Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Actually so excited to have you on. Can you kind of give me some context as far as your background, where you are right now? Just the whole shebang.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Happy breakdown. Excited to be on the show today. My journey towards entrepreneurship, this whole startup world began when I was 17 years old. And in particular, it began with this idea to take our favorite content creators, creators that I watch creators, my co founder, watch global in some capacity. Now, being high school students, we had zero clue as to how to do this. We had no business experience, we had no sales experience, we had no email experience, we had no website creation experience. But the only experience we did have was that we watched their content, we understood their content, and we're fans of their content. And so with this little understanding of the creator economy and this bigger understanding of their content, we started reaching out to our favorite creators. People like Logan Paul. Yes. Theory, Mark Rober, Vitaly FouseyTube, these OG creators that really structured the way of what content is today. And within six months, we heard back from an up and coming content creator named Lope. At the time, he had about 2 million subscribers and he had just come off this big push right from Vine. Remember Vine? Right. And I got on a call with him and I said to Logan, look, this is what we're going to offer. We want to expand your audience, we want to get more eyes on your content. We believe that we have a solution for you. We're going to translate your content using a tool that YouTube already enables and we're going to help you grow. And he said, sure. You know, I like the sound of this. Why don't we do some free samples and get things off, off the ground? I said, absolutely. And so since then 2017, we've actually been doing all of Logan's subtitling. And then more recently, start of this year, we're doing all this dubbing. So if you actually go to his YouTube channel and you can change the audio track to Hindi and Spanish, it's all done by us. Like Logan, we were able to expand with many other content creators, starting with globalizing their content, expanding their content. This lasted in high school, about two years until we stopped because we realized one, this was a fun little project and two, we had enough money to go to university and pay tuition. So then, want to make my parents proud. Actually was planning to go down the whole med school path last minute, decided to go to business school instead. And during my second year of university, long story short, pandemic hit, started another company in the creator economy, built that company up left that and actually came back to a view about a year and a half ago. And with this new understanding of the market, the new understanding of AI tools, understanding of pricing, understanding of like what a true startup is, kind of reimagined. The problem and the solution that we're offering to creators through that expanded relatively quickly out to not only content creators, but also large brands, edtech platforms, so on and so forth, essentially helping everybody globalize and distribute their content to new international markets.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Amazing. And you mentioned a bunch of stuff there. I was, right? I was writing notes like a madman when you were talking because I was like, okay, there's so much here that I want to break down. I think the first thing I'm most curious about though is when I look at your product, like, it looks so well designed. Like, I think whoever's done your UX has done just like a fantastic job. Because even like just looking at it at a glance, I was like, okay, like I know how to use this, you know, or like I felt that way, whether that's true or not. But can you kind of give us some insight as far as, like, what's your process as far as building a product? And not just like the functionality, but also like the psychological, like the UI aspect of making sure that that turns out really well? Because I think you've done such a good job of that, especially for something you build when you were in high school. Like, good Lord, man, I appreciate that.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: This, the version you're seeing of the website today has iterated probably a hundred times. And I'm not even kidding when I say 100 times, I mean every single week. We are understanding our customer feedback, we're understanding what's trending in the markets, and we're making very small iterations to put some perspective into this. This was actually a big conversation internally. When we had launched version one of the actual platform, we were obsessed with this idea of optionality. We wanted to give our creators options to do this, options to do that, options to translate dub, options to distribute, options to do everything they could possibly think of. There is a button that allowed them to do. And when we were even using our own platform, we're like this, this is so overwhelming. This is ridiculous. Why are we having them select 10 options that they have to select by default anyways to get our end product, the end product being globalized content that is uploaded to every international channel you run or international channels that we manage for you. So we kind of went right back to the drawing board and said, okay, if we Had a creator go through our flow. All of this stuff has to be done for them. Can we put that all into one option? 10 things into one button. You click that button, it's done. It's automatically done now if you want additional requests, notes, add a note. Done. Right. And so this idea of optionality grew on us very quickly. And how, I like to use this analogy of how you go to a diner sometimes and you flip through 50 pages of meals that they offer and you go in there thinking you know what you want, but then you start seeing that they serve Chinese food and then you start seeing that they serve Indian food, then you start seeing that they serve British food and like, where the hell am I? Right? And then you don't know what you want. And then people start to get upset and they, and they aren't willing to necessarily pay the most amount of money that they're willing to pay for a start.
So we use that analogy. We cut down that menu to essentially three options. That's it, that's all you're getting, three options. If three options don't fit for you, send us a note, fix it. We'll add something unique. Right. That's a case by case basis. So that was a big part of that design process, was understanding what are we actually solving for and eliminating any barrier to solve that bigger problem as quickly as possible.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: I might be taking an analogy too far here, but I, I never trust restaurants that have like giant menus. And this actually happened to me today where like I went into a restaurant and the menu, literally it was like the thickness of a small book. And I was like, I just don't think you guys can do like this many things. Well, yeah, you know, so I don't know if that translates into software or like, am I taking that too far? Or like, is there some level?
[00:06:36] Speaker B: No, you're absolutely right. I mean, even when we look at some of the competitors that are out there, they're offering a hundred things and it's like, okay, it's all rooting from the same technology, a bunch of spin offs. But in reality it's only one core product that people are interested in. I'm not going to invest time, energy and resources for a product that can get five customers interested versus a product that will get 500 customers interested. Right. It doesn't make sense from a business perspective and resource perspective. And so what we been doing in terms of expansion is as soon as we see signals that things are becoming more interesting to some creators versus others, we'll then push A kind of a MVP version of that product. Get some data, test, iterate, and then deploy to larger amounts of people. And we found that cycle to work a lot better than, oh, let's just spin off this. Oh, we're getting an email from one person that says, oh, we want Gen AI thumbnails. And it's like, all right, how many people actually want that? And how can we build a piece of technology that's going to outrival the best other Gen AI thumbnail solution? Right. Unlikely to spin that up in one week. So that's how we decide on that and the design process. The one thing I always tell my designers, and I have such an eye for design myself, I've built a lot of the initial designs and kind of give it to my designer to tweak up, is what are the biggest, best brands doing consistently? How are they able to capture the attention of the audiences? Because these creators that we're working with get brand deals, advertisements, sponsorships from the biggest brands in the world. They're seeing and exposed to the best media out there. They're going to want to work with a company that reflects that as well. And so before we even start designing, it is a deep, deep research phase, down to the understandings as to, why did that company put that button there? Why is that copy written that way? Why are people transitioning from here to this page, from this page? I want them to understand at such a deep level so then we can understand. Most importantly, I love this part of it. What's their next step? How do we do it before? And that's how we navigate it.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: When you're communicating this to designers, I would. I'm really curious about your workflow here because I could see a world in which you're doing all this. It's called, like, research, where you're asking, like, why do they have the button right there? What principles do they. And you pass that off to, say, a developer. And I could still see a bunch of worlds where the developer, like, gets it wrong. Ish. Not, like, perfectly right. Like at least 60% of the time where the developer has, like, the spirit of it, but it's like, off base. So I'm really curious as to, like, your workflow with designers. What, like, how many iterations do you guys go through before you're like, okay, this is presentable.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: So the way we normally navigate this is we'll do some kind of lo fi understanding as, here's the rough outline, here's what we want, here's the value of this page, here's the messaging that we're trying to communicate and then it goes through essentially like this all break down to two week sprints. So like one week worth of initial, then one week of iteration after we're done the iteration, that's when we then go for our development team and say, here, here's a game plan. Here's exactly what we're looking for. Here are the things that we're loose on and here's the things that we are very strict on. This is the point of this page. So that could be something like an animation that we think is going to be a very big part of the UX component or it's going to be a color grid that's going to be a very big part of the UI side. At the end of the day, we make it very easy for our developers because everything gets pulled from our own custom library that we developed. And so if we're making a big change like a button or a color or a font, we can swap that out really quickly. That helps a lot for AB testing. But essentially, yeah, I mean like our developers know that, that we're very keen on little things like this. But again, I'm very, also cognizant as of the bigger picture of need to deploy quickly, need to get things out to customers fast. And so if, even if it's a tiny, tiny, tiny detail, I'll let that slide iterate on the next sprint, modify it, but make sure that customers are still able to use it.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: The bigger picture and what is sort of the scope of work of your designers? So is it like, are they the ones doing the research or are they just designing pages or so, and, and I'll give you some context here, this is a process that I just don't have a lot of insight on, but it's super interesting to me because I have insight on the development side where it's like, I think probably in an ideal world, you, you give developers as little design as possible in general, you know, not every time, but in general you're like, just build the stupid thing right. Like, yeah, it looks exactly like this. Just make it, just make it happen, right? Make it like how much free reign you give designers. Like, is it similar, like, or I guess it can't be similar because they're the ones making the page. So can you just kind of give me some insight here?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so I, I'm pretty hands on on most design processes. I will help them do some research and that research I really enjoy doing in general because it helps Me understand things, what's the market heading towards, what are other companies doing at the moment and what are competitors doing? I am obsessed with my competitors. I follow them on every social. I use their product a lot, I understand their product and I'm trying to figure out what their next step is. And so this design process helps me also get a better understanding from a business perspective, this obsession I have with them. And I liaise a lot of information down to my design team to say, here's exactly what I'm thinking, here's what I'm visualizing. Do you understand this? And once I have a clear understanding of just the communication component of it, that's when they will actually put pencil to paper and actually start to put something together in a way where they're bringing my vision to fruition ideally. And we found that that flow works relatively well. It works on certain types of designers versus other designers. Other designers need a clear cut, written guide. That's not what you're going to get with me. You're going to get kind of this word vomit of ideas, ambitions of different inspirations. I'm pulling from kind of this idea board and then it's up to them to put it together into something that actually makes sense using best design practices and principles.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Well, it seems like they've done a great job. So thanks for, thanks for answering all my questions, kind of giving me insight there because that's just. The whole process is just something that I just don't have a great insight on. I freely admit that I'm an idiot when it comes to design and I, I probably forever will be, so. So yeah, that's just not in my, my skill set. If you need someone to make like fantastic banana bread, that's. I'm your guy.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: But I'm gonna have to take you up on that.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. So next time I'm in Toronto.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: I'll make you some.
I am curious as to your experience and your thoughts on just the creator economy, because it sounds like you've been around basically as long as Logan Paul. Right. So can you kind of give some insights on. I don't even know what to ask exactly, but like, where is that going? Where's it at right now? Where do you think it's going? What's the whole rundown?
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack when it comes to, to what the creator economy is. And in particular what we're seeing is the rise of brands becoming content creators. I was on Twitter the other day, or X or whatever you want to call it now. And I saw a post by Ryanair and I was like, is this the, is this the parody account or is this the real account? And they're just shit posting to their customers, replying to the criticism that their customers give them and they're just eating it up completely. And I'm like, are you kidding me right now? Another example of this was the Icelandic cricket team. Who the hell knows the Icelandic, who knows there is cricket in Iceland, right? But they were again just doing all this shitpost during the national cricket tournaments and getting a ton of traction with that stuff. And so it's, it's this rise of brands that are becoming creators. And I think the companies and brands that aren't following this trend are very, very quickly going to get weeded out because people are consuming content for entertainment, for education, for information, not for promotion. And if you make your content so heavily promotion, promotional heavy, guess what? Skip, skip, skip. And brands that don't evolve with that trend are going to fall very quickly behind. So. So even with the companies I'm working with right now, we're funneling a lot of their content to bigger purchases, whether that be a Chess.com course, whether that be UFC pay per view subscriptions, whether that be educational courses. So how do we create content that allows the consumer to get value and also make that end purchase point? At the end of the day, it's tough. So that's one side of the market, right? On the brand side, I think we're also going to be seeing a lot of mainstream media heavily leverage your traditional content creators. I mean seeing the amount of exposure that people like Kai Senat Ishowspeed are getting when it comes to like celebrity basketball games.
Even outside of that, we're seeing other micro influencers being picked up for Porter Airline showcases. We're seeing these creators get involved in so many other not typically seen brand integrations. And I think that's going to be coming up a lot more frequently than what we normally seem to. And I'll kind of end off on, on where I believe this content trends are headed because this is always a very interesting one. And I talk about this, it gets people like, oh, that's fascinating. But we started off with this really short form buying 7 second content and then as that weeded away, then we saw this rise of the 10 to 15 minute vlog style content that picked up a lot of popularity. And then we had the David do style of content where that 10 to 15 minute content daily got reduced down to four minutes posted three times a week. And then we saw the evolution of TikTok of the one minute videos. And then we're starting to see the evolution of podcasts, which is again now that hour long plus content. And then we're starting to see the like. It's just this full cycle of short form, medium to long form, medium to intermediate to intermediate, medium to long form. It gets, it's this whole cycle, full wave. And I think what's important is that content creators with struggle is converting their audiences from short form content to long form content, back to short form content, because people are so used to consuming one type of medium and they're used to consuming that style of content for that one creator. And so that's something that we always getting questions about is how do I change over my TikTok audience to YouTube? It's like you're essentially rebranding yourself and creating an entirely new Persona for a YouTube audience that now wants to consume content. So that's going to be a very interesting struggle. And I'm curious to see how creators trust that and what tools are out there that might support that as well.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Are you seeing more creators wanting to go from short form to long form or from long form to short form? Just, I mean, I guess I know there's people on both sides.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Short to long is, is typically the, the biggest because of the monetization capabilities. I mean, at the end of the day, even saw the rise of 24 hour live streams, these subathons that people are doing on Kick on Twitch on YouTube Live, and it's like even I started streaming, I started streaming MMA content. I'm a huge MMA fan, so I. So even I started streaming on the weekends of doing commentary and stuff just for the fun of it. And a lot of people know that when you have long form content repositories, it's very easy to repurpose those into short form repositories. And so they're trying to gun for that long form content. However, the problem is though, a lot of these creators are short form first. So it's really hard. They go from short to long.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: But long to short, yeah, long to short is actually super easy. This is sort of the basis of our content strategy. So I run marketing for Turnkey. That's my role. And long form content is quickly becoming like the pillar that we're building all of our content on. You know, in the past, people, I think people would get like a bunch of really good returns from SEO. So, you know, writing blogs, get traffic From Google Convert. I think that's a, that's just a dying game. You've got AI that's doing search now. AI, AI, even without the search, was beating search in a lot of ways. Like, my brother doesn't use Google anymore. He's. I mean he is a zoomer, but he doesn't use Google anymore. He just uses ChatGPT.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: And now you have like deep research and so on. So I think search engines are just getting their lunch eaten and you can see this in a bunch of SEO stats if you look up any big websites. So yeah, long form content is, I think the challenge is like, it's really difficult to make. Like, it's hard to keep people entertained, which is why this is like a sort of like medium long, like 30, 30, 40 minutes. That's perfect for me. But I just made some notes on some stuff you said. So one about like corporate communications and then building brands. I do love Ryanair's Twitter X whatever you want to call it.
I think Wendy's has a pretty good one as well.
And honestly, like, man, this is such an exciting world. Would the world be more or less fun if every business communicated like Ryanair or if they communicated like Delta, you know, like, like there. I don't think there's anyone who's like, oh, I just love corporate communication. Like, I just love this.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Well, I think at the end of the day, like, it depends back down to what is the goal of that. Like, is it to get more eyes? Is it actually get a purchase point at the end of the day, Delta, for instance, their consumers probably will relate a lot closer to them with like four will cap on with the whole captain's outfit on by tennis, right? Like very proper, very sophisticated versus something like a Ryanair where it's budget, they know who their customers are. And even to the point where this is always funny to read the comments, it's like people acknowledge that admin cooked right, the admin cooked here. Like, no way admin posted this. Like they, they, they're breaking that fourth wall in a way of like, wait a sec, we know there's a human, a real human behind the scenes here compared to this like corporate ad agency that might be running this BS without any sense of engagement to the audience. Another fun example of this, this was actually one that I've seen a lot on my feed lately was the Paralympics, the official Paralympic account, if you want to get a good laugh out of content.
And I was, I had to do like three takes to see if this Was a parody account just insult assaulting these athletes or if this was the legitimate Paralympic account, it was the legitimate Paralympic count. It is, oddly.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: But guess what?
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Every single video went viral. Every single. There was thousands of comments, there was thousands of likes. They killed it. They absolutely killed it. They took an unconventional path towards it.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: And kind of on the subject of that unconventional path, what do you see as like the advantages and disadvantages of hiring creators and using them for marketing? Because I think on one hand there's like, oh, well, it's just another channel. But on the other hand it's like you're entrusting your brand as someone who has oftentimes a very dedicated following. Like, one wrong word and you're, you're kind of cooked, brother.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Well, that's it. That's exactly, I mean you, that's the problem is one wrong word, one cancellation, one sign of controversy, you're cooked, right? You're literally cooked. And I remember when I was running my previous startup, there was some controversy around one of the creators that had featured on their website there. It was a platform that connected fans, influencers. So we had a bunch of influencers that were, that were connected audiences and stuff. And that was the first time ever I've got like hate emails sent to us saying there's no way you're working with so and so. This is ridiculous. I am like doing X, Y, Z to you guys. I'm like, what the heck? And then we had a call with their management, they send us an actual formal press release saying, hey, we're going to release this tomorrow. Heads up, you may want to remove so and so off your website. And I start to see how that actually works. And so I, I understood why a lot of brands are more cautious around what type of content and what type of content creators they're pushing. But this has been something that's been going on since the dawn of YouTube. It's very family friendly. Content creators have the highest CPI. They're the ones that are getting the massive amounts of brand deals. They're the ones that are getting a lot of opportunities. I mean, look at the Costco guys, right? Very family friendly deals, very family friendly content.
And they are literally everywhere. The Rizzler, right, A.J. bigger. Like these guys are just like ever. Because I hate that low level of controversy. Right? Exactly. They're the fact that they're at an LA Kings game, like dropping the puck and all, doing all this stuff. It's like, like even at the Knicks game, they're there doing like a shoot around like love them or hate them. All we can do is watch that, right? All we can do is just know that these brands are pulling them in. Because there's an audience, may not be you and I, there's an audience that follows them, that dedicated towards them, that loves their content and will engage with that. That creator's content or that brand's content rather, regardless as to who that person.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: And what's been your experience kind of working with big brands? Because I know you mentioned some really big ones like Chess, Logan Paul. I'm actually a little surprised you mentioned Logan Paul. That's what that, that goes back to the working with creators thing.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: But hey, I have some funny stories about that. We were. We were through and through. Like, we were with him with all the controversy facts. Like, we were part of. We were part of it, but we were working with him during our entire process of stuff that happened and is what it is.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that just goes back to like, the dangers of working with a certain creator is like you're just associated and they do some weird stuff and you're like, dang it.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's interesting because look at the playbook that Dana White follows with the ufc, right? I mean, some of these fighters are complete loose cannons when they come out to. When it comes to pr, when it comes to speaking of certain things. And Dana's very.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Fighter, you have to be. You can't just not be a loose. You can't, like, be paid to get hit in the head and not be a loose cannon.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Exactly.
And he. And so Dana always says, this is the fighting game. If you're. If you're upset by what's being said, don't watch it. Right. And he's very firm on that. He believes everybody has free speech. He believes everybody was. Say whatever you want to say, even if it's the darkest, deepest, worst things that someone could possibly say about another human being. Unfortunately, that was a fighting game. There was a time, though, where he did step up and he did call a fighter out. The fighter made some comments about some horrible things happened in past World War. And long story short, Dana did address all this and was very firm as to the ufc. And I personally do not believe in xyz. That's. And so said. So then you start seeing, okay, this is where it comes a liability. Right? This is where you start to see where companies are stepping up and saying, yeah, this is a problem. So again, it's always going to be this fine line that people have to balance no matter how they balance that.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's been your experience with like, brands working with them, how they're balancing that line?
[00:26:04] Speaker B: So for the most part, a lot of the brands that we're working with, we're repurposing all their content from mobile audiences. So the extent that we work with them is we're not creating any new content for them. We're just taking thousands of videos that they are kind of staying dormant, globalizing that, culturally modifying all that. I mean, that's. That's the part that they get most interested in is like, how are we actually culturing modifying this stuff? So how are the words being spoken? How. What's the jargon being said? Some content will resonate in some markets versus other content. Right. Like, if it's explicit content, good luck breaking into the Middle Eastern market. Right. But if they want to do that, how can we address that content and make it more suitable for that audience and then distribute that content like the right eyes? So for the most part, they love all of the latter aspects. What we always get in some really good conversations in is how are we modifying the content and how are we culturally changing that content? An interesting example of this was with Oppenheimer, the movie. You had a couple different versions of the movie that spun out. So the one, there's a one scene where they're speaking, I believe in a bedroom, in a hotel room. And the lady, the main character lady, was sitting there fully nude. It was random ass scene. Like, there's so unnecessary nudes. And in certain regional markets she was draped in clothing, but certain markets she was not. And so it's a very interesting. A lot of people don't, don't get exposed to that. Same thing with Marvel.
A lot of Marvel movies are modified slightly for contextual understanding for international markets. Essentially what we do for a lot of these brands.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Okay, cool. And then I'm really curious as to your experience doing so. This is like, not only is it B2B, but it's. I call it BD. Like B2 Enterprise. Yeah, because I really think there's like the division is not as clear as like B2C and B2B. I think it's in my mind it's like B2C, B2B, B2E and that B2 Enterprise. So it sounds like you're on that kind of like B2 enterprise level. If you could go back, do you think you would go closer to the like B2 smaller B, like B2C, B to smaller B? Or do you enjoy. Do you like Working with the big enterprises. Just curious personally.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: So Brian Collins, who is one of the renowned designers, one of the best ad agencies, spoke to our Techstar class about this topic. B2B, B2E, B2C, all that stuff. And he said, and this actually resonate very interesting and it goes against what you said, actually, which is, I love to hear your thoughts on this. He says none of that exists. It's B2P business to people, regardless if you're selling into enterprise, regardless if you're selling into a business, regardless of selling to customers, you're selling to another person. And I've actually taken that philosophy and applied it to how I do the sales. When we first got with like the UFC and power slab, when we got to Chess.com we got to these bigger companies is I treated them as not this massive conglomerate, but like, here's the problem I'm solving for, for you, for your audience. Right. And I took back that layer of like corporate to it.
And maybe it's just those companies I had worked with seemed to like it better, but it seemed to have worked really, really well to the point where I literally flew to Las Vegas, met with them at their, their hq, which was a dream come true of mine, and talk to them about this. And so it's like, would I go back? I don't know if I'd go back in particular. I think I wish I had understood that concept earlier. So when I did reach out to these brands, when I did reach out to these larger companies, I approached it as people more so than, oh, your company does xyz. Right. Like, how am I going to help you in your role, reach your own milestones better? Right. Like that's kind of how we addressed it. It could, it served well. Now I don't know if it's going to be a long term thing. I don't know. Right. Who knows?
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say, I would say me and him are probably both correct. I think, I mean, at the end of the day, like, he's totally right. We just sell to people for the moment. We'll see how OpenAI does this year. For the moment, we just tell the people. And on the other hand, I think there are some situations and when it's useful to think about the distinction of like B2C versus B2B of course, especially when it comes to implementation because that's where I see the biggest gaps is like it's a very different implementation. Selling to Chess.com, barnes and Noble, whatever, versus like Joe down the street.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: So have you run into any problems with that, with your startup, with IT businesses like one a lot, or enterprises like one a lot, or they hold up your work, anything like that?
[00:30:44] Speaker B: The biggest concern that we've gotten was with some enterprises, they all are slightly different in a sense of technology integrations. Some want this versus some want that versus some want things packaged up in a certain way. Some receive content differently. That's been the biggest challenge, is just making sure that our technology can adapt and be integrated relatively quickly across multiple different use cases. We've gotten to the point where I don't know if this is maybe a problem on my end, but, you know, I like to always see through a lot of opportunities, no matter what it might be, as long as it falls within the scope of what we're doing. We've had a few requests for live streaming, so actually concurrent dubbing live for MMA content, and that's an exciting project for us. I said to them, yeah, sure, we can take care of this. And so we've actually started actually developing technology that do that live side of it. Completely new product line, but the resources were there internally for us. The demand was there. We just had to build the supply. So that was a situation where there was a big request of a new project, saw the opportunity, jumped at it.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: And when you're thinking about building new features, how much of it is like that? You get a request and you're like, oh, this, this is. This has gotta be done. Versus just like feeling it out and thinking like, oh, you know, I think this can make our product better. Or you're like, how much is intuition versus data?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: As long as it falls within this bigger scope of what we're trying to solve, I'm happy to see something through. As long as the integration, the project revolves around content servicing and content distribution, I'm happy. And as long as that distribution leads to greater revenue or monetization opportunities for our customers, we're going to see through a project where things swerve is when they want us to develop a tool that already exists at a cheaper cost, then it's like, okay, we're not going to start competing in a completely different market just to offer you a more competitive rate. Unless there is a much larger demand for this. Absolutely. And that's where we'll pull data. That's where we'll try to figure out, okay, market size, understanding TAM opportunities, understanding the opportunity costs. At our end, I would say most of it right now has been a lot of this intuition side. And then when I Have that odd feeling. Then I'll dump the data and just do a quick kind of number crunching, make sure that it is actually a realistic opportunity to see through.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel like what you mentioned is a threat that a lot of businesses face and they don't really know it is. I think if your business does well enough, there's a risk where it's going to become a consultancy where you're just making custom Software.
You have 90% of your customers, but you have the big three that actually hold the majority of your revenue. And they're like, hey, we want this feature. And you know it's going to take you six months but you don't want to let them down, you don't want to disappoint them. And then it's like you're not a SaaS anymore. Like you're literally just a consultant. You're literally a software development consultant.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: It's a fine line, right? You have to balance that.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: How do you balance it?
[00:33:48] Speaker B: So we're like, we're pretty firm as to like here's the offerings that we have in order to get to our end goal, right? So in order to get our end goal of distribution, there are 10 things that need to happen to content now typically, and this is where interesting demand has been. And I go back to the optionality question of like you used to offer all 10 independently. And then people are like, yeah, we just need all this bundled, great. But now we have some odd cases where they're like, oh, I actually just need this part of your technology which is, let's just say the dubbing. We just want to use your dubbing software or we just want to use your transcription software. We have a few customers like that on those cases. We'll isolate and we'll modify for them. But if we're, if we have to like innovate and develop brand new set for that, that's again, we'll have to go back to the drawing board and decide does this make sense, right? Is this a viable product that we can see 10, 20,000 people using or is this going to be something that one person wants to have because it's super unique to them, right? And so that's where we again will evaluate the circumstance, make sure it makes sense. And so we're not going down that, that path completely. Unless of course, here's the thing, unless it's a big enough customer willing to pay enough money and fund the development of it, then by all means we'll run that, right? There's no problem.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: And how are you guys thinking about building your company especially? So I'm sure you're using a lot of automation. How are you guys thinking about building your company with AI on the horizon?
[00:35:21] Speaker B: So everything that we've been able to do so far has been AI. We're pretty LLM agnostic, and so we're not trying to compete with the major LLMs that are out there. In fact, as they get better, get better. And so that's been actually something that we've been really digging deeper on. When we first started to build up this company, I thought that the vision could be, let's compete with OpenAI's transcription system or compete with Google translation system or whatever it might be. And I was like, what's the point, right? I mean, they have more resources, more processing ability and, and a lot more money to do this than we would ever have right now. So why not create a system that can be easily interchanged and swapped depending on what is a leading AI technology that's out? And so being able to have that flexible system also allows us to adapt our technology based off customer needs. So as an example, some systems are really, really good at doing Japanese translations in Japanese. We're right now working with the Japan Cricket Association. And so for them, we need a system that understands that content. So we'll adapt that content, we'll make that modification, it'll be a lot easier to work with versus another system. So that's where the interchangeability comes in and that's where we're leveraging AI and how we're using AI to actually streamline that entire process.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Okay, well, I know you didn't pay me any to offer consulting for you guys, but I will give some right now. I think you guys made the right decision in not competing with open AI.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Thank you. Appreciate it.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: They have some. They like their nerds. Like, they like their olive oil extra virgin. And those guys, they're just on it, dude.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Yeah, those guys are absolutely cracked. It was like, I remember the. The funny. There's also some funny stuff that came out. Remember when Amazon Fresh and everyone's like, wow, the technology, the cameras, was actually just a team in India that were just watching the video, seeing what you grabbed, and then charging your Amazon account. It's like, I know what deep sea had come up. People were like, wait, are these like, so much like Chinese, like people in China just, like, responding to my answers, or is this actually AI? Right? Like, it's so funny to think through, like, how these people, like, how the customers are looking at some of these softwares I find that so funny yeah.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: It'S a it's a funny world we live in it's it's a weird one so I don't know well actually I really appreciate having you on if people want to learn more about you what you're doing where should they go?
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Yeah you can check out I mean I post a lot of Updates on our LinkedIn so you can check me out on LinkedIn Sakshi Maharaj on there as well as really just our view website is where you can if you ever want globalized content content distributed all around the world we're happy to pop on a call get things rolling with you guys as well so that the main thing updates is amazing.
[00:38:05] Speaker A: Well thanks so much for hopping on Anything else you want to cover before we hop off?
[00:38:07] Speaker B: Oh that's everything perfect it was great to be on the show today Great.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: To have you See ya.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: It.
