Growing the team and outlining what Smooth actually does

We’re super excited to share that Colin Richardson has joined the team as our Head of Partnerships.

Colin spent the last 7 years at Industry Dive, one of our favorite media businesses out there. He joined in 2015 as the ~30th employee, became one of the company's top sellers as a Senior Account Director, and saw ID through their recent sale to Informa for $525m.

Colin and I (hi, it’s Jenny) overlapped at ID for a while circa 2017, and we’d often find ourselves in the corner at company happy hours analyzing the latest episode of Survivor or tossing around business ideas.

Fast forward to today: Colin is joining Smooth to lead and scale the brand partnerships operation. With his experience selling premium niche audiences to target advertisers and building quality, high-performing marketing campaigns, we know he’s ready to hit the ground running.

Feel free to warm up Colin’s email at [email protected] :)

Also…we’ve got more open positions! We’re hiring for the following:

• Account Coordinator — work with Colin to deliver white glove service and creative marketing campaigns for our advertising partners

• Creator Operations Associate — operate and scale our media businesses

• Ad Copywriter — help us craft killer ads

• Graphics Intern — make our newsletters more aesthetically pleasing

If none of those perfectly apply to you but you’re still interested in working with Smooth or with any of our creators' businesses, please reach out anyway! Our hiring needs are constantly evolving and we love talking to smart people who are eager to build creator-led media businesses.

One more thing…

We’ve been heads down operating our core media businesses, and as such, our vision for the future has continued to get clearer. Today, this is how we look at the Smooth Media organization.

* Kinsey is now serving as Smooth’s Managing Editor at large, meaning she is the editorial lead on all the newsletters we operate: The Publish Press, Consider Radar, FamilyMade, The Workbook, and more launching soon 👀

Each creator-led media business we work with is very much unique, but this framework has helped us communicate both internally and externally both our team's capabilities and the future toward which we're working.

Lots more to build! Email us whenever at [email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected].

Since social media (particularly in startup/Twitter-land) can easily distort reality, we’re going to leave this reminder on all our company updates—building and running a company is very hard. We’re obviously going to position our narrative to make it look like we’re cruising. But some days suck. We’re grateful for our team, our family, our friends—everyone who supports us. This is exactly what we want to be doing.