The Gist
Published November 2019
Meet Ellen, Roslyn and Jacie, The Gist
The Gist is the result of the best energies colliding into one big bang. A conversation between cofounders Ellen, Roslyn and Jacie is full of warmth, and without judgement. Whether you know the latest in the sports world or not, you are welcomed into the conversation.
In this feature of Make Lemonade Entrepreneur, we sat down with these founders to dig further into their business in building The Gist. Experience their magic in the video and blog below.
MAKE CHANGE
I'm Ellen, this is Roslyn and Jacie and we are the three cofounders of The Gist. The Gist creates sports content and experiences that are by women for women to connect and empower them through sport and fill the gap in an industry that focuses on an avid male sports fan and lacks gender diversity. We inform and entertain for most of our content. Our main kind of offering is a free twice weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to at thegistnews.ca and that gives you “the gist” of what's going on in the sports world in a really fun and accessible way.
Start Somewhere
In terms of making the decision to leave our really great corporate jobs and go full time with The Gist, it was a big decision. We launched at the end of 2017 and it was really mostly amongst friends, family, colleagues. We call it a soft launch because in hindsight, when we look back at what we launched, it was pretty bare bones. It was what we call, a minimum viable product to just see if this was something that people were even interested in.
Photo by White Lioness Media
Think it, Want it, Get it
What was the catalyst for us all to leave our corporate jobs was hearing about this incubator program that was going on with the Ryerson DMZ here in Toronto and Facebook's journalism project. It just felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity. It came with, $100,000 in non-dilutive funding as well as $50,000 in Facebook and Instagram ads, and with a business like ours is huge, as well as mentorship, programming, office space in the DMZ and access to all of their resources. But when we did get accepted the digital news innovation challenge, I think we all were really on the same page of just having to take this opportunity and run with it.
When life gives you lemons…
I think for The Gist in the way that it came together was that something sour: which was so many women feeling left out of the conversation in the community with sports and that there is a massive lack of gender diversity in sports –that is definitely the lemon. We noticed with the Raptors winning the NBA finals, everybody's out in the streets partying, having a great time. It really is for everyone and so there's no need to only have 14% of sports journalists be female and then less 4% sports media coverage be on female athletes. And so we're trying to take that lemon and create our lemonade by creating the Gist and trying to change that and change those stats and make it so that women, when they're watching sports feel a part of it, and so that young girls can hopefully see that we're talking about female athletes more and that we're providing background on different games, and that they can actually see a female sports journalists in our team, and that they can say, “Hey, I can do this too. I can write about sports too.” I think that's the way that we think about it.
Thank you to The Gist, and White Lioness Media for helping to bring together this blog!
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