#20 - Reinventing The Autograph

hi katie caitlin jenner here hello martin charlie shane here what gabe i'm weston nice joel gary here hey matt liz what's up it's tony hawk how's it going ashley lance bass here i got one question for you what did you build we created the new autograph one local business has marketed celebrity personalized shout outs cameo that allows people to get a special customized message from their favorite celebrity platform has attracted athletes musicians social media influencers since their launch the day that we launched we one talent on the platform he sent the tweet on and we were just expecting this a lot of people and we're looking at google analytics and they're two dots like it was just such a disaster but then and all of a sudden this dad pops up in rent in washington get in this video and he foam his daughters in no response to it and that was the moment when we really felt we had something five million is nine a low ten million million money million dollars hundred billion dollar half a billion hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually the threats to these like giant multi million dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy add two more zero first every week we sit down with self made millionaire air and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories with all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like and shit the fuck i ask them how did you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million good how do it sound all good all good all good stephen my duke brother yes he's here love it and i got one question for you how did you do it what did you build we created the new autograph the new auto and what is the new autograph we had the idea in that sophie are the new autograph so when you see someone famous today you wanna take a selfie with them put it on instagram and share with your friends back in the day you know if you could think of our time at duke you know we might have grabbed a basketball and got lance thomas to sign it right but today if we were in school with zion williamson and you you need to have an instagram post you never met right yeah exactly yeah i don't want him sc his name on like my shirt i wanna picture okay so you realized selfies are the new autograph and i love that that's like you know that's it like that's the vision okay great that's the insight that births the company so how did you realize that where did that come from my cofounder martin was an nfl agent and he's a guy that wrapped like imagine the fifteenth best seattle sea hawk defender okay so not superstar players but an average player on a roster martin showed me this video that he'd young made for his good buddy brandon who at the time was very high up in nike consumer marketing department brandon loved the seattle c like nothing else like that was his favorite fan super fan and it just become a father for the first time and martin got this player of ka marsh who last year was on the forty nine to record a ten second video saying hey brandon congratulations on your son maverick yeah know this catches is marsh from the seattle sea hawk i heard about your son maverick if he gets your athletic ability he'll be playing for the sea one day go hawk awesome and this guy put it on instagram and said it was the best gift he ever got in his life and earlier that year you know he done something with michael jordan and with pal and he named his kid maverick because of maverick carter lebron best friend yep so you could imagine if you have all the access on earth like that and you're excited about hearing from ka marsh like who you know i love cash he's a our first investor at the company and the first day and on cameo so always will be grateful for him but that was a huge insight that somebody with all the access in the world would be really excited about somebody that just has their name right and so you and these are like cell phone videos is not like you know some professional set up where you gotta go to a studio or you have this camera and you're kinda sitting there like a corporate stock video this is like casual it feels raw it feels like authentic from the celebrity for sure we made the product decision early to focus on authentic over a high quality so that was one of the big decisions we made and by authentic exactly what you're saying the very first cameo we ever saw cash was driving his car with no shirt on through southern california that's authentic and no makeup no camera crew nothing like know at it and so for the filter no filter so for those who don't know about cameo why should you care this thing is gonna be big it's already pretty big saw you guys recently raised like fifty million bucks or something crazy raised a lot of money valued at hundreds of millions of dollar three hundred million was the last i saw reported so this is already a big company but i think it's gonna get really big because i don't think most people know about this yet right like i did my first cameo i wanna say two years ago something like that it was my buddy's bachelor party and we were like do we get this and so somebody was like hey we can use this thing what have we got him a shout out from brian sc and we were mom but the yeah the white mom but for those who you know if you if you follow basketball you you know about brian sc and so i was like that's amazing do you know brian they're like no we just use cameo and i was like what and so we went on there and brian cal green i don't know where he ranks in their talent but he delivered like the best we had lance bass the guy from in sink do it and brian cal read did too well those are two of the classic cameo talent like those are some of our best people it's kinda like the blend of like really well known but not like strat famous and busy where oh sometimes they were right lance bass was literally one one of those famous people on earth at that of time but one thing that we found is it's really more about how good of a personality you are versus how famous you are so for example you know in the duke something like brandon and ingram you know was a fantastic player but wasn't ever like the personality or like a derek bros where someone like a zion and basketball it's just such a magnetic personality right they're better at making personalized video messages than somebody that's just really tall and shoot too right and they kind of improvise right so you give them the general premise hey my friend mike it's his bachelor party you know we want him have a good time and by the way make fun of his blah blah and then they kinda you just use enough of that but then it it comes off real they're not just reading a script because that would feel weird as yeah get two hundred fifty characters and then it's really their job to turn that into a piece of content with you and in many ways is the person purchasing it you're almost like the c producer of this piece of content with them which i think is really cool alright so i think this idea is dope i think it's gonna be really really big or you saw that first one which wasn't on cameo that was just your buddy correct doing this sort of custom so right away where you're like oh let's make this happen or did it take a couple of different ideas coming together for that to mel into what became look i mean i was driving martin home from my grandmother's funeral when he showed me this video and it was like so stark that i dropped him off he flew in from the day from la to chicago i dropped him off at the airport the second he got through security he got right back on the phone we started r on this you know i was working at linkedin at the time and it was abundantly clear that i'd needed to get on the plane and go to la we went to la we spent the weekend dreaming up a marketplace where f amount of money you could do why activity was z person so we imagined that it wasn't just gonna be videos but you could go meet them in person and or go play basketball with brand scale bringing here or go through a football with brett far these are all things that we thought at the beginning but we kept coming back to this video and how special it was and how it was something that could be easily repeatable for the talent to do so we really believe that it was a highly personalized low friction experience for the talent and was affordable enough because we were selling the small unit of people's time the almost anyone could afford it today the average video is fifty five dollars right yeah it's like within gift range but if you're way more unique and way more special i think what you just said that happens a lot with ideas it starts small or you notice a little nugget then you get carried away and you expand the vision really big yep and then when you try to execute you're like alright let's just go back to the small simple thing and then as you grow and like who knows maybe came a and ends up doing a little bit more down the road but things do is expand again that's very common if you find yourself doing that if you have an idea then you kinda blow it into this like really crazy thing and then you tried execute and go back small very common pattern and so you guys did a very similar thing yep and so you were at linkedin were you already on the hunt like i gotta go start a business i wanna do a start or were you comfortable and this just kinda struck you like lightning well if you remember from our duke days i was always an entrepreneur i i ran something called spartan entertainment so my cl fame duke was starting wednesday night beer pong yes so that was always in my blood to go do something got entrepreneurial and frankly i always knew i wanted to it i with a big deal on campus like this wasn't a small thing like i remember this think think was a big deal it was big and and frankly i was making more money doing that than i was trading after college which was kind of funny you know i'm one of those three percent of people that i think was born up being an entrepreneur and i was never gonna be as good at working for anybody else's as i would have been working for myself i was very fortunate to have that time at linkedin and there was a guy in linkedin named mike ga who's ran all the sales at linkedin and when you start working at linkedin the very first thing he says on your first day is welcome to linkedin tears from today none of you will be doing the job we just hired you for we know that we support and we literally have the profile data to prove it your job is to become the best version of yourself and then when you're ready to leave you just need to find someone better than you to replace yourself so like that that's kind of the linkedin and mantra in cra my last day at linkedin was my exact two year anniversary of my first so in that case the mike ga prophecy ended up pick become true when i wrote my goodbye letter they called the next play letter at linkedin and i told that story that got to ga and he saw it he thanked me for the kind of words and then three months later he ended up calling me out out nowhere in leading our first angel round in the company wow i love it about linkedin i didn't know that that's because i know read often writes about the alliance and sort of the way that work has changed where he's not gonna be the come next four years cool that they sort of put in practice like that so you were entrepreneurial but you're at linkedin this idea comes to you and you're like alright i'm gonna fly flat fidelity let's r on this idea yep and you guys are r on it and at the time were you thinking like i know what i'm gonna do next i know what the next move is meaning like if this was lane a what does point b look like yes well very obviously martin and i are not technical so the obvious first move was let's find somebody that can build this night and i turned back to the duke network i recruited i get buddy devin townsend who was the best engineer that i knew and i brought this devin i said hey do you wanna help work on this thing with you know me and martin you know he was probably like a four or five out of time excited about it when we first got going but one of the things that's really cool about devin was he was actually one of the early buying stars so he was an engineer at microsoft after college left and spend the next year and a half blowing up on vine traveling the world he ended up with nine hundred million loops on vine so many ways he was probably the perfect perfect person in the world to build this product because he really understood what the creators needed and how to build a product that was so fun the town would do it for free but they got paid so we ended up recruiting devin after about three months we all got really excited about working together and really thought this was pretty cool we still hadn't sold one yet but eventually we got devin to come on as our third cofounder and you know it's kind of the rest of the history you get the engineering talent and you're like alright gotta build this website but now we need creators right like i'm at twitch now where we sold to twitch and so twitch is probably one of the biggest creator platforms out there so i know like that supply demand in a marketplace right nobody's gonna come if you don't have the right talent but the john's is not gonna come if a they don't see other big talent on there and b you don't have any demand for them so how did you start to bootstrap the the marketplace how did you get your first ten creators on was that through your friend as an agent yeah we well we started through our network so i literally went to people like lance thomas and people like andrew wang so people i knew from duke that were able to get on ka marsh who was my c founder martin's client and is an nfl player he was the first talent to come on very quickly after about six months of not finding product market fit with pro athletes devin one day was like hey i think cody his roommate with three million followers on youtube and like cody cody ko right but do really well on this platform and the second we put cody on that's when it really kinda of blew up and we sort of find a niche within especially ex vine stars were were really the first great talent on the platform and what was the difference it was that more buyers wanted shout us from them then like let's say last officer or or you know not to pick on lance but if you're a vine star you're youtube star you're in reality tv you're are in the nba for making videos right like you're the best in the world at doing that i think that was like a first very obvious thing number two in our marketplace the supply is inherently famous and can market themselves so by coming on and tweeting out that they're on cameo our supply can be get its own demand and then that really starts the flywheel going but really the big moment for us when we first got it because like you said we had a fan marketplace with no fans and a talent marketplace with no talent but we got cash marsh to come on the very first video we sold this father filmed his sixteen year old daughter crying because she was so happy again acting and then the first time we saw that reaction video which happened on the first one we now had an asset that we could take to talent so was like don't you want people to feel right like this and you can do this in a pretty easy way right right right because it takes them you know how long does it take you know when they get the message so they get a buzz saying yes somebody wants to buy do they usually do it you know right then same day what's their flow doesn't it take them like thirty minutes or three hours they have seven days turn it around but the average video on the platform gets turned around in twenty four hours now so it's pretty quick they get ping in their app they read the request they can either accept or decline it if they accept it basically a tele opens up right on something will like snapchat they record it send it off and get paid immediately right through their app love it that's kind of amazing and so for these guys you know they make a lot of money doing what they do so how much does the money matter in that sense right like does the fifty bucks for this match or are they doing it more to connect with their fans i kinda know what the p r answer is but like what's your real insight into like how the money plays into these guys it's both right like the value prop cameo is that talent is getting paid by the fan to become more popular they're almost all gifts so when somebody receives a cameo from somebody you like that person more than you like them ever before right you are sharing it in the same way like when you buy a t shirt of your favorite band and you wear it all around san francisco and people on market street go like oh wow let's up in and then they start thinking about it it's the same way you are turning your fans into living breathing paid billboards for yourself love and so who are the most popular people right now on cam the people who get booked the most again are know historically have been some of the vine stars so guys like evan bringing nick cody ko other cohorts that do really well the real house is a vertical if killed it characters from scripted to television and like the office have done fantastic people like lance bass have done incredible gilbert godfrey free perez hilton these really unique personalities those are who do best what's the wish list if you could get three people that today are not on the platform yeah who would you want on i mean i think you have to go the rock i think the rock would be fantastic i think peep somebody like kanye west or chance the rapper would just be so kinda cool hip and now but also amazing and then i think from the political side i mean you could imagine an obama trump any of these guys on the platform we've had a lot of the twenty twenty democratic candidates actually reach out to us about putting the talent there the candidates on cameo ahead of the primary these are all things that are really really interesting for us and we want anybody with fans to beyond this platform and you guys are also going international now how big is that opportunity is it gonna be is the autograph culture and you know is that is that similar in different markets you know my parents are from india i'm indian i know bo is like bo cricket huge k pop huge i mean we believe that that celebrity culture is something that's a very global phenomenon on people all over the world have different people they like i'm greek my mom asked me why the greek singers aren't done cameo yet so you think like we could get them it's just are we looking there so right now thirty percent of our business is already coming from abroad and it's largely because our talent have youtube followers or twitch people that follow them on twitch or your people that follow them on instagram that are all over the world so really it's foreign people buying largely american talent mh the next phase is gonna get local talent on as well and we're gonna be especially focused on people we could resell to the us so for example you know there's eight million indian and americans living in the united states most of them are still immigrants are first generation that very tied to the culture so you know your parents probably spend a lot of time watching indian tv and hollywood and cricket and all that type of stuff so we have high conviction that if we got that tone on even without local the site we could resell it to the united states right yeah that that makes sense to me and when you were doing this you know now it sounds it sounds like it's all moving right because and then now with the the profile of that cameo has the money in the bank the investors you have your network is growing you know if you wanted to get in touch with the rock i bet you've already talked to the rock or you you know you've had a way to get in front of the guy but early on that wasn't the case right and so talk us through some of the times where shit was not working you've mentioned kind of them passing but i'd love to hear more and i know that the people listening like it's important one of my missions with this podcast is for it to be real have them part of part of being realistic to be realistic about sometimes you know shit hits the fan things go horribly wrong sometimes things are just slow and it's like is this ever gonna work and so tell me some stories either where shit hit the fan or you had some doubts i'll tell you a great story from our launch the day that we launched we had one talent on the platform and for those of you that have been to cam dot com we now have twenty thousand talent and hundreds of thousands of videos that you can watch in reaction so there's so much to do but imagine the very first iteration of cameo which was called power move dot io we had one talent on power move power move dot io we knew were gonna change but that's what we just started with it's not a it's a power move yeah was yeah was like a power move whatever so we we put this out and but we basically had conviction that in our market we could launch it by getting the talent to promote so we had planned i i remember it was was marsha twenty seventeen i was down in scottsdale arizona trying to get our second talent on this guy who i grew up with that was playing for the cleveland indians at the time so i'm down in scottsdale my two cofounder and ka marsh in venice beach california and devin apartment and cash is about to hit tweet on that first video that i saw with the link saying hey for twenty bucks i'll make one for you go to power move dot io slash cash right he sent the tweet on and we were just expecting a lot of people and we're looking at google analytics and they're two dots one in venice one in scottsdale you know at first were like maybe google isn't working so i literally remember signing off the site the scottsdale got dropped away and then i came back on and and nope it's like that doc came back google works it's not us and in the meantime when cashed sent that tweet out people started talking shit to them they were like europe a pro athlete why what is this why are you charging twenty bucks for people to talk to you you know how greedy are you this is so shitty so he started to feel really bad yeah and he ended up walking out and weaving and he was really really upset about it and then for like the next ten minutes you know my c founder martin worried that he just lost his only nfl player cash talked to us he had just given us twenty five grand to start the company and now he's telling us you know get out of here you guys don't know what you're doing you know i want my money back like it was just a disaster but then all of a sudden this dad pops up in rent in washington we see the third dot pop up and we're so excited four minutes goes by that felt like four hours and all a sudden nothing happened no purchase no nothing and there was nothing to do on the site we're like is he gonna buy is he gonna buy he didn't buy and then about five minutes later i get a dm on twitter and that adds like hey your payment process isn't working my daughter loves cash marsh python send you the instructions can you still get the video done we ended up getting that one done like herbert that was on that thursday this was a tuesday night castro was so mad at us he didn't do the video for like a week and even that it was super une enthusiastic but this dad ended up getting this video and he filmed his daughter's you know response to it and and that was really the impetus for the first reaction video and that was the moment when we really felt we had something that's a it's a epic long story epic in the lights on epic same time it's like you know you're at a bad spot when you're hoping google analytics is broken and and so where do you you know just cut it to wrap up like where do you think this goes what's the dream and yeah how do you see this thing growing from here as we're learning more about this space i think there's a couple things that are really interesting to us number one we think that just the the area under the curve of how much talent exists is expanding every day people are blown up on twitch they're blown up on tiktok we believe there's two point five million people on earth today that could qualify as talent on cameo but we believe that number is gonna double in the next five years as some of these other platforms continue to manufacture new people so we think we have a business where number one they're are more famous people today than they've ever been number two people are more famous now than they ever have been in history so we really think that that will enable us to find you know totally new talent that we have no idea like the next justin bieber is someone we probably will capture on the way up versus like us having to go and and get the top one right and we've seen people like bob men for example that when we signed you at eighty thousand followers is three million a year later so we really believe that by focusing on the long tail and mid tail we can actually capture people on the way up and and that's can be huge as far as what's next for cameo i really believe it's all about facilitating these asynchronous conversations so we're really really interested in doing things that are more repeatable than maybe just like buying a video here and there like you had an amazing experience two years ago and maybe you haven't used the product again so how can we create product that gets you coming back time after time after time and we really think that that's gonna be turning cameo into more of a two way conversation right that would be i mean that would be a game changer that's a tough one but have built this thing i love the hustle behind it because you didn't over complicate it you took a simple idea you took a basically a fresh take on an old idea right autograph were a thing before today selfies you see that insight you've realize that even though these people are online celebrities or real world celebrities connecting with fans is something they're always gonna wanna do and if you can make it frictionless and you if you can make it affordable you can make a business around it and you've done that now if i'm listening to this and i'm inspired by this so there's couple people that might be listening right might be some talent that's listening get on cameo yep if you've never done it before you should go check it out and for the next birthday you know like for my mom's birthday i'm gonna do this for example but like i've done maybe five cameo each time i'm like the star of the occasion because it is the most fun gift to give so if you're trying to buy a gift for somebody this is an amazing way to do it but who else is out there that should reach out to you from this how can people who are listening to this how can help you how can i get in touch with your if they're inspired by kinda of what they've heard so far well number one we're hiring we're really looking to put that capital use and hire some of the best people on earth and i think one thing different about us we're headquartered in chicago with kind of an hq two in la yep so we're not in the bay area at all but there's a lot of great talent from the midwest that's been looking for an opportunity to work in consumer back in chicago or there's great west coast talent that will not leave the west coast but venice beach is a pretty good alternative to san francisco so if you're a pm that's worked on search has worked in marketplace has worked in gaming pm engineers you know we're really excited to do that we just made a big hire on our marketing front we just brought stephan over who is the global out of marketing at tiktok he's our now new cmo really looking to build that team up so if you know working on the future the fan talent experience is something interesting we're hiring for a variety of roles right now and how do they follow you how do they you know email twitter where where where should people get touch with yeah you can find me on twitter at at mister mr three one to the chicago area code or you know cameo dot com and i'm steven at cameo dot com awesome man i appreciate you coming in making a pit stop you know coming there from chicago