Mastering AI Video Marketing w/ Magnific CEO Joaquín Cuenca Abela | AI Basics

Hey everybody, welcome back to our Basics series. I get asked all the time as an angel investor, as somebody who helps grow companies, what should I do in terms of, uh, customer motion and, and finding my ideal customer profile? I get asked, hey, how should I do my cap table, legal issues, finance issues? How should I do my revenue, uh, recognition? And increasingly the last 2 years, How should I use AI to make my startup grow faster, produce better quality products, better, cheaper, faster? You know, that's always the mantra. And you can see all of these great episodes at thisweekinstartups.com/basics. We started doing AI basics to help people understand the core things this technology is allowing you to do. And the challenge is this technology is moving faster and faster, faster than anything we've ever seen. It's easy when we're doing legal 'cause that changes every 5, 10 years. Finance, hey, that changes also. Like, hey, every couple of years you might get something out of the IRS to tweak. My Lord, when it comes to AI, it is changing month to month. And we've got a great guest today to help us with creative. And of course, this AI Basics series is brought to you in partnership with my friends over at Google Cloud. Google Cloud really cares about founders. They're constantly giving credits and tools and this very series to help you as a founder figure it out and just figure out how to scale your company and increase your chances of success, you can check out Google's brand new Future of AI Perspectives on Generative Media for Startups report. You can access that at goo.gle/futureofgenmedia, all one word, no spaces, no dashes. And we'll put that in the show notes and the YouTube description. Today we are lucky to have Joaquin Cuenca Abella. Uh, he is the co-founder and CEO of Magnifique, uh, Magnifique, I think would be the non-French way to say it. Formerly known as Freepik, uh, they're based in Spain, uh, I understand. 5 billion all-time downloads, over 150 million monthly users for a reason. We're gonna talk today about how to use his creative tools, hey, to go help founders be more creative, but then turn their marketing into video, which is a big part of what you're doing, Joaquin. Yes?

Yes, Jason, thank you for having me. We are gonna talk about how a marketing, a modern marketing department can do more with AI. Many people are focused on how they can do the same things that we're doing before, but cheaper and faster. We are gonna talk about the void. When you do things faster, what can you do that is new?

And marketing is one of those spaces that has data, it's got creative, and then there's a whole bunch of best practices and alchemy between these two. Yeah, you have the, on one side, you You've got this great science of marketing. And then on the other side, you've got the creative and in the middle, dare I say alchemy. So let's, uh, let's see what you've built and how it works. Maybe you could do a quick demo for our audience of founders here.

Sure. Of course. Let me share my screen. Okay. Listen, for this demo, I took the freedom to, to make it a little bit personal for you.

Great.

I put together like a few restrictions. Okay. I wanted to show what a single person can do in 24 hours. And I'm in a point of making it myself. Okay. I'm not creative. My background is in tech. So there are going to be some glitches in the demo. I hope you will forgive me. Okay.

So consider yourself pre-forgiven. Yes. It could be some glitches here and there.

Okay. So the scenario here is I'm going to put together a little ad for your show for This Week in Startups. Okay. And I'm going to put it in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, just love it.

Again, I'm all about the Blade Runner, post-apocalyptic, Walking Dead, zombies. I'm there.

The first thing that I did is I created a few characters here that I'm going to use on this little show. Okay. So this one in particular, Harry, he's looking for advice. This comes from a book that I read a while ago about science fiction. That is from the 1915, very old book. Uh, so I decided to take a little bit this background and mix it with yourself. Okay, love it. Uh, so the first thing is I create a little storybook for the opening. Okay, so you see how these three characters, they're walking through the Golden Gate. So everything is devastated.

Oh, it's like storyboards.

It's storyboard. Okay, so you can create here like multiple images you can combine them all together and then you pick them up and you create a video based on that storyboard. Okay.

So you see now, do you do that with text prompts or do you just find some images as inspiration and then add text prompts to it?

Great question. There is a little bit of both. In this case, it was all text prompt. Okay. But in some cases, I like to pick like some images from the internet, use them as a reference, especially when, when the text is not precise enough. It's very good to use some existing images. But in this case, it was all generated from scratch from text.

Okay, great.

And then I took your logo, this Waking Startups.

Yes.

I make it like rusty and old and all of that.

Okay. Yes. Very dystopian.

Yeah, exactly. And I introduced it in a video and I made the same with you. Okay. So I took a few images from yourself and I made it post-apocalyptic, like you're kind of, you know, wore down a little bit more.

Yeah, no haircut. I got a goatee.

Love it. Yeah, exactly. So you are going to be kind of the guru that those 3 people seek for advice into how to do like a big project. Again, it's a bit messy because the creative process is messy, but here it shows how you can go from one video to the next, from one image, blend it all, use all your references. For example, I use like this image from the internet as a showdown that you are having.

Yes, and I'm a little dirty. I'm a little greasy. It's been, it's been a rough post-apocalyptic era for J-Cal. I'm in my post-apocalyptic era.

Exactly. Let's say it's been a rough week. Okay. So we put it all together and at the end I got this little clip here. Okay. I'm going to play it.

I am excited to see this. Okay. So here we go. The bird screeching. We're going over a rusted out Golden Gate Bridge. There's an old man. Walking down the bridge. He's out, down on his luck.

There is no one. Everything's desolated.

Oh, there's Fort Mason, uh, you know, the, uh, the various buildings, uh, on the north part of San Francisco. Yeah, here we go.

Do you see that the young boy, he's still happy, he's still a boy. So there's a little bit of hope in the end.

I mean, this looks amazing. Oh, and there it is. There's the This Week in Startups tattered logo. Like a billboard or something.

Exactly. And they get to this whole building.

Maybe my studio. Maybe it's a studio.

That's it. Okay, we're gonna go. We're getting there.

Here we go.

Who is that?

Uh-oh, he's getting his laptop. Oh, he's got a shotgun and his glasses on. This is some dark dystopian stuff here. It's me, Jason. Grandpa?

Yeah, you are.

I thought you were dead. It's my grandfather. The kid needs your help.

It's a grandfather.

I don't do that anymore.

Who knows?

Who knows? What do you know about building? What have you ever built? Do you even know how it feels to lose everything? Yes, I'm a great—

I want to rebuild civilization.

What? Come on, follow me.

So not bad for one day.

I mean, it's so inspiring and fun, sincerely. Like, I could see like it makes me wanna use this this weekend with my daughters cuz they are into storytelling and they use CapCut and some of these, you know, like TikTok type tools, but it doesn't give you this palette. Now when you were showing all of those, uh, storyboards, like sketches and whatnot, and they were getting attached together, did you draw those lines or did the AI draw the lines between the different scenes and collateral and inspiration you gave it?

You, you can do both. Like as soon as you are typing the prompt, They can suggest, oh, do you want to connect it with this one? So you start connecting, okay, I want to use this image as a reference. I want to use this voice. I want to use, and you can put it all together super easily. So this thing was done just by me one day. Imagine a true creative team, like 3, 4 people, like to their best. You usually get like somebody that is pretty good at photography, somebody that is good at audio. You put them together and now you can tell much more compelling stories than before.

What's really interesting about what you've built is you're starting to see a movement of people doing launch videos now. Startups are all doing launch videos. Uh, there are some brands, uh, that are getting a little cheeky on TikTok, Instagram, uh, YouTube has the Shorts feature now, uh, and there's Reels. I mean, all these different short features. You did letterbox there, so it looks cinematic, but I assume we could have flipped that and made it, of course, in the short feature. And what's great about this is, uh, this would have been $150,000 to make, you know, maybe $10K a sec, $10K a minute, $20K a minute, depending on the level of person you hired. So you do a 5-minute launch video, it could be $50K, it could be $100K. Here, you know, what, what do you charge for the software? What does it cost to do the output? Um, and how do you charge for the product?

Per second is around 10 cents nowadays. To be honest, like you usually take like, you do multiple tries to get the right one. So you should assume at least like $1 per second. That's nothing. Like the real budget here is gonna be your creative team spending their time and doing something great. It's not gonna be any more on the platform.

The models, you're building all these tools, but there are many people building models, open source models. We have Frontier models. Obviously Google's got all their amazing models that are making great progress. Nano Banana and everything. So what do you use as the backend for this? Is it headless or are you actually building language models as well or image models as well?

So we have some image models like the upscaler is our own technology. We have some skin enhancer that is our technology, but we use many other like third-party models. We use the state-of-the-art, obviously many from Google, but also from some other, but we try to have like state of the art, whatever it is in the platform, so that it is really easy for the user to achieve the best work that they can do.

Who are the other customers for this product? Obviously, you know, the first thing that comes to mind here on This Week in Startups is startups who want to do launch videos. But has this made its way towards Hollywood creatives? I would think they would like to use this. You know, if you were a writer on a television show like The Walking Dead or, you know, any of these hit shows, Better Call Saul, it kind of would be cool to do a little cinematography yourself and, you know, do the dialogue and actually be able to use those actors' voices in the creative process. So the line between a writer and a storyboard artist, a set designer and a director and a cinematographer, I would assume those lines are blurring. Yeah.

Oh yes. Uh, the great thing about this is that it is raising the ceiling and it's also raising the floor, both of them. So you have Hollywood Studios, they are using it. For example, like the company that does the House of David, they have used Freepeek to make the production. It's used by all the big studios in Hollywood nowadays, and it's used more and more. The growth there is exponential. We're getting many, many users in Hollywood, but also many, many marketing departments. So that's the other side of the equation is you get used by companies that are 200, 300 people doing a film. But also by small studios that have 3, 4 people making an ad or making a short film. Okay, it's, it's using both sides and they are both getting great value out of it. The use is slightly different. I want to clarify, like, if you're doing a film, typically you still record actors and you still do like all that work, but now you can do much more with that footage.

It seems like Hollywood went from just 2 years ago saying Hey, you know, pardon my French, eff these tools, or like, these things are evil, they're bad, to now 2 years later they're like, wait a second. And I was literally, uh, at this Breakthrough Prize this weekend. It's a science— the Oscars of science. And I was talking to Gal Gadot. She, um, is very famous for playing Wonder Woman and a bunch of other things. And I asked her, hey, what's your take on all this AI stuff? It's incredible. What We are now able to make films for 1/3 the price. We can, you know, film ourselves on a green screen or a gray screen, whatever it happens to be, and then let everybody else do the rest of the work, but we just focus on our performance. We'll be able to make 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much content, and we'll be able to service different audiences. So, you know, sometimes people get scared, oh, people are gonna lose their jobs, but we're also gonna see a Cambrian explosion in creativity where you know, somebody who's a screenplay writer, or they want to be an ad executive, they can't break in, so they just start making spec work. Spec work's got a little bit of a, you know, people are like, oh, I don't want to do spec work, but people write spec scripts all the time. You can make a spec storyboard here, bring it to somebody, and you're just proving your idea out bit by bit, a little bit more. Yeah, and it's just so exciting.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can Listen, you can take like some sacrifices and put still what looks like a great story, and it's going to be like a great story, uh, for people to see. Or you can go full on on a bigger production. Like, I talked to some Hollywood directors, and what they told me is that they had a project that it would have never been greenlighted because of the cost to make the project. But now, as they managed to reduce the cost, they managed to get that film and employ 600 people doing the film, while otherwise there would not have been enough budget to do it. So it's actually creating more jobs. And I think you're right, like Hollywood is coming to terms with technology because now they see it more and more as an ally rather than something that's going to challenge their jobs or anything.

Yeah. And you've based the company in, on the coast of southern Spain, am I correct?

That is right. Yes.

What is the AI talent like? I know it's big in Europe, right? Uh, you have Mistral there, you had a lot of great PhDs, et cetera. But when you pitch people on coming to the south of Spain, incredible seafood, incredible, their tapas, great lifestyle, obviously. What's that like to recruit AI talent and have that as in your, in your, uh, back pocket?

Uh, listen, it is not San Francisco. That's for sure. But at the same time, it offers like a great quality of life. It's also a great place for people to live. So when you pitch, you know, the whole value proposition is you're going to build something that is exciting. You are going to reshape how creativity works in marketing departments, how films are made, how people tell stories. And it's in a great place, you know, with a great company, people. Really, bye.

Yeah, it's amazing. Really nice for us. When do you think the line between, um, being able to execute really well on the visuals here, the aesthetic, but then creative storytelling, this seems to be a blocker for some people. You ask any large language model, hey, make me a script or make me a storyline. It's good at giving you brainstorming ideas. I find like when I'm writing a blog post or I'm gonna be on a podcast, I might say, hey, I'm gonna talk about this. Give me some bullet points, some history or some analogies in history, right? I'll ask for things that are analogous or maybe some other people's take on this topic. And it will do a good job brainstorming, but it's not, doesn't feel creative. It doesn't feel tight, um, or visionary in any way. It's almost like asking a college student to, you know, give you some ideas and it's good at giving you some ideas and looking something up like our, like an intern might or a researcher might, but it's not. Fully creative. So do you think we're going to hit that point where the creativity of these models starts to match the creativity of humans, or do you think it's going to be a tool creative humans use for some time to come?

I think it will match the creativity of some humans. What I think is unique to us is that it's our individuality. So in a way, you are you, and you are a result of your experiences and what is inside your brain. Uh, me, it's impossible to replicate you or to replicate me. Okay. We are very, very like, uh, an AI is very different because it's a digital artifact. So you can copy it again, humans, you cannot copy it. So the thing that is important about us is that whatever we do, it's unique to us. And I think that's important and putting that in your work, I think that's important and that's meaningful. Okay. So I think that those tools, they're going to drive more opportunities for people that are good at telling stories and are good at putting their own history into something that is meaningful for others. So I think this is going to drive up actually more demand for people that can tell stories, for people that can put together like a good film or a good story.

The interesting thing for me is as the compute gets better, I could see making 100 versions of the film you just made, uh, in some dynamic way, and then using targeting to share them. So we did one dystopian San Francisco, but we could have done Los Angeles, we could have done Sydney, we could have done Galicia or Madrid, or, you know, any number of cities. And then people from that region could actually experience the same concept. Oh my God, everything died in this post-apocalyptic world except the Cybertruck, and the Cybertruck made it through. Its solar panels, and you should buy a Cybertruck to prepare for the apocalypse. Are people doing that yet where they say, hey, you know, pick the iconic bridge in that city, pick the iconic restaurant or baseball field, the main street, and then make me 100 versions by city? Then you can use something like the Google Ad Network to do hyper-targeting, regional targeting, or even other preferences. You know, it could have people who are my age, right? Or it could be more inclusive in different ways. Could have— I could have a, a, a Spanish accent. I could have a Japanese— I could speak Japanese. Like, there's so many possibilities here. Have you had customers try that yet?

Yes, but for simpler things, not just for video. So what is happening is that for the previous generation of ads, when you have something static, that's something that you can try. That's something that we do. Uh, you can localize like 50 different languages, change the food in the ads, change like things like that. And that works pretty well. If you try it with a full video like this one, problem is that at every step you have a decent probability of error, decent probability of some of things going wrong. So at the end you take like 1 minute and it completely loses the track. Okay. It diverges. It's not yet. I think we still need uh, I mean, we provide that, that we still need kind of a Claude code for design. Yes, something that harnesses, uh, the AI, checks the output, and kind of steers it.

This feels like, you know, we're making progress when we start talking about the harness, the fact-checking, the validation level, uh, because what it means is the tools are actually ready for production and we need the fit and the finish and the polish let alone doing this in real time. I mean, I'm talking about making 100 versions, but eventually this will be like Minority Report where each ad will mention you by name, you know, and it's, they're gonna be served dynamically in real time, you know, uh, and it's gonna be pretty crazy, the future.

But, but I think we are gonna get both. We are gonna get like some productions that are very, very, uh, bespoke. To the viewer. Yes, but some of, some of them, you want the vision of the director. It's like when you go to a restaurant, okay, they tell you you can get any dish that you want here. You have all the ingredients. That's too much. I want you. I want your opinion on it. So sometimes you want the opinion of the creative to drive the narrative. That's also pretty, pretty cool.

Yes. All right. Listen, Joaquin, thank you so much for educating us. Where can people download the app and find more information?

Go to magnific.com.

Oh, well, there it is, folks. It couldn't be easier than that. And of course, check out Google Cloud's brand new report, Future of AI: Perspectives on Generative Media for Startups. It's a great report that you can get at goo.gle/futureofgenmedia. It's in the description. It's in the show notes. Joaquin, you're famous. You're also featured in the report. Yes, they got you in the report.

Yes. I want to thank Google for that. Thank you.

Yes. Uh, and, uh, all the episodes of Startup Basics from marketing to legal, uh, to, uh, accounting and now AI Basics are available at thisweekinstartups.com/basics. This is our gift to the community. Get those basics, lock 'em in as a founder and just keep building your knowledge and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.