From 50k Users in 6 Weeks to Shutting Down, with Ryan Hickman
The Failory Podcast
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Full episode transcript -

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hello. Welcome to another episode of The Hilary Podcast, where we rewind the tape of Founders journey and unlocked critical takeaways that you can apply to your business. I am Brendan Handle Echo. And on this episode, I'm very excited to be joined by Ryan Hickman, who is the founder at Epic Aye aye and company to help start of funders across the spectrum with their multitude of air base tools ranging from investor intelligence to decking. Before this, Brian also ran another company with the same co founder called Me V, a mobile live streaming platform that dominated live video by reality before snap periscope and at the time the newly announced Facebook live along with the incredible insights from that journey. In this episode, Brian and I discussed the idea of first mover advantage and disadvantage, shiny Object syndrome and Ryan's experience with waffles and Alicia Keys. Sit tight, get a notebook ready and thank you for listening. This podcast wouldn't be possible without the help of our friends over at referral Hero. The all in one platform could design and run flexible referral programs that grow your bottom line.

If you're tired of wasting money on Facebook, ads or writing tons of content that never rank on Google but already have loyal customers. You should definitely try a referral program. The Dollar Flight Club grew its business by 13% and holiday pirates added 300,000 emails in less than a month after setting up their referral programs. The best thing about all of this is that you can get started in minutes with their no code widgets, and if you sign up today, you can get 20% off with the code. Fail ary to zero. Try it now for 14 days without any cost at referral. Hero dot com Once again, that's a referral hero dot com Hello and welcome to another foot of failure Podcast. Your one stop shop for failed ventures in the Founder's Behind them. I'm your host, Bat and Yoko. And today I'm so excited to have Ryan Hickman on the show with us. Hello,

Ryan. Thank you for being on the show. Are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you? Fantastic. Great. Great Ryan was previously the head of product and thin air. He was previously also called 100 Me V, which was a mobile last year in platform that I love to say was something that, you know, popped up before the huge giants that we know today. I'd like, pick, talk and bite, etcetera.

And currently, Ryan is the founder at Epic. Aye, aye and right has, like a great, great history. But I'd love to just scale back and, you know, I hope my summary did you just this, Ryan, But I love if you could just introduce yourself in any way possible. You like Thio?

2:22

Absolutely. I am a very technology centric frontiersmen. If you will focus on building technology that is often times a few years ahead of its time. I'm currently a partner at Epic Epic is a venture studio where we develop products around helping startups succeed across. What we define is the founders journey. So everything from the ideation of the business to the early validation of the business funding product development all the way through to growth. We've created a myriad of different products that enable that over my career, I've created cos some that have succeeded, and heIp seen exits from Ad Needle, Taylor's etcetera. I've also have companies that I've been behind that weren't so successful. Such is maybe which is a lot of the reasons why

3:15

we're here today. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I feel like that one did much better than the one high trying to. But I love to just, you know, just jump into it. This is a great Segway into my first question, but you talk about how you know, you had companies that had, like, exits and then companies that didn't have exists. But I love to just, you know, get your I guess sentiment behind becoming a founder in the first place are like in 2009. Actually, you started as the co founder and at needle, I guess. What's your mantra bound? Not like. Why did you go into start ups first before working in industry?

3:47

So I actually was working at a bank at the time and seen opportunity. I guess I'm always looking for opportunities. I guess that any founder anyone with that entrepreneurial spirit is always looking for new opportunities and everything that they do when they're ordering coffee at the Starbucks or their, you know, experiencing something on an airplane at the bank. There were these archaic processes in how they marketed to find new audiences and, you know, as we start to see this transition are I started to see this transition into digital media. I've seen it. They just becoming more fragmented and had less idea what was going on. They were spending more time trying to figure out how to prepare the marketing, opposed to how to quantify and really get that marketing out. And so it was in that moment where I spoke to the senior management and asked if they could be the first customer off this idea that I was working on and they said absolutely anything to support. And before we knew it, we were 30 km RR on the second month of the business, and we built this platform that consolidated with today they call trade deaths. But what consolidated the online advertising experience?

So you log into one platform, you build your creative, your traffic, your creative from one platform you pay for your assertions from one platform you've you reporting from one platform that amassed these incredible efficiencies toe, identify where there were problems in campaigns and when there's opportunities to scale. And I guess you know we continue to push that and we were fortunate enough to sell it to another company called Click It. And it was the journey of trying to identify where the customers come from, how to keep those customers how to innovate around those customers. Where to focus your tough, All of that magic, I think, became incredibly exciting and kind of encouraged me to go to the rodeo. A 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th Time s. Oh, yeah, after we've sold out,

you know, I had a little surplus of cash Added was based out of upstate New York outside of Albany, and what I started to do was to commute into New York City. And I met some gentlemen who were working on this NFC marketing platform. So this is before there's an apple pay. This is before there's a Google wallet, and what we did was we took the bones of at needle. So this reporting the mechanism, this ad trafficking mechanism and connected it to the NFC technology at the time, which was incredibly magical. You take a phone, we touch something you don't need to download an app, and whatever you touch calls the Earl that makes magic happen on the phone. And from that relationship we were able to build out than air and we built some incredible products. Were Google, Walgreens,

Adidas, Samsung Horizon. I mean, it was incredible and bleeding into Maybe when I left I started it Influence of platform because I just kind of been in this ad tech, you know, finding new ways to market online space in my head. And it successfully worked out for me, so I just kind of continued to nurture that. So we we looked at this opportunity around celebrity influencers, and we built this platform that allowed thes influencers to pair with brands and deploy activations on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, etcetera. We sold that. And on the back end of selling it, we were able to keep a technology license, which was one of the awesome things in that relationship. With that license we crafted the foundation of maybe,

And it was how could we take this model of implements or marketing and make it work for the hyper local on the micro influencers? Statistically, we've seen that the celebrity influencers were great, you know, on MBA player Kim Kardashian, they they post something and it definitely has a significant reach. But the metrics behind that reach and the way that impacted brand recall was significantly different than when you had 10 people that were part of a hyper lyrical or a micro community And how much more influence was built into those experiences. And, you know, recognizing that there was this change in landscape into video in this push for video we created

8:7

maybe yeah, absolutely. That was a great great summary. You know, you talk about me would touch this huge passion and, you know, you talk about how you're getting the influences, how you're getting the micro influencers involved. And granted, I didn't, like, know the story like I've read the story, but I love to know why you considered

8:24

a failure. So from a learning point of view, it was wonderful. It's pretty, you know, I'm a programmer, right? So everything for me is math, right? So the math of maybe is we spent a lot of time, spent a lot of capital to make it go, and we didn't achieve the r o i on the capital and the resources that we were looking for. So for that reason, I put it in the failure bucket.

8:48

Sure, sir. And then you eventually shut down. Maybe because, yeah, because you guys were competing. And, you know, it's like against, like, periscope, etcetera. Is that, uh, yeah, absolutely. You know,

I definitely agree with you on your sentiment of working on things that were, like, definitely before they're popular. You know, maybe we have thin and doing NFC, but yeah, you know, I'd love to take this chronologically and just go into me, V What would you describe

9:14

me? We did so maybe was a live video streaming platform. So what today people prefer to periscope. Er I g live is very much what maybe was birthed around with one primary driver being too mature to the partner monetization model that YouTube has. And it's but introduce that day one. So the periscopes of the world and meerkats of the world are VC back. They're focused on growth, and they weren't able to create those types of connections with the creators That was foundational to media. So I'd say live video streaming platform is the best. Wayto put that in the box?

9:54

Uh, absolutely. And then your co founder Tamir had connections that eventually negotiated Y'all deals with, you know n B A. Players like Ty Lawson and Trey Brick Thio become like influences on your platform to, you know, share live video and make it very, very popular. I love, you know, just like the taco. By the journey of that, like, how did you decide on these players? How did you get these players?

10:18

So Tomer is incredibly connected to that world. One of his great friends is Billy Hunter, who ran the N b A players Association. And you know, the Players Association's is responsible for helping amass wealth and fight for opportunity for the entire N B A. So the access was unprecedented. And you know what we were able to do was rapidly produce a prototype and get into the hand in the prototype of the business, not just the technology, and get into the hands of some very excited agents because the agents expressed a problem often to him. It was, you know, I just signed an amazing contract, and I recognized the importance of my brand because I could get hurt any day. And if I'm hurt, I lose access to this windfall of opportunity in life and you know there's the one percenters like LeBron James who are going to get these amazing Nike contracts. But right now I'm unknown. Unheard of.

How can I show brands that I have influenced? How could I show brands that I have impact? And then how could I monetize that along this journey? So for us, it was taking the ideology of the influence of platform that we had and the understandings around that data and surprisingly, the solution to this perk that these players were expressing. We kind of been kind of architect of the Call it prototype. I mean, it was pretty advanced prototype, but we architect of the prototype around that solution and they were excited. They were all in it. Everybody, we showed it to its They said, This is the future. This is what we want to work on. This is what we want to do because you know,

these guys have 100,000 followers, a 1,000,000 followers, three million followers on the social platforms, and that can't get any brand deals because they don't have 100 million 50 million followers. So it was extremely valued on there. And where this potentially can go some. Yeah,

12:19

yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I love that you talk about this being a very, very advanced product. As you know, I don't think or I love you could touch on this, but this isn't your first rodeo in live video. You were previously or I don't know if there's just like prior to add needle thin air. But you worked on something called the Waffle Shop with CMU. You know, it was like a reality show where, you know, students ran the restaurant in the restaurant. Attendees were people on the reality show. I'd love if you could just see it. I just touch on that.

12:50

The Waffle shop was incredible. Jon Rubin, who was a professor at CMU, reached out to me and I don't even know how he got my contact. While originally I I am from Pittsburgh. I didn't go to CMU. So the connection I have no idea how it happened. But I got an email one day, said I heard you can build anything and I responded absolutely. And we got on the Skype and he said, This is what I want to dio I wanna open a wa ho diner that Onley opens at 11 at night till three in the morning. And I only want to serve wobbles in water. Nothing else. No alcohol, no eggs, nothing. Just waffles.

And what I want to do is I want to put this in close proximity to the college bars that are nearby. And what I want to do is with a stage inside of the shop well lit with cameras. And I want to stream live these chaotic instances in this very artistic way of people that are a little bit of need creative that come into this experience where there's only waffles, right? So everything about it is just weird and their live video streaming on a stage inside of this waffle shop, which is just weird. And we're gonna put a host David Letterman style George Carson stout, and we just wanna capture these experiences. I said, I'm all in. And so we built this platform and in his world went extremely viral. And I thought it was incredible. And I got that experience, and that fueled this kind of expertise in being alive. Dream producer, if you will.

And I was doing consulted of work for Alicia Keys, helping her team with building their social media and their digital brand. And we work on this really cool project called The Vault and Fast Forward into the vote. It was this in her physical studio. We went and she walked us downstairs and as this giant safe and she opened it up and she's pulling out these photos with and they're incredible. These collection of magazine covers thes songs that have never been heard of with the most amazing people in the world. And she says, What I want to do is I want to give this to my fans. I literally wanna recreate this physical vote and put it on the Internet so that my fans can experience this. And at the moment I mentioned that, you know, I love everything about this with the most magical part beyond the content beyond this archive of Amazing This is you connecting to you. And I thought going live would be the best way I I told her about her and and and the rest of the team. I told him about this this waffle shop, saying, and they said,

Wow, we want to do that. But like this with this and I said, Great, let's do it and we built the vote and the vote was, you know, another case of being ahead of its time. It was a live stream of your experience. You connected with your Facebook with your twitter, whatever your email, and you were able to kind of chat in this commune way and engage a leash on these live environments. People signed up to the boat, and whenever she went live, they receive notifications. And ah, lot of that thinking.

Was the foundation off what went into? Maybe let's take the live streaming experiences that we have. Let's take the experiences from the influence of marketing in the advertising industry digitally. Let's take the network that we have from these athletes and extremely high net worth individuals. Let's even take the advertisers network of people that look to us to help them find opportunity to market online. And let's roll all of this up into an extremely intuitive, simple experience. Let's call it a crane way only name Democrat because we had the domain already an MK ran Met projector in Hebrew and Tomer, my partner, is Israelis, he proof, and we thought that the connection between that work really, really well. So we walked this McRae and product into how many agents office represented players. We walked into some brands who were excited about connecting with thes MBA players in this varied, immersive way.

And by the seventh day, I believe six. Seventh day we had a product. We had an advertiser. He had participation from some n b A players. We had a plan, and we were ready to take it and validate the product, validate the business model and validate everything else in this spirit of wing

17:22

start. Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. You know, I love that you touched on the topic of like, you know, this is was like your 6/7 day of building the you know, maybe or like Cran are like you were wanting to validate the business model. Because from what I know, or like what I research this or medium, a cran was a experiment. Or like it was something that you could do with live streaming. Yes, sir.

17:45

Absolutely so we've seen all those different opportunities from our pasts and present, and we decided to pull them together to build out the experience of can we build? This idea could be prototype. This idea Can we get quality of feedback around this idea? Can we actually on board both sides of this constituency of this out of this market place? Can we get them the brand who would wantto quantify or help monetize that side of the business? Then can we put this thing in the world in as short of a periods possible? And we very much

18:21

did. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it was great reading your story, but I like this, you know, in the description below. But, you know, you know, we're just like an experiment that was testing out live streaming. And then, like, at one point, you have,

like, Ty Lawson, who was like an MBA player who was traded to the Kings and he, you know, if you loop here like he recorded that on my cran and then that one, like, extremely viral got over like a 1,000,000 loops been like the first couple hours, and then you guys were, you know, going toe to toe with these. Like eventually Hughes giants like meerkat in periscope, you know, they enter the market with different value props and, like, Facebook ends up talking about, like,

ending. Or like, they want to talk about going into, you know, live video, I guess. Talk. Yeah. So

19:5

Facebook. Right. So we did the Ty Lawson thing. It was great. It went incredibly viral. We did not anticipate it to be so big. And that's when things got really changed. The name from MK ran to me V. We actually had a ah, great friend who worked on the android brand come in and help us with shifting it from my cran, which is actually really difficult to say to me being, you know, need TV, right? And, you know, he gave us the brand with the peace sign,

and you know, what sold it to us was he said, Listen, imagine that every time somebody goes live, hold up the peace side, that's the best brand recognition ever. And then we learned a lot about the peace sign. In some countries, it's It's not great. Yeah, we learned that the hard way. Nonetheless, we had this brand and we had another test that came down the funnel, you know, because people seeing the success of Ty Lawson, they seen the use case of here's an influence or who is big but not LeBron James,

who went live created, you know, low production cost content. And you know you don't need handlers. You don't need in line producers. You don't need lighting. You don't need all that, stat. You don't need all of us. You just put our app, you hit record, you go live. You push that content to the Internet and you can monetize it with the brand. So a gentleman came to us and said, Hey, the biggest show on VH one is having their reunion special.

And the main cast, one of the main cast members is having a party at their house. They've invited some of the other cast members to their house for this party. This watch party. I can have her go live on this platform with them. Kind of functioning as an echo chamber supporting the brand supporting the brand, reach an affinity and put this on your platform. I said, great. This sounds great. Little did we know it was gonna go super viral. We thought, you know, maybe 3 4000 people would be tuned into the stream at once So we prepped the servers that way. And at the time at that day, I had just bought a house.

I moved into the house so we didn't have Internet. We didn't have strong Internet. So I was using the Internet for my phone, which wasn't so great just to check on everything to make sure everything was gonna launch accordingly. The first commercial break she went live for maybe five minutes. And there were, like, 60,000 people that hit the live stream all at once from her Twitter and Instagram channels crashed all the servers Bye to run and get to the nearest Starbucks, pull all my machines, fire them up to the network, scale the infrastructure and and figure out how we were going to overcome that. It ended up being an extremely successful because she went live during every commercial break. It ended up in extremely successful experience. At that point, we raised some seed capital because we felt that listen, you know,

it's gonna take a few more resource is to take this thing to the next level, and we clearly have all signs of something that could be massive. We have market signals saying that, you know, live video is the future. We have our success cases showing were able to realize that technology, our brand, these people, that are users that are incredibly engaged. Everything was really highlighting the fact that we should go all in on this deal. So we did. We spend a few weeks and we developed a full version of maybe with authentication and exploration views. And there were people grabs and profiles and all of the mechanics of a social network. We put me into the market and it went like that January thoroughly. That week we found ourselves in the middle of CS and New York Times and Wall Street Journal. They're all writing.

Listen, CS is about hardware. It's about electron ICS. All of a sudden, there's this showcase in Highland of AP technology, and we were at the center of it, and now we're getting calls from people that are interested in investing. We're getting calls from people that are interested in doing partnerships, and this thing is starting to really take up. And there was an event. It was called the Periscope Summit. So news broke twittered purchased periscope meerkats in the market, but it's dying and really the elephant in the room, the glyphs and the Romans periscope. So they together this event called the Periscope Summit, and we said,

We gotta crash this Get to the Periscope summit and it's called the Periscope Summit. At the end of the first day, the name was changed to the live streaming summit, which showed the impact. And to this, a still called a live streaming summit summit. It's show the impact that we made in connecting to this community of creators, understanding their pain points and there desire to take on this as a career. Make be a content creator in this new dimension where it's not heavily produced like the YouTube stuff. And it's not soundtrack like you know, the tic Tac stop today. It worked. It was amazing. Many of the creatures were able to be compensated for their brand activations on the platform. A lot of the creator's went incredibly viral, but the cost of the servers to get it,

too. The technology to toe work really well in Australia and Japan. Brazil, we had to set up additional infrastructure. Now we're spending $50,000 a month in servers and we need cash. So we said, Let's raise some more capital time Our offices were in Times Square and investors were excited to meet him, so they came to see us and, you know, they're walking through Times Square and in the middle of Times Square everywhere you look their Facebook live ads, but I just want ad. But they they bought the entire time square go and the airports. And everywhere there is community of venture capitalists everywhere their act. It says Facebook live and they would hear a pitch. They would love what we're doing and end the meeting with. But guys,

there's no way to compete with Facebook. And we couldn't we couldn't raise the capital at the dwindling operation down. What is ironic is there was a death that we created that we circulated to some folks that we wanted to have help in our partner programs scale some of our influencers, its scale, some of the brand activations, maybe three weeks or so after that deck began circulating, Ah, Facebook Deck, with a lot of the similar ideology, began submitting it, hidden her hands and you know, Facebook is just now realizing some of those some of the things in in both of the documents, but it's incredible to kind of see the influences. It's incredible to see kind of the impact that we were very much making, So Yeah.

25:51

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was, like, incredible incredible story, you know, and I love that you touched on. You know, this analogy or like, this story that you guys were clear the deck, and then, you know, Facebook came up with, like, almost the same stuff. I love to spin this into a question you know,

about first mover advantage, because I'm also aware that you are maybe rolled out a banner and full screen ads in January 2016 and then snapped it the same thing June 2016 and then periscope, March 17 Facebook live et cetera. You know, I'm just curious, I guess working on something that I think you guys have documented as being, you know, first mover in like before. Premier cat. Preed, Facebook. Live, protect, talk pre everything. I'm curious what you think about your position. You know,

like I think in the CS. And like all the New York Times articles I've read, you guys were only talked about is like an upstart, you know? Would you have released earlier? Would you have released later? I guess. Did you like your position of being constantly compared to Facebook

26:48

Live So to be part of the conversation Waas phenomenal to make such a ripple that people that we didn't know that we're in these incredibly authority of positions compared us for us was incredibly validating as faras first mover advantage. If you don't have the capital or the resource is to grow, there could be big challenges there. I mean, it's a lift to uber scenario, you know, it's ah webcrawler to Google scenario. Are are like coasts to Google scenario it gives the incumbents are always threatened by the capital and the innovation that the larger entities can build around what you're doing, and that's a hard place to be in. So I think if you have the opportunity for first move, it's important to brand around being that leader and make your brand about being that leader. Because you've laid out the process, you've shown what works, what doesn't. So the learning curve is dramatically reduced, the bars reduced for somebody to go in and just replicate the essentials of what you do it and then put there the magic that runs their operation on top of that and scale success a lot fast. I mean,

you know, again, Facebook spent, like $1.3 billion in advertising to become the de facto the prominent, the leader. I mean, today it's Heidi live on Facebook. I mean, the other technologies exist, but they're not from you. Don't go on periscope now and get 10,000 people to watch your live stream. That's not a reality anymore. It is a reality, potentially on instagram by G Live, and that's very much because of the brand that they've created in the consolidation of audience that they created some. You know,

sometimes it hurts the heart to look back, look back, but to be honest, to know and have others have documented these timelines like I didn't publish the Wall Street article. I didn't publish the New York Times article. They're time stamped their you know that that stuff is written in history for posterity. You can see that and you know it's validating it. You know? I know my heart, how it played out, and for that I'm

29:5

great. Yeah, absolutely. No, thank you for being so public, so open about it. But the second is into a great thing. I'd liketo ask you, you know, as someone who worked a little bit and live streaming, you know, at one point had Ty Lawson at one point had, you know, so many of you had, like, a double edged sword of the problem that, like you,

had too many users, that yet the scale your infrastructure up to accommodate for them are like the status quo today is like, you know, there's Facebook gaming twitch mixer. You know, pick taught by just, like recently launched. It seems like everyone's trying to get into live streaming. It seems like trying Everyone's trying to, you know, be the de facto in live streaming. I loved, you know, to get your thoughts today about it as like someone who is now 1/3 party.

29:47

Interesting. So what television? What cable taught us is that people consume media in these time shifted experiences. If you give them the opportunity to see something on demand or Tebow to people, they'll prefer that because they're people have busy lives and even in maybe what we seem was a trend of replace. More people would watch the replace. The replays had all the value live was a alignment of planets that you were had the right content, the right message. You were going live at the right moment when the right audience was on the APC at the right time and committed with the right amount of time to appreciate your experience. That was hard to land every time, so the replays would reinforce those gaps. It would give those creators the metrics that they need to say, Yeah, people still like me here. People still watch me here. It was able to give the creators that value in the sense that if I'm getting 10,000 views or 100,000 views, I know that I could still monetize that.

So I'm committed to this platform because it's rewarding me traffic. So what musically showed us was that people are willing to consume content that is low production quality, short form on demand. You know, Tic tac requires them, except your exception, and by dance acquires it re brands at tic tac cetera, et cetera. What Tic TAC is showing us is the identical thing is that people are willing to consume these experiences, that there's a There's a company called you now, and there are also library of streaming experience, and they play with the digital currency and give you tokens that you can reward creators. I bring them up to touch on a report that they worked on many moons ago that showed how much it costs to be a successful YouTube creator. And then how much is does it cost to be a successful live media creator? And as you reduce the amount of production costs, you increase the margin in the margin increases in the profitability increases,

you're able to grow your audience size a lot faster. So I guess from the outside I seen two sides of the spectrum, one being extremely well produced content in the arcs of Call it Netflix and Disney plus et cetera, Or I see the wave on the very short form, easily digestible format of content. The company that I'm most interested to kind of see their success rates is going to be quick be, which is which is if the medium between between the two extremes and I'm a really big believer in the messaging and story are bigger than the way it's produced. And again, Tic Tac quantifies that and in many cases the Netflix is of the world Corn into programming on the Netflix is of the world. Quantify that. So I'm kind of just on the sideline watching There is a project that I have in my backlog that I wanna work on. I'm waiting to see how quickly comes together because I think there's a There's a perfect opportunity between what Tic Tac is on one end. What Quimby is short form on one end, what YouTube is in terms of monetization on one end and then on the far, far and what production level quality content like it looks like some of my two cents.

33:20

No. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if anyone would be working on it to be really be you, you know, the post Waffle House post, maybe posting a developed with Alicia Keys. I have no doubt that you would at least make some ripples in the market. And I know you touched on a little bit on this, you know, in the eventual intersection between high quality and like easily on demand content, with Quimby, But I'd love to, you know, unlock any more thoughts you have about, you know,

the future of live streaming. I think, at least from 1/3 person perspective, for me, who is like, grand could be, like, uneducated because I haven't worked in, you know, live streaming Or like, I only see it from, like, on my twitter feed and like anything that I might research. But I think it seemed like for me that there seems like not too much of a high barrier to entry. I think I compare it to food delivery in the sense that where a lot of food delivery is competing on, you know,

price, because essentially, they offer the same thing. I would say that live streaming are, like, you know, to the extent of, like, live gaming, etcetera would compete around, you know, the repertoire of like, who they have. So mixer acquires, you know, the rights to ninja rides to Stroud,

and then Facebook acquires the right. So disguise toast. Who was like a popular hard stone streamer back in the day. And, you know, tic tac. You have whoever comes around on. Take that. Yeah, I'm just curious to know. You know what your thoughts around this is, you know, like, how would a player established themselves as wth e de facto in live streaming in the future? If it all seems to be, you know,

competitive on one aspect that seems very, very random or like, very arbitrary, like something on the other. Fun, a lot of money into.

35:3

So it's all about content. It's no longer even about the platform and technology because of the barriers to entry. You know, now it's Web RTC, and there's delivery mechanisms for it. I mean, somebody can build What? Meave Iwas? What periscope? Waas What meerkat waas in a day today? You know, even if they grew it from scratch and used, you know, an application like react native or something similar, it would take him a day in a few days, and there's a lot that first week there live with an app. The thing that makes that homegrown app different from periscope different from twitch different from any of the other providers,

really has to deal with the content creators themselves. If you took Netflix and you took the originals often, Netflix Netflix is no different than epics. It's no different than who looted the same things no different than the Amazon. But when you put that investment in and Berit Netflix is a market, our data driven company, right? So they're looking at data around consumption they're looking at data around are lying impact. They know if I put a $1,000,000,000 investment into content, exclusives and content production that it will in fact improve subscriber rates, improves retention, improve C H E R. It will improve everything that makes a business successful, right? So if in fact they're a data driven company in that data is signaling the value in producing original content. I would imagine that,

you know, others are recognizing that hence why Amazon Studios is investing in their own content. Why, who lose investing in its own content and anybody who's in this Disney is investing in their own, but they're investing in their own content to lure that audience, to create that differentiator. So anybody that's going to build in this space from a deduction or platform side, it's all about how you could have unique content that really excites the audience that makes willing toe either add on your service or cut their other service to experience it on yours And the note world. Is there a place where people only use one service? So, you know, people don't only want to watch one channel. You don't Onley watch USA, you watch USA and Fox and see and 30 other networks. You know, in this space,

it's very much the same. I think that the more these platforms understand their communities and focus on that, what makes that community special, the more they'll succeed. So twitch, staying in their lane in the gaming gamer archetypes will allow them to succeed. The moment that you go to twitch and you see cinematic core films, it was gonna

37:50

be It's gonna be a disconnect,

37:52

right? So So you know, I think it's about understanding that audience and creating original content experiences for them, and you'll differentiate. You know, YouTube is that exception. That anomalous took exception. I believe with YouTube actually could definitely begin to kick in. Whether is this degrading in what the brand represents? So it's critical for them to get in front of that Gen Z and your audience. It's important for them to get in front of you know, my kids. My kids aren't saying YouTube, YouTube, YouTube than the size and brand impression and brand value. And Brandon packet marketshare we have mentally for YouTube will begin to deteriorate.

38:30

Yeah, absolutely. And I love to just, you know, take this chronologically. You know, you talk about maybe, you know, competing like when you guys were taking, like, meetings for your investment rounds. And like people there, folks would talk about you guys not being able to compete with, you know, Facebook, And you guys, I assume,

like, quietly shut it down. I guess I'm curious to know, you know, the transition between maybe into your next company at Epic.

38:58

So when we were transitioning down on, maybe we felt the judiciary responsibility of somehow reconcile ing the investors that gave the capital. Now, these weren't professional investors who operated VC fund who are expecting to take losses. Thes are angel investors. They are high net worth individuals, but they're not conditioned for loss in the same manner that of venture capitalist is. And so to reconcile them, we said, Listen, everybody under the sun has called us and said, Hey, can you make us a clone? of your app. You know, we want to make a maybe, for churches are meaty for sports or and we always we always turned it down and said,

Listen, we can launch channel on me And we looked at the margin and the cost and thought about how can we know the 1st 1 came in. It was like just changed the locals. The 2nd 1 said and eliminate all this other stuff and just make it do this. The third one's like change the brand and make these changes and the requirements list were very different her but the foundation was the same. And we said, Listen, how could we automate this so that weaken make it as profitable as possible that investors in capital back and put this thing to bed through this extremely rigorous and immersive R and D process? We looked at how automation and I try to loosely use the term artificial intelligence but automation and in quoted air quotes, artificial intelligence Could we use these technologies toe unlock a process that will help automate the requirements, production, the code, the design, the core design functions of getting these ideas from these potential customers who wanna take me being clone it. How could we do it using this manner and and succeed? And that's when we created crane and grains.

Really interesting. Crain uses computer vision. It uses knowledge grafts to compute what you're going to do next in your software project. So the same type of recommendation experience that you get inside of your Gino account you begin typing of sentiment in it. It shows your recommendation for the remaining part of the sentence is fundamentally what we do with Crane. You upload screens, and we use computer vision, the same technology that self grab in cars uses to detect club sides and pedestrians. Buildings We used to detect buttons and text and elements inside of a screen, and and therefore we're able to then produce it two the same colors to the same location in the screens to the same functionality, or even more so able to understand the Concorde. Mark Greene And you know some of the call it back and functionality around how that screen's gonna connect with some server experience on it in the clout, and as a result, we were able to build those APS we deliver those absolutely sunsetted meaty and began building out crane. And part of what we found was that not only the people who were using us to build this offer what did that they did not understand how tow the software process and production worked. Recognized this this gap between the needs of Ah,

yes, the company. And then what they wanted to put into production or holly wanted to spend their resource is to make it on version one that really felt most of the time, like aversion pen. So we began consulting these people to really refine their requirements so that they can use our development platform or efficiently, and that kind of transformed into this. Well, wow. Can you guys help me? You help me pack with this for raising capital to help me get a picnic? Help me with my finances. Help me with the financial models. Help me with the company. Growth productive. Help me identify how large the bottoms up background addressable market is. And we found ourselves kind of consulting and we said,

Well, wait a second. If we can automate the production of code, why can't we automate the production of building slide decks and building pitch decks and automate the process of reaching out to investors in building a network of investor relations. And we then automated process around growth and customer acquisition. And that's where epic want.

43:25

Yeah. Wow, I love to just, you know, like, dive deep into this, cause you talk about how you know, you felt the fiduciary responsibilities of returning money to the investor that participating you nursey round. And you know, folks would reach out to you about cloning me v and then you consulted for, like, Dex. I'd love to just, you know, also, just like I think about how else you guys air are you? How are you sourcing the start ups where you know, epic is like consulting for is it all through like inbound

43:55

e mails? Or so it's a mirror out of techniques. I would say the strongest mechanism for us is a B m R account based marketing, really understanding the traffic that we've been successful with that comes to our site. So if we're coming to search and you know we are able to detect, they had made a point like email address because they sign up to ah, get a guide we could transform that email address into all this data is very rich data around the size of that organization. The role that persona that came to the page, the market segment that they're in this industry that they're in and the trajectory of that tree growing is shrinking. We take all that data, and we drop into other Cools and the cool. Toeplitz find similar audiences that were able to market to be appetizing online via sites that the visit online that we pushed content to do outbound emails that were able to softly introduce ourselves through. And it's a strong marketing mix. What I find is will rely on one channel by itself. What will tend to do with attribute all of the value to that one channel When we add, you know, three channels will look specifically the last click modeling that attribution chain saying that Well,

because they downloaded this guide and they came from the email that went out about the guide. It must have been the guy. That is the reason that they have a customer, and what we learned is the waiting on that. Distribution isn't as arbitrary as the last stage the last stage is perhaps a deciding factor, but there's so many of their touch points to make it so. I guess what we've ultimate with our d n a around how we find customers is based on making sure we have a rich marketing mix in as many channels a CZ we find effect. So, you know, again press and blogging and re targeting advertising and P p. C. I mean, a lot of people say Don't use paid marketing if you're really small and you can afford to spend a small daily budget and small daily budget so that you can at least appear in keywords where cos they're doing research around you confined you. So if I Google, you know your start up and you're not even on the first page. The buying consideration is going to drop,

and then you're gonna have false positives around the realities of what works and what doesn't. Bye. I penned it with ethnic believer that make sure that you're mixing multiple general weather, make sure that our activating where people are going to looked whether or not to trust your brand or consider your brand or think that it It's a scam. That's the nature of the Internet. Send me an email or you tell me some cool value prop I get to your site. Nothing about it is communicating the human side of the opportunity. There's no pictures of people, no phone numbers to contact addresses that show the locality of the business. There's no chat. Or if there is a chat, nobody talks on the chat. All these different nuances really make a difference in trust, and that trust is the driver of conversion. And a lot of early stage started will have the noted. And they will come, you know, thought process. And we're strong believers that that's not the distribution pieces so vital to part market fit. But

47:29

yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going from, you know, epics. I looked at the epics wheelhouse of, you know, products you have, you know, decking investor intelligence, you know, software solutions, analyst mentorship. That's like everything on this on.

I'd love to just, you know, I guess it gets your thoughts around. What's your thought process around building a new you know, solution like, how do you go about deciding whether or not building? You know, this product for mentorship is something that is needed. And yeah, I guess. How do you go about like using, you know, integrating unicorn unquote artificial intelligence into building whatever a product that you get. What is

48:10

that, your building? So I think the basis of it is about how quickly you can get feedback again. I'm a big believer that I'd rather drive 100 people to a phone call, then to a self service process. Because I care less about if somebody can, for first time get to my user experience that nobody's ever used before and successfully use it. I don't have that. Expect patient. Whether I say, Let me get on the phone with that person, let me talk to them or somebody from our team. Speak to them, understand that they understand our value, understand that they need that value in value. It and that they are being communicated to properly through our materials, that that's what the value of our platform is.

And when we see that, or don't we know where to reinforce what we're doing? We know where to fortify what we're doing, and we tend to have way greater successes in our process, you know, when we start a new product for us to get to 20 km are are within the 1st 3 months is a very, very achievable milestone where I often see companies who create products that are from a technical Arkham picture. They're great, like they work well. There's few bugs. There's great documentation around pricing and how it were. They have videos. It looks amazing, but they can't get past $100 them are. Yeah, and most of the time is because they don't watch where customers want it on the phone.

They don't talk. They don't really understand what the experience look like to that. They only understand what the experience look like. They're in a card game. So a lot of what guy thus is signaling. When we see people or hear people communicate to us that this is a problem, this is a hurt, and this is a value. If in fact we can connect with lot on that opportunity will create the most minimal experience possible that gets the value prop across. I really believe if you're starting something out, put up a beautiful website. You can go toe wantto or any kind of plan warm, Get a theme. You can grab your developer and you need to, you know, use a jam stack.

You can do all that and download whatever pre builds that you want. If you're anti WordPress, I understand where presses have been phenomenal tool, though so but either case fire up a site as quickly as possible. If it takes you long time to fire up a website, gonna take even longer to get accustomed. So put up that website and you know how lonely hub spot there. So money solutions at that calendar and bite which it on your site and start getting people to your site. If you keep working burden, get on the phone with you and talk to you and your learning this feedback and learning the value opportunities. You're gonna get to a place where you could deliver what bats product faster. And it's that value eco system that begins the compound in $1 month turns to $100 a month. Turns to $1000 a month growing because you have that compound element in there because values obvious some. I was building anything. Fire up that landing page.

51:40

No, Absolutely. Yeah, that's great advice. And, you know, going from just like bridging the gap between you know me via an epic I know, you know, they're indifferent verticals, where babies working in, you know, live streaming on an epic is, you know, sort of like crafting. You know, this handicraft experience for started still grow. I love to just,

you know, get your thoughts around. What are you bringing over One of the lessons that you've gotten from me that you're bringing over, you know, into epic and like using as tangible insights

52:8

One of the biggest things with me B was about lean startup methodology in its purest form. Again, I'm an engineer. The way I used to build product was open up. My I d fire up like my command line tools start MPM installing a bunch of widgets and modules and a hit Get hub. Look for some really cool frameworks and libraries too kind of accelerated and get caught off in the creative craft of code. And that's really fun. It's really, really fun. I really enjoy it, however, is the kiss of death in the sense that you're putting this extra focus on pressure than on product. If you're a three man team than the conversations are when you scrum and you get on the phone or you have your meetings, it's house a product coming along. We need to add this feature because that future will complicate this fleeter and you become a liqueur factory. Everything's about a product, and while there's a vision in mind, it becomes less and less

53:13

achievable. Yeah, shiny objects in Germania

53:15

says yes, the serious case of this shiny object in you and what maybe was about Waas. Forget the code. Focus on all of the aspects that make business go because an investor invests in a business. Customers subscribe and utilize a business they don't utilize just the product. The product of Facebook isn't just you log in and your friends are there. You know, notifications and e mails are crucial, and that's less of a code thing. It's more of ah ah marketing thing, so it shows you that you know when you're building a business, marketing is inclusive products. Inclusive partners, air inclusive, part of the supply retainer are inclusive funding in capitalism and modernization and just operational resource is our, you know, part of that foundation. So what? The takeaway of maybe is that you can build a very successful construct if you start by being a Salinas possible and focus on building up each area of the business equally produce value that is undeniably obvious and attractive.

54:30

So yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. I hope this is like a well worded question, but, you know, with the rise of, like, consumer super action like Asia, I think also Connie Chan from a 16 z talked about how in the future of you know, consumer, everything will become a you know, super up. And yeah, with you are, like, running or something,

you know, quote unquote like a superstar Tupper. Like helping, Like a venture studio that helps start ups, you know, scale with, like, all of the products that you guys have. I guess I'm just curious to, you know, any thoughts are like any takes you might have here about, I guess, like, you know, one company doing everything or like everything, becoming a super up in the future

55:12

capitalism makes it really tough. Competition friendly, friendly, friendly competition makes it really tough to believe that there is going to be a case of, ah super app in the western side of the hemisphere. Sure, sure, you know, state ran government ran countries. I believe it's a lot more achievable because you don't have this despair. It dis aligned interest. The interest is very hierarchically vertical. So in those countries like China, where you have a wee chat again, it's very liable in this side of the world. I don't see it. I think people will get close.

But I would imagine that legislation around monopolies are gonna kick in. And I mean, the dialogues Aer happening that is Google Monopoly. I don't know. A Zappos Amazon. A monopoly I don't know. I think the super APPA the future isn't going to be a quote app in the sense of downloadable experience on your phone. Think the super app of the future on this side of the planet looks more like an Amazon, right? Really Think about it when Amazon is I mean, their web cloud infrastructure is powering a large part of the Internet. There there, e commerce, commerce is you know, it's ah federation off. Yeah, or experiences that can be coin is a super app. I think that's what it would look like on this side of the world. Not I Open up. We chat and everything's there.

56:46

Yeah, well, And I think, you know, Epic is on the forefront of doing that with, you know, venture studio, or like doing things to help start of scale. But I love to, you know, this is a question. There's a tradition on the Hilary podcast. But, you know, if Ryan, you know, circa today would have to talk to,

you know, Brian, circa December of 2016. You know, post maybe being sunset or like in the midst of maybe being sunset, you know, thinking about like this transitioning or like, just transitioning this into, like, a question about our listeners who are like founders, whether you know, they are going through the trenches. And it may be good. And maybe you're, like, really, really terrible. I love to just, like, get your thoughts around what you would say to Ryan Circle 2016

57:28

move. Your office is out of Times Square. I believe that we lost touch with by ideology of just ship it and focus on building the business more than the product we got caught in the product. cycle and started to innovate with technology, and that took away our focus from building the metrics. That would have likely got us the additional funding that we needed before a Facebook. So we became a everybody's entering the space. So the investors say, Well, how are you different? We should have continued to make how we're different, the partnerships and the monetization, but because that's not tangible, we've focused on then features, you know. So we were doing the show up a peace sign, these computer vision and who showed little things happen in the background.

And we were focused on things like that, using computer vision to detect when somebody puts explicit or inappropriate material on the platform how we can automatically block the screen. Those things were really cool, but they weren't the true differentials. Prove differential. Local business Not, I would say, to buy my younger self. Don't open V s code. Do not do it. Go and shake more hands going network more going cream or strategic partnerships because you congrats. That and that Those members on that graph on that shark that are going into that hockey stepped formation or beginning this signal hockey stick formation is the exact reason that you're capable. You need the features that you're gonna add Our subject. Well, it's Messer says, add,

you know this feature This investor says, add Black Peter Before you know it, after you've spoken, the you've courted 30 different investors have 40 different features. But there's no compound, no riel compound interest between any 30 of those features for each of those 30 different archetypes of investors. So back to the drawing board, you don't have capital. If you want to raise the capital, build the business.

59:44

Yeah. Wow, Ryan. You know, thank you so much. And I bet that's like advice. That would be, You know, I've put it with my life applicable to lots of the funders who are listening. But I love to just, you know, this is your moment here, you know? Quick plug epic. Aye. Aye. But anywhere are you no listeners could find you,

You know, on social media, what's your like, you know, preferred method of just getting in touch with our having folks get in touch with you?

60:6

I am old school. I don't do social media. But if you email me, I'm happy to respond. I'm Ryan dot Hickman at epic dot Ay, ay. And you can view all of our products at our website, and

60:21

yeah, yeah, absolutely. If any of our listeners are willing to, you know, send Ryan snail mail or something are, like, think about, you know, running their own reality show with, like, you know, either like a waffle house or like something else. Ex house or, you know, looking for officers in Times Square. Definitely.

Reach out to Ryan. I'm sure he'd be happy to give you some consultation, but Ryan, thank you. So what's, you know, for making some time on the podcast? I've had a great, great pleasure. I hope you have had the

60:44

same awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is amazing.

60:47

Absolutely. That was another episode of the Hilary podcast. Thank you for listening. We're doing a bunch of these in the future. Just take her hand. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Hilary podcast. I've been Brendan Hindalco, and once more, I'd like to thank our friends over at referral hero for making this podcast episode possible. If you're looking to grow your business organically through word of mouth. Make sure to check out their tool that allow you to create and grow a referral program within minutes. More than 7000 companies are using it, already generating over 30 million leads, and now you can get it to for 20% off with DECODE Phil Ary 20 Try it now for 14 days without any cost at referral.

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