How Fanbase CEO Isaac Hayes III grew Fanbase to $105.7K revenue with a 22 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is isaac hayes the 30s the founder and ceo of fanbase which has raised 3.5 million bucks in seed funding on start engine in may 2021. the company is a new social media platform that monetizes social content for all users isaac you're ready to take it to the top absolutely all right man who's paying you who's using you right now what do you mean who are your customers oh well anybody like anybody that wants to monetize their content right the world is full of people that give away their content for free and the times are changing i think we're moving into a subscription-based world through everything and so it doesn't matter who you are where you are what you do i think all content has value and so i'm really excited to offer the opportunity for any person on the planet to monetize their content on fanbase but it's really hard to build a product and get users if you try and build it for everyone so who are you building the mvp for who are you targeting well really i think fanbase is for the future so it's really for the youth i really think that the future of social media belongs to the younger generation of kids that understand in-app purchases virtual currency subscribing all these things so fanbase is truly for the gen z generation the centennials that are coming right into social media right now the the way you present the story on the website is especially almost like instagram but people can it's a paid instagram you can subscribe to someone's instagram and i'm sure there's video content besides just images and then i can see almost sort of like um oh what's that oh almost sort of like only fans but obviously not that industry related but you can log in and see your revenue reports live too absolutely you can have followers and subscribers on the same page which is cool because it's a freemium app so it's like the things you want your followers to see like you normally would on instagram or twitter or facebook it's free um the things that you want people to pay for whatever their skill set is if it's a podcast the tutorial your private life whatever it is you can uh post that behind the paywall if people can subscribe to see that so i think that's what makes it very simple and then we have tons of verticals which is like photo video long form live audio rooms like clubhouse and sort of spaces stories and our new version of our short form video editor called flicks which is like our tick tock and reels which is coming early at the top of the year so it's just a it's a wide variety of tools for anybody to use to monetize their content isaac when you launch the business well enjoy the first line of code so that started in 2018. really we launched the app the beginning of 2019 and i didn't tell anybody that i built it right i let it sit for a year because i wanted to have a proof of concept without using my name or anybody that i knew to get users i wanted somebody to come on the app and use the app what it was intended for and we had several users do that but one person made about six thousand dollars in a year and we had less than ten thousand users and so that that showed me that i have a proof of concept that i could take you know and raise capital um and to do so but then 2020 came and coveted hit and then i couldn't move so we had to go a different route with crowdfunding um so how many downloads to date all downloads since 2018 of the app uh probably almost 200 oh wow okay and how many just in the last 30 days oh we just had a big uptick maybe maybe 20 25 20 000 what drove you uh well we actually had a a new user um rapper lotto she just joined the platform actually and she's having a birthday party here in atlanta and she's inviting five people to come to her birthday party on fanbase which i thought was really really cool and people are downloading the app and subscribing to her like crazy because they want to come to her party that's very cool okay so you mentioned the one user made six grand in 2018 how much have all your users made all time oh i don't know off the top but i mean it's we're well over probably almost three or four hundred thousand dollars just thinking about all the users in our user base so it's a significant amount of users that made a lot of money so over three hundred thousand made by made by users posting this great content and how many how many have made at least a dollar all time oh probably eighty percent of the ad it's not very high it's not very hard to make money on fanbase and i think um it's very very um intuitive and people are very very transactional with virtual currency like love is the virtual currency so you can like something on fanbase you can love it you buy love in the subscription store if you love a post you tap it you give the user half a penny and you can actually give as much love on the post or in an audio room or on a video or in a live as you want so people are making money like the first day they come on fanbase it's like oh i made three dollars on fanbase and i've been on instagram for 11 years i haven't made a dime so it's very very easy to make money on the plan when you say 80 on the app is that 80 of the 200 000 downloads yeah i mean 80 of the user base so yeah 80 of the people that have actually used that have actually made money so how many users i i don't know how you quantify user base by active users so how do you measure an active user they log on at least once the last 30 days they posted at least once yeah so they yeah they posted it i mean anybody that's posted at least once um all the time yeah that's made money all the time but active users we're in the you know maybe 48 49 000 a month um range which is pretty good for app that you know doesn't have that's almost 25 of the app that's just checking in month and then daily is pretty high too what does that mean though 49 000 made at least one post or they just open the app and cruise through content they open well they open the post they use the post they join an audio room they sit on the stage they're doing some sort of activity um that has them on the app for a period of time i see super interesting okay let's talk about start engine so first off where you bootstrap before start engine yes i actually pay for the the mvp of fanbase with my own money out of my pocket uh how much was that that was probably about 150 000 wow who did you have to pay um my cto and his company which actually they became equity partners and fan base and they are the team that continues to build fan base to this day interesting was that a local dev shop in atlanta or who was it yes it was a local shop in atlanta a gentleman by the name of ramiro kanavos and it was great i got introduced to him through an attorney of mine and he hopped right in and said yeah we can do this and they they've been in business for about 12 years 13 years and fanbase is the first app that they actually wanted to invest in because they believed in this so much i was really excited that they want to join the journey and i couldn't do it without them and i'm glad to have them on board so how much equity did you give them oh i can't tell that i mean a range is fine are we talking like a percent or like 10 oh no it's it's well above a percent i mean you ha and and in tech you have to have you know ctos that actually have some skin in the game because when you're building these things and you're raising capital um people have to know that the buttons are going to do what they're supposed to do and believe that people are going to stay involved who are around so they own more than ten percent no okay so between one and ten we'll leave it at that yeah i see okay cool and then um you mentioned he invested then so were they your pre-seed round before start engine or they put money in via start engine um both they were precede and so they just came on and said hey let's get in this um and then they they came in a little bit more on start engine so when did you raise your precedent round well it really wasn't a it really wasn't a precede that's the thing it was just they wanted to come on board and be part of the the platform so i allowed them to do that i mean the only other capital that we raised at starting it was just started it was just myself uh romero and his team and then we went to start ninja i see okay tell me about start engine how much did you end up raising and how much of the company did you sell we raised about 3.4 almost 3.5 million dollars right at 3.5 million dollars um at a 20 million dollar valuation so that's about 15 percent of the company free money or post um you're saying oh 20 million pre-money pulse one is 23.5 okay so yeah you sold about what 18 percent something like that 17 17 yeah every point matters baby every point matters all right 17 and tell me about the rest of the team how many folks will time today uh um probably about 20 maybe um maybe maybe more even with development i mean i have a senior team of executives that work on a bunch of different...