Clipisode Team Size (2022)

hello everyone my guest today is brian alvey he builds software that makes creative people more powerful his platforms have been used by an uh engadget tmz gucci aol businessweek netscape mashable and many others his app clip episode lets you make video shows with people inside apps like twitter facebook and instagram brian you ready to take it to the top i am ready all right so i i don't want to lose people on what this thing actually does so let's just use let's use twitter as an example what do you mean by video shows with people inside twitter ooh i'm going to use uh you as an example okay so this is great for podcasters it's kind of the anti-podcast product but bear with me and it's great for authors and then hell if you're a podcaster author it's kind of amazing so you might want to promote your book you might want to promote your show upcoming guests previous guests right so we have a way for you to ask a video question to do content marketing with your fans and with your famous friends to help promote your new book right so what's a question you would ask on facebook on twitter on instagram something like that to get people talking about the subject around your next book do you by the way the next book is a release it's behind me but but a thing i did i said hey it's coming soon yeah it's like comment below do you like the yellow cover or the blue cover sure right help me pick my cover yeah help me pick my you know maybe b side what dress i'm wearing to the grammys right those kinds of questions so you have a question like that hey i want you to send me that video tell me which one you like and why right if you were to try to get people to give you video replies for that the next thing you usually do on twitter is say now go download some crappy app yep right nobody's gonna do that for a one-time video reply correct so we've invented a two magic trick product the first magic trick you don't have to install or download anything to send back video replies so they'll literally click on a tweet that you send watch your question without leaving the twitter app swipe up on instagram watch your question without leaving the instagram app click a button and send you back a video reply okay so then they go back to the instagram stories and twitter right hold on i see i see download though on your website that's for me the question only the host there's actually crazy crazy enough there's a way where even the host doesn't have to use the app but yes only the host uses the app all your fans all your friends click a link they get an app like experience and they send you back video replies okay that's magic trick number one interesting trick number two can i see this anywhere on twitter like if do you know a profile that i could go to right now to see this or no oh to actually do a response no just to see it yeah uh like nationwide uses with brad paisley and peyton manning okay so this is a big thing in like october november that's led to like a crazy two months of like all the doors opened up for us where did the replies get stored yeah they all come back to the app so it's totally brand safe that's the thing that nationwide and you know comic book companies and movie companies are all like oh my god it's ugc but not it's you know you had that um heyo did these like video replies and stuff like that right ugc contests hashtags hashtags go to hell they're horrible people and you know you don't know and the brand doesn't own a hashtag anyone can go correct so you actually so they got um more than 500 replies for this brad paisley thing so you know the nationwide commercials right the jingle nation while i was on your side okay so brad paisley country music superstar peyton manning football superstar they do these commercials where they're working on the jingle so they have this great idea peyton is driving brad nuts because he's you know not a musician he thinks he's part of the band this whole cute little buddy cop thing what if brad looks into the episode app and he asks his fans for help please guys we're stuck in the jingle people driving me nuts send me something help me and they didn't know how it would go if they get no replies if the whole thing would go to hell like a hashtag contest does they got more than 500 replies all of them but one was like legitimate people playing guitar writing lyrics everything like that sorry unlike hashtags that go to hell it's very safe for men so brian i totally get the products i want to move on and learn more about your background in the business um uh do you give me magic too before you move on well hold on let me let me ask you let me ask you a question on the ugc for a second um is there something built in legally where the submission this whoever submits knows that the brand has rights to do whatever they want to do with the content okay good that's the biggest thing by replying you agree to terms and conditions perfect things like email addresses what's your twitter handle things like that there's a whole it's been like two years of great and magic trick two is what you said animated branding yeah so basically you put together like a tv show a talk show so now you have um a titles that get applied so think like a cnn looking show right where every guest name is on there but your book's url is under each clip so let's say you talk about space travel and you actually get a response from elon musk because he clicked on a tweet sent you a video reply he was feeling good at the time and boom he's now part of your show it has his name but below his name it has your book's url got it okay very good all right history so you launched it two years ago you said uh we've been working on for two years we launched it last summer so really our first big brand thing was october november okay and how do you make money is it a sas platform it's uh so right now it's gonna be like you know every sas platform starts out as campaigns and one-offs and agency deals trying not to become an agency because we're venture-backed we have really famous amazing how much have you raised so we raised a million and a half for the business but we put a million of that into the previous version of the business that we folded okay so really about a half a million bucks in the episode yeah but you kept that you just kept that same cap table right you didn't read because you don't want to tell mark cuban like i've just paid your money away yeah or like the guy who sold to amazon yeah yeah okay so 1.5 raised you really get this thing you pivot to this in 2018 last year you're doing kind of one-time things to generate cash uh or and to kind of learn do you have any pure sas revenue at this point or no isn't it no so we have a partner studio so we have we know the product that we will be selling access and training to and we're finishing that thing up it works enough for us to use it for brands ourselves but not for us to put you in the driver's seat yeah what's a team size today three people i like to say two and a half but two and a half three that's funny okay so three of you guys um and when you're doing kind of these custom projects which is kind of a human-powered back-end right now before you systematize it and sell it to sas i mean are these like ten thousand dollar projects or a hundred thousand dollar projects yes no they're more than ten range exactly okay and and what are you so you reach out to a nationwide you say pay us ten grand to do what you're going to come up with the creative and the yeah so we fit in you know both of the ideation end and the media ends we can boost things at the end that you've already got something going but no we really want to be part of that thing we want to be worked into your campaign they literally turned their like tv commercials into a clip episode style campaign to get ugc and um so we're you know yes that's it so we're basically working with agencies so we did that one with ogilvy to do nationwide they have a whole bunch of other brands lined up because that went so well they're like oh dove has real women but you sold this through ogilvy correct yeah interesting are they an investor you have a lot of direct relationships they're not yet uh i don't expect them to be no they're just lining up customers but we have direct relationship media companies movie studios uh comic book companies so past 12 months um how many uh customers have you worked with so just we've really been live since october so it's two okay nationwide and discover yeah okay and um and all these great things can be fun and so you're talking like 20 30 grand and kind of professional services sort of revenue exactly really just and and really just to get the reference content at the highest level to open the doors which has been what i've done in my career is usually like work with the top brand in the commscore category and then work your way down okay now you're trying to figure out how do you sell a sas platform here what's your best thesis right now on what the price point is going to be and what they'll be buying yeah so it's funny um we actually had some really smart advisors helping us with all that so it's it's think of campaigns no less than 10 grand but they're probably not gonna be much more than that you know an awards show or things like that that's kind of where their sweet spot we want you know five grand per sub brand within a company so every tv show within warner brothers or every tv show with an nbc or every uh team within a certain league right uh something like that so you know and then and then in bulk of course discount so instead of it being whatever that would be 150 grand a month for you know every baseball team you know maybe it's a hundred so you think about five grand five grand a month per kind of brand whether that's shark tank at under mbc and the nbc buys it for all their shows or something like that right and how did you get so this is like a beautiful place to be this kind of exploratory phase because you don't have any sunk cost grandfather plans you have to like worry about grandfathering in how did you get to the 5000 were you out walking through like the question process you've used with your two test clients to get to five grand yeah so a lot of it is really you know there's the two ways to price it right there's your costs and then there's the value and there's also just and there's a pull out of your ass is another option well no that's good one right yeah exactly oh i'm sorry right there's the the drugs the drugs there's the value one and there's that so we're targeting for the value right what would it take you to do something like this so you think of the process to make one of these little five or eight minute shows that maybe a famous person jumps into or maybe your fans are all in right and it's like 10 hours of work you know the graphics team to put after effects stuff on all these you know people emailing you files you just go out of your mind so we make that a 10 minute process so what's that worth to a network tv show or a big movie franchise that has a bunch of stars in it that's coming out this summer so here's exactly what we're pitching so you have some big franchise with you know famous people big famous celebrity people they don't have time to promote things well how do you get content from them how do you get them to do influencer takeovers we have a way where you you just send them a link get back the content is it safe for our brand yeah absolutely comms can we do it we have a dashboard for that a whole online like pipeline for all your content across your teams across your movies across your tv shows it's set so it's it's an interesting thing because it's something radically new that has never been sold right group video shows have never worked when i pitched into mark cuban he flat out told me i was an idiot he said i've invested in these things these lose my money they're terrible you're a i'm out right like that was this that was conversation number one year and a half later we come back we show him how it works with one of his cable stations he's like oh wait a minute nobody has to download anything oh my god you're a genius here's money right so we kind of have to get over that hurdle people don't believe it literally the project we did for discovery was they just didn't believe that what we showed them in the office works how much runway have you bought yourself to figure all this out so what are you burning per month right now uh so i've had exits in the past so i can hold my breath for a long time well ignore sorry sorry without you putting in your own money or anything like that just the company today how much is it burning per month um uh tens of brands like low tens of brands not a lot but really i have a cto and me and a sales guy yeah that's great um okay so 20 grand a month you bought yourself some runway there um why um at what point did you know that the old product wasn't working and a pivot was the right decision yeah so we actually had if you know the the site patreon yeah i know patreon really well i use them but great so we built a thing called recurrency that was going to compete with them and this was four three four years ago and it looked really good we ran it for about a year but we looked at patreon and we looked at their business model and i don't want to spend a lot of time on patreon because like we left that behind and i don't even dream about it anymore but uh there were some flaws in that you know they were collecting 50 million bucks for creators they were keeping two and a half yeah back in the day and then we actually looked at the 25 000 creators they had at the time there were less than 30 who could make a living doing it right yeah no more there were less than 300 that were even making 1 000 a month so it was a if you looked at the 25 000 creators they had an average of one supporter paying them four dollars a month i wonder how that compares though about everyone who uploads to say youtube and what you get from adsense revenue right totally i couldn't agree more yeah but i think the promise of it was people would come to us to our platform and say hey i just lost my job i want to do my you know my top podcast for a living now how do i do that and i'd say well how many fans do you have and they're like well i have 30 fans like well you can't take the 10 of your fans and get money from them that you can't do the 1000 true fans like you can't do that unless you have a million you can't get a thousand to pay you if you have 30 like go to gofundme like that was the thing we had a lot of talk with people there's a weird thin stripe of creators who can use a patreon who aren't so famous that people think they're begging for money if you're britney spears if you're a taylor swift you're not going to use patreon but if you're a nobody you can't use it either so it's a weird thin line of people like you know like you have an audience you can monetize yeah yeah and it's almost it's people that are in the operating in different niches very specific niches yeah it's amanda palmer it's pentatonix like the best whatever you know a cappella band that opened for kelly clarkson once the christmas special right they're cute but anyway yeah that was the thing so we looked at that and we said you know we can do this for a long time and be like the lift to their uber and build an okay business but i have a product that superstars can't use what if we did a looked at the rewards model they had and looked at the video shows people were making together and built a product for that now i actually have a product that taylor swift that brad paisley that people can use now second question here you're down to 500 grand cash in the bank when you do this pivot um there's like mess you have to get rid of and you have to erase the old patreon id and like move for a different direction i mean why not just shut it down give yourself a break and then explore the market a little bit do some consulting work and launch a new idea uh so i love that question and i of course you know being the greedy person looking at my full cap table think about this all the time like why didn't that just inject these people but really it's ejecting jason gallicanis it's ejecting mark cuban you let them come in on your next idea on preferential terms no i totally get that well so part of it too was we looked at this as actually the recurrency app so we started building it with this team with that business so we were building an app for that business and what we just decided was let's stop doing the crowdfunding part and spend the time to make this app work i see so it's very hard to disconnect those two it would be very um sort of disingenuous and you know bad to kind of disconnect those two like there'd be a very a very strong case for wait a minute that old business i put money into owns that ip so we'll do this yeah yeah i guess i guess what i'm saying is there's a lot of people talk about starting businesses and not enough people that talk about this is when you should end the business and so i i totally agree with you if you took ip you built with other people's money and then stopped it took them off the cap table then use that same ip to launch a new company look yeah that wouldn't look good what i was saying is like why not shut down the whole thing completely go do new discoverability maybe launch a whole new different product that had nothing to do with what you passed built you you i guess have seen enough promise in this clip episode idea where just you said it just made sense to have the continuity and keep building on it correct yeah it really did yeah very cool all right brian let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book that's a good question so i really love uh well i love angel by jason calacanis because i helped write it but i would say dream teams by shane snow one of the founders of contently he is actually my favorite author you know he is great i didn't see you there i was at the launch event in new york when he did this with the different alcoholic tests and it did things with your mouth and it was like yeah i was in that room i just my daughter just found a little weird ass packet of stuff from that yeah yeah that's his that's hysterical drugs there's a pill and some powder yeah and you do the one where you you put the glasses on and you chug it yeah yeah yeah oh so we just we just party i was there too we just missed each other all right uh yeah great book shane's no great book number two is there an under the radar ceo you're following are studying right now god i love a lot of them uh the microsoft ceo the stitch fix one uh i'll tell you i don't know if she's under the radar but tina sharkey from brandless is like a money raising machine brands it's kind of like there's no brand to them right so uh she's amazing and every time you think oh she raised 16 million from nba players then she turns around and raises 240 and you're like i didn't know my friends could do this like yeah it's shocking so tina sharkey interesting number three what tool do you use for billing or will you use for billing oh for billing uh i'm not sure you know for the next year we're figuring out the models yeah number number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh once a week uh is like my cheat day and i get like eight or twelve and then all the rest is five or six okay fair enough good kids and dogs how many kids uh three kids three okay married or single i'm married okay good okay so married three kiddos and how old are you uh 48 48 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew so you know it's uh nothing so if it was really the time travel thing i would say buy amazon stock um but other than that like every decision i made every co-founder i don't talk to my six-month first marriage it didn't work out like it all led to the 20-year marriage that did so i would change nothing guys at all there you have it episode pivoted to it in 2018 again helping people without having your audience have to download an app basically generate ugc on the fly whether it's on twitter facebook or instagram hoping to price this at about 5 000 bucks per brand a brand being maybe a tv show owned by nbc they buy it for all their shows things like that he's discovering the pricing and you and the fit right now by doing consulting work doing two projects call it 10 20 grand a month of pop with this team of three people out in california or san francisco they raised 1.5 million bucks got about 500 grand left for the new idea burning about 20 grand a month so plenty of time to kind of figure this out as they look to launch the next couple of months brian thanks for taking us to the top this was awesome