 We were signing up these local merchants, but there was a problem, which was you had to go to a physical spot to redeem something. And what makes the product work now was two essential things that we implemented that we didn't have originally and it really changed the dynamics. We didn't even have to quote-unquote pivot that much, but we changed the focus just a little bit and things started working. Whereas before, we had some users using it and creators using the platform, but those small merchants couldn't pay, they were pretty small. Right. And so the amounts they could pay were very small, especially back then when no one believed in Instagram as an advertising source. Right. But also, you had to be in a physical spot to redeem the deal. There simply wasn't as many creators back then. So it was failing. There were tough times with our early team. We raised a little bit of money, but we were running out of runway. This is Starved to Storefront. Today's guest is Corbett Drummy, founder of Popular Pays, a platform that enables brands to easily connect with creators and influencers and vice versa, all in the name of generating sponsored social media posts. Corbett started out in traditional advertising and noticed the inefficiencies rife within an aging structure. As he puts it, the past 100 years were the century of the agency, but the next 10 are the decade of the creator. This episode was actually taped right before California went on a statewide stay-at-home order and thus was the last time we recorded an episode in person. Man, this is just one of those things I took for granted without taking the time to fully appreciate how much fun it was to sit down face-to-face with a guest. The energy in the room was always so electric. This episode is no exception, as it was a sort of reunion for Diego and Corbett as they were both part of the Y Combinator class of 2015. So listen in as we cover everything from why Vine failed, how the initial idea for Pop Pays came from an inebriated stream of thought, and all things Y Combinator. Now, back to the episode. Alright, welcome to the podcast. We're here with Corby from Popular Pays. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Tell everyone what Popular Pays is. So Pop Pays is a platform for connecting brands and content creators. So people usually come to us for one of two things. They want to scale content, you know, on their Instagram page or on their Facebook ads, or they want posts from influencers like a TikTok video or a YouTube or Instagram story. So what we do is we have a community of content creators and also a software suite where brands can search and find the right creator, collaborate with them, and then track all the work that they're doing, whether it's the content they're making or the posts that they're getting. And you started the company in 2015? No, so although when we first connected in 2015 through Y Combinator, we'd started in mid-2013. Okay, give us a sense of the landscape. So 2013 Instagram knew. It was really new. Twitter was everything. Yeah, I remember, so at the time I was working at an advertising agency called Leo Burnett. If you remember the Allstate commercials, the guy in the suit that always gets into accidents. Mayhem. Mayhem, yeah. So good. Those are still going. They're still going. He's made a career out of it. Yeah, so I was working on those and everyone gravitated towards the TV commercials because, you know, it's these big production shoots, really cool post-production, all that stuff. And being the most junior person probably on the team, I was an assistant account executive. One of the only outlets that I could really apply myself to is social. And so we had just gotten a Facebook page. We were trying to push him on Twitter. Instagram was unheard of. I remember in 2012 when I was first there, I first started Instagram. And it was when someone was like, Mobile Molly, this mobile guru at the agency was talking about like things. And someone asked her, what are your favorite apps? And my co-founder of the audience, she was asking around the audience and he goes, oh Instagram. And she goes, I love Instagram too. And it's one of those things where you hear things twice in a row. Like, I remember the first time I heard Serial like three times in the space of like 10 minutes in terms of podcasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotta check this out. The murder mystery. Yeah, so I downloaded Instagram. I showed all my friends. It was amazing because you could take a photo and it magically made life look better. I remember the filters made things look better. The filters, yeah. And so we were experimenting with that. But brands hadn't moved to it yet, right? Not even close. This is super easy. They're super early. Yeah, super early. It was so early. The first time we ever crossed into the idea. I remember Alan, my co-founder, was really into Instagram. He's always been an innovator and like getting on the newest thing. And he was following these people. He had never met them in real life, but you know, these people had a couple thousand followers, which back then was a lot. Yeah. And we were at a party and he was probably a little tipsy and he was leaning against our fridge. And he said, I want to throw a party that you can't get into unless you have 500 Instagram followers. Wow. And I was like, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So you're checking phones at the door. Yeah. Like you check a year. So we were like, who could you pitch this to? Because before all state, I had worked at, I was actually, when I interned there, I was on the Miller course team. It wasn't even 21 when I joined. And so when I sat down the first meeting, they passed out a Keystone and I was like, this is amazing. I'm not even 21 yet. And they're like, what? And they took me off the account until I turned 21. And then I got back on. But I was contacting like our Miller course friends on the account. Other people in the broader like publicist agency portfolio, because we were pitching it to like Stoli vodka or other people. Because yeah, we wanted this like amazing events with all kinds of Instagram all things where it was just a brand activation that you'd get card at the door and then you get your Instagram, we get carded. And we put together a pitch deck and we had no exposure to budgets being like, you know, really junior teammates. But we just were like, how much would this probably cost? We're like, I don't know, 40 grand. And so we pitched it to Stoli, I think, or Spedka. I think it was Stoli. This is amazing. Kind of got like looped in up the chain. Like, you know, it was interesting. And so people would loop in there, like one up the chain of command. Eventually it actually went all the way up to the COO and the CCO of Burnett. And I remember there was an internal conflict and get this. This is how early it was. Leo Burnett said at the time, look, one of our other brands is doing something on Instagram this quarter. We can't have two brands doing something on Instagram. Wow. Yeah. So they said, not now. They don't want to over saturate the market. It was just so early. And so like, I can't remember when we first started talking about it. But you recognize at that time sort of the ability to play into these connect these two players, the brands and influencers. Yeah, that was like, so maybe like late 2012. We kind of shelved the idea, but we were obsessed with it. So we tried other ideas. Alan and I were kind of obsessed with trying to start some side project. We had a bunch of ideas, but we kept coming back to this and we eventually just started doing it on the side with our own brand. So we reached out to local merchants. So we signed up these local merchants. Like what kind of merchants? Like a coffee shop? Coffee shop, restaurants. We got rejected a lot, but we just like ride around in his element and he'd run in and pitch the brand. And I'd sit in the back working a business plan because at this time we knew we couldn't. They wouldn't let us do it internally. So we tried to do it internally. But the power I started seeing was that as I was working at all state on all state account and we're trying to do stuff on Facebook. I remember like the cheapest video I ever made was like an online video explaining how some product work worked on their website. And that was like 40 grand. And we could never get the budget for socials for that. So but we realized if we reach out to all these content creators, they could do the same video for like, you know, 400 bucks or $1,000 or whatever. Sure, sure. And so probably 1000 bucks. And so we realized the power of using creators to number one, just like get awareness on new social networks like TikTok now or Instagram back then. Influencers are by far and away like the best option to get like mass awareness on something. You just have to do it with the right strategy. Yeah. But then as the network gets more mature, it's an S curve where influencers become less important in a sense of like they have less impact. But their content becomes more important. Because there's more of them. Yeah. And also the ad tools on the networks get more and more sophisticated. And so if you look at Facebook now, their advertising systems are so sophisticated that we all the time like probably a quarter to 30% of our campaigns are just purely content creation for things like boosting on Facebook ads. Because Facebook is such a powerful user acquisition tool. Right. But no one has like Facebook influencers really. And so Instagram is still in this middle ground where influencers are a powerful force, but now just boosting like story ads can drive so much in terms of user acquisition or sales. That's kind of the bounce of power is kind of shifted a bit. But on TikTok, it's still in that brand new part of the S curve where an influence like one of our influencers for a Columbia Records campaign got like 400,000 impressions. And the cost per thousand impressions was well under a dollar. Right. Totally. And it's like when things hit, they go viral on there, but TikTok is structured in a way where it's more prone to go viral. So influencers are even more impactful there. So it's been a really interesting, really interesting market. But long story short, we were pitching these like small merchants. We were trying to save money. You know, we were making very little at a time. And you guys are bootstrapping this for sure. Yeah. I can't even believe how little we're making and looking back. I wasn't like $1,200 a month. It was I was making 38,000 a year. Okay. And in Chicago, you know, that in 2011 or 2012, Not bad. Right. It was still bad. But looking back now, I mean, I don't know how I did it because I even managed to save some money. And I remember in the mornings, I would like wake up and make breakfast and lunch. When we first quit our jobs, I would make breakfast and lunch for my co-founders, Alan Nathan, because I knew that if I didn't make lunch for Alan, he'd go out and buy it and we couldn't afford it. Super expensive. Yeah. I'd make like KZDS for him. But we were like saving some money. I would go to work. I'd put in a full day of work at Burnett. I used to get up early back then. I'd probably wake from work from like 8 to 5.30 or 6. But I'd eat the cereal on the Kellogg's floor for breakfast. And there's free beer on the Miller course floor. So every day I'd leave with a beer in my hand. But yeah, we were saving money working after hours. Once we had like three months of money saved up, we so foolishly we were like, all right, we're good. When you quit, you quit your jobs. Alan, I was going to say longer. Did you have a product? Or what? We did. Was the website pairing? It was super MVP. We were pretty clever with it. I can't remember if this was Alan or Nathan's idea. The very first quote unquote product was simply a private Instagram page where we would post the deals that if you had 500 followers, you could go get that free product at that restaurant. So for example, if you had 500 followers or more, we'd let you in to see the page. And then you could see all the deals. And you would just kind of like hold that up and they would just check your Instagram account and they'd give you the product. So it was like, there was no tech involved. We just like, how do we get this up today? Right. And that's how we did it. I remember the day we signed up that first merchant. I knew the day that I should have known because my gut also told me that day that it wasn't going to work because we signed up this merchant. It was like March of 2013, March 21st, I think. And we signed up this local merchant, this amazing coffee shop. We got up to Heritage Coffee in Chicago and their founder met with us. He's like, I'm in. It was a connection of Nathan's. And we put up the sign. It said like, have 500 followers, get a free cup of coffee. And we sat there all day and like, no one, no one redeemed it. And we're like, there's probably a problem in our model. And you know, there's many, there were many problems, but it took a year of painful learning. So what year is it now? Is it like 2013, 2014? Yeah. 2013 going to 2014, we were signing up these local merchants, but there was a problem which was you had to go to a physical spot to redeem something. And what makes the product work now was two essential things that we implemented that we didn't have originally and it really changed the dynamics. We didn't even have to quote unquote pivot that much, but we changed the focus just a little bit and things started working. Whereas before we had some users using it and creators using the platform, but those small merchants couldn't pay. They were pretty small. Right. And so the amounts they could pay were very small, especially back then when no one believed in Instagram as an advertising source. Right. But also you had to be in a physical spot to redeem the deal. And then there simply wasn't as many creators back then. So it was failing. There were tough times with our early team. We raised a little bit of money, but we were running out of runway. Like friends and family type round? No, it was great buying. I think like one person put in like 10K. That was from the friends and family side. But we found a bunch of angel investors that each put in like 10 or 20. We ended up raising like 200 at first. We put in the first 100. We were like, man, we never have to work again. This is so funny. But it was falling apart because we weren't growing. Our running was shrinking and it was hard to raise money. But Alan left and he joined Instagram. My co-founder left to join Instagram. And Nathan and I parted ways because he was the creator. He had a thriving business in himself as a designer, as a content creator. He had a lot of work. Whereas I as an account executive was extremely unemployable. Right. You can't be a part-time assistant account executive. Yeah, and double AEs in the added industry aren't even sellers. They have no exposure to budgets. They're just basically like a junior project manager. Got it. We had this one engineer, Steven, and he and I worked to kind of rebuild the next version. But we added just a few things and that made it click. We added briefs. The brand could say, this is the kind of content I want. We opened it up so that brands could pay. So it was not just local coffee shops, but page denim or Gap or Nike or anyone could put a brief out and say, I'll pay you for this content, but we need this type of content. And so that naturally attracted bigger creators. And we had a huge creator base at that point. How did you grow that creator base at the beginning? So it grew kind of viral at first because we had all these local deals and it was kind of neat. So it was growing just by word of mouth on the creator side. But as soon as we got the first paying brand, I think it was... How did you grow that side? We asked a creator, we said, like, who's reaching out to you? Oh, interesting. Yeah, a friend, Grant Leegan, had said, page denim, reach out to him and we contacted them. They just put in something small, it's like three to five grand. But as soon as we got that, I knew that we had a business because our whole burn rate was probably like three to five grand. And so we got this like campaign. We easily set it out to our creators. They applied. We did this campaign and from that moment I knew we had a business and it was just finding more brands. And every time we found a brand, there were so many creators who wanted to do that work. And when we first actually, that was kind of manual at first, but when we launched quote-unquote paid gigs. So the product we have today, we launched it on October 21st, 2014. And we got, I think, 20 grand in that first month. Whereas we had never made, I think we made 20 grand in like the last year and a half of the company. Got it. And so that's when we knew it was working. And was there a shift in the market? Like did brands just start realizing the power of Instagram? And so at the beginning you were kind of ahead of that? No, the market changed. I used to go into coffee shops and pitch them. It was so, it was tough. Every time I'd go to get a coffee, I couldn't just enjoy it because I'd have to pitch them. And it was like the grind of like, I'd get lunch or I'd get coffee and I'd be like, all right, here we go. And I'd pitch them and they'd be like, yeah. I was only just telling them, give a free cup of coffee. I wasn't even like asking for money at that point. And I couldn't even convince people to give a cup of coffee in exchange for a post. I was telling them, you get content. You get the post and awareness, you know, like maybe 500 impressions. You get oftentimes when they were doing that free product, they get, they buy more stuff anyways. They might bring a friend. They'll come back. Totally. Yeah. But over time, the industry definitely shifted and it's still shifted to the point where at first we were able to get people interested in trying a campaign. And then now like cuts it today. It's at a point where almost every big brand is doing this regularly. So they just need software to do it. So it's gone beyond just like, oh, do a campaign for me. It's like, oh, we do these campaigns or we have this creator base. Let's find the best software to scale the work that we're doing. So it's, it's continued to evolve even today. Do the individual store managers at these coffee chains that you were visiting have the authority to buy into your pitch? Like, yeah. That's a good question. Like half the time I'd strike out and they'd be like, dude, I just work here. But then a lot of times I met some cool people. Like I met some founders of different coffee shops or restaurants and I met a lot of cool people. And unless you got a chain, like a blue bottle or an intelligentsia, like a medium or large chain, those small ones, you know, oftentimes you'll bump into the founders that they're working in right now. So we met some cool folks in Chicago, made some friends and they often did have the authority to just try it out, especially because we weren't asking for much. But it was funny how much like I really, I really advise anyone starting a company to charge for your product as soon as you can, because they always say like, if you want advice, ask for money. Right. If you want money, ask for advice. Yeah. So like basically we went into this and, and once we started asking for money, we were getting this advice of like what they would really pay for. And that's when we realized, oh, well, they need to dictate what the content would be. So we started stumbling into like, hey, these bigger brands really do have a lot more to play with. And it's not that much more complicated of a sale. We lucked out and that one of our early deals was Nike. And so when we were applying to Y Combinator, we were, What made you want to apply to Y Combinator? Oh, I had just always Paul Graham's essays. Yeah. It's like Hemingway writing. Tell people who Paul Graham is. So Paul Graham, he's my, one of my startup heroes, probably the startup hero, although many, but I remember just when I was in college at William & Mary, I think the only other startup that came out of William & Mary before ours was like Thomas Jefferson's age. Like there was nothing coming out of there. Like it's an old school. Century. Yeah. But now there's like right after, so my friends and I started one in college and then shout out to ad hoc. A friend, Todd, launched one like, you know, right after graduating as well. Yeah, they're doing well. They seem to be doing great. They're crushing it. And so, and it seems to be more threat. They've got a thriving entrepreneurship center. They're getting into the, they built a new school of business, like Mason School of Business. And it was really starting to pick up already, but it was kind of like the right place, right time, but I was just like, I don't know, naturally curious about startups and technology. I had been reading online and I came across Paul's essays, but Paul Graham, he's a startup founder who sold via web to Yahoo for like $200 million. And he's extremely smart guy. He's a very independent thinker. But when he writes, he writes so simply that it sounds like it looks like Hemingway's writing, but it's about startups. It's a really powerful combo and he doesn't waste space. Like if he just needs three paragraphs to communicate his thought, the article is three paragraphs. If he needs more, it's more. And so I was reading these and we launched like a tutor matching startup and William & Mary was like a marketplace. And I remember I was like, I was like, yeah, we could do this and we were making some money. Like not enough to as to have it be our day jobs or like, we didn't even think of raising money. But then I saw a company from my C get funded. That was doing exactly what we were doing. And I was like, oh, it's over. Yeah. And they were just such a juggernaut. YC had funded like Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit. And it's like everything they touched was just gold. But I remember we applied to YC for popular pays about a year in or whatever, like less than a year in. And we didn't get, we didn't, we didn't really hear back. And then we applied in that little growth spurt when we first launched paid gigs and we got an interview and it was just a mad, like even the interview was magical. Like how was your experience like going through? Cause like, what was your experience going through YC and how it was for you guys? So people listening to Y Combinator is like an accelerator program in Mountain View, California, a lot of big companies, Airbnb. You mentioned them Dropbox and there's a, there's a ton of other ones. Stripe. Stripe. Yeah. For, for me, it was really cool, man. It was like you're meeting these legends, right? Yeah. Like Justin Khan who started Twitch. Paul B, I can't pronounce the last name. The founder of Gmail. Butchette. Yeah. And so you're meeting all these like legends and you realize there's two things, right? They're just people. It's almost like meeting a celebrity. So you're like, oh, this person is just a human. Yeah. And you realize their gifts aren't, and this is not to be disrespectful. It wasn't intellect. It was persistence. It was like they just had a vision or were super passionate and were very persistent to the point of not quitting. And then you get to ask them for advice. Yeah. And Michael Siebel who's now the CEO. He also like co-founder of Twitch. I just loved him because he'll spend 10 seconds with you and tell you like your idea is shit. He'll just like candidly say like you're fucked. Like he'll draw you a curve like this is where you think you are. And then he does like a cliff. And he's like this is where you're actually. So the best advice is always the ones where it's like a gut punch. Yeah. And so the way I think about Y Combinator is like these guys are guardrails or I used to use the reference they're bumpers when you're bowling, right? And they're just there to make sure you don't fall into the gutter. It's good metaphor. And but it's wonderful. And it's also so empowering because you realize they're just like you. Yeah. They're they're super like you. I remember talking to Justin Khan. It was Alexis from Reddit that called us to say that we're in and that's a whole other story. Like the interview getting in it was just like Alexis Serena Williams is his partner for those wondering. Yeah. So Alexis. That's a name drop. And so when he called me I was like fan boing fan girling you know because I'm such a huge like Reddit user alone like let alone that but it's it's him and I try to negotiate with him on like the percentage like he's like clear jet. And I'll get to that. They actually helped us tremendously later in that area of like because we had raised a little bit of money at that point. We actually got to like 750 K before YC with that growth spurt in terms of money raised. So we were trying to negotiate that but he had quickly had to leave and go back into Reddit temporarily. And then Gary from delicious cat the chief of staff for Alexis at Reddit and then Justin Khan were our main partners. But I always remember like interacting with Justin for example. I was like interacting with like an older smarter more accomplished brother where like yeah he's really driven very clever but it didn't seem like with talking with them they just kind of remind you of the basics like talk to your users and they make you better by reminding you of what to think about and checking your assumptions. It was also encouraging because they showed you how to do it. It wasn't just like they're just if you're in trouble they'll probably just like tell you an answer to save you time but they're always kind of walking you through it. So it made it approachable. I do remember that sometimes I think I went to Sam Alvin one time and he just we could never get on Sam's counter it was like Sam just like email me just like a parent would like you know we'll walk you through but I think we were short on time for something he's like okay here's your answer and he just that wasn't the answer he gave us the answer and so sometimes he definitely really impressed me with that. I remember we were unfortunately it was Paul's Paul Graham's last years so he just left and Sam took over. Yeah Sam's extremely ambitious but some of the stuff I've learned from Sam is just like the ambition and stuff alone because yeah he's a human like all of us but he has these philosophies like make every new project you do ambitious enough to where it makes your last one look like a footnote and like that's inspiring that's really inspiring. I was just going to say when we we had a meeting with Paul so Paul had retired kind of somewhere right and he like opens his office hours office hours is just the time for you to schedule a time to sit down with Paul and Paul hadn't been around for most of the batch yeah and so he does it and what happens naturally is like it just fills up the schedule fills up so we get like a four o'clock slot and we're there we get there like at three we're waiting he's talking all the startups and he's talking to you before he's talking to us. I can't wait to tell you about how that went. And I was like who the hell is he talking to because it's like 430 and he's still talking to Corby and I'm like what is happening what are they talking about I'm like this camp out why is it an hour we're an hour in. So do you know I was like so excited for this conversation and I go to meet Paul Graham because he's almost like it's almost like some startup guy just ascended and he's so aloof because he just doesn't care anymore. He's wearing sand. You're the story about how like someone will try to mess with one of the YC startups and he just like walks into the the company's like lobby with his like Birken Stocks and he's like hey you're going to stop what you were doing and they're like okay Paul he's like yeah otherwise we're not going to have you go to any YC demo days anymore and they're like okay we'll stop and he totally but he was he came in for the office interviews and I was so excited I was like hey Paul do you mind if I record this conversation just so I can pay attention I can reference it later and he's like do you realize your shoes entirely match the carpet and I was so not ready for that to be the first thing he said and I looked down and it's kind of crazy my shoes blended in completely with the carpet and I was like wow you're you're right and that's how the combo kicked off but he gave you know tremendous advice but he almost was like if you talk to Sam he was almost like laser focused helping you in the problem but Paul almost like ascended to this point where he would ask me these questions but he's like but I mean you know what's what are you really trying to solve here for like what's right what are you really going for like the point of life to be happy right like and he don't want to bring it too far above like the realm of what we're focusing on but he gave some really amazing thoughts on how to position things yeah maybe when you thought he was a I thought he was going to cancel our meeting that was my concern I was like oh he's running over I really loved I mean I loved every minute YC I remember later like a few weeks later I was in the cafeteria for some reason and Paul and Sam were there and Paul's like you're you're Caruso drummer right and I'm like that's close enough Paul Corby drumming you know you call me many things but yeah so my teammate Pete he made people call me many things like you know Corby whatever but he's only calls me Caruso still what was raising money like so no day was it was it successful for you it was I was so nervous I remember I forget exactly the company's name but right before me this guy Phil I forget his last name like XR or something like that but he was on that shipping company you know it starts with P yeah packable maybe I don't know but yeah he was doing these like exercises he was like put his hands up and like doing some breathing exercises and I was like maybe I should be doing more to prep and you know he crushed his his presentation and but we were lucky we went up there and we still have it like that's a link on YouTube we could probably even attach it to the notes but yeah well we met a lot of amazing investors after the demo day although we'd struggled we raised in three months we only raised like a hundred or two hundred when we first started pop pays in a month and a half I think we'd raised like two million and capped out at like what we were trying to do that's great it was the only time of our experience where it's like to be you know the hot startup or where like fundraising is usually pushing a boulder up a hill whereas we had just we're at capacity for the first time we had it like return money away and it was pretty pretty interesting yeah that's amazing yeah what was the thing that these investors saw were they like we don't really know and I'm just I'm thinking a lot where they like we think we know Instagram we're not really sure we think this makes sense I think it's like I think it's kind of people actually right now are treating tick tock the same way where it's something that's but there's more precedence now there is there is and then you can you can assimilate that information in your head because you've seen like the rise of Instagram right Facebook but right with the rise of Facebook you didn't see the rise of influencers correct whereas you saw the rise of the creator community I actually saw it most with Vine which is interesting people forget Vine it changed culture like Vine was so important and I never thought poppies would live longer than Vine like but Vine was such an important thing why do you think Vine failed they turned their back on the creator community okay yeah I thought about it a lot and well it's also Twitter bottom and right it's really hard to revenue goals are important yeah it's like really hard to integrate a company and it's no diss at Twitter I have a lot of friends there it's a great company I actually used to just poke fun at Jack Dorsey saying like he's no Elon Musk what's he trying to do running both companies but dude Square and Twitter they're both you know very well run machines Square itself is crazy I just think what the problem is in some cases culture takes these platforms and does really interesting things with them and so Twitter has sort of become part of the political campaign and then it makes it makes a company have to pick a side much like a television show right or like a Fox or a CNN it's like all of a sudden who's the owner what are the thoughts and is there buys how do we allow it with Vine specifically though the creator community was basically saying like we don't like certain ones of these changes we're driving all the use like with any network whether it's Reddit or whatever it follows the Pareto law that you know 20% of users drive you know the activity in the 80% are passive but it's even more like all that 20% 2% of them are like the most active and really drive almost everything right and there was a small amount of creators like that's where you saw the birth of everyone you know love and hate him I don't really love him but like Logan Paul et cetera like you know that kind of class of creators that came up sure but there is they were super important in a sense that they were a new media channel they were driving immense creativity like the amount of creativity if you just scroll through tick tock you can kind of recap for that magic of Vine where it's just some of the most addictive funny clips you will see and you can spend 40 minutes watching seven second clips or like 30 second clips yeah Vine kind of folded there was a gap in that short form video segment and some people like Quibi or whatever are trying to come in and take Quibi yeah Quibi yeah I can't even pronounce it do you know a little bit about that not really they're just raising a ton of money but you know so basically what they're doing I don't know anything about him yeah I actually I was just at an interesting meeting and I got the whole pitch but basically they're using two cameras so every everything that they film so you know how a lot of TV shows has B-roll kind of yeah you know how a lot of shows have like B-roll of like here the trees blah blah blah right yeah tell us about B-roll yeah yeah I know we have make in the room the professional and so what Quibi's doing is getting rid of all the B-roll getting rid of all of the I hate to say this but artistic elements to any television show and they're just making it like Corby says something to me I get punched in the face and it's all action and then story it's like cut to cut to cut and the whole thing is like 10 I think it's 10 minute television shows are less but the thing is they're filming it with two cameras one is horizontal one is vertical and they're also filming it from different perspectives and so if you want to see Nick's perspective you just flip your phone maybe to horizontal and now you're and now you're seeing it through Nick's eyes and vice versa and so there's a story component to this and they the whole bet at a really high level is everything is moving toward mobile money but they also have a tremendous amount of huge networks on board already huge television content creators but it's also it's just 10 minute clips 10 minute videos 10 minute basically episodes but the I think the coolest thing because it hasn't been seen yet is this perspective it's like which is and I haven't seen how they're gonna actually what it looks like or what it feels like but directionally correct in terms of where I think the market is moving everything needs B-roll but the fact they are getting away from it's got it's all about that B-roll the fact that they're getting away from it entirely from a story perspective yeah I think is just interesting at this point I am gonna have to go and research this some more but you are really taking away the creator's ability to allow the audience to sink in because that's what B-roll really does it's just a I just think people don't care the story or the bet is right I don't know but the bet is when I think about movies right movies you don't need really hooks in the middle you just need kind of your typical build the character a little bit of a climax drama end right and movies sort of follow this trajectory television shows have to have a hook at the end right they have to or else you're not gonna watch the next episode and I just think Quibi says screw both of that we're just gonna tell you the story with all of it and no waste of time no waste of character hooks at each 10-minute thing I would think so I would think so I mean we'll see right it seems like it makes sense I think the bet is sound and look if you have enough capital you can mix up work for example tiktok is dominating the short form like you know like 15 to 60 second stuff and you know there's always gonna be like the the parasite feature film where it's just the B-roll itself is so beautiful where I just was seeing like the gorgeous shots and there's like the craftsmanship of the feature film but Quibi is is that pronounced Quibi? Quibi or at least that's how I was told I don't know it looks like they're betting on number one that there's a format in between and then number two they're betting a lot on that that people will gravitate towards that new usually you only see user behavior like that start from like in a groundswell like start small and grow so it is a big bet and I think about it too like IGTV hasn't really hit in my opinion yet and so that's the only form that today you know you can go vertical horizontal on its own but you couldn't before so we ended up making all these IGTV videos that we had a Nick had I had to make this infographic that's like turn your phone now and so I would just upload it sideways and then force people to just turn their phone because you do lose a lot in the 9x16 yeah scale but just real quick I wanna touch more this B roll thing just one one point one point I wanna make is that I wonder if this is going to be like the taste test between Coke and Pepsi so like with no B roll maybe you will like it at first but over time you're not going to want to watch this because it doesn't sit as well with you because that's what B roll allows you to do it allows you to become a part of this environment or the show or whatever are you familiar with the Coke versus the taste test yeah so it's like at first sip Pepsi has a much sweeter taste to it so people will gravitate towards that but I'm wondering over time if Quibi will Quibi Quibi I can't say it dude it's also maybe the name it's making you Quibi it's making me Quibi but yeah so I'd be interested to one learn more about Quibi but then to see what the development of it is over time I look at it differently so we don't have a TV right I have 9TV in like 6 years good for you I am dude amazingly entertained I'm like that like I'll start laughing commercial laughing like wow that was so well done and I think Quibi when it launches what it does I think it puts more it almost highlights the B roll in movies and sort of cinematic whatever right that's how I think about it it's just like I watch a commercial today and I'm blown away I think people will watch movies and be blown away by the content the curation and they'll appreciate B roll more and I'm blown into advertising I remember thinking like look I love this space because it's the intersection of art plus business so there's like creativity plus it's solving a business problem and to me the North Star of advertising should be that number one it's worth watching it's easy they're giving you some utility making you aware of something you need to know because it's targeted well et cetera but so few times as it live up to that really the only time people say that what you just said is the Super Bowl but then the problem with advertising is that they're such a high fixed cost for that asset that they just they just then hammer you with frequency where you'll see the same thing over and over again to the point where yes you are aware of that brand now but it makes you like angry because you've seen the commercial so many times and so the end that's totally true yeah and so like we were thinking about this so much but like the antidote to it is the variety of like if you're lowering the cost of content production you can just basically as a brand shrink the cost of content production by working with content creators to the point where you're always giving something new to people unless they're choosing to rewatch it so I've rewatched some TikTok videos like probably 50 times same here yeah but we can share some later but like in advertising you really want to be thinking like you really want to be breaking out of this model of you know spend 20% of your budget on the commercial and then hammer at home with you know 80% of your budget at the media buy and just hit people like seven times at least so they remember the brand you need to move beyond that and so we're trying to push brands it's a smart thing you're saying I mean yeah what you're saying is actually really profound in a lot of ways right it's like moving away from the node the touch points yeah and we've been trying to champion like the whole ethos of poppies when Alan Nathan and I were sitting at this restaurant they had amazing onion rings unfortunately no longer around but we launched like we were sitting down and we were talking about this kind of stuff and Alan said what's one thing we can ask ourselves where we know we're always heading towards this vision and he came up with the question is it worth sharing because whether it's like the output of the of the platform so it's this piece of content that's worth sharing that itself is the North Star but more than that the experience of using the platform and so we try to come back as our cultural North Star but I've been trying to evangelize this concept of brands that you need to move away from waterfall content creation with high fixed cost investment in your assets to move to more agile content production method where you're testing and learning and you know using variety to captivate your audience and so it's a hard switch but we've seen like we've seen some people like shout out to Colgate they we went to their North American marketing summit and they're just into agile content development do you help them do you give them some concepts that's my ideas we do but they I was actually so surprised that when we came to them they you know invited us to their like marketing summit and they almost they had the whole system itself like they they knew they had some stellar examples of agile content development already and they're leaning into it so well just being like a startup but there's this one example where like I think Notre Dame was playing some of their football team and like the local team pulled all the Irish spring through you Colgate jumped in and they made like some content about it and they donated a bunch of like Irish spring to like the team that pulled it out and like they just made made fun with it and it's like that kind of kind of it's like that kind of conversation you need to be a part of in a staying age and that's why brands like Wendy's we actually aren't even working with them but the people that know how to like be a part of the conversation and play along with the internet basically it's so key and with networks there's trends every day so it's easy to play along you just have to listen it's like going to a party just listen and then participate you know like talk to your talk to your friends around you so you're in a space where you're connecting brands with influencers where do you see your product moving given given that's a great question so it's pretty when you think about culture all of those things I personally think it's very interesting I want to like I don't want to give away all the cards give them away so I want to keep my people to my chest but I'll tell you this it's 2020 decade what's your Hemingway approach what is it I'll say this so we write today we are software for collaborating with content creators and influencers I believe that it was the century of the agency you know modern advertising was born like pre-war World War I in like the 1910s and have been dominant like agency the agency model has dominated the next hundred years but that model needs to evolve and the agencies that we've seen do really well these days are tech enabled using tools to make themselves more agile they're moving upstream and so they're moving into more strategy and like leveraging you know these creators as content workhorses but not necessarily doing everything internally themselves so they're moving upstream the agency model is evolving so I really do believe it was like the century of the agency but it's the decade of the creator and moving forward software will continue to eat everything it is a boon in the sense that the routine work that no one loves doing I used to traffic TV spots with excel sheets and like submit stuff and it was just the bane of my existence and I made mistakes all the time so like people aren't even good at that kind of work but that routine work ranging from like you know the difficulties around content creation that routine work is getting automated and improved with workflow software and so people can lever up into more creative stuff and so we're going to see our software better inform on the beginning part like the briefing like better inform people on how they can make content that's effective and at the end use data that you're getting back from the content's performance itself to improve content the next time around and there's some concrete examples that we haven't been toying around with that's really interesting just to basically take data and say here's what the content's doing you give that to the content creator and they're better off people have been doing this for a long time as example Sesame Street used to play their episodes to kids and just watch for the kids stopping attention and they just like cut out that section right yeah they're super good at it yeah it's like using audience data to improve content has been manual for a long time and we're not reinventing the wheel in a lot of things but there's certain best practices for every network ranging from factors on like how often people have sound on or not to like how the audience takes in this content but we're just using that gonna give that data to creators and editors or overall just by using less data for marketers and brands so it's a really exciting like decade I think coming up pretty scary month very exciting decade coming up I think in a lot of ways it's like you can democratize the content creation of it right exactly and if you can make data more accessible I think it also leads to people being more creative I agree I think there's value to that there's a book I forget the book but it's basically making the point that everyone at some point is gonna be a celebrity so the Andy Warhol but in their own way like they'll own the niche and so if like it's basically like Corby is really good at creating this content around founder creation for let's say like your vertical so it's like people know like Corby's the guy and then this person makes really cool oil canvases depicting like old nickels more of a niche but you like own your domain you own you plant your flag yeah it's definitely been democratizing like the tail is getting longer in the sense that you know you do have people that are occupying these niches content creators and it's crazy the amount of people that are like famous on tiktok alone for whatever their you know their go to things are it's pretty pretty astounding how many creators there are I wonder if you ask kids it's probably like if you ask them like what do you want to be when you grow up I'd say their number one answer right now is a tiktok star yeah no I think that's accurate it's funny so my sister in law was in London doing like a study abroad and she had a like a flat mate his name is Noah shout out to them Noah Noah would just scare Nina every day that was his thing he would like bust in the room and scare but he would record it so at the end of these three months he had like a compilation of scaring the hell out of Nina I think I watched that video 45 times I've seen those they're very entertaining I've seen a kid do it to his like kind of it's one of those but he pisses off his parents I feel bad for the parents but I get a lot of gratification out of the videos he was kind of like playing around with different things and it's funny he found his niche in just like making his parents yell and his parents are these unwitting participants because like their yells are just so perfectly like cut for video like they're unwittingly like encouraging behavior because he's getting millions of views online and that's creativity today it is which is really interesting and you know they're gonna be they're hitting him now but when he starts bringing in like a hundred grand for a sponsored video they're gonna be like they're gonna have a harder time yelling at him I think there's parents who will say like I used to play video games a lot in high school and I actually met one of our one of the guys who worked briefly at Hot Pays we met playing Call of Duty a long time ago probably gonna dinner with him tonight online yeah but he I was playing video games and you know my parents rightfully so were like you know get outside the house go do other things but it's in stories now where parents have been seeing that and then these kids now are like pro athletes basically and when you think about it if you play basketball the athletic peak quote unquote for e-sports is gonna be much higher because you can game for like 12 hours a day you have to basically yeah you have to it's gonna be more like you know Lionel Messi is the best like soccer player ever but he there's no way you could play practice 12 hours a day you know so I think you'll see even more stratification and like peaks in the like prowess of e-sports than you will for like physical sports but I wonder if like down the road like you know decades on the road if they'll start to cross even to compete because it might be stuff like VR etc so it'd be like F1 racing these days it'd be like super athletes yes right it's all about hand out reaction time those little micro seconds will make the difference in like getting shot in the video game but you also might have people that are just like really fit because maybe they're playing like a VR like shooting game but you gotta be gotta move around just to do that so that's an interesting take we'll see it reminds me of that video like everyone has like it's like the VR world we're kind of we're kind of getting into that it's really possible that at popular pace no no no but I meant just like it's really possible in like you know 2040 a significant portion of our lives is spent just interacting with digital and VR content like I was wondering how VR was going to first make its way into content I've been looking at it for a long time and it just surreptitiously it did not come how I thought it first appeared in Snapchat it was like the AR VR lenses and filters and it's now become so commonplace that we don't really think but face filters were like the first application of AR and it'll become probably more and more I just remember the Pokemon game yeah those huge so viral first Pokemon Go yeah and it's like there's different Pokemon in the water that was the first like real world AR like people were hooked man it blew up so quickly in terms of like you hear things that are viral you hear it a few times in one day I remember yeah like hearing the serial podcast a few times in one day and I went to download it Pokemon Go was probably just except for like COVID-19 like Pokemon Go was probably like the biggest like I remember just hearing it so quick like saw it on red all the time saw it around the internet but it really flamed out yeah some viral infection infections do it flamed out and you know there's still a lot of people that are playing it but it didn't take hold in the same way in terms of going to switching gears back to pot pays how do you connect with brands now is it different than you used to do it or is it now people understand you exist and so they just influencers and brands I know you have an onboarding process people can do auto yeah definitely influencers we probably get like 500 to 1000 creators influencers sign up every month just word of mouth and so we do some recruiting there but interesting enough some of the brands themselves will bring in their own influencers to the platform and upload them to the platform or do their own searching interesting but on the brand side we have a sales team we do marketing probably the most effective is just like direct outreach to large brands but we've got a network now where you know between pot pays YC our investors everything we can usually get in touch with a brand just from that and just like regular sales outreach marketing we've been investing in more but something that's happened recently is we've kind of scaled since we've got a platform that really can be totally self-serve about a year ago we started offering just a SaaS solution to brands and at first it was to smaller brands that we might previously have turned down or not worked with before and we offered it and we've everything from like a startup tier to like a so for example your friend who started like an almond milk company all the way to like like maybe a company the size of like all birds they might use this software just to scale the work they're already doing searching and finding creators or managing groups of creators they work with collaborating with them like tracking revision history shipping products that kind of stuff and then the back end like tracking stats like actual impressions maybe if they've boosted the content tracking its performance but the SaaS tier has been there's been a lot of traction with that and I think it's because people now are doing regular like they're doing regular partnerships with people on Instagram at least in YouTube regular partnerships have driven a lot more success than like one off transactional one and for the people like you know in all birds they use that whole suite of tools but we've been investing more in marketing now simply because almost any brand can use it even in a smaller scale so we've actually seen one or two brands from the way early days that we used to work with in the first really product swap days where even a small coffee shop could you know pay for the low end tier that's a couple hundred bucks a month and just use it to search and find influencers in their city and like offer them free products in exchange for a post and so they're all in costs could be just you know a couple hundred bucks just to connect with the creators get content and build like a brand ambassador like relationship and so we've done more marketing just to reach that broader like tier of startups and growth brands recently I think everyone on the podcast that we've had on or I guess the majority of them they're either past the point or getting to the point of like we need to start using influencer marketing shit that I did in Boston they got on Katie Couric just from Instagram nice they partnered with her but that's their whole strategy their whole strategy is influencer marketing I'll give like so my like intro to influencer marketing content creation yeah so like trying to be as helpful as I can so if you're I'll give I'll go for the stages if you're just starting out I've just launched a almond milk product or you know you've just launched a new company making like apparel or whatever it is I'll talk about consumer companies first I would you know probably gonna spend some of your budget on AdWords cause that's a really effective tool be your best bet after that is just reaching out to a creator and getting them to create pieces of content I think our average on the platform is like three or four on our bucks for like a photo and maybe like under a grant like a grant for a video and how many followers just to give that side of it too we have people from you know 10,000 to a couple you know to multi-millions but I just say like your average Instagram or for example might have like you know 25 or 50,000 followers but you know they'll charge less if you're just asking for content than if you're asking for a post and you could find people just you know you could reach you could use tools like PopPays cause at the start up here it's like you know it's just a couple hundred bucks a month depending on what you're getting but you could also just reach out on Instagram if you're just starting out and you have no budget just find some people just from searching Instagram offering free product it's harder like you won't get the same quality of influencers when you're just offering free product but if you're scrappy and you have no budget you can find people that like you know it's good if they're doing a product maybe they're an earnest fan of the product but no they're probably just gonna post a photo it's not gonna be some oh no and I would even just start off with this like if you're really budget constrained I would just get a couple pieces of content and boost it on Facebook and Instagram okay influencers at the early stage are probably not the right vehicle for converting sales you can have a TikTok video go viral and that does just drive like tremendous growth but that's a whole separate thing I'll get into but at the early stages I would advocate you know spending your money on Google AdWords getting a piece of content in a cost-efficient way and then you know putting even if you have a grant or two like experimenting with paid social and trying to get sales from paid social okay beyond that you can start building grand ambassadors by shipping you know your product to people on YouTube Instagram they build and it does build an engine over time of driving word of mouth but unlike the quick hit of advertising where it's like you get immediate sales you see the direct ROI this is building an engine of like brand ambassadors basically companies like Glossier they've really built this over time and you'll want to find those brand ambassadors because there'll be a steady sort of steady source of content and you know awareness and consideration like they will slowly convert people who follow them to consider your product beyond that you should experiment basically we had a friend of company de-scout they're not even like a consumer well they basically have a marketplace where you can basically sign up to be like a user to test things and they're post one viral and they got like so many downloads that crashed their server on TikTok so it can work but B2B I would focus on making content and using Facebook's ad tools to target that post to the right audience right it's interesting Google, Facebook still one and two they still dominate a lot like their content is very cost effective and then you can leverage Facebook and Instagram's amazing ad tools to target the right businesses so for example for poppies you know we advertise to SMB's and you know we can hit the exact type of audience we need with our content so it makes it really easy for us to like right get in front of the right brands and for us let's just say so on the podcast typically our clips are like us just talking nothing's really flashy nothing's disappearing not getting afraid in terms of content do you have any advice for what type of content people should post what's what does the data suggest in terms of most impressions well I mean so like well I think it drilled down to like what problem would you be trying to solve like focusing on that like where would you start with that makes sense yeah so if it's like selling a product probably highlight the product in a cool way meaningful way yeah and I'd always drill back down to like what problem we're trying to solve if you're trying to drive sales you just using that content and as with like tracking links to measure and refine that work over time can be important but when you're talking about like content for this podcast like how do we advertise this yeah how would you do it well you guys so you can actually you can actually make a lot of good content so like with you you're almost an influencer and a content creator in and of yourself and so you're making this content thank you so much I would just say both I usually say content creator as like they're known for their content whereas an influencer is known for their audience so like kind of a Kim K. versus like you know a really creative artist on Instagram yeah but for you guys you could take clips of this video works really well I'd always lean towards video but you take clips of this and put it on Facebook and Instagram and boost it towards people that follow similar right brand like whether it's how I built this exactly you know let's say that yeah if you're launching a soap company you probably boost your products to people that follow like Dove and like Axe or whatever so yeah it's basically taking clips of content like content is oxygen for brands you need the content and then using smart targeting to reach the right audience this is very much a wide-combinator conversation it's like a start up comes in they ask the question and you get the answer so directly yeah and another thing is like measuring and refining like being agile like the mistake of the past was people investing a lot people who I see who are doing the best things with content now they make the content and they see how it's received and immediately they're working with a creator on the next batch to refine it so for example if you guys took clips from the show or let's say I'll just contrast two companies like the soap company and like let's take a B2B company like I'm making internet conferencing software you know there's like very different asks the soap company probably can use influencers on YouTube, Instagram, the company cannot like they're not going to it's going to be hard to find a LinkedIn influencer or like a for someone to promote your B2B software but on the soap side for example I'm going to start telling people LinkedIn influencers yeah the one and only yeah no there are I mean I know some people like when Gary Vee or Justin Kahn post totally and LinkedIn actually drives a significant amount of traffic you'd be surprised for example the soap company you might test out with TikTok we're talking about something right now around like you watch your hands for like 20 seconds instead of 5 seconds and so it's the happy birthday right you got to do the happy birthday there's so many songs coming out right now but yeah you might you might have like people doing a TikTok just talking about like what song do they use to like like what funny mnemonics do they use to like and it might be something really silly hence the views but anyways you might experiment with TikTok giving to people on YouTube who just talk about eco-friendly products whatever getting a bunch of content some of this might hit and go viral probably not most things don't but you get this content and when you boost it you'll see which ones you're converting and so you kind of lean into that like you say oh Instagram stories are converting when we're using like outside photography or whatever and then on the B2B side you would purely just be creating like maybe some lifestyle content like it's us chatting on the table and then it cuts to like emotion graphics video of like the software being used to make this stuff easier or whatever you boost that and then refine like the targeting based on like oh when we boost this to people who work from work from home companies it works really well or whatever I like it it makes sense Facebook's targeting is so granular it's amazing you can target like it's scary you can target people who work at Home Depot or women who are pregnant but only like six months pregnant like it's crazy targeted it's scary that's why it's like influencers in a vacuum because that by itself probably won't do the trick for you you've got to think about media and content kind of holistically we just hired a social media person and the her whole thing was data I mean she her whole thing is post the content she also creates content but then she posted she sent us to Google she very generic but obviously and she's tracking everything impressions, views, clicks and we're just seeing you know we'll refine as we go you'll learn a lot of things if you you just look at the data you need to run enough experiments but if you run like 50 experiments two of them are going to work and so you'll see it and you'll see it hit and that's when you that's where you invest do you ever think about or worry about Instagram changing in any way or maybe even eating you up in some way or acquiring you I mean what's the what's the relationship I can't talk about that smart answer no, no yeah I mean we view poppies as a content operating system and we view it as way more than than just Instagram although Instagram is an important like we're a Facebook and an Instagram marketing partner they're an important part of our ecosystem and I have some friends at Facebook who are some of my best friends and some people that are earnestly so helpful like our partners manager sim he's so helpful that he's just an extension of your team and we we get so much from them because we are listening to like where their product is they're listening to where ours is and we collaborate with poppies as an engine for creating content for anything we've had people like Macy's that used our content in billboards and Times Square people have used it like Dunkin Donuts or Jimmy John's and like in-store menus but we specialize in social because of the the speed scale and the data that you get but we have been investing a lot in these other things like everything from TikTok and other networks to content for ads it's broader than you know Instagram influencers as an example and so we are trying to build something that's very durable and if we lost access to these networks we could still be we still have a community of creators that can make content and it's a viable asset broadly speaking but we always are keeping an eye out for not being too dependent on one thing and keeping an eye on what we can do that provides durable value because look it matters about the durability matters like Vine was a test but it's not here and same with many so true great companies and so we look at content as there has always been a media channel whether it's out of home digital TV radio Facebook influencers but the one constant has been content right and so we want to we want to own that in the long term yeah we want to we want to own that and it's a long journey it's going to take us you know a decade more to really be where we want to be but we're constantly thinking about like where's the market influencer where they can find you website Instagram give it all online so it's popularpays.com and then for all of our handles you know Instagram Twitter Tech Talk all the handles are just at popular pace and if you're a creator we have a an iOS app for content creators and a web app and so you can browse different gigs across all the networks and then as a brand just reach out to us check out our info online and then reach out to us if you want to sign up so we're happy for everyone even if you're a small brand and you don't have much of a budget we'll point in the right direction or you can use our light tier and then if you're an enterprise brand we can lean in and help you with these strategies like with service and support and one last note what advice would you give for a budding entrepreneur someone like you who was in your position eight years ago don't give up yeah keep it moving if you're just starting you probably didn't know what you got yourself into but if you just stay alive then you can be successful it's all about just persisting a lot more than anything else awesome thanks brother thanks for coming on podcast thank you thanks guys it was great started a storefront team consists of Diego Torres Palma Natalia Capolini Megan Conrad Haley Nelson Owen Capolini and me Nick Conrad our music is composed by DoubleTouch we've got more great episodes coming out every week so if you aren't already consider subscribing this is a very supportive and helpful community of entrepreneurs and we'd love for you to be a part of it you can find us on Instagram, Facebook LinkedIn and YouTube at startupastorefront because in case you didn't know we film all of our episodes and release them a day early on YouTube and you can always go back and listen to any of our other episodes available wherever you get your podcasts and on our website startupastorefront.com thank you for listening we'll see you next time