Kyle
I’m one of those people that thinks in order to be the best you need to think like you are the best, it’s a motivational mantra that’s driven me since my childhood. Such is the case with Derek Flanzraich and his health and wellness, socially driven info startup Greatist. This New York based startup is a destination site for original, amazingly good health and wellness content. It must be because they’re currently seeing 1.5 million uniques a month, which according to Flanzraich makes Greatist the fastest growing site in the health space.
Whether you’re looking for great healthy recipes, workout tips or even how to get over a hangover, Greatist offers a great variety of wellness and health related content.
While the content on Greatist.com is overflowing, the team at Greatist encourages their users to take it slow, one week at a time. The startups mission is to inspire and inform the world to make at least one healthier decision per week. Whether you want to lose weight, eat better, get stronger, get motivated, relieve stress, or just start working out, greatist.com offers the content you need, in an easy to read format for all of their users.
Flanzraich has been an entrepreneur since his first “lemonade stand” startup dog walking business. All the while friends, family members and new acquaintances would ask him what drove him and one of those main ingredients was health and wellness. That’s why he created Greatist.
We got a chance to talk to Flanzraich. Check out the interview below:
Greatist is a health & fitness media startup on a mission to make better choices easier for everyone. Launched in 2011, it’s now the fastest-growing site in the health space with over 1.5 million uniques/month. Currently a destination site for super high-quality, original fitness, health, and happiness content (every fact cited by a PubMed study, every article approved by multiple experts), Greatist is working to build the first truly trusted health & wellness brand online to help the world (and especially those 18-35) think of preventive health in a healthier way.
We’re basically a go-to site with all the trusted social content you need to help you make better choices about your health, wellness, and overall fitness!
Derek Flanzraich is the founder & ceo of Greatist. Flanzraich graduated from Harvard in 2010, was previously with Clicker.com (acquired by CBS) and NBC Universal’s Digital Entertainment Strategy & Operations, and has been building media-related organizations that last since his dog-walking business at 10 years old. Besides everything health and wellness, he also loves theme parks & theme bars.
Greatist HQ is based in the Flatiron district of New York City.
New York City is one of the most exciting places to be for startups right now, with an increasing amount of innovation, talent, and finance. We’re honored to be a part of it all!
I’ve been starting media-related organizations and brands throughout my entire (short) life– and everything I’ve started has stuck around, bigger and better than I left it. For the past 8 years, I’d tell anyone who would listen that health & fitness helped me make those things happen happen. I’m definitely not an expert or a fitness pro, but I was just super passionate about the space. Convinced that it improved my efficiency, my creativity, and my happiness big time, I nonetheless still struggled to build health & fitness into my life. And I was especially frustrated that there was no place for me to go on the web that I could trust, no brand I could turn to on a reliable basis for even the simplest health & fitness questions. My friends began increasingly turning to me for help (probably because I just talked about it so much) and it just became pretty clear to me that others felt the same frustration, the same void of a trusted and friendly brand in the preventive health space. So I became obsessed with building exactly that.
Well, the way we put it is that you don’t have to be the greatest, just a greatist. We believe it’s all about just making one healthier choice at a time, that it’s more important to be empowered and informed enough to know what better choices you can make than making all of them.
In an increasingly important and popular space, we believe there isn’t a consumer-facing brand people truly trust to help guide their health-related choices. We think the opportunity for a brand like that to make a meaningful difference and help make those choices easier is massive and important– and so we’re gunning to be that brand because we believe we’re doing it for the right reasons!
Greatist differentiates itself through high-quality content, a relatable voice and personality, and social. Most of our traffic is driven from social networks like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and others– and that’s no accident. We’re extraordinarily proactive about putting the most valuable and shareable content in the hands of the people that are looking for it– wherever they may be!
As a founder, one of the biggest dilemmas I’ve encountered is the shift from doing everything (I used to edit, for example, every single article on the site) to delegating the stuff I’m not as good at. Luckily, my job increasingly becomes working with and finding people who are way better at everything than me– and somehow convincing them we can build this important thing together.
A significant challenge in the early days was making sure that only the best cultural fits ended up on the team. I’m particularly obsessed with team culture– and ours is awesome. Figuring out how to make sure only the right people with the right attitude, values, and passion come on board is something we’re getting increasingly good at! That doesn’t mean, by the way, that everyone is the same– instead it’s about making sure everyone is in this together for the same reason. And smiles a lot.
Thanks, but no thanks! We’re focused on building Greatist one step at a time, so honestly we’d probably sit tight and invest it for our future… and that’s only if the money came from someone we respected and was completely agreed on our vision for the future.
We’re beginning to work on adding a pretty significant community element to our site, inspired by requests from our readers to speak and interact with one another! We’re also working to continue experimenting with different high-quality revenue streams. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon!
