Nigel Eccles - How FanDuel Became A Fantasy Football Empire

Kind of definition of a startup would be there's a company that doesn't work.

Because nothing works because you're building it. And sometimes you're a company that doesn't work in an industry that doesn't exist. And so the borderline between genius and crazy here is really not that big. And the ones that are geniuses that are ones that can go into this, create a new category and build a company there.

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All right, all right, all right. Well, this one's actually kind of a long awaited one. This is a guy that we were introduced to six, seven months ago or so. Our buddy Chris Kremitzos from podf. Yep. I gotta give a little shout out to our boy. Yep. But yeah, this is, this is Nigel Echols is who we have on the podcast today. And his current title is the founder or co founder of flick. It's flickapp.com. but. And you might not know about that quite yet, but possibly very soon, hopefully. But the company that you probably do know him from is FanDuel.

Yeah, he was the co founder and CEO of FanDuel for what, what do.

You say, 10 at least? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it was at least 10 years.

Yeah.

Pretty freaking awesome because we get the full backstory of that. Yeah.

He was basically involved with writing the laws around this type of app in the United States.

Betting and all that stuff.

Yeah, the fantasy sports betting and stuff like that. He actually worked with legislators and created the laws alongside with them to get this stuff in the United States.

I can't even imagine, like it's. That's just so foreign, you know. And so it's really cool to hear his perspective. He broke down how at the end of the day, you know, dealing with law. Yeah, it's difficult, but they're not as bad as they actually might seem, you know. So he gives the story there. I thought that was pretty fascinating.

Yeah. So you're going to hear the whole origin story of FanDuel, which I believe is a billion dollar company, Right? Not sure.

Not sure.

Okay. Don't quote me, but I thought it was like in that range it could be.

I mean, it's huge. And you know, obviously they've been on, you know, TV for a very long time. And so it's really interesting because he breaks down not only how they started as a startup, how they morphed and pivoted throughout the years, but also how they marketed. And I thought Nigel actually gave a really interesting perspective on marketing, how there's a. There's kind of a widespread approach and then there's a smaller, you know, approach in his perspective and experience around that. I thought it was pretty cool because I'm like, it's something. Obviously we're not all. We don't all have the budget to go on TV with our ads, but you know, you can kind of take his, his model more or less of how they did their marketing for FanDuel and apply it. Just maybe it's on a more micro scale. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

I mean, definitely some, some good ideas around how FanDuel grew and became such a monstrous company. And you know, at the end of the day, both are required. The sort of wide and the sort of sniper approach.

Right.

They're both kind of necessary. But that's not all we talked about either. We actually talked about his new app, the flick app, and. And how to build communities around things like podcasts and Instagram accounts and influencers. Influencers and things like that. We talked about venture capital and how to raise venture capital for businesses. I mean, we covered a lot of ground in this one.

Yeah, no, we actually covered quite a bit. And Nigel is super gracious with just sharing pretty much everything. Anything with open book. Yeah. So awesome. Dude, you're gonna love this interview. And he also recommended some pretty damn kick ass books. Some of them we heard of before, but.

It'S very startup angley sounding, but a lot. I mean, all that stuff applies to any business.

Yeah. I mean, small businesses can look at what massive startups are doing and that's kind of an oxymoron is massive startup. But look at what some of these big sort of unicorn kind of companies are doing. Still draw ideas from them and still implement some of the things that you're learning from these other companies. Yeah. So, yeah, I think there's a lot to take away for anybody. How to sort of exponentially grow a company.

How to build a community around what you're doing. How to raise venture capital. I mean, raising venture capital is still selling yourself, still selling the business. Even if you're not trying to raise venture capitalists, there's venture capital. There's still ways to leverage this information in your business somehow.

Yeah. And how to validate ideas, how to valid scale things. I mean, there's. I felt like this was actually a really good masterclass at taking an idea, a concept, and making it a reality. And in his case, you know, growing this company to some large number that literally is a household name, that everyone knows what FanDuel is or at least have heard of it.

I could have sworn I had it on my notes, but now I'm not finding it.

Well, you can search for it, but I think it's time for.

Notes.

Notes.

Yeah. So actually, it was kind of cool because when Nigel was talking about business models, we were talking about information being free and some being paid and all that stuff.

We told him our business model, and he kind of validated that. Yay. But he basically said, yeah, the model that we have, which are these notes that about to tell you about. Every single podcast, we have a note taker. And those notes are free for two weeks. So this episode has notes from everything Nigel said here and us, and then those are free for two weeks. And then after two weeks, you gotta pay $15 a month. But the thing is, you're not necessarily buying just more information. I think that's the key thing. It's. No, you're actually getting time savings. You're not listening to two episodes a week, an hour each, on average.

Or if you are, you don't have to sit there and take the notes on them while you do.

There you go. So that's the flip side. We did the work for you, but you also get access to bonus material from our guests, from us in video format and all that stuff, and all these different resources behind the $15 wall or the epic vault.

But for today, why don't you just go get these notes?

For today, just get the notes. Yeah, but I thought it was interesting. It's like a business model. And he was like, yeah, that's. That's pretty much. It works. And it's great.

It's true.

And there's value in all ends is kind of the whole point of it all, too. Yeah, get the notes.

So if you want to get the notes, they can do that. You can do that.

They can do that.

They, you, any of us. We all can. Really.

We all can.

You go to hustlinflowchart.com comp or it.

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Hey, before we jump over and chat with Nigel, I wanted to take a real quick minute and tell you about LinkedIn. LinkedIn helps you reach the right professionals at the right time. And people are kind of kicking butt with LinkedIn ads at the moment. It's got over 62 million decisions hanging out on LinkedIn. So you could kind of get in front of anybody on LinkedIn. That's what's pretty cool about it, is almost anybody you can think of on LinkedIn and you have the ability to get in front of them. And with LinkedIn ads, it's not just about awareness. You can actually drive traffic. You can drive engagement. If you've got landing pages, webinars, podcasts, sales pages, opt in pages, you name it, you can drive traffic to it using LinkedIn ads. So check it out. LinkedIn is hooking up Hustle and Flowchart listeners with a hundred dollar ad credit. Super, super cool, super generous of them. So go try LinkedIn ads for yourself with this hundred dollar LinkedIn ad credit. To launch your first campaign, all you gotta do is visit LinkedIn.com flowchart. That's LinkedIn.com flowchart. Terms and conditions do apply, but go try some free LinkedIn ad credits and test out their platform. I really think you're gonna dig it.

Hey, Nigel, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, thanks for taking the time. And I know you're busy in startup mode with your flick app and you're just startups, I'm sure, Grind. We've been in a few of them, but I know yours is taken to the next level.

Yeah.

No startups are Like a straight line. But I think we maybe weave more than most, maybe.

Yeah, yeah. It's a special beast that you have to kind of wrangle.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, as soon as you start getting other people's money involved, other people want to have more voices. And this is my own sort of negative experience with startups is the more money you get involved in the startup, the more these people that give you the money want their voice heard.

Yeah, that definitely is a big part of it. I think the other thing is that, and I kind of lay it into being a startup I didn't fully appreciate is that kind of definition of a startup would be there's a company that doesn't work.

Because nothing works because you're building it. And sometimes you're a company that doesn't work in an industry that doesn't exist. And so the borderline between genius and crazy here is really not that big.

And the ones that are geniuses, that are ones that can go into this, create a new category and build a company there.

And it's hair raising because in any kind of small deviations, up or down, whenever you extrapolate it.

For example, if my metrics flick, they're going up three days in a row and I draw a line, I can say, you know what, we're going to be billionaires within two years. But if there's three days in a row that they're going down, I'm like, we're going to be zero in like three months. And, you know, and just through normal variations, there's days where, you know, we think the former and there's, you know, two days later we're thinking the latter. So that's, that can, you know, that can definitely play with the mind.

It's kind of the plight of the entrepreneur. That's what we all signed up for. This roller coaster in life.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you have a. Let's, let's get into your backstory and what led you up to this point, because I know it's fascinating and, you know, you ran a company, started a company that I'm sure most people have heard of. So take us back to what got you in entrepreneurship and all that.

So I joined my first startup, actually, back in 2000, which was a company called Flutter.com, which was a betting exchange in the UK.

I was there for a couple of years. We then merged with Betfair, which was another betting exchange.

That experience really was really valuable to me.

I knew that's what I wanted to do and I Knew that I wanted to go and start my own company.

It took me a few more years to get the courage to go and do. Wasn't until 2007 that we started the company that would become FanDuel. But it really was built on that experience.

I loved the experience of building a product. I loved the experience of building a.

Team.

And getting feedback from customers and then changing the product and just the excitement, the dynamism of being in a startup. And so in 2007 myself and four other co founders started a company which then was called Hub Dub, which was our prediction market. And then two years later we pivoted and became FanDuel and then grew FanDuel from there.

So it's interesting. So you started off as a prediction and that's in the betting space still?

Well, yeah, so it was a play money prediction market. We actually did a lot in politics. So this was 2008, the 2008 election, which is when Obama was elected the first time. And so we had actually very, very active politics markets and we also had active sports.

And people were trading predictions on who would win which state, who would win the election.

But it was for play money. People would accumulate the play money and the idea was it would be a sort of ad supported model. And the problem that we ran into was the business model just wasn't very good. People loved the product.

I still have people sometimes mention it to me. Oh yeah, I love playing on Hub Dub. It was so much fun. But we realized we need something that just monetize better. And so we looked at it and we said, we've got a good team here. We're good at building a really engaging game.

Sports is a category where it's always throwing up content. Even though we hadn't focused on it that much, that had become our biggest category. And we also saw that fantasy sports was a place where we could have a legal prediction game for real money. And that's when we sort of said, okay, well maybe we should take this Hub Dub idea and we should move into sports and do something in fantasy sports, but make it sort of faster and more exciting.

Yeah, I'm interested in what was it that allowed you to see that the business model originally at Hub Dub that caused you to do the pivot, was it a financial thing? Was it projections?

Yeah, it was because our user numbers were growing linearly.

And I could draw a line and not line did not equip a large number of users. And then I also could figure out, well, how much are we making per user in Advertising and you draw that line, you multiply that small number by a very small number and you suddenly realize that.

We'Re going to run out of money long before we're going to become an interesting business.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. You notice that it's not exponential if it's linear with small numbers to begin with.

Yeah, well, especially with an ad supported model where you need volume, you need.

To get really exponential growth. And so that was at the start of 2009, said, Ooh, we need to get out of this ad business and we need to get into some sort of transactional business.

Now, did you run into any sort of legal barriers when you were setting up FanDuel just because of.

Not in the early stages. So fantasy sports has been around for over 50. No, actually since about 60 years. And.

It'S considered a game of skill in pretty much every state that people play it in. And so we certainly went to our lawyers and said, look, we want to get your blessing on this. And they said, sure. Fantasy sports is kind of commonly accepted that it's a game of skill and it's legal. And so we took their advice on how we set up the games and things to avoid. And then we, you know, that was fairly straightforward. And so no, certainly we didn't have any issues for the first, you know, sort of, I'd say three or four.

Years until you got big enough to.

Until people had issues. Yes, absolutely.

But that's when, you know, you're like, oh, okay, we're onto something now.

People are. So the legal issues that you did run into, was it basically because of the visibility, because it grew and you were just on more radars?

I think that's right. So, you know, when you're small, no one cares and.

Like. And no one really. Yeah, no one really wanted to care and no one cared. And then when we became big, we, you know, we suddenly, and we definitely made enemies, you know, sort of state attorney general level. And.

I think.

There was two things we definitely made enemies. But I think there was also another thing which.

Legislators and we actually agreed with them, they said, wow, okay, we're fine with this being a game of skill, but it feels crazy that there is no consumer protection here. There's no guidelines, there's no guardrails in this industry. You guys are handling billions of dollars and there's no one regulating you. And we said, yeah, you're right, there should be. In fact, we, even before some of the regulatory issues, like the year before, I drafted up like self regulation.

Rules and in fact, when we went to.

Write, when we went to work with legislators to write laws for the industry, some of the things we picked up with the self regulation that we had written many years with the. So it was something that we actually as a company sort of agreed with and said, yeah, like there is room for sense of regulation here and let's work with you on. Was a messy and incredibly painful process, but the outcome was a good one.

That's interesting to be in that position to write laws. I mean you're doing something, I would say you're doing something right because you're creating, you're in a completely new space and it's a different paradigm you're shaping.

Yeah, yeah, that definitely real eye opener to me. Like I, I guess I maybe had a, I actually came out of the experience of like this surprised everyone like a better opinion of government.

Yeah.

I always sort of thought they were all kind of nakedly self interested and you know, maybe somewhat corrupt. And you know, my experience actually working with legislators is they were by the large part public servants who genuinely wanted to do good things and kind of leave the world a slightly better place.

Good to hear.

Yeah, no, it was, it was a, you know, it was a real surprise. And, and we worked in states like, you know, Illinois and New York that don't have the best reputation at times. Right.

With business and all that was that.

You know, they, and you know, I think it was good in that the industry was like, look, we're supportive of regulation. You know, we don't love taxation, but we accept that you're going to tax us. And we, we were willing to work with you that regulation that kind of protects the industry, protects consumers. Let's try and find that middle ground that works for all of us.

Yeah.

Now the company, it started in Scotland, correct?

That's right, yeah.

So in Scotland, how different are the rules and the laws in Scotland versus the US did some of the legislation stuff come up when you were trying to expand out into the US or did you deal with this in Scotland as well?

No, so we, while the company started in Scotland, we only ever operated in the early years in the US.

So we never really had sort of legislative issues there. The British system of dealing with this stuff is very different. So the British system I would say is.

You have a sort of a government body. So like you grow, you get to a certain scale, you engage with some particular government body and you kind of work out some rules that kind of work. And if things go wrong, there's people you can Kind of go and talk to. And generally, things are kind of worked through. The American system is much more sort of adversarial where, you know, you go from, like, there's no one you can talk to because there's like, you know, the government doesn't have a, you know, a department for this, so you just have to kind of go and do stuff that you think, well, okay, this seems fine. The laws are fine until the day that someone in government suddenly dislikes it and then, you know, threatens you with the nuclear button.

It's like. It's like either nothing or you're into it.

Exactly. It's like you go from, like, zero to, like, you go from hero to zero.

And then there's a huge fight, and then there's lots of headlines and. And there's threats sort of going back and forth, and then finally everybody gets in the room and they kind of settle it out, and then you don't hear of it again.

So it's quite different.

And that kind of certainly sort of surprised me how differently things were kind of done.

Yeah, that's interesting. Do you think that the fact that you worked with government at that level helped you really grow and make more of a Household name for FanDuel? I know, obviously, there's others.

I think it was very good for the company in that.

Like, it showed us.

It showed us just being kind of responsible actors. Like, I love to tell the story. Like, in 2016, when we passed the law legalizing fantasy sports and. Or clarifying the law and legalizing fantasy sports in New York, in that same session, both Uber and Airbnb both lost their legislation. They both failed to pass it. And I think a lot of it was just kind of the approach we took to it, which was kind of like, look, let's treat legislators with respect. Let's kind of all be grownups about this. And then also let's listen to their concerns on things like consumer protection. So I think that was very good for the company.

Yeah, it kind of sounds like that the rideshare companies sort of came into it with an us versus them approach and totally kind of came into a.

Let'S trample all over their rules because we'll tough it out. And as they are finding now, government may be a little bit. They may have pushed and won a few battles, but in the long run, government tends to win.

Oh, yeah. They kind of have a little bit more power than all of them.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm curious. How did fanduel grow? I mean, what were some of the things that really gave it some traction.

Sure. So like the first thing and should never be overlooked is we had a product that users loved. So before FanDuel fantasy sports involves you going and finding 10 or 11 friends, getting into a room, organizing a four hour draft.

And you know, and then playing that game over a period of four months and then maybe getting paid if your commissioner kind of has managed to collect all the money, you know, at the end of the season. So like, tremendously fun game. And like a lot of people would say those aren't bugs, those are features.

Right.

But, and what we said was, well, that's cool, that's a fun game. But what if we took that game and we made it faster? We're going to, we're going to have the game last a day and we're going to say you don't have to go and find a bunch of friends, you can actually play with anyone. And actually, instead of just playing in a 10 person league, you know, paying $10 to win maybe $100, why don't you play in like a, you know, 100,000 person league and you can pay $10 and you can win a million dollars.

Right.

And so that was our. And then thirdly, at the time the products weren't really mobile optimized and we said, well, why can't you just do this whole thing on your phone? I can go in, pick my players, submit and then within like three minutes be watching the games. Surely that'd be a lot more fun. So that was the first part. Having product that users love is incredibly fun. And then the second part was when we got to that, we were like, okay, how do we drive awareness to this? And there, honestly it was really just very disciplined marketing.

Growing the category. And you will see in all of Fangio ads, at the time we put our product in the ads, we always put it front and center. We always really explain the benefit. And so over that period from 2009 to 2015, the company was growing sort of between 3 and 5x every year.

Wow.

And that was baseline of a product people loved, but then really driven by marketing that really kind of knew who the target consumer was and kind of talk to them and explain the product to them.

So in the marketing side of things, I know obviously you're on TV and you're on all sorts of things. What was the most effective channel that you can identify?

Yeah, so.

Well, there's kind of two things in marketing. You tend to have efficiency and you have reach. So efficiency is like what's Your lowest customer acquisition channel. And then reach is like, where do you reach the most users?

TV is nearly always the one that has the most reach.

And then the ones that are the most efficient usually have the least reach. So you know, for a classic example, historically.

Cost per click on Google, if somebody's searching for fantasy sports, that's great.

That's a very high value, very targeted consumer, unfortunately for us is that people might be searching for fantasy football in September, but no one's looking for it in October, November. And with our product, you could play at any time of the year. And so what we needed to do was.

We needed to create demand and create awareness. You could start playing fantasy football at any point, point in the season. And so for that we had to go beyond digital and go into initially into radio and then into television so that people like when we did digital ads in October, people just wouldn't even see them. They'd be like, oh, that must, like, that must be a mistake. Because everyone knows you can't start playing a fantasy football in October. But you put it on radio and tv, then you have an opportunity to like really tell the story. And then particularly effective is host endorsed ads. So when you get the host saying, hey, come join me in my fantasy football league, we're playing this Sunday, then that was very, very effective.

Yeah. And I could see the broad messaging like on TV or and radio. What you're doing is you're almost like establishing this new idea in people's minds of what's possible before. It's like a paradigm shift. And then once that's happening, then you're kind of, it seems like you're moving them online so you can clean up with the ads and other marketing.

Yeah. So what broadcast media is really good at is.

Creating a demand, creating a story.

Digital media is great at capturing it. So once someone has a sort of general awareness, then they come online and.

Then they're much more likely to click on an ad or actually search for the product. But broadcast media is just sort of great at sort of saying, hey, there's this new thing you've never heard of before and there's new thing you can't, you never knew you could do before. And that's how we kind of balance the two media types.

Yeah. I'm curious, how do people play fantasy football during the off season? How does that even work during the.

Well, no, so you could play in October. So traditional fantasy football, you would have to start before the start of the season.

So you say mid season.

Basically you could Start at any point in the season, all the way up to the Super Bowl.

Oh, got you, Got you.

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. My, my. I'm thinking October's awesome. October is middle of season.

We've got the, you know, we've got the XFL now, so.

That's right.

A little bit of off season play.

I saw that. Yeah.

Hopefully it doesn't go the same way as the afl.

That's right. Yeah. We can't look good, you know. So let's see.

It did. Yeah, I saw a couple of games.

Everyone's kind of surprised. But now let's see.

We'll see. So with FanDuel, I know you exited that company.

How did that, like, was there a reason why you exited or. We just.

I left about six months before the company sold.

Like, I'd been there 10 years.

You know, when anybody leaves, there's also, there's never really one reason. Yeah, I, you know, some of the things for me where.

I had already sort of planned to leave as part of a merger and then that merger got blocked, so we were going to merge with DraftKings. And so to some extent, mentally, I was like, okay, I'm leaving. I had to sort of. I sort of went to look at sort of new things that I was going to plan to do. And then.

And then what happened was it got blocked, so I'm back at the company. And then the other thing was like, during that period I started to sort of think about what are the things I love doing? And I really loved early stage and building something new.

And actually flick was something that I'd been thinking about for some time. And so there's never a really good time. Also, when the company was lining up to be sold, I had to sort of think, well, do I want to go and work at an early start again and start an early stage company or do I want to go and work in a really big corporate event company? And that to me is usually always a fairly easy decision.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's. That makes sense because it's almost like a point where it's like, okay, well, I've done what you could, you know. You've done what you could there.

Yeah.

And it seems like, I mean, you've definitely, you've learned a lot through the startup and through the growing of that company, which a lot of startups fail anyway. So. Yeah, so that. So Flick, it sounds like, started almost pretty closely after you left then, huh?

Oh, yeah, it was straight after. Yeah, like I left. I left with one of my Co founders of Fando, and we immediately went into starting our next company.

So where did the idea for Flick come from? How did you guys start that one up?

Yeah, so it goes back, actually. It was one of the things that we had on Fandel. We had a thing called fanduel Chat, which was incredibly fun. It was basically anybody who was on the side could chat with any of the other members. It was total nightmare to manage because this was like a free for all, but it was so much fun. And when we started to really scale like it.

We struggled to scale it, and we had to. We were starting to spend so much time and building it and fixing it and dealing with moderation issues that it was taking away from our focus on building the sort of the core platform, the fantasy platform. So we had to drop it. And I always sort of thought that was a little bit of a mistake. And so When I left FanDuel, I was like, well, it really shouldn't have to be a decision. There should be this product out here where people can have live conversations about things they're passionate about.

And that was really. The idea is, like, whenever a game is on, I want to go and hang with other people who are watching that game. You can kind of do it on Twitter, but it's not great for conversation. You can kind of do it in Reddit. And so we wanted to be that unique place where you could hang and have that conversation.

Nice. Yeah. So Flick, I know it caters to the podcast community, but does it sound like, can it work outside of just podcasts as well? Because you said, oh, yeah, absolutely.

So podcasts is a big area for us, but sports and sports podcasts are particularly strong. So, like, sports in the last, I would say, four or five months have gone from maybe being 30% to probably over 95%. And what we found was that they were using it and they were using it for their podcast, but what they really were excited about was using it for whenever. They'll be like a Lakers group, and whenever the Lakers go live, they'll want to bring all of their fans to that group to chat about the game.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because, I mean, we have a Facebook group, for instance. A lot of people use Facebook for their groups, and it's probably because it's just something inside a platform that they're used to using.

What's your perspective on that? Because obviously there's communities all over the web.

Yeah.

So.

What we find, and we survey our users regularly and say, well, where else do you do this.

They'Re actually for conversation and particularly live conversation. There really isn't anything. So Facebook is really good for sharing media and commenting on it, but it doesn't. It's not really a conversational platform. It's kind of like you post, then maybe somebody else will post like five or 10 minutes later.

It doesn't work well on. Around live events. And that's where we've tried to really focus on being really, really good.

Got it. Yeah. So that makes sense. So it's more of a real time thing. There's a larger audience, there's a collective community that wants to just share thoughts and passions and all that stuff.

That's correct. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, gotcha. It's interesting. So what similarities have you found from your FanDuel days and startup and growing in Flick? Now obviously you have the chat mechanism or the community mechanism similar, or at least the concept. Have you drawn any kind of comparisons and ways that you've been able to do things? Well, in Flickering or maybe mistakes with.

Their experience at FanDuel, you mean?

Yes, yeah, yeah. Kind of your prior experiences and what.

You'Re doing now, sort of what sort of information and what sort of knowledge did you bring over to Flick that you've leveraged from FanDuel to Flick?

Yeah, it's a very different product. In fact, that was one of the things that kind of excited me about it, you know, the opportunity to learn something new. So, you know, FanDuel was really a gaming product. It was a paid acquisition product where, you know, we paid to acquire users. We delivered a paid gaming experience. And that's become a category that I feel I know pretty well. And so I was quite excited to do something that was more in a, like a social media category. Much more like Twitter or, you know, Instagram or Snapchat, which is a category I don't really know that well. So it's. That was kind of what excited me like. It's also. It makes it kind of a lot more challenging, which is we're doing something totally new in this new category.

Yeah, I was going to say.

So why did you make the decision to focus on podcasters?

Why do we. I think we felt what podcasters was that they had.

Podcasters would love to talk about their community, but they're not really a community because community means that the people that are in it can have interactions with each other and they can also have interactions with the host. And we thought it was really interesting that podcasters thought of their listeners as a community, but there wasn't really A good platform for them to engage with their community or their community engage with each other. And so we sort of thought, well, clearly this is a vertical where they, you know, where they kind of need this solution. And so that's why we focused on that last year.

I could see that because I mean, even, you know, talk shows on radio are like that too. And you mentioned even reality TV shows, there's a lot of different. Well, I guess they're not calling out the community so much there, but either way there's all these like built in audiences happening behind the scenes. I want to keep discussing whatever it is. And that's why you see spin off podcasts around different popular TV shows and sports teams and things. Yeah. So I guess in terms of flick.

What'S the. I'm just trying to think like what are some of the next steps in terms of where you're at in the company? What are some focuses and things that maybe we can share here in a startup?

Yeah. So big focus is on sports. That's a category that not on Hub Dub, we started sort of more horizontally. Like we supported multiple categories, but sports is the one that's taken off. And so we're going to like double down on that.

Our big focus there is twofold. One is we want to help influencers. These people who organize groups, engage with their audience, particularly around live. That's where we're seeing so much traction. And then two, we want to help them monetize. So at the moment we work with a lot of creatives, a lot of.

Organizers that might have a couple hundred thousand followers Instagram, but you don't really make that much money from it. And so we are sort of borrowing from some of the platforms like in the Far east or like Twitch, like donation and tipping models. And we're extending that these groups. And so over the next few weeks, actually we're releasing those functionality that if, you know, if I'm an influencer on Instagram, I can create my community on flick and I can monetize it there as well.

That's really cool. Yeah, I mean that's such a common thing now with all the influencer culture and people even I think there's kids now saying they want to become an influencer, a YouTuber as like a profession. It's like, well, most of them don't make money.

I actually had an argument with my kids about it and I was like, it was a survey that said in China, like kids, top thing you want to become is an astronaut. And in America was a YouTuber and I was, like, horrified. And my kids were like. They were like, but youtubers make loads of money and do something that's really fun. Like, why wouldn't you want to do that? I can't argue with your logic.

It's good logic.

It's good logic. Yeah, I get it. Right.

Yeah. Well, it's like, we've surveyed. We have a pretty good amount of podcasters that follow us mainly in the business kind of space, but we surveyed a thousand of them kind of recently here, and 85% said they make $0 from their efforts. Podcast.

Yeah. Which labor or love?

And part of the problem is there just isn't really good tools for them to monetize. So there's no. For example, in Apple podcasts, there's no way to tip. There's no way to become a subscriber to the show in a way where you're given some sort of contribution. And so.

We are excited that there's a more broader movement towards more paid content where people sort of. You kind of see where you end up where everything's free. You kind of end up with listicles on buzzfeed. And I think after a while, people realize that, like, you know what, My time's really more valuable than that. I actually would be willing to pay a bit.

And so we see the rise of, say, the athletic. There's no shortage of sports content on the web, but if I want really good sports content for my team, then paying $5 a month, the athletic is a pretty good deal. So Substack is another one which is doing paid newsletter subscriptions.

Again, I think this is a general trend where people are like, you know what, when you pay nothing, you kind of get. Sometimes you get that it makes sense to, you know, support the creators and you get a return on that investment.

Yeah. So that's interesting you're noticing that trend because this is where there is a push for content to be free online, but again, then there's so much content, so there's a lot of noise. So there's like this kind of balance. And yeah, it's interesting that that's happening. It's like a micro continuity model that people can access. Sounds like more of a distilled version or a very focused version of content.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't, like, I'm not sure. I know that the whole kind of content wants to be free argument. Like, content wants to be free and that consumers would love everything to be free. You know, like, I'm a consumer, like, if it's Free. Great. I love that price point. But like everything else, if something is valuable, you'll be willing to pay for it. And I think whenever you start to put a price, whenever you put a price on something, it creates a really new, interesting dynamic, which is as a creator, you then have a customer and you then have to be thinking about, how do I build something for that customer?

And that I think, and then you can create something so it creates something of value that someone's willing to pay for it. And then you as a creator have to be figured out what that thing is that they'd be willing to pay for.

Yeah, and that is a good point. There is something that people are going to pay for. It's identifying what that thing is. Yeah.

And then maybe, and you know, there is a great model where.

The base thing that you do is free.

And Maybe it's only 5% of the people want to go to the premium, which adds extra content, features, functionality, and that works. That's a really good model for a lot of businesses. And that's what we're working with with Flake is these hosts where the vast majority of what they will do will be free. But what they will do is they'll give people the opportunity to go premium and say, hey, I want to support this person. And also I'm going to get something back for it. And so that's kind of our model.

Yeah.

It just resonates with what we do as our business model. That's what was kind of hand signaling to you, Matt.

He was miming to me. I'm like, what are you trying to say?

No, it's like we actively said we want to build our platform so the bulk of our content is free. So the podcast is the biggest part of it. We bring on people like you to share some of your best, you know, tips, tricks and stories and stuff. But we actually take notes on every episode and that becomes. There's a continuity model where we package them up and it's a time saving. So if someone doesn't want to sit around for an hour twice a week, then they can get these for 15 bucks a month. Yeah, there's added stuff too, but it's similar to what you have.

Just, you know, that model works like Twitch is a really good example. The vast majority of people who watch Twitch don't pay anything. They'll watch advertising. But I think somewhere in the region of 70% of their revenue comes from subscriptions. If I'm a streamer, subscriptions and tipping.

And that comes from a small Number maybe less than. Certainly less than 5% of their audience, but it actually makes over 70% of their revenue. Yeah, Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about, like, actually the community building element. So let's say our podcast is in Flick and we wanted to try to grow our community and get discussions going in that community. What are some of the ways you've seen other people using the app actually cultivate that?

Yeah, so.

Generally what we've seen is that people, you know, they create their flick group and then they market it to their audience.

Particularly if they can market it around a particular event or topic. So for sports, where they market it typically is around a particular game. For other ones, it tends to be like a particular question. So like a podcast or saying, hey, we're exploring this, or, you know, another one might be, we have this guest on our show next week. We'd love to get your feedback on what we should ask that person. That tends to work quite well, posing.

Questions and getting the engagement, just creating that conversation. Yeah, I like that.

It's just we're big fans of building the platform, building these new communities where you can interchange ideas and follow up with folks. And yeah, that's kind of always been. Our model is like, here's how can we cultivate. Build and cultivate groups that are relevant to what we're talking about? Because there's always something more that can come from that. Yeah. And yeah, we haven't yet to use Flick yet, but I think it would be a really good value add to our podcast and many others out there, and it seems simple to manage as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So I know a lot of your time, you said you're passionate about entrepreneurship, helping people kind of navigate the craziness of that. Do you like to. I mean, you have such a. I guess, what focus or what do you like to educate folks on that based off of your experience? I'm just kind of curious of some of your favorite ways to help entrepreneurs out.

Yeah.

I was telling some of this the other day. I do get reached out by a lot of entrepreneurs, like, even just on LinkedIn. And.

I think my funnel is. I typically respond to anybody who's not clearly crazy, like a little bit crazy. That's okay. Yeah. I very typically ask people to just, like, email me their questions, because a lot of time I get people that, you know, they kind of want to talk to me, but they don't really have any questions, which I always find really weird.

I'm like, just wasting time.

I want to meet.

I Want to have coffee. And I'm like, great. I don't, you know, coffee's kind of like that will take many weeks to set up. And why don't you tell me what you want to know? And then it's funny because I'd say about half of those. Then they never email me again. And I'm like, okay, like, I don't really know why you want to meet me if you really don't ask me. And then the other thing that I discovered is.

Some of the ones in the do follow up is they don't actually really want an answer. What they really want is they want validation. Right. So what they really want me to do is me to tell them that their idea is a really great idea.

And when I have those conversations.

I.

Often say to them I'm usually pretty honest if I think something is in my category and if it's in my category of something like gaming and I kind of know it, I'll usually be pretty honest. And I'll say, look, I've seen this idea sometimes before. It's never worked before. There's a lot of issues. I personally wouldn't do it, but I could well be wrong.

But the other thing I tell them is to be honest, my idea doesn't really matter. It's, you know, and even if I told you I think this is a great idea, what really matters is customers. And so like getting me to say this is a great idea doesn't really, like, doesn't really add much.

Right.

But it is weird getting, you know, that contact from someone who doesn't really have a question. They just want me to validate what they're doing. And I'm like, that just doesn't. That's dumb.

No, it's true. That's very.

I can't validate your idea. I'm not buying. Unless I'm a customer. Then I'm not validating it. I'm just like giving you my opinion.

Yeah, yeah. We get this very, very similar things. And usually, I mean, let's be honest, I feel like a lot of, lot of folks when starting out and I think that might be the case because you have a lot of experience. We do in our own field. And it's just that little nudge. Yeah.

I think everyone wants a little bit of a boost and if they can act for somebody, you know, he's maybe had the experience and they say it's great, it's obviously a huge boost.

Sure.

And.

I just sort of like, look, that's not where I'm going to be helpful and I also advise them like don't like the thing about pitching VCs is like primarily VCs are there for the money. You wouldn't be going to these guys if they didn't have money. Mostly guys. Guys and girls.

And so.

Don'T be going to them for validation. Right.

And there's often people who are much bigger experts in that industry who you can talk to. But also even then it's the customers are going to provide validation and so don't be down beaten if a VC doesn't like your idea. And also don't get over too excited when they love it because they don't have a very good hit rate either. They have a 2 out of 10 then that's great if those two really take off.

Whereas customers have 100% success rate. I've yet to find there's very few startups that customers love the product and they're buying and that company is not successful. That's always been my advice is if you're looking for validation, you're going to have to talk to customers.

Yeah.

What's your advice for somebody who's interested in raising some venture capital or.

Raising capital in general? What's your advice for actually approaching people and getting them to even take your calls or get in a room with them?

Yeah.

If I work with somebody and I'm like yeah, you raising venture capital is right for you and for this business and this opportunity and that's the first hurdle. A lot of companies I sit on a board of a company called Ooni, which make an amazing outdoor pizza oven. It can heat to 700 degrees Fahrenheit in about 30 minutes. Cooks Pizza in a minute.

That sounds awesome. Incredible.

It's only $300, right? Amazing company.

They've never raised venture capital. The founders still own the vast majority of the business. They didn't need to raise venture capital. They did Kickstarter, they built a great product and they had customers buy it.

And so that's the first thing I say. Look, is venture capital right for you?

And if it is, then generally I say you really have to be in a position where you can clear your diary for anywhere from three to six months. It is going to be a long process, typically much longer than anyone really expects because they kind of know some guy who did it in like three weeks or they read these amazing stories that you know, the Google finders turn up somebody's house and he writes them a half million dollar check.

And I'm like, yeah, you know that's not the norm. So I always sort of say, look, expect it's going to be a lot longer. Expect it's, you're going to have to meet a lot more people than, than you think and just get, you know, like, you know, you're gonna have to spend your time really working your networks to get those introductions and go pretty broad. Like, another mistake a lot of people make is like, they go, okay, I'm going to talk to these three investors because I've read their blog post and I'm sure they love it. And I'm like, you're almost certainly going to come back with three turndowns and you're going to be like, really upset because you don't know. Like, you go into that meeting and they might love it, but they've just invested in something that looks kind of vaguely similar. Or they've made their two investments that year and they're now making a third. Or, and you know, there's 20 reasons that are nothing to do with you or your idea. And so it just, it just doesn't make sense to try and like sort of pre calibrate with.

You really have to go and have that meeting and then just, you know, and then like, take it from there.

Yeah, yeah. Is there, is there a point when a business owner that you found is like the perfect point? Because you've said, you know, numerous times now, a great product is the Atmost the best thing you should do. And then of course, understanding your customer and as well, like, is there a turning point where you found pretty common that VC monies are a good option to go now?

Sort of depends on the market.

If you're in a market where you can build a business profitably without venture capital, you should seriously consider doing that. But if you're in a market where, for example, with Flick, Flick is a product that's gone about two years without revenue, we have to really invest in building an extremely robust.

Chat platform. Can't really do that. We can't really do that without raising venture capital. It's also a very competitive space. And so that's what made sense for us.

When you're raising money, there's always two competing forces here. Investors always want to see more traction and you need money to invest to get that traction. And so.

Typically.

You'Re just sort of fighting that sort of like, well, I want to push it out as far as possible, but so I can have more traction, but I also kind of need the resources to get that traction. And so there's no Magic point.

I can catch 22 a little bit sometimes.

Yeah. Like it is. And you're like, that's why you really are selling. Starting at early stages, like pre product, you are selling a vision that you're selling the team, the vision that you can do this and you can build something. And then you have to convince people to have belief in you and what you're trying to do.

Get ready for the marathon ahead of meetings and calls.

Absolutely.

No, it's a good perspective. Thanks for sharing that. Well, let's close things off here because we're getting a little longer. We always like to ask, what are one or two books that you just find yourself maybe going back to often yourself or gifting to friends or recommending.

In the startup world? I think there's probably three or four that I'd say are kind of must reads that are certainly, you know, any founder really benefits from reading them. I would say Peter Thiel, zero to one is extremely good. Just that kind of like how to start. And you know what that actually means.

I would say that.

Scott Cooper's book about raising venture capital is extremely good.

If you're raising venture capital. I would definitely read his Eric Reese on Lean Startup. It's kind of a manual. You really need to be reading it. And then one of the ones once you are kind of starting to be company, but you should read it early is.

Ben Horowitz. In fact, both Ben Horowitz's book the Hard Thing about Hard Things and the more recent one about culture.

Both exceptionally important. They're more sort of softer part of entrepreneurship. And so they're less much of a manual and they really are one that you should go back and read again. But they're very, very important and like how you think about building your company and what sort of culture you want to have and. And dealing with the sort of challenges of being a founder. Founder and CEO.

Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. And those are perfect recommendations. I think it covers everything we pretty much talked about on this call too.

That's perfect for sure now. So flickapp.com, everybody listening should go check out that app. Is there anybody else or not anybody else anywhere else you'd want to send somebody after listening to this episode?

Sure. Yeah. Like I'm on Twitter. Nigel Echols. In fact, I just shared today.

A guide to employee options, which is like, seems like a very mundane topic. It is very complex and confusing. And what I always find is if something is complex, confusing, it doesn't actually represent a very good incentive to someone and so I put together a post that really tried to explain very simply how options work and, you know, for employees. So that's something I just shared on Twitter today. But that's the sort of things I like to do on Twitter when I get the chance.

When you get the chance. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, I'll go and follow you because I think it's fascinating stuff and especially from your perspective, too.

Yeah. And we'll link that stuff up in the show notes so people can easily go and find you as well.

Cool. Nigel, I appreciate your time, man. It's been a great time.

Thanks.

It's been fantastic.

All right, have a good one.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you dug it. I know Joe and I dug it. I actually kicked Joe out of the room. He's not here right now. Because I wanted to tell you about a tool that I really, really dig. We use it in our business. We recommend it all the time. It's called Easy Webinar, and it's a tool that lets you do live webinars, automated webinars, hybrid webinars, webinars, and, you know, pretty much any other kind of webinar, if there are other kinds of webinars. But anyway, this tool is kind of like your all in one, do it all tool for anything webinar related. It's easy webinar. It's put out by a dude named Casey Zman. He's been on the podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a killer episode. He's a really smart dude, but his software is amazing. It does everything. It's, you know, the title tells you exactly what it does. It's an easy webinar platform. And we use this in our business to run automated webinars all the time. We don't do a lot of live webinars these days. We like to do the kind of automated webinars where somebody can register and then it, you know, they can either watch it like 15 minutes later or they can watch it the next day, but it's just kind of always running. And it's a system that helps us make autopilot sales off of our webinars. Super cool tool. If you haven't tried it yet, you know, it's. It's an amazing tool. And Casey is actually hooking you up. He said for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart, I can't believe he's doing this, but. He said for listeners of the Hustle and Flowchart, podcast. He's giving 25% off of the membership to use Easy Webinar. It's already super, super inexpensive for what it does and all the cool features it has. But he's hooking you up with 25% off because you're a listener of Hustle and flowchart. Go to easywebinar.com hustle that's where you can get that 25% off discount. That's easywebinar.com hustole. It's a awesome tool. You're going to dig it, so just go grab it. Check it out. Easywebinar.com hustle See ya. No, not see ya. You'll hear me in the next show. I don't know. I don't know how to close these things. Go get Easy Webinar. Talk to you later.

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