Welcome to The Spin
Here’s a confession from two women who have spent the last couple decades telling other people’s stories for a living: We’ve been terrible at telling our own.
We started JBC in 2014 with a shared conviction that PR could be more than press hits and product placements — that the right story, told the right way, could actually change the trajectory of a business. Since then, we’ve grown from a two-person operation into a 50-person agency with offices in New York and LA. We’ve helped hundreds of brands launch, scale, pivot, and weather crises. We helped mobilize 40+ female founders in 72 hours to fight tariffs threatening women-owned businesses. We helped restore access to reproductive rights resources for 168 million women when the government dropped the ball. We built a hotline with the U.S. Women's Hockey Team so fans could text their favorite players directly — and watched it break the internet. And last year, we launched After Hours Capital, an angel investment firm backing the underrepresented founders that traditional VC keeps overlooking — built in the sliver of time between closing our laptops and our kids’ bedtimes.
And through all of it, we never once sat down and wrote about what we were actually learning.
That changes now. Welcome to The Spin.
It’s us. Top row, from L-R: Partner & Managing Director Melissa Duren Conner, Head of Strategy Ilana Dvir. Bottom row, from L-R: Head of Growth Libbey Baumgarten, Founder & President Jennifer Bett Meyer.
Why “The Spin”?
Let’s address the name. Yes, “spin” has a reputation. It implies manipulation, misdirection, smoke and mirrors. We chose it anyway — because we think the word deserves a reframe.
Here’s what spin actually means to us: It’s the angle. The way you take a complicated, messy, or overlooked story and find the thread that makes people care. It’s what we do every day — for our clients, for the founders we invest in, and increasingly, in conversations about what’s happening in media, culture, and the way brands show up in the world.
The Spin isn’t about making things look better than they are. It’s about making the real story impossible to ignore.
Who We Are (The Short Version)
Jennifer Bett Meyer: Founder & President of JBC. Mother of two. The one who will text you a fully formed creative campaign at 6 a.m. before her kids wake up. Has spent over a decade building an agency rooted in the belief that integrity and ambition aren’t mutually exclusive. Co-founder of After Hours Capital.
Melissa Duren Conner: Partner & Managing Director of JBC. Mother of three. Oversees JBC’s client services, team operations, and the day-to-day reality of keeping a boutique agency running at full speed, which means she has very strong opinions about what makes a good story — and an even stronger opinion about what makes a bad pitch. Co-founder of After Hours Capital.
Together, we’ve been business partners for over a decade, which is longer than most marriages and statistically more impressive. We finish each other’s sentences in client meetings, disagree productively about strategy, and share an inbox that would make most people cry.
What You Can Expect
We built this newsletter because we kept having the same conversations — with each other, with our team, with founders, with journalists — and realizing that the insights we were sharing in private were exactly the kind of thing people were searching for publicly.
So here’s what The Spin will cover:
The Playbook: How brand stories actually get made. We’ll pull back the curtain on real campaigns (with permission), break down what worked and what didn’t, and share the strategic thinking behind the results. Think of it as the case study your MBA never gave you.
The Landscape: What’s happening in media, culture, and consumer behavior that brands need to pay attention to right now. We track this obsessively for our clients; now we’re sharing it with you.
Off the Record: The stuff we talk about when we’re not on the record. Our actual opinions on industry trends, founder culture, the state of media, and what it’s really like to run an agency while raising small children. Sometimes earnest. Sometimes unhinged. Always honest.
The Toolkit: Practical resources you can steal. Pitch templates, strategy frameworks, the LinkedIn post format that actually works — things we’ve tested across hundreds of client accounts.
We’ll be in your inbox twice a month to start, with shorter takes on Substack Notes in between.
Why Now?
Honestly? We should have done this years ago. We had a version of this newsletter — called Office Hours — that we let gather dust because client work always came first. That’s the classic agency trap: You’re so busy building everyone else’s platform that you forget to build your own.
But something shifted for us recently. We launched After Hours Capital and realized that the founders we were investing in — many of them first-time entrepreneurs — were hungry for the kind of unfiltered, behind-the-scenes insight that doesn’t exist in most business content. They didn’t want another “10 Tips for Your Product Launch” listicle. They wanted to know how things actually work. How decisions actually get made. What the people behind successful brands are actually thinking.
We also realized that after 11 years of doing this, we have a perspective worth sharing — not just about PR, but about storytelling, culture, building a business as women, and navigating an industry that’s changing faster than most people can keep up with.
It also felt right to launch this ahead of International Women’s Day. So much of what we’ve built — the agency, the fund, the coalition work, this newsletter — comes back to the same thing: women’s stories deserve better strategy, bigger platforms, and louder amplification. That’s been our mission since day one. Launching The Spin today is our way of practicing what we preach.
So here we are. Two founders, one newsletter, zero ghostwriters.
A Small Ask
If this sounds like something you’d want to read — or forward to a founder, marketer, or friend who’s building something — subscribe and share it. The best newsletters grow through word of mouth, and we’d love for The Spin to become the kind of thing people send to each other with a “you need to read this.”
We’re also genuinely curious: What do you want us to write about? Drop a comment, reply to this email, or DM us. We’re building this with you, not just for you.
Here we go.
—Jenny & Melissa