We were lucky to catch up with Lynn Harris recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lynn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
The story REALLY begins on one chilly night in 1985, on a Jewish youth group overnight ski trip in New Hampshire, where a bunch of dudes borrowed a bunch of girls’ nightgowns and somehow found a bunch of grapefruits and did a sloppy random and probably hilarious drag skit that brought the HOUSE down, and I have resented Adam Sandler ever since. It’s really not personal, but he was one of them, and I — even being a leading “funny one” — knew that even the funniest girls could NEVER just get up there unrehearsed and dumb like that and CRUSH. Not that WE couldn’t — but even I, at 15, knew that the AUDIENCE would never be so fawning and forgiving and just laugh. People just didn’t see girls that way. We were the audience, not the act.
I actually really liked Adam Sandler in that bat mitzvah movie, so he and I are good now. But for a long time, that stuck with me. That vibe followed me — and all my non-dude peers — into years of standup, where men were comics, women were … “not funny.” Or, worse, “comediennes.”
So yeah. I’ve been in and near comedy since the 90s. I’ve performed, produced, and taught comedy on numerous platforms and built several successful comedy-related brands. I’ve done this because comedy matters: when you make people laugh, you make people listen.
And times have changed—you may have heard that women can be Ghostbusters now!—but it’s not enough.
Dudes still dominate the comedy world and access to it. Comedy is hard for everyone, but still extra hard for non-dudes.
Twice as many ads feature men being funny versus women.
All five major late-night hosts are cis white men.
Standup lineups are still up to 70% men.
Amy Schumer is STILL the only woman ever to make the Forbes 100 list of top-earning comedians.
SNL has hired two sketch teams to make digital shorts. Both are all white dudes.
We love these guys!! Some of our best friends are very funny men!
But still. Even though women are more and more visible in comedy, men still control and define it.
And as long as comedy is defined by men, it’s not designed for women.
So we’re redesigning it for women.
And that is why I founded GOLD!
We did start out with a get ’em early approach, offering free workshops for teen girls in order to test the market (and some press). But, over time, we kept hearing from women in their 20s and up who wanted to be part of what we were doing, big picture: creating a bro-vibe-free space where women and other “others” could find the skills, community, networking, and mentoring they needed to succeed in comedy-related careers and side-hustles. I knew WHAT I wanted to build, and I knew I wanted to do it all in one place, online, for reach and scale — but I’m not a tech founder, so I wasn’t sure where or how to do it. I did some experiments with some very smart advisors, but I was a little stuck.
Then, the sad part: in 2020, my mom died of COVID. But! When I finally got my post-grief surge of I MUST GIVE MY LIFE MEANING energy, I knew I would turn it toward GOLD. A trusted advisor recommended Mighty Networks, which allowed us to build out GOLD’s MVP without (at least for now) having to build the tech beneath it. Perfect.
Over time, listening to our potential customers and those who became our ride-or-dies, we built just that. Today, with all organic growth/$0 marketing spend, GOLD has 300+ members and is the comedy school, professional network, and content studio where women and non-binary folks grow their comedy careers, join a powerful community, and make funny stuff. Through our classes, celebrity speaker series, sketch teams, shows, and more, our members build skills, rack up laurels, and nail their showbiz goals. Rachel Dratch is an advisor, and we have a seriously brag-worthy list of guests and mentors that includes Margaret Cho, Rachel Bloom, Maria Bamford, Ashley Nicole Black, and more.
I’m doing this not just because comedy is the “best medicine” (tied with … medicine). Not just because, God knows, we need to laugh. It’s because comedy is a JOB and women are PEOPLE. We are here to help women succeed in comedy. Which helps us build a world that listens to women. BOOYAH!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m obsessed with comedy and with building a fairer, funnier world. The content I’ve pioneered and the brands I’ve built or helped build have all successfully challenged perceptions of and limitations on women, and now I’m doing it again with GOLD. I’m a long-time brand-builder, strategist, and author/essayist/journalist whose work won awards and changed laws and lives for women. My cover story in Parade (largest circulation in the U.S.) was the first to bring the term “dating violence” into national vernacular; calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline doubled in the weeks following publication. I spent
25+ years creating comedy-driven products and campaigns designed to scale and drive change, e.g., animations shown at NASCAR races challenging violence against women. I co-created Breakup Girl (breakupgirl.net), which was among earliest internet success stories and was acquired by Oxygen. I spent 10+ years performing, producing, and teaching standup comedy. I have a husband and two teenage kids, who are all, thank God, very funny.
So as a “woman in” various fields, and THE WORLD, I wanted to solve for others the dumb and harmful sh*t that I (and so many others) had been through myself.
That’s why the real gold of GOLD is not just our classes or our connections to comedy idols. It’s the people and community we create who are all dedicated to each others’ success. People who met through GOLD formed a sketch team, around the theme of chronic illness, called Sick Bae. (LOL!) GOLDIes just made the award-winning web series Rat Czar, with time and treasure and an ace crew (largely) from GOLD. GOLD and GOLDies also made the web series Late Bloomers, which just dropped on FOX SOUL. We’re not just here to build your confidence — which we do! We are also here to build your concrete, measurable, comedy success — powered by people who want you to succeed.
Also unlike our otherwise very nice competitors, we offer the following:
– direct access to a powerful network of celebs, pros, and mentors
– connections to potential paid gigs both external and in-house (writing for our website, teaching, joining a writers’ room/creating branded content via our sketch teams)
– other exclusive and potentially paid opportunities for advanced creators (sketch teams)
– a private, interactive, and scalable online platform
– … at one all-you-can-eat price ($499.99/year; scholarships available)
Aside from all the laurels we win and bold names we can drop, I am most proud when GOLDies meet and make funny stuff together. And, bragging, when GOLDies tell me how and why GOLD has changed their life. 🫶
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
As “fun” as a comedy business sounds — and it is! — there’s also the BUSINESS part of things to deal with. For me, it’s mostly that! And we have long been a scrappy team of hustlers focused on growing organically.
To figure out what worked best we have long experimented with a number of channels. We found that—with our limited budget and human resources—word of mouth, partnerships, and content marketing are the three areas where we can most effectively win new customers.
So one of the biggest challenges we faced a couple of years ago was recognizing that the investments we were making in paid marketing, even with conservative bets, were—surprise—not the right growth strategy for our modest size…and deciding to cut bait.
A well-meaning advisor had convinced some investors that our business would be on its way to a profitable CAC within six months if they could just help us seed our performance marketing. We did invest some resources in performance marketing, new landing pages, and new creative assets to boost on Google and social platforms. While those tactics did lead to a temporary spike in growth, we learned that it does take a fair amount of time and budget to get performance marketing channels to work (especially as that channel becomes increasingly expensive). Managing that advisor and following our gut to return to our growth fundamentals was one of the largest challenges we ever faced. But we pushed through, determined to learn—and it led to a more targeted, learner, and ultimately more effective growth plan.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
The story of how I met my co-founder, Ami Vora, is not that interesting a STORY itself, but it mirrors the power and potential of the network and community that is GOLD itself. I belong to a network of women called The Li.st, also dedicated to each others’ success. I was looking for a co-founder whose skills would balance mine–to be the “Deloitte” to my “Carol Burnett” (but who also loved comedy), I posted on the Li.st, which, through a few introductions, led me indirectly but quickly to Ami. We do the same thing all the time at GOLD, whether someone needs anything from a sound person for a shoot to a special ask of a celebrity for a comedy event. That’s what in part, and on purpose, makes us different from, say, all the white dudes from the Lampoon* who just hire each other. All these interconnected and powerful networks of women and other “others” who build trust and stand for each other’s success — it’s yet another way we will change the comedy world, and the world-world!
*Again, we love this guys! But still.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.goldcomedy.com
- Instagram: @goldcomedy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GOLDcmdy
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/goldcomedy/
- Twitter: @goldcomedy
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/goldcomedy
Image Credits
Denise Winters, Jorg Meyer, Eric Gordon