quicker deadlines.

I was job-hopping so much that, in late 1999, I decided to go to business school--maybe I wasn't meant to be a journalist. In the process of learning about business and Wall Street, I ended up subscribing to TheStreet.com's newsletter. I looked at their business model and thought, Why has no one done this for lifestyles? Wouldn't it be nice to have one really simple e-mail that every day gave people the heads up on one cool thing: the new hot restaurant, a cool sample sale, the new must-have digital camera? Something that would weed through all the schlock and was short, entertaining, intelligent, and had service at its core. At that time, not much on the Internet was attractive to look at. I decided to make every e-mail look like nice stationery.

The immediacy of the Internet thrilled me, as did the ability to scoop other forms of media. I set up a desk in an office of a friend who ran a tech company and, with the money I was going to use for business school, started my company. I named it DailyCandy, because in print journalism if pages were easily digestible and easy on the eye, we'd call them "eye candy."

To get the word out, I sent e-mails to all of my journalist and nonjournalist friends, asking them to forward them to all of their friends. The e-mail gave them a taste of what DailyCandy was going to be, and it said something like, "Sign up now. Be first. Be in the know." Before I launched, I had 700 subscribers. Knowing people in the magazine industry helped, not really in generating press, but in growing my subscriber list and giving me credibility. Any time you branch out in an industry, it helps to have already made a name for yourself.

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