Smash Notes
Ryan Hickman
Episodes
Notes
The Failory Podcast · From 50k Users in 6 Weeks to Shutting Down, with Ryan Hickman
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What MeVee Habit Did Ryan Hickman Refuse to Repeat at Epic AI?
Ryan Hickman says the MeVee lesson he uses at Epic AI is lean startup taken literally. He is an engineer, and the old habit was to open an editor, install packages, and hunt GitHub for a clever framework until the code became the project. He calls that the kiss of death. On a three-person team, meetings turn into a feature factory, and the original vision gets harder to reach. He names it shiny-object syndrome. Investors buy the whole operation, and customers use more than a screen. Facebook is not only the login. Notifications and email matter, and they are marketing as much as code. Marketing, partners, supply, funding, and operations have to grow together.
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How Does Ryan Hickman Decide What Epic AI Should Build Next?
Ryan Hickman would rather put 100 people on a phone call than into self-serve software nobody has used. Someone at Epic AI checks that they understand the offer, need it, and hear the same offer in Epic's own pages. Where the call fails, the team knows what to fix. He says a new Epic product can reach about $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue within three months. Polished pricing pages and videos often stall under $100 a month because nobody heard a customer. His order of work is a WordPress page, or another builder, up immediately, a HubSpot calendar on it, and conversations. One dollar a month can become $100 and then $1,000 when the value is obvious.
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How Does Ryan Hickman Find Customers for Epic AI?
Ryan Hickman says Epic AI's strongest source of customers is account-based marketing, not a pile of inbound email. When someone downloads a guide, Epic turns the address into company size, role, industry, and whether Epic's prospect is growing or shrinking. Similar audiences then get material on sites they already visit, plus outbound email, press, blogging, retargeting, and paid search. He warns against giving all the credit to the last click. A small daily ad budget matters so a founder searching for Epic AI still finds it on the first page. He treats trust as what converts: photos of real people, a phone number, a street address, and a chat that a person actually answers.
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How Did Ryan Hickman Turn the End of MeVee Into Epic AI's Crane?
Winding down MeVee, Ryan Hickman felt he owed angel investors who were not venture funds trained to lose money. People kept asking for a clone, a MeVee for churches or for sports. He and co-founder Tomer Dicturel looked for a way to automate the work, return the capital, and close MeVee. The result was Crane, at Epic AI. A customer uploads screens. Computer vision and knowledge graphs guess the next step, the way Gmail finishes a sentence, finding buttons and text the way a self-driving system finds a curb. Crane rebuilds layout, color, and the link from screen to server. They shipped the clones and shut MeVee. Many buyers, he says, did not understand how software is produced.
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What Does Ryan Hickman Think the Live-streaming Race Gets Wrong?
After shutting down MeVee, Ryan Hickman says cable taught audiences to prefer on demand. A live hit needs the right content, message, audience, and moment together, which almost never happens. On MeVee the replays often held the value. A creator with 10,000 or 100,000 replay views could still earn and would stay. Musical.ly, and TikTok after ByteDance bought it, showed that people will watch short, cheap, on-demand video. He sees Netflix and Disney+ at one extreme and TikTok at the other, and he was watching Quibi as the attempt to sit between them. Cutting production cost, he argues, raises margin and grows an audience faster. He cares more about the story than about how expensive it looks.
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How Did a VH1 Watch Party Blow Up Ryan Hickman's MeVee?
After a Ty Lawson stream spread further than Ryan Hickman expected, MeVee took a new name, replacing a tongue-twisting brand, and added a peace-sign logo. The next test was a cast member from a hit VH1 show, live from a reunion watch party on every commercial break. Hickman had prepared for 3,000 or 4,000 people at once. He had just moved, had almost no internet, and watched from his phone. About 60,000 people arrived from her Twitter and Instagram, and the servers died. He ran to a Starbucks, scaled the machines, and she kept going live on each break. The night produced a seed round and a fuller MeVee, with sign-in, discovery, and profiles.
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What Was Ryan Hickman's Live-streaming Startup MeVee?
Ryan Hickman describes MeVee as live video in the vein of Periscope and Instagram Live, built so creators could earn the way they do on YouTube from the first day. Periscope and Meerkat, he says, chased venture-backed growth and never built creator relationships. Co-founder Tomer Dicturel knew sports. A close friend, Billy Hunter, had run the NBA Players Association, and agents wanted players who were not LeBron James to prove influence and get paid before an injury ended the contract. Players with 100,000 to a few million followers still could not land brand deals that demanded 50 million or 100 million. Ty Lawson and Trey Burke were among the players who joined.
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What's Your Failed Startup Story
Ryan co-founded MeVee, a video streaming application for influencers and well-known people. They launched in 7 days and grew to 50k users in just a few weeks.
However, they eventually couldn't compete with FB Live, were unable to raise funds, and were forced to shut down.
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What Pulled Ryan Hickman Out of Banking and Into Startups?
Ryan Hickman was at a bank, watching it flail at fragmented digital media and spend more time preparing campaigns than measuring them. He asked senior management to become the first customer of software that put creative, ad trafficking, payment, and reporting in one place. They agreed. By month two revenue was about $30,000 a month, and he later sold the software. Finding customers, keeping them, and choosing where to focus is what made him want another startup. From upstate New York he commuted into the city and attached that reporting system to NFC marketing, before Apple Pay and Google Wallet. The NFC work reached Google, Walgreens, Adidas, and Samsung. He later sold an influencer market
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Who's Ryan Hickman
Ryan Hickman introduces himself. He's the founder of Epic AI, a studio developing products that help startups succeed. Prior to it, he was the founder of MeVee, one of the topics he will be mostly talking about.