Evan Britton - Founder of Famous Birthdays

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we are joined by Evan Britton, the founder of Famous Birthdays. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Evan.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. You know, I've, I've been a user of famous birthdays for quite some time and being in the creator space for the last six years, professionally and even prior to that, like famous birthdays has been such a powerful source of information, of knowledge for so many creators, including myself. And I want to ask you, where did this journey begin for famous birthdays? How did the idea originate and you know, where did this journey start?

2012, mobile was the next frontier in the Internet. Zuckerberg famously told his team to work on mobile devices, actually work in the office, just to get his team used to the mobile experience. And you know, I thought mobile was going to be the huge next frontier. In hindsight it's obvious, but you know, I don't think it was so obvious that it was going to be as big at the time. And I remember looking up Wikipedia and IMDb on my phone, especially Wikipedia, and I was like, that's just too much information. You know, if I looked up Beyonce or Tom Hanks or an NBA athlete, it's just too much info for mobile. So the initial vision was to synthesize information on mobile, kind of like a Cliff notes for Wikipedia, concise. That was the vision, you know, famous. There's a reason in our logo why famous is more bold than birthdays. Birthdays is kind of a fun theme. It makes our homepage cool and we have some cool social content and it happens to be the first thing people want to know. But it was really about fame, it was really about famous, like learning about celebrities on a mobile device in a concise format. Not news, you know, not news, more fact based, like Wikipedia. So that was the initial idea, nothing to do with creators. I didn't know about Vine. I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, fans of creators, nothing to do with it. So that's how it all started. Just to build the cool mobile web experience that rivaled Wikipedia for celebrities.

Wow, quite the, you know, the, the vision and seeing that is so cool. And you know, as you said, you didn't do it or start it necessarily for the creator lens, but that quickly and now is such a dominant force of famous birthdays. When did that transition happen? When did you hear about vine, hear about craters and really start taking it seriously, where it's like, hey, people actually care about these people and we could create these, you know, differentiated version of Wikipedia pages at scale for creators.

I definitely didn't know about creators, but what I did do with the site, I always felt like the internal search box on a website and I still feel is one of the most important things, because it's users showing you what they want. And a lot of websites put up like a results page, so if you search the word tom in a search box, it'll show you every page on that site with Tom on it. But I was like, okay, why not just take that right to a page that lists all the famous times? If you search Tom Hanks, I don't Want to see 20 different webpage links that contain that word. Take me right to Tom Hanks. You search for basketball. I don't want to see every page that has the word basketball on it. Take me to the basketball stars. So we built a really cool internal search engine that took the user right to where they wanted to go. But obviously we weren't able to match every search. But we analyzed those missed searches to see what are people looking for that they're not getting. And it was either typos of existing celebrities. I remember Nicki Minaj had like a hundred typos, people trying to search her name. People were searching dates like May 12th to get to that birthday. But then people were also searching for craters. The first two, I remember Nash Greer and Cameron Dallas, they didn't know who they were. They were being searched in the office. There was maybe four people in the office. And we're like, who are these people every day? And then we learned they were on vine and Twitter and they had millions of Twitter followers and their email was on their Twitter bio, Whereas somebody on some actor would have, like, their manager on their Twitter, their assistant email on their Twitter, even though they only had 5,000 followers. So, you know, we just saw from our internal search data that these creators were not only very popular, but they were on Wikipedia. And that was exciting to us because for traditional celebrities, we were kind of a cool mobile resource.

Yeah.

But for the tradition, for the creators, we were the source, because they were nowhere else, you know, with bios on them. So we would reach out to them, since their emails were so available for their headshots and kind of some info. And we would write the bio, and that became a loop that continued to happen and still happens to this day, where people are being searched and we see that, and then we. That gets the bio process going.

That is so cool. And, you know, as someone that's founded a SaaS company, and when it comes to the growth mechanisms of. Okay. People searching for these creators and how that played a part in the growth of famous birthdays. When was. In your eyes, Evan, when did the growth start to happen where famous birthdays was becoming a trusted source of not only creator data, but just to be able to see, you know, this, this new age version of Wikipedia, like what was. Because I know you've been doing this for quite, quite some time now. Over 10 years. Is that right?

11 years.

11 years. So when, you know, for you, when was that moment or. And I'm sure it wasn't one specific moment, but when did the traction start coming up and what were some of the mechanisms used to maintain that traction and really grow into what it is today?

Well, what I noticed is different from the mechanism to how it grew. So I'll answer the second part first. The mechanism to grow is focusing on the user. Like, we don't. Like we're just. If we're helping users every day, then, you know, we'll be okay.

Yeah.

So. And the site, it wasn't like one of those hockey stick social platforms that just grow. It was more like 2% growth a month for eight years. So in terms of the users, we just kept. As the creator economy grew and the platform got better, it slowly grew. It wasn't like we had one moment where, you know, there was a Bieber tweet or we got on, you know, Good Morning America, where then we just went viral. It was slow growth, which to me is good because if you can grow really quickly and you can go down very quickly too, it was more slow growth. But for me, in terms of understanding the impact, definitely at Vidcon, you know, I guess it was great that VidCon's in Anaheim because that's a 40 minute drive for me. So I went in 2014, I told everyone about famous birthdays. No one cared. And I never took it personal. It's like, okay, like no one cares. That's motivating. 2015, no one cared. 2016, maybe 10% of the attendees and the industry folks knew about it. By 2017, I would say maybe half of the attendees. And then by 2018, we mean our team, maybe we had about 18 people went up there at that time. In 2018, we would get like a cost it from wearing a famous birthday shirt by fans. I love that site. How do I get on that site? Managers were coming out to us, the social platforms came to us and we're asking about it. So I would say we probably had about 99%. Wow. Maybe 95% up to 99% adoption by 2018. Vidcon now, four years prior was zero. So that's when I noticed it, when like these people were like, emoting about our brand in line for the food trucks.

Yeah.

You know, that's when I was like, okay, like, we just can't. We better not mess this up because it's. It's very hard to have mind share like that.

Yeah, you know, absolutely. That is so cool. Just, just knowing that too over the years and how that has changed so much when it comes. You said you were there, Vidcon, for example, with the team, 18 people, you said, what is the growth look like from a team perspective? I know you're a solo founder when you started this. How did the team look like in the early days? Where is it now? And how have you maintained and built the culture with inside famous birthdays?

We have 70 people working on a platform now. We're doing a lot of different stuff. We're writing bios, we're reaching out to celebrities for headshots, we're manually translating it into five languages. So there's a lot that goes on to construct our proprietary BIOS that we do. So the team has grown as we've, you know, that's the main core process we're doing. You know, then we have other, you know, folks on a team working in marketing and so forth. So I think that we're very narrow focused and user driven. You know, we want to be the new IMDb. We don't want to be a TV show. We don't want to be doing influencer marketing. We don't want to be talent management. And I think that's been good because there's a lot of great companies that are doing great in those industries. You know, we want to continue just to triple down on what we do. And that's kind of always part of what we do. I get famous birthdays. We make it very simple for the users. You come to the site, it looks simple, but there's been a lot of hard work. You know, we've manually wrote 255,000 bios. Manually, that is, those have all been manually researched. Manually wrote.

How many is that a day? Like, on average, how many BIOS is that a day? That's insane.

It's been 11 years. So it's not like we're doing so. But we've been doing that and now we're manually translating them and that. And that's only on people, celebrities and creators. We also have done tens of thousands of bios on, like, movies, TV shows, web groups and so forth.

So, wow, that gives me so many different ideas. And one thing that comes to mind, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is AI. When it comes to AI bios, I'm sure you've seen Chat GPT from OpenAI.

There's this new technology I just posted about, Chat GPT on Instagram.

Okay, I'll have to go. I'll have to go read about it, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Because when it comes to whether that's writing bios for famous birthdays in this setting or just anything that has to do with content creators, it is so powerful and I am so intrigued by it. And I truly believe, based off of following all these incredible venture capitalists and investors on Twitter and founders, it's a very monumental pivoting point for what's possible in tech. And I personally look forward to staying on the pulse of the different use cases. But I would love to hear about it from your perspective, because you're talking about writing manual bios 255,000 and now when you think about AI and the capabilities there, I'd love to hear where your mind goes, well, we're not going.

To stop writing our bios. Our bios are proprietary. I think that. And they're in our format. I do think a lot of the AI stuff is going to have a lot of utility, but become a commodity. Whereas what we do with our BIOS are our format written in our style and written with the quality control that we can control. So, you know, so I do think that for a lot of different businesses, you know, AI, there'll be certain ways where it can help or certain ways where you need to double down on the old way of doing it. But it's also, I think it's also very early and it's going to be exciting to see, you know, see it advance.

Absolutely. I will definitely check out your LinkedIn post after this pod. When it comes to creators, the creator economy, you know, I've been in the space now as a creator, then I just built and sold my company media kits, and just seeing how much it's evolved over the years has been insane. As someone that is just so in touch with the space with you and famous birthdays, you guys have been so ahead of not only emerging creators, but sitting down with creators so early, before anyone may know about them or when they're just starting to get some attention. And I'd love to hear how that has impacted the brand and, and what you've learned from that when it comes to discovering talent, finding talent and just being a part of some early creators careers at scale, I think, I mean.

I guess, you know, in terms of like what do we notice creators are doing when they're early and rising, I think it's almost similar famous birthdays, how we're consistently wrote 250,000 bios. You know, Emily Marico is a TikTok star where she was on TikTok with a half million followers and last year she put a salmon and rice dish, which is a unique comment, in the microwave and made like a custom food dish and that video got tens of millions of views. But she stayed in her lane and does a lot of fun food dishes on TikTok. So she's withstood her growth. So I think that since there's so many creators there and so many platforms and also there is AI which makes sure that it serves the right content to the right user. So if the AI algorithms know I like trick shots on basketball, they're going to keep showing me that. So if there's someone that does a really cool trick shot video, if they just keep doing that, they're going to perfect it, get better at it and keep showing up in my feed because I'm interested in that. Whereas if a creator went viral for one cool basketball trick shot or food recipe dish and then went back to doing a variety of content, it's going to be hard for them to sustain their growth and their momentum. So I think the best creators early have a niche that they really focus on and they fine tune and also have one platform. You know, I always notice companies in their footer link off to like eight social platforms and each platform they do like one update a quarter. It'd be much better if that company said we're just going to focus on this one social platform and, and actually build good engagement. And that's what we did. We only did Twitter for the first few years of our company, nothing else. Famous birthday's Twitter and then we eventually, like once we scale Twitter and really nailed it, then go elsewhere. So and I think that applies to creators as well. You know, find one social platform and one niche on there, block out the noise and just triple down on there. You know, I think the early creators too, the ones that continue to rise, have that passion to do the work. It takes hard work. They're not lucky for being, you know, for, for getting verified and getting past 100k followers and growing, you know, they're talented and they work hard. So that's what we notice as well.

Very well said. And that perspective is, is gold. So I appreciate you for sharing that when it comes to the founder journey. For you, Evan, what have been some of the most challenging parts of building famous birthdays and just some of the lessons that you've taken away as a founder that you'd want other founders to know if they were starting their journ.

I think that a prioritization, when I meet a founder who tells me what they're doing, I often can instantly tell in my opinion, if they're going to succeed based on if they're explaining their vision, we're going to do this and then once we do this, we're going to be able to do that and we're going to do this and we're going to have this and we're going to have that as opposed to, I'm just going to nail this one thing and do it over and over again. Now the challenge with that prioritization focus, it's hard to stay motivated sometimes because it's fun to have, you know, to work on different stuff and try all this other stuff. So, you know, I think that the most two important things for a founder is to have that focus and prioritization, but also to figure out ways to keep themselves motivated once a founder succeeds. It's hard if you're staying in your lane to stay as motivated because you're doing the same thing you were doing a while ago. So I think that's really key determination and the motivation of a founder, not only at the get go, but after you already have momentum and doing well, how can you keep that burning?

I love that. And you're truly practicing what you preach here. You've been at this for 11 years now and that leads me to asking you, how have you stayed motivated and have stayed so disciplined for what you guys are great at, when I'm sure there's been so many different ideas of where this could go, how you could use it, et cetera. How have you guys stayed so in your lane?

I think I'm humbled. Our site's visited by 25 million users a month and you know, it's choose throughout schools and, you know, industry folks and all the fans of the creators. So I'm humbled the fact that this is how big famous birthdays got. I didn't think it would get close to this big. So I kind of remind my, I remind myself that I also look at our missed searches. I can log in today and see in the last hour where all the missed searches were, those are users trying to find something that they couldn't. So this is a big enough vision and a big enough audience for me to continue to be excited and motivated.

That's so cool. Where did you, I mean, you said you never imagined it to get this big. What was the initial like mentality of success for you early on? Because I think for every founder, your idea of success can change so quickly based on certain milestones. So for you, what was the ideal outcome? Success vision for foundation Famous Birthdays, it.

Wasn'T numbers, it was more just adding value. You know, I, I thought it'd be cool to have a website that really added value on the Internet. You know, one of my long term goals, you know, like, you know, some of these hosting companies like Cloudflare aws, when it goes down, there's like a, you know, tech article that writes aws is down and it's took down espn, Reddit and Airbnb. You know, those are like the pillars of the Internet. I want that article to say Cloudflare AWS is down and it took down Reddit, ESPN.com and famous birthdays. I want to be a pillar of the Internet that, you know, where the site really matters. So I think for me, even early, I just wanted to make the site better and faster and more useful and that was success for me.

That's inspiring to hear. Very, very cool. Prior to Famous Birthdays, I want to get into the journey of what led you to not only taking on the responsibility and the execution to go start Famous Birthdays, but where did this drive for business entrepreneurship come from? And I'd love to dive deeper into what were you doing before Famous Birthdays?

I've always like, you know, the Internet first burst on the scene. Right. When I was in college, you know, in the late 90s, I started a, tried to start a website in college actually.

Okay.

And this is in the late night. So I always felt like it was exciting that this new dot com frontier was right when I was getting started in my career. So even if somebody was a 15 year exec with a, you know, Ivy League MBA, they didn't have a lead with me because I already started the website in college. So I always wanted to build on the Internet and make an impact on the web. And so I think before Famous Birthdays I had a network of websites but nothing was growing. And I think, you know, I think that's one thing I've learned is that to make an impact, focus is very important. You Know, like users know famous birthdays and they enjoy it because we've been focused on it for so long.

Yeah.

You know, had I been working on seven different websites, you know, we would have spread ourselves thin, you know, almost similar to how I mentioned with different social platforms. So.

Absolutely. That's super cool to hear and I think it's so interesting because, you know, early young entrepreneurs that are listening to this today, the landscape of creators, the landscape of AI, the landscape of Web3. There's so many new frontiers that are so interesting and fascinating and it's, it's cool to now think about that in my own shoes as a founder. That's 22 and really just getting into this whole world of business to really audit what's happening in these different industries. So kudos to you for being ahead of that term, that trend when it comes to famous birthdays and the vision moving forward and the creator economy overall. I would love to hear what, where you believe the creator economy currently is trajectory. Obviously we, you know, people go read articles from different sites, whether that's Business Insider or Forbes, and you hear all these stats and statistics about the growth of your creator economy. But you're someone that has been in it and have been so hands on for the past decade and I think your perspective would be very valued here in this conversation and would love to just hear your overarching thesis. Whether that's tech tools, whether that's creators, whether that's platforms, short form, long form content, there's just so much happening and I'd love to get your lay of the land.

Creators are doing great. Users love their phones, the social platforms have built amazing technology and the social platforms are prioritizing creator content. Five years ago, creators can even get verified sometimes. But you know, like Facebook famously is like they're moving away from news because it's very divisive and they're, you know, prioritizing more creator content. And then there's also so many different social platforms which helps creators because, you know, Snapchat, 350 million unique users a day, that's just one platform.

Yeah.

So there's so many opportunity for creators to, you know, grow their audience. I do think that it's all headed towards short form, which has a pro and con for creators. It has a pro in terms of more awareness and brand building and it helps famous birthdays in a sense because there's more niche creators that are going that it's going more wide. So there's many more creators that users want to learn more about. Yeah, you with YouTube five minute videos there might have been less popular creators but they, they were watching for five minutes where they had very deep connections. You know, in five minutes you can watch 20 TikToks. So you might know of more creators but you might not go as deep with them. So I think that what's going to happen is that, you know, niche is going to be so important with you know, as I mentioned earlier with the 15 second content where there's so much content for the AI algorithms to pick from. And I think creators are going to, you know, not monetize as well as they did a few years ago because short form you have less intention. The CPMs are going to be significantly less. Remember a five minute YouTube video pre roll, mid roll, that can't happen in a short form. So I think that's going to be the next big challenge and opportunity in the creator space is how to leverage the short form scale to make it a business. You know, that said, the industry is very, very strong and you know, the attention for creators, which is where it spawns from, is growing.

Very unique and insightful perspective, Evan. I appreciate you for saying that and when it comes to that just sparked an idea of my mind of you know, you've been vidtown, you've gone to all these different creator events and in person that you know, a lot of the times this creator economy, it's lived through being on our phones and being, you know, on social and watching these creators. And now taking a step back, you see the biggest creators like Mr. Beast launching their, you know, Mr. Beast Burger and like physical locations and David Dobrik launching Dobrik the pizza shop. Do you think that not only trend but that model will be more popularized over the years or what are some, you know, like predictions that you have that how creators can monetize and really take advantage of the opportunity moving into the future when it comes to building brands and actually building value outside of just more attention in the short form.

It gets back to when you have a niche. I There's a YouTuber with a few million followers who does home aquarium videos where she shows off her home aquariums to her fans. You know, where she makes a little, you know, a bunch of fish in her bowl and she cares for the fish and that and so forth. So now she's selling an aquarium kit so other people on her so her fans and followers can do it at home and make their own aquariums at home. And that's perfect because her product is directly correlated to not only the content she produces, but, but the fans that she has. And again, if someone's just doing basketball trick shots, they might as well start doing it on a little home, you know, basketball net that they can shoot on. Yep. So that food recipe could come up with their own, like, do this at home kit. So I think that's going to be the sweet spot. And that's kind of similar to the bigger trend you mentioned with the more mainstream, huge creators launching a physical location that can tie into their brand. So that can work, but again, that only works if you have strong engagement and, you know, real authority in a niche.

Absolutely. No, it's. It's super cool to see and just seeing what they're doing on that scale is awesome. I want to talk about, I know we mentioned it briefly, but team culture, building famous birthdays. Internally, of course, every user and creator may see the outside or loves checking out their page and seeing the updates and just, oh, my God, I have a page. But, but internally, I'd love to hear just some of the philosophies that you've built the company on in terms of values, in terms of just day to day how you guys operate. Because again, the creator economy, I think there's so many companies out there that are starting in the creator space. But knowing how you've sustained for a decade plus building in this industry, I'm curious to hear your perspective on that.

A, we're always focused on the user. You know, we want to make sure that we do what's best for the user and let the chips fall where they may. I think another advantage we have is since we've been so focused, we can leverage technology to improve our process. I think a lot of people, when they think technology, you know, setting up building some amazing thing, you know, we can build technology that just focuses on like our core operation. You know, I remember we work with a bunch of ad vendors and we signed with Amazon. So Amazon's an ad vendor on our site and when you sign up with them, you have to fill out like a W2W9 form and all the other ad vendors would email it to us. We'd have to print it out, sign it, scan it and send it. Amazon built some whole online portal where you can, like in two clicks, you can fill it out. Is that a big deal? No, but that saved my team the five minutes of printing out and scanning it, and it saved the Amazon team member of having to get the PDF and like handle it. And Amazon built this whole workflow for that. But over time, even though that's a big upfront cost for Amazon to build that over time that'll have ROI because they're doing the same thing over and over again. And I love that type of technology. Like, what can we build that will make life easier? On our core process, we still do everything manual and we still have our own format where we've run writers and researchers. But what can we do to be more efficient so we can still help users? And I think another core key focus for us is speed. You know, our platform is extremely fast and easy to use, so we make a lot of trade offs internally in terms of initiatives or features. If they're at the cost of having a platform be fast again, getting back to the users.

Absolutely.

So if we're in like, then I also, I think like we've gotten a lot of like hate email, maybe not hate. We've got a lot of negativity on social and email. How is, you know, this TikTok star ranked ahead of so and so, you know, and you know, and I think even internally when we get all these messages like in team meetings, like we follow the user and if, with our scale, if our users are telling us there's this new Netflix show called Wednesday, two weeks ago it was being searched more than any other movie show or band in a while. Yeah, that it wasn't. People were confused. That's what users wanted. And of course a week later we learned it was the most searched show on Netflix ever. And we saw right away in our data, but it confused us at the get go. What's Wednesday? How is this one netflix movie getting searched 10x as much as Stranger Things right away? So I think that we always focus on what the user wants and offering a good user experience and then being efficient with our internal process to be able to deliver that.

I love that. That's, that's incredible to hear. And just so for context, you guys are based in Santa Monica, that is that right?

Yes.

How has it been and has it been the whole 11 year period of in Santa Monica? Wow, that's awesome. And I mean being in la, how do you think about the future of work? It looks like you obviously you guys have always been in Santa Monica. Physical location. Is the team remote? Is it physical? Is it both? How do you think about that?

We're virtual. I think that for a lot of like our core work with writing the BIOS and doing the research and reaching out to celebrities, you know, we're, we're a virtual and we've been able to be efficient and you know, still help our users throughout the process.

I love that. Two more questions.

I have a call. Let's do one more. And by the way, just, you know, this. Okay, I'll tell you after. I have one comment for after, but go on.

Absolutely. I mean, last question, Evan, that I always want to ask different founders that come on the show is if you could go back in time and give your 18, 20 year old self a piece of advice about business, life or anything in general, what would that advice be and why?

So I would say a piece of business advice would be, you know, I think I used to do a lot of fantasy football and I enjoyed it, but I would spend so much time and so much effort like researching who the backup kicker is on a team if they're on a buy and all of that. And that was, it was fun, but it wasn't related to what I was working on in business at the same time. Now, you know, I'm on LinkedIn, like learning from people, like I'm learning about chat GPT now and I'm, you know, listening to podcasts and I enjoy that just like I enjoyed fantasy football. But it's making me a better entrepreneur and leader and helping my career. So I'm, it's important to have hobbies and do fun stuff, but I think to always try to find ways to double down on hobbies and passions that are directly aligned to your career and what you're working on, I think is just a better use of time. And I think just always, you know, when thinking about your career, trying to double down on that, if you have an opportunity to go to a football game or going to a conference, if they're both going to be equally fun, maybe go to the conference. Because what you're going to learn and gain from that is going to be a tailwind for your career.

I love that. That's awesome advice, Evan. And for the sake of timing, I want to make sure people, if they don't already follow you, follow famous birthdays that they do. So where's the best place for everyone to learn more?

Definitely LinkedIn. You know, that's, I'm enjoying on LinkedIn, posting about, you know, insight to the industry and about famous birthdays. So I would say LinkedIn.

Perfect. Well, Evan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate your time.

I enjoyed chatting with you. Casey, thank you for having me.