 on, yeah, we are live on Periscope and on Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube, and if you're watching on YouTube and you want to get notified when we do these, go ahead and click the like and subscribe button. We're just about to get started here with our guest, Mike Prasad. My guest today is Mike Prasad. He's the founder of Tiny Sponsor, an online marketplace for influencer and content partner, false start, 1202. My guest today is Mike Prasad. He is the founder of Tiny Sponsor, an online marketplace for influencer and content sponsorships. He's also the founder of Marketing Club on Clubhouse, which is a top 10 club globally and the biggest industry club on the platform with 241,000 members. He also advises brands, startups, agencies, and creators. Mike, welcome to the Earn Media podcast. Thanks for having me. Today in 3x, influencer marketing, sustainable digital marketing, and the Clubhouse app. After this, stay with us. Act one. In my media relations days, we often accommodated mommy bloggers at press events. These days, there are content creators building audiences specifically so they can become online celebrities and earn a living either from online advertising or sponsorship deals with brands. Most of them build their audiences on major tech platforms like YouTube or Instagram, which begs the question, are they building their own audience or are they just building the platform's audience? On a recent episode of The Prof G Show, Scott Galloway said, quote, I love the bullshit lie that people are making money off of YouTube. There's a small 0.01 percent of people making money and they make a lot, but everyone else is subsidizing the content so YouTube can capture all the margin. Our guest today is Mike Prasad. He's the founder of Tiny Sponsor, which is an influencer marketing platform that connects marketers with influencers. Mike, let's start from square one. For those who don't know, what is influencer marketing? Sure. It's a great question, actually. I think a lot of people gloss over and just kind of lump into one big bucket. And so influencer marketing is a subset of content marketing. And so the idea here is that influencer marketing is a typically digital type of content marketing that happens to have built-in distribution. And then that distribution has specific mechanisms that then subdivide it further. So the idea being that influencer marketing as a bucket might include YouTube or Instagram or it could be live events. All of these things have different mechanics and then you're a subset. So if you think about that way, it's this idea of marketing to individual specific audiences through these different unit types across the different social platforms. But it's much less controlled than content marketing because in content marketing, I can sort of figure out what the problem is that I solve. I can then create content designed to get found by people searching for answers to those problems online. Maybe they find me. I get in at the top of the funnel. We build a relationship. Maybe I sell them something down the road. But if I hire an influencer, aren't they pretty much on their own to do what they want and run in the direction they want? Yes and no. So just like any content you put out there is consumed organically. At a level of what you're saying, which is exactly true, which is that influencers are going to create something that's in their vein and the vein of what they create. That is ideally a collaboration between yourself and the influencer. And so if you look at actually, terminology-wise, the marketing industry calls them influencers. Internally and on the platform side, we mostly refer to them as creators. And so you look at the YouTube creator program, not the YouTube influencer program, same with TikTok, same with Instagram. So the ideas are creating content fundamentally. Now the ideal balance of the content should be created in collaboration with the brand. But because you're addressing that creator-specific audience, there should be a little bit of a relationship in that the creator needs to frame it out to present the product or the goal or the sponsorship in the context that will resonate with their audience. And so it's a little bit of a collaboration in that sense. And the argument would be that if it wasn't a collaboration, you would just be writing your own content on your own ads. And the reason why you're working with an influencer or a creator is to actually access their specific audience in a manner that is unique to that combination of the brand and themselves, not just one or the other. And Mike, you've got a marketplace, an online marketplace, yeah, where creators sign up and then brands come and they can do a deal with them. How does it work? Tell me about it. Yeah. So I mean, I'll give you a really quick high level of the industry, right? The influencer marketing, again, it becomes this external people to say, oh, it's social media. That's like everyone knows social media is more than just a big generic thing. There's details. Within influencer marketing and marketplaces, we are a marketplace. So the idea is that creators use our platform like an online e-commerce shop. Creators come to our platform, they tell us what they do, and then they create these custom packages that are specific. So for my example, for myself, I am a content creator. However, I don't, I especially have them food and beverage, but not just alcohol in general. I actually specialize in cocktails. And for example, if I posted about beer, my audience would be like, you don't drink beer. What do you know about beer? But if I post about a cocktail, they're going to actually purchase that. And they're going to try it out. They're going to say, oh, this must be really, really good if Mike's posting about it. And so for me, my specialization in my package is a custom cocktail creation where I make a custom recipe and a cocktail, show people how to make it at home with a sponsored liquor. And the idea there is that it's specific to what I do. It's what people trust me for. And so that specific package is what is booked on Tiny Sponsor on the website. So in that sense, the marketplace is made up of these specific placements, these packages that are unique formats to that creator and brands can browse and just book them and put them in production. So you can start a campaign by adding these packages to your cart, customizing them, of course, and then making that placement. And then we have an escrow system that holds the payment, communications fulfillment all built in. So the whole idea is you can launch a campaign in minutes instead of having to like email someone off the Instagram profile and negotiate it, figure a lot of stuff out. It can be really instantaneous, but still safe and balanced process. So what does it cost? If I'm a liquor brand and I want to hire you to do this, how much do I pay? So for me, it's about $150 because my audience is smaller, but very focused. Now as a marketplace, it's a dual sign marketplace. So creators have the pricing, we don't. We give them advisory and recommendations on what the pricing should be, but we don't actually dictate the pricing. So if you go to Etsy and you have someone making custom crafts and like, oh, I make this custom designed cup and you choose what you want on the cup, they set the pricing. Same idea. Creators say I make this custom, see the podcast and I have a pre-roll and a shout out and in the notes link. You can set that pricing for that episode and say what you want to charge and then also talk about who your audience is and the brand can then be informed on whether that's a good choice or not for them. So I know you're a fellow Angelino like me. You know, we grew up in the same town and obviously, you know, you can't pay your rent in this town for $150. So is anybody, are creators making money here and are most of them making money? Are most of them trying to make money? Talk to me from the creator side because I know a lot of young people today want to be creators. You know, they're content entrepreneurs and they're raring to go. Is there, I mean, is it like becoming an actor where, you know, like in Hollywood, you know, you can get rich, but it's tough to make a living. Is it the same type of thing in the creator world? I think it's more distributed than let's just say being an actor. I think you look at like music and television and movies, it's very hip based, right? So you get big, you get really big, but there's not really much. The medium, the average is kind of not a Velcker, right? With influencers and creators, it's definitely, you have to hit a certain threshold to be able to live off of it. That said, that's an achievable threshold if you think of it as a business. And I think this is what a lot of creators don't have the right education. That's why they rely on managers and agents to help them. But I know a lot of creators that do it themselves and it goes both ways. It really depends on how you think about what you're doing. Now, if you're someone who's like, I posted a thing on TikTok, I go in viral, I'm going to be a creator now. Yes and no. So on one hand, you might have gone viral a couple times, but if you don't understand what makes you unique and why your audience loves what you do and you can't replicate it, then you don't have a business. A business is replicating a product or a service and being able to scale it out. A creator as a business is the same thing. Now, the creator that understand that know specifically what makes them unique and how to actually repeat that and scale that and learn the mechanisms of the platforms and are able to bridge platforms to the one that we typically see make a living off of it. Now, you don't need to be super huge to do that. So I've seen people that are in the low 100,000s of followers, for example, that have really good engagement and they make a very good living. Some of them make five figures a month off of being a content creator. Now, when you hit like when you're in the tens of thousands or the thousands, it's kind of harder to actually pay rent that way. But when you get to a certain level of good engagement, and I don't just mean big numbers, so the follower account and engagement rate and all that, that's a factor of price. Now, the factor of making money is really a mixture of, okay, what's your baseline? Which is like, what is your audience size and how much are they engaging with you, which gives you a total real addressable audience? And then, why do they engage you? So like, do you have high trust with them? Do they specialize? Are you known and trusted for certain topics? And if the answer that is true and you can present that to a brand, then that value exchange is much higher to that brand because the qualitative elements are aligned. And when those work out, it works out for the brand and for the creator and they're able to do less sponsorships and try to hire price. And that's where they get to a point where they can sustain themselves and make a living from it. And then from there, you can expand into merchandising and other options to monetize your audience. But the idea is that fundamentally, you understand the business of your content. And that's really a key understanding that needs to exist for you to live off of that. So I'm sure you've been in this situation before. I'm sure you've been approached by brands that are performance-based and they are direct marketers and they want quick-thrust, man. And you can talk to them about the value of branding and impressions until they're long in the face. At the end of the day, they're still focused, direct marketers. What's the argument to those guys for how they can leverage online influencer marketing? So influencer marketing as a format can be used in a lot of different ways. There's going to be something about all marketing goals. If you divide all the possible goals in marketing, I would say there's really five buckets that it falls into. One is going to be narrative, storytelling, education, like conveying a story. They'll call it a narrative goal, right? Storytelling. There's going to be audience growth. I want to get more followers, I want to get more sign-ups, I want to get more addressable audience. So there's audience growth. There's going to be an action, a sale. I want to get, click on the website. I want to get a performance out of it. There's going to be data. I need to learn about my audience. I need a segmentation. I need testing. I need feedback, reviews, whatever. And then there's going to be content creation. I need licensing rights. I need to get photos because we're in quarantine and I can't film the way I use this. I have a creator do that and then license it from them. That's another use case. So five use cases. And the questions to the buyers, well, what do you need? What are your goals? One, and two, where are you in your conversion funnel? Where is your audience, in your audience development? That's actually where I see most people misunderstand. So let's say you are a brand that is well-known. You're Apple, right? Or you're someone who like everyone knows and trusts that brand. And that's scenario. Then you can go straight for the conversion. You have a new launch. You get people to show how the product works and you drive it to an Instagram story with a click. And then you can really focus on the conversion there. And you're going to get that because then brand is trusted and you're not having to convince people or story tell why this brand and this product is going to be high quality. It's more about can I get in front of the right people? And then if so, here's a reason to buy now. I mean, there's a coupon code or a special sales brand you launch. You want to be the first person to get it. Let's see your new brand on the odd land inspectors. No one knows who I am. And a lot of times they'll come to me and say, okay, I want to drive X amount of sales in three weeks. I'm like, that's cool. But no one knows who you are. No one's going to trust that. And then what's your conversion? Where do the clicks go? Do they go to a website? Do they buy on your website? Can they trust you enough to get your credit card? Well, let's say that's handled. You have somebody comes to you. They're performance marketing. They're slick. They've got great funnels. They're ready to go. They need traffic. They know that if they pour gas on the fire, they're going to do a certain percentage of a conversion rate. And so they're just looking at this point to sort of help use influencers to drive traffic. Is there a deal to be done with that type of a brand? Yes. And then in that case, you're going to choose a format that supports that the best. So in this case, you're going to focus heavily on Instagram stories or certainly that how direct click through YouTube is really great for traffic. Depending on the format, some live formats can be really good. Twitch can be really good in certain industries for traffic. So you're not going to focus on the storytelling units. So a storytelling unit would be like an Instagram feed post. But if you want traffic, you've got to have a click through. And so you're going to choose a format that enables that best. And you're going to make sure that the qualitative match between your brand, your product, and the creator's audience is there. If it's not there, you're not going to get click through. But again, it has to be a thing where your brand has to have the visibility in that audience that the first touch is not going to be a click through usually. Mike, what about small business? You know, it's funny. There's this event that they used to have, they were having it pre COVID called the Small Business Expo. And they would go to different towns. There's actually a pretty big event. I went to the one in LA a couple of years back. And they just sent out that they're getting up and running again. Small businesses starting to rebound. And most of the speakers there are enterprise speakers. And it makes sense, right? Because you see, oh, somebody from Wells Fargo is speaking. I want to hear them regardless of the fact that a small business can't really benefit from advice from an enterprise marketer because it's a completely different game. So that said, how can small business create successful influencer marketing campaigns? So the beauty of small business is typically most of the audience type are local. And influencers, small influencers, micro influencers at scale are really great for that because they're heavily targeted to a specific audience. And they can also be targeted geographically. So for example, our very first customer on tiny sponsor was a local vegan restaurant that sponsored about 10 influencers at various sizes for their opening. And then it was, it's been about $1,000 to launch. And they got all this content out of it. Enough stuff to feed their Instagram. They also got a bunch of reviews. And it drove a ton of local traffic to the restaurant that would have taken them weeks and months to get people to know that they were there. And it was also with their specific demographic because it was a vegan focused restaurant. And that's that the ability to hyper-target, I would argue, is actually one of the best benefits of micro influencers at scale. And then for small businesses, that's a big plus. But also, when we go into this privacy world that we're running into now with IDFA and ILS 14, there's also the ability to target that way through content and specific audience that can be very valuable. Sustainable digital marketing strategy with Mike Prasad, founder of Tiny Sponsor, when we return, stay with us. Act two. For those small businesses without their own digital presence, the lockdown was an existential crisis. Many had to pivot to digital overnight as evidenced by the exponential growth of companies like Zoom, Shopify and the food delivery apps. Now, small businesses are starting to realize that the apps they pivoted to as a means of survival came at a very steep cost. Small businesses with a Yelp listing or Facebook page, instead of their own website at a top level domain, saw their margins erode. It's one thing to have to buy ads to acquire new customers. It's something else to pay a recurring 20 to 30% commission on every sale forever. But when your foot traffic is gone overnight and your trade shows are canceled, digital is no longer a nice to have. It becomes the only way to sustain deal flow. We're here with Mike Prasad, founder of Tiny Sponsor and also founder of the largest marketing club on the clubhouse app. Mike, Yelp put out a report that says small businesses rebounding from the pandemic. But has the pandemic changed consumer behavior in a meaningful way? And how should small business adapt? So the pandemic has 100% changed consumer behavior on so many levels. It accelerated the shift in the push to digital that was already happening. Some more than what you saw decades ago when people said, oh, do I really need a website if I'm in business? And now you have to have a website, digital presence. And so I think what the pandemic is forced businesses to make digital their primary short fund versus a secondary or maybe just a nice to have type of presence. And with that shift in behavior, you also notice a change in priorities of consumers and what they care about. The economy obviously has been a little bit tricky. There's been a lot of other issues on the forefront. And so the consumer is more aware of what they're doing and why they're doing it. And they're more critical about that spend and about that time and that focus that they have because they realize the preciousness of it, I think as a whole. And so as a result, you've got to really communicate the value. And you also have to be able to make sure that you are presenting properly in the digital storefront to then feed back to any kind of physical storefront that you might have. And those are the things that you could have gotten away with before, not doing, but now more than ever, it's actually a requirement, I would argue, to succeed. What walk us through this framework of a digital versus a physical storefront? Sure. You think about discovery, right? In pre-COVID, and I mean, it's been a trend that's been happening for a while, obviously, but pre-COVID, you might go to a local store, you might buy, you might shop locally, you might go pick up your clothing at a local store, you go in, you browse, you check it out. Now, that's fine, but now the physical venue is more of a destination. You have to want to go there in the first place. You're not casually browsing as much. You're browsing and you're discovering online. And so in a lot of cases, more so than ever, you're buying online. You're buying things that you maybe would not have originally bought online. So when you go to a physical store, you're going there with a more purpose-driven outcome. You usually know what you want. It's very rare that you're browsing, especially right now. Now, that might come back a little bit more as things open up and safety become less of a concern, but it's still going to be a behavior that people now have learned to discover online and shift more of their attention to discovering online. And so that digital storefront, the ability to engage and target consumers and then either drive them to a familiarity or to a specific purchase in person at the end part of that funnel is more critical than ever because that's what they're looking at. That's what they're being the validation of what is good and what is bad and what is cool and is not. What about touchless transactions? Do you feel like people want to do touchless transactions and that that may somehow necessitate a digital e-commerce transaction versus paying in person? Even if they show up, would they rather you think pay with their phone or somehow without having to touch a pen or handle a piece of paper? I think there's a huge consciousness of that. You see in the acceleration of Apple Pay and Google Pay and merchants accepting credit card only, for example, in the last year. Huge businesses that have been casually switched to that. And there's a reason for that. It's not just for the consumers, for the safety of their employees. So I think there's this awareness that people weren't thinking about before. And that's not going to go away. It's a learned behavior that we've practiced heavily for a year that's not going to instantly overnight disappear. So I think that the awareness of it alone is going to is going to make it more attractive. And I think there's going to be a large percentage of those people that realize, oh, this is actually more convenient. It's faster. I can do more with my time. You can go back to this idea of awareness of time that, hey, my value, I can do all these things. We were locked up for a year. And now I want to do all the things. And so I'm going to be more critical about what I do. So anything that gets more convenient for them is going to stick. And I think that's one of the things that will stick. In more mature industries, sales reps have commissioned schedules where the amount they earn from a customer declines the longer the customers retain. So you may pay out 30% originally, but then if they renew, it's 20 and then 10 and then nothing. But if you look at the deal that Amazon or Grubhub or Upwork or any of these online marketplaces forward, they don't change. It's the same thing. So I wonder how can small business that wants customers to buy from them direct compete against tech giants like Amazon, Grubhub and Upwork? Absolutely. So I think this is the same argument I make for any creator because you don't rely on a platform. I think the thing you alluded to earlier, which is if you're building on someone else's platform, it's not your store. You don't own that. You're just using them. And if you rely on them as a business, that's a fatal flaw. And you saw this back in the day when businesses built their games on Facebook and Facebook and microtransactions on business. So as a creator, you shouldn't build on one platform. If you're a creator, truly created your career cost multiple platforms. If you're a small business, each of these venues are sales channels, right? And you shouldn't rely on a single sales channel for your entirety of your business. So then the question becomes, how do you leverage these channels to grow your own audience and your direct customer base? And so using Amazon as an example, Amazon is amazing for instant discovery. It's amazing for getting building customer base. But if you're a long-term customer, you should give them the opportunity to shift off of that platform. So for example, I have a caffeine approaching by that I'm a partner in, and we are primarily subscription-based, but we use Amazon to get the first engagement, the first purchase. Because the ideas, especially with quarantine, is like you're not going to buy something you never tasted before, but if it has high ratings and there's a validation through Amazon, you can only get in a marketplace like that. You might say, hey, that's in the category I'm looking, I'm searching for. It comes up. People seem to like it. I'll try it out. Now that said, on the packaging, literally on the back of the box, on the back of every single bar, it says, visit Calfabar.com. And that's the branding. And then in every single box, there's a coupon. It's only valid on Calfabar.com. And so the idea is that if you like it and you become a subscriber, you're going to subscribe. It's a strong incentive to push you to our direct customer base on our own website. And so that's the idea. You want to think of like, how do you use these platforms as discovery funnels for your audience? I think of the digital storefront, same with Grubhub, same with Uber Eats. Like how do you convert that customer to discover you on these platforms, which is what they're really great for, and you're paying for it? Well, then draw them into it and give them a real incentive to then become a regular customer, a recurring customer more directly. There's lots of ways to do that. There actually is a restriction in the Grubhub terms of service. You're restricted from asking customers for their contact information. So you can't, yeah, each customer has their own rules on what you can and can't do. So I was on Facebook, but you cannot get, you don't get that contact information, right? So you really have to do is give them something that benefits them, that they then choose to come to you. And then later on, you get the contact information. So like you can't ask them for a newsletter. What you can do is say, hey, here's a coupon or here's a benefit or you leave a review. You can give them an incentive to come back. And on the food world, what I've seen is with Uber Eats, for example, I've seen local restaurants do a thing where they have a special, they run like a buy one, get one free special on Uber Eats. They'll get the initial traffic to try them out because it's a good deal and they look really great. In the packaging, they have these custom bags that have their branding on it, that have their locations on it, that have their website on it. And then the, there's also a little postcard that talks about the app they have and you can view the menu. And then that's when you download that app, you get a discount and that pulls you and if you like that restaurant, you're going to maybe say, Hey, you know what, I can just pick up locally, I can get delivered locally, I get a discount. That offer isn't there anymore. So you're essentially setting the person, someone to come up easily with low friction, something they know, and then giving them an incentive to switch to something they don't know, but might be better long term. So let's switch to the creator side now. So you're a creator, you're building a personal brand, you're obviously reliant on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok to do it. Is there a flip side strategy where a creator could create an audience that they could take with them? Absolutely. And the best creators have done that. You look at like things like Omni song or like Ninja or Mr. Beast, right? The first one was Omni song? Omni song. So there's the songs, there's the two sisters, they're in the beauty business. There's some of the biggest YouTubers in beauty, but she has a product line. So, oh, I'm probably saying it wrong. It's like Amy, but Omni, and then her sister, which I'm blanking on her name right now, but I can look it up. Let's see. Let's say Omni song and then, so she's an American blogger and then she has a sister whose name is, why am I blanking on her sister's name? But somebody like this, Mike, these two fashion bloggers or beauty bloggers you're talking about, I mean, are they killing it? What are they pulling in annually? I don't know the exact numbers, but it's, my understanding is it's in tens of millions. In the tens of millions annually. So then the ones that really build huge audiences upwards of the millions, they're actually doing millions of dollars in revenue almost. Most of that money coming from YouTube ads or is it coming from direct sponsorships? Like how does a deal like, how do they generate income? They're stages, right? So you start initially with a smaller audience, you're going to rely on primarily sponsorships, the bulk of your revenue, because the high value sponsors are better than the pre-roll ads that say on YouTube, because they're more targeted usually in the rental pay specialized integration fee. Are they disclosed always? Like do you always have to be a sponsor? Absolutely. They have to say it's a sponsor. They can't just say, oh, we love this, whatever it is. Yeah, if you're getting a free product or any kind of compensation whatsoever in any format, you have to disclose. Do people do it or do they just ignore it? I would say the vast majority of people do it. And the creators who really understand the audience know that if they choose the right sponsor to integrate in the right way, it doesn't really matter if it's sponsored or not to the audience, because there's a trust there and there's an understanding of how it's being presented. What if you just get like this shit sponsor that comes to you, but they just give you so much money? You've got to think that if someone's trying to make a living, they're going to be enticed to do that deal. Yes. And then definitely some people do that. Those, you burn your audience over time that way. And so essentially what it doesn't have is your engagement will drop. One and two, the conversion for your future sponsors will drop because the trust isn't there. Now do people do it? Absolutely. I would argue that if it's a bad fit, you should not actually take that deal. Because if you burn your audience, pretty soon you're going to have no audience that matters. And that's going to actually become an issue for the future of you as a business. Every business knows their customer and you really got to focus on who your core customer is. What are the brands, what are some brands that are spending a bunch of money on online influencers and doing that all the time? There's a bunch. I can't think of a single brand that isn't spending money on influencer marketing. And Major Ben at least, they have a category there and it's become more normalized. What's interesting is you sort of see influencer marketing as a categorical spend moving into the overall ad spend budget. So you might have like display and print and whatever. We see that more and more becoming a rather part of marketing spend. And I think that's actually really encouraging, but it also speaks to the outcomes that the value of getting from it. And so influencer marketing when done right will help in the best ROI's of any type of spend. However, it does have to be done contextually properly for it to work. And does it have to be done for a long period of time? Like is consistency important? Not necessarily. I would say consistent content and digital presence of the brand is important to set that funnel up. But in terms of the influencer engagement, you don't want to just do one post. Whenever you work with influencers, we always say listen, don't just have them do a single post or story. Do a combo. So maybe it's a feed post on Instagram plus two stories or two stories. If it's a Twitch stream, don't have them do one, have them do like one a week for four weeks. Because it allows the audience to kind of engage with the content and move down that funnel. Every marketer knows it takes multiple touch points before you drive a sale. Same principle applies here. It's still content, it's still touch points. So we recommend that you do a multiple unit type of sponsorship, but it doesn't have to be over months or years. It could literally be a week or two weeks or three weeks. What are successful small businesses that make use of online technology well do differently from small businesses that struggle to compete online? That was always in the details is what I always say. And I think the businesses that do really well understand those details. Specifically, it's looking at understanding their value proposition and being able to communicate that in their own media. And then being able to communicate that and work with influencers to say, okay, this is what matters to us. This is our end goal. But then giving the flexibility to say, but I want you to reinterpret it along our brand guidelines, along our safety requirements or brand safety requirements. We're in a way that's going to be really acclimated to who they don't have, which is the audience that this creator does have. And I think the ones who create the structure by giving the flexibility are the ones that succeed the best. And then also understanding that the platforms are always changing, but the fundamentals never change. So the mechanisms will change. But what works and their value to the audience is very usually pretty consistent. And so they understand that and they're able to understand how they integrate with that. So I think that's really like those details are the ones that matter. The follower account, the engagement account, that's a factor of price, but not a factor of success. The clubhouse audio chat app and building the largest marketing community on clubhouse with marketing club founder Mike Prasad after this act three clubhouse is an invitation only social media app for iOS that facilitates auditory communication through rooms that can accommodate groups of up to 5000 people. The audio only app hosts virtual rooms for live discussions with opportunities for individuals to participate through speaking and listening. The audio based social network recently closed a financing round that reportedly values the company at around four billion. Clubhouse has 10 million users according to a town hall meeting hosted by CEO Paul Davidson, which is impressive growth since January when they had two million users and may when they had just 1500 users. Mike, for those listening who aren't familiar with clubhouse, what is it and how does it work? Yeah, so clubhouse is just able to give it as a hope to give it a conference call that anyone can jump on anyone can host at any time. And then there's a really great way to discover that through your network. And so essentially you have this list of audio rooms that is hosted by a moderator and they might have other speakers that can talk and then everyone else is in the audience and people can go back and forth between the audience in the stage based on the moderator's choices. And then you can just have these conversations and they typically range from very casual social hangouts to entertainment like you might have comedy shows or just funny discussions, socialization to more formalized talks that you might see at a conference. So a fireside chat or a panel or an open discussion and things that you normally see at a professional conference. And so you kind of it runs the gamut. But in terms of accessibility, what makes it great is that audio I always say is the highest resolution type of engagement with a lowest amount of effort in the sense that you can get the cadence and the nuance and the tone of the voice and you understand information there. And it's interactive and live. But you don't need to be on camera or you need to be presentable. You can just hang out and listen or talk and you get all this value in terms of detail without necessarily having to put a lot of explicit effort in. And so because of that becomes very accessible and very open and I would argue that the platform done a really great job at discoverability and usability in terms of their UI UX and that's led to a lot of its success in my opinion. So these guys had 1500 users in May and they have 10 million users now. What made it pop into the mainstream? You know, every every start of success, they surround the venture fund. Our usual success is is a little bit of ingenuity, really, really good products and a little bit of luck in market dynamics. They happened to hit all of them. They had a really simplified focus part. They did one thing did it well. The UI UX was very understandable. They did a really great job curing the community. Are you think that's socialist community driven? Your first thousand members are going to dictate the nature of the platform typically forever. And in this case, we see that a lot of what is popular and what is the the most biggest successes on clubhouse today were really stemming from the room audience early or mid last year. So they use an invite-only system to curate the initial content to make sure it was high quality and good content. They started opening it up and those those content lines sort of are still maintained. They did a really great job at proactively updating the app every week to reflect the changes in the behavior and curate that community. I think they're the one of the best examples of rapid development in line with community development. Now, the other part is a luck part of the market dynamic. We were in quarantine. People couldn't get out as much. People were looking for a social outlet. They wanted to do something that was comfortable and accessible and clubhouse offered that and the market timing was perfect and there's a demand that now you're seeing as things open up, their active users are dropping, but I would argue the quality of what's there now is becoming more mature like any other platform matures. We're seeing that behavior now, but the market timing couldn't have been better. So there were 9.6 million clubhouse app downloads in February and that number dropped to 900,000 in April. So you think they're slowing down? How big do you think they'll become? They're a total dressable audience. So a ton of people, everyone and their literal mothers joined clubhouse in the last couple of months. So there's an argument to say the people that were going to join the core audience are probably already joined. They're in massive growth on iOS specifically. They're only in iOS right now. I would say the people interested are part of it for the most case and they're joined. Now, there's going to be a small amount that kind of trickle in as time goes on, but what I think you're going to see is that with the Android launch, which we think will happen in a couple of weeks, you're going to see a much larger influx because the world is largely on Android and clubhouse is a global app. One of the best things about it is that when I host my marketing room, we've gone on for, we've had single rooms that lasted for days. We had a marketing Monday room that lasted until Thursday and then I had to shut it down because it was just too long, but we actually rotated global audiences. I was talking to people in Europe and Dubai and London and in Hong Kong. There's this amazing community of people in the world that I regularly engage with that I would never otherwise have a unique relationship with. So think about that. It is a truly global app. On top of that, it's open to Android, which is globally the largest use platform. So I think we'll see some crazy growth in the next couple of months. I don't see that really going away anytime soon. I think there's going to be ups and downs as it matures. And every social platform goes through phases. Twitter did this, Facebook did this, Instagram did this. You had a big growth, it plateaued, it slowed down and then jumped again. And each time that happens, you see a maturation of what the purpose and the unique use case of that platform is going to be and you're seeing that now with clubhouse as well. Are you earning any revenue from clubhouse? Directly. Well, I guess someone did tip me recently. So they launched a monetization feature for creators on the platform where anyone can tip. You can send someone cash in app. And if you're invited as a creator, you create a merchant account and you can just get payments into your back account. I got a couple tips by giving advice and hosting in these rooms. It hasn't been much, like $5, $10 here and there. We've also been, so Tiny Sponsor on our platform, we actually added, we were the first platform to add clubhouse as a supported sponsorship category. So a couple clubs have joined, creators are joined on Tiny Sponsor and they're able to sell clubhouse sponsorships. And so we got a couple that have been done and a couple more in progress that are happening. And one of them from Market Club, we're testing out. But because it's still a platform is new, the measurements and to the metrics is still being defined. And there's no official metrics system right yet. It's third party right now. What you charge is very much in flux. Some people are charging a lot of money, which I don't think is worth it. Other people are going to charging. And so we're trying to figure out what is that, what is that mechanism, what is the right metric and what's the right measurement base for payment to make it work for everybody. I think we'll see that increase over time as they release more insights into the usage of the app and the individual room stuff like that. So indirectly, I'm getting sponsorships and we're doing that direct sales. I also got a couple clients from it, just people reach out to me, which has been great. But it directly, it's limited, but I think that's going to change soon. But like any of the social media platform I would argue, very few had monetization out front for creators usually rolled into that as they grew. Are you part of the clubhouse creator program? I am not. They, it looks like it's really my impression that they focus more on people who are doing structured shows. So the comedy shows or things that had like a various entertainment focus versus business focuses. That's really really focusing on individual personalities and individual entertainment programs is what they're starting with. I'd like to see more in the business side. I think the best use case I would argue for a clubhouse is actually the highest value is a professional use case. It's a B2B use case. The number one purpose I found in our use case in the clubhouse has been around networking and developing partnership funnels because you get to have those discussions and build those relationships. And you can do that quicker more efficiently and more directly than you can in person, arguably, because you can do that on the fly. So to me, that's actually unique utility in clubhouse that is hard to replicate anywhere else. And they haven't really focused on that yet as a platform, but I think we'll see that be one of the major use cases going forward. Mike, I know Twitter has a competitive service called Twitter Spaces. Do you see that as a threat to clubhouse? There are some industries that are going to prefer Twitter Spaces. And you're seeing that already in the pickup. The industries that are typically big on Twitter are going to prefer that. Also, the fact that Twitter is accessible on all platforms is a big one. I think what we'll really see is going to be what happens when clubhouse opens the Android and see the adoption there. I think if the adoption is similar to how they had on ILS, I think we might see them become the dominant audio platform for live audio. Twitter's actual interim interface, I would argue, is actually better. They have more functionality in terms of being able to respond as the audience with emojis and give indicators to the monitors on how you're feeling as an audience to be able to read the audience, so to speak. Clubhouse doesn't offer that yet. It's also a very simple update for clubhouse to make. So I think from a future point of view, in-room experience on Twitter Spaces is actually better. But where Twitter Spaces fails at, and I talked to the product team, they're aware of this, is discoverability. The discoverability is secondary. You have to open the app. You have to kind of see it. It pops up at the top of the Twitter app. And it's not really descriptive. There's no scheduling. There's always things that just are not great about it. So I think unless they can fix that, that's a big deal because if you can't discover the rooms, then there's no point to hosting the rooms. One and two, I think Twitter has a specific audience and behavior that will bleed into its audio space. That's very different than the audience to be here that you see on Clubhouse. I would argue that behavioral profile on Clubhouse is actually better fit to the value proposition in an audio lab room. And so I still think them becoming more of the premium version of that offering in the industry. Mike, for a aspiring content entrepreneur or brand that wants to get into influencer marketing, if they want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that? Sure. I'm using a hold of Mike Prasad and all the socials. And then also Mike at tinysponsor.com goes straight to me. And if you chat on our website on tinysponsor, it actually goes to you and myself and my business partners. It goes straight to our phones. So we're super easy to get a hold of. Well, I sure appreciate you taking the time today to walk us through Clubhouse and influencer marketing and sustainable marketing strategy. Awesome. Another picture having this has been a great time. And really, I love the questions you had. I think the idea of owning your own channels and understanding how to do that is critical to every business. And if you don't understand that going into any kind of digital format, you probably should should figure that out first before you start. You heard it from Mike Prasad, own media first. Okay, guys, we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Okay, we're not recording.