[May 24, 2013] Cup of Zup is up and sending funny business Tweet May 24, 2013 (Detroit Free Press - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- What started more than two years ago as a daily e-mail to the boss to alert him to employee birthdays and anniversaries, has become -- after an executive assistant's creative thinking -- a company, Cup of Zup. The small company sends a free, daily e-mail to about 10,000 subscribers at 6 a.m. Cyndi Lareau, the founder and CEO, said the daily e-mail is designed to make people smile, and, in text-speak, LOL. She and her team search the web for jokes, trivia, photos, videos of cute animals, celebrity look-alikes -- and what they call awesomeness (more on that in a moment). A recent joke, posted under the heading Hipster Burn: "How did the hipster burn his tongue He sipped his coffee before it was cool." From a business perspective, Lareau said, the start-up hopes to keep building its subscriber base and make money by selling advertising in the e-mail and on the company's website. She also said that the e-mail also could be a template corporations might buy or license. That's not just wishful thinking. Some e-mail newsletter companies have actually taken off. In 2008, for example, Comcast paid a reported $125 million for DailyCandy, a New York-based trendy e-mail newsletter that later branched out to other cities. Lareau, 32, was hired as an assistant to Dan Gilbert, the chairman and founder of Quicken Loans and majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. He wanted Lareau to send him an e-mail every day to remind him of employee birthdays and anniversaries, she said. She gathered the information and plugged it into an electronic form. But, after a while, she discovered a problem. "The form was so boring the e-mails were not getting read," Lareau said. The determined assistant decided to act: "I said, 'I'm going to find a way to make you read these e-mails.' " She started using humor in her e-mails, jokes, funny photos -- and, she said, Gilbert loved it. She added: "Then, he said, 'Get rid of all the birthdays, all the anniversaries, just do funny.' " Glibert also started asking her to add other people to the send list and it grew. Last year, the e-mail project became its own company in the M@dison Building, a hub for tech start-ups, in Detroit. Lareau said the free e-mails have a 54% open rate -- higher than the industry average, and anyone can sign up for them. The company name is a play on your morning cup of coffee and one of Gilbert's signature phrases, zup, short for "what's up " Lareau said she added a monkey to the logo, because, well, she just likes monkeys, and a monkey is fun. Cup of Zup now has five employees, including two part-timers. They've given themselves fun titles, such as twitter czar, staff cryptozoologist and ambassador of monkey business. Lareau, who plays along, said CEO really stands for chimp executive officer. (She likes monkeys, remember ) And they also are always in search of what they call awesomeness -- their version of OMG. It's a word to describe something so great, so funny, so amusing that it really defies any other description. "Sometimes you see things, and you say, 'That's awesome,' " Lareau said. "That's awesomeness!" ___ (c)2013 the Detroit Free Press Visit the Detroit Free Press at www.freep.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]