Market Leadership, Fundraising as a Creative, and Improv for Team Building, with Analisa Goodin

Annalisa, welcome to the show.

Hi, Justin. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Yes, I appreciate the time. And there's, okay, there's a lot of ways I can start a podcast. I love hearing the kind of overview first. So let's go with that. What is Catch and Release? What's the company doing today?

Catch and Release is awesome. Catch and Release is actually building functionality for the internet that's never existed before. We're making the licensing layer for the internet. So we work with advertisers and filmmakers and creators To help them license images, videos, music, writing, art, anything you can find on the internet that an advertiser might want to use in a commercial or a filmmaker might want to use in a film. We're making that transaction possible on internet scale. I've been in the business for 20 years and this has always been my vision is to do this at internet scale.

There's a ton that I want to unpack in this company, but real quick, the name Catch and Release, where'd this come from?

You know, it was born out of a conversation I was having in the really early days with my husband, Nick Cronin, who's a designer. And I was describing to him, I'd been in the business already as a researcher. I was someone that creative teams hired to go find stuff on the internet that would help them tell the stories they wanted to tell. And the way they'd give me that information of what they're looking for is called a brief. So they'd give me a brief and they'd say, we're telling a story in 30 seconds about X, Y, or Z. And we need images or videos or audio or something to support that story. They need the raw material. And so I was the researcher that did that. I went out and I was the sleuth that went and dug around in the corners of the web trying to find this content. And when my clients just liked it, when they indicated that they really— that it was supporting their story and that they liked the direction that it was going in, Then they'd ask like, how much does it cost and can we get it? And are all the people in this image or video released for the usage? Because this all requires— advertising requires a lot of consent.

Yeah.

If you are the owner of a photo or video and Nike wants to use it in an ad, they have to pay you. And if there's anybody in the photo or video, those people have to sign off and possibly get paid as well. So there's a lot of logistical challenges there that were really hard to automate and really hard to scale. So the appetite for internet content was going up, but there was no mechanism to actually get creators and advertisers to connect and have those transactions. And that was really the vision for Catch and Release. And so the name came from that action of, you know, you can catch the content, but it also has to be released. And when I was chatting with my husband about the early days vision for this company, he's a fly fisherman. And so that phrase was top of mind for him. And he said, you know, what you're describing, this kind of engine that can pull content in from everywhere and make it available for licensing, sounds like catching and releasing in fly fishing, where you're— it's a really gentle cycle of really understanding where you're dipping and catching it and throwing it back. And there's this kind of exchange that happens of energy. And I thought, thank you for that beautiful analogy, but also thank you for the name of this company, because I'm going to name it that now.

This is perfect. I love it. Okay. Been quite the evolution for this company from the beginning to where you're at now. Most recently raised a $14 million Series A last year at some point. Take me through the early days though, very beginning. What was this company in the beginning? And then we'll walk the story up to today because I think it's been quite the journey from what my research has shown.

Yeah, definitely. It has. It absolutely has. This company was born out of being in the epicenter of customer pain and internet opportunity. Like this was, this started because I was in the belly of the beast with creatives and producers and editors and people who were in the production industry that were really hungry to find the right kind of content to tell the stories they wanted to tell. And when I say stories, I mean commercials, really. But a good commercial is a great story. There's bad ads out there. Great ads are memorable. Great ads are emotional. Great ads pull us through. So that's really like, that's That's what we are interested in creating. And we're working with customers that are interested in creating content like that as well. And so I just, you know, it was really painful. They had a lot of needs. They wanted content that was gonna do their story justice and do the brand that they were working with justice. And they were doing it on increasingly crazy schedules, you know, days, not weeks. weeks, not months. And budgets that were really challenging too. Like, how much can they get done with, you know, budgets that are getting cut in half or getting cut in quarters? And so I, you know, the internet represented this awesome opportunity because all this content's already been shot. And when I first got started, we didn't even have the iPhone. So, you know, the quality of the content has since just become incredibly amazing, which has democratized the whole medium of photography and video. So many people now are participating in this art form that it used to be you had to go to film school to do it, or you had to have a budget to rent some beautiful camera. Now it's in our pockets. So I was seeing this appetite for this content going up on my customer side and the supply of it all exponentially growing and the platforms for this launching. You know, Instagram came out and Twitter came out and YouTube and Vimeo, not in that order, but it, and it continues to happen today. And so I really wanted to help bridge that gap for my customers that really wanted this content but couldn't find a quick, scalable way to get access to it. And for this emerging economy of creators that may not even realize that they are sitting on gold that a brand would really be willing to pay for. So that was the, that was how the idea was sparked was just by being inside of this customer problem that I was really curious and eager to solve.

There is always quite the change from the initial vision to what you have 5, 6, 7, 8, whatever years later. What was the initial product or service you had in like the very beginning? Because like we hear these successful companies, you're like, oh, they've raised money and they're this, they're this thing now, this current juncture. But back then it was something completely different, or maybe it was the same thing on a smaller scale. Just take me through that initial kind of product service that you had.

Yeah, I would say it's exactly the same. Um, but it started at a smaller scale. I think the journey for us started at this nugget nugget of how do we find— how do we take something that we've just found on the internet, on Flickr, from a photographer in Egypt?

Yep.

And within a few days be able to tell a producer or a creative at an advertising agency or in a marketing team at a brand that they can use this on a billboard? Like, how do you do that? Because the person in Egypt is not like sitting around waiting for a note from me saying, can you please, you know, give me access to this photo? And are you even interested? And will you agree to this price? All of that, all the logistics didn't exist. So we set out at the beginning to solve that problem for a small set of customers, like 10, 10 customers maybe. And I grew a small group of freelancers who could help with the catching, who could help with the finding of the content. We call them curators. So I trained a group of my, the first kind of freelancers I hired were curators. You know, here, I'm going to teach you how to go fish for this content and how to find the right stuff that our clients want. And then I hired some freelancers to help on the licensing side, because that wasn't my expertise. I was, I was a creative. I wasn't somebody that really understood indemnification and E&O insurance and licensing terms and legal stuff. So I brought somebody in to help us with that. So we were initially just solving this problem and it was like, this is great. All these customers are coming back and they're telling other people to come and use us. And I sort of started to grow it and it was starting to feel a little bit like an agency, like a little service company, like a boutique service company. I would say that the nugget for catch and release was born when I just started to see the scale opportunity. Like, there are thousands of customers that need to solve this problem, not just the agency I'm working with, but what about the brand they're working for and that brand's entire team? And what about all the campaigns they're running? And what about all the content strategies that they have from their advert, you know, going to the Super Bowl, but also like their email marketing? Like, how How are they serving up content to their consumers and what's the relatability of that content? And if they wanted to access the internet, how would they do that without tools? I can't build a company big enough to hand serve every single person. And that's just on the customer side. Then there's the creator side. Like, oh my gosh, the internet is 1.3 trillion things get added to the web every year. The internet's a different internet right now than when you and I first started this conversation.

Yeah.

So how do I keep pace with that? 'Cause that's where culture is. That's where if a brand wants to really relate to their consumer to the point where they're like sharing a heartbeat almost, right? Like so relatable, so personal, so connected. They have to keep pace with what creators are making because creators are reflecting back to us what's happening in the world. And that's where brands need to be in conversation. So that little small nexus of how do I get this guy in Egypt to say yes to licensing his photo for a a Nike ad turned into, oh my gosh, the internet needs a licensing layer. It needs a licensing button on it that people can transact seamlessly on. And that obviously is a technology solution. And so that began the process of turning all the things we'd learned and proven as a service into a product roadmap that led to our first round of funding, that led to the the beginning of this kind of vision for how to do this massively at scale and fill a gap that just hasn't been filled before.

Okay. So much to unpack. There's the product side of it. There's like the fundraising side of it. There is the evolution of going from this idea of like more so a service to how do you scale this to like the entire internet? I want to go back to one—

Part 1, part 2, part 3.

Awesome. Awesome. Let's go. Let's start with funding, knowing, getting to the point that you realized, Okay, wait, we probably need to raise funding for this because this is a massive idea and we could use that to grow and all of that. Just take me through the decision to raise funding and then how that first fundraise went for this.

Well, I didn't know anything about fundraising. I didn't even know any other founders. I didn't know any other CEOs. I didn't know any investors. Now, I happened to be based in San Francisco, which turned out to be kind of handy because as I was starting to build a network, it was easy for me to meet somebody for coffee or sit down with someone. So that was helpful. I would recommend anybody who's going out to raise their first round and needs to build that network to consider going traveling to do that if you need to. Now with Zoom, it's a lot easier. We raised our Series A on Zoom, so that's not impossible now.

Yeah.

But nothing quite meets just meeting somebody for coffee at the early stages of an idea. And just, you're not pitching them, you're not really fundraising yet, but you are socializing your vision. With an objective audience and getting a sense for what they, what resonates with them, what's confusing to them, you know, how quickly do they get it? That's all the early stages of practicing the pitch. And in those early days, there's no, none of that is wasted because you might have a great conversation with an investor in a coffee shop and then figure out a new tagline that you want to put on your website. I mean, it's, it's very, it's a very alive time. Everything's on the table and you're learning so fast that none of these conversations are a waste. Even if they don't lead to funding, they lead to insights. And so I just really recommend to anybody out there, just take those calls, go out and have coffee, just keep pitching.

One thing on that, just for context, I want to go into more of this, but one thing for context for people, how long into the company did you decide to fundraise? And what year was this roughly? I'm just curious for this first fundraise.

Yeah, absolutely. So we bootstrapped for the first few years. So I incorporated the company in late 2014, continued working to continue growing the service and learning through the service, providing to customers, like really paying attention to the pain that they were experiencing, learning what their day-to-day behavior was. All in my mind, I knew we were going to be building a product, but to them, I was just working for them and with them.

Yeah.

And so we actually were able to survive for like about 2.5, 3 years. on our own revenue. And we didn't raise our first round until 2017. Okay. That was a seed round. We, I, we had, yeah, that was a seed round. And we raised from angels and institutional investors, some really amazing ones we got. There's a whole conversation we could have on how to, how to raise a round the first time and kind of angels to go after and all that.

Let's dive into that, how you were thinking about it back then, especially because you mentioned, you know, you weren't, You didn't have this massive network necessarily when you came into this point to raise funding. I think it'd be helpful for founders to kind of get an idea of that for you.

I'm actually just finishing up an article on this.

Ooh, love that.

I'm happy to follow up with you on that after.

Yeah.

So yeah, it started for me, one of the first important people I met in my network was a CFO. He had been a founder before. He was kind of had already had an exit, and so he he was looking to advise companies. And as a as a creative person who'd never never been a CEO, never fundraised, never built a business, but understood the customer pain really well and the domain, it was really helpful to me to have a finance partner early on. He really helped me see all the nuts and bolts of thinking through a business. He he even came up to me at one point in the early days of our conversation and said, "Hey." Are you building an agency or are you building a tech company? Because those 2 things are really different. Here's how, and you need to make a choice because those are 2 very different paths.

Yeah.

And I was like, it's a tech company. Like, let's do this. So it was really helpful to have him give me insights on infrastructure, early hires, how to incorporate, how to write my first deck for investors. He, you know, he was a different audience than I was used to engaging with, and that was super helpful. So I think the advice there is surround yourself with people who see the world differently than you do. in those early stages, because it's going to pressure test your vision and your plan. And for me, that was a CFO.

Yeah.

So, I first met him and then he introduced me to investors. I started to just have coffee dates with people and bumble through really early pitches, not knowing anything about that audience, not knowing anything about what they cared about, what metrics mean, and none of that, projections, didn't know anything at all, but was really open to learning and would take those meetings notes back. And I'd sit down with my CFO and be like, okay, this is what they asked. What do I need to be prepared for next time I go out? So, you just rinse, wash, repeat for a couple of years while we were making money. So, we were able to hold off. We didn't have to go out and raise right away. And then, by the time we got to our seed round, I had a bit of a network. I'd met other founders and other CEOs who'd gone through fundraising. I was able to get great advice from them on how to structure investor meetings, how to go out and formally say, I'm raising, and here's what I'd what I'm looking for. And then I just started meeting investors. I got introduced to Gokul Rajaram, who was a really well-known, is a really well-known angel investor here, an operator. And he introduced me to other people. And I think what I was looking for in a seed round, and I'd encourage others to think about as well, are people who had been in operating roles within recent memory. Because in that first, like, early seed stage where all you really have is a is a dream and a story. You want somebody who can say, like, I understand how this can map to a plan. I understand what the first team's gonna need to kind of look like. I can be on the interview panel when you're hiring your first engineer. These are people you want. And Shruti, who you're gonna interview next from Array, was definitely in that first round. And one of the reasons I wanted her in was because she brought some of that expertise to the table. So, you wanna bring in people that you can trust, And you want to bring in people that you think meet the stage of the business that you're in.

Yeah, I love that. I think it's something that I always talk to a bunch of different founders and thinking like, okay, like let's look at best case scenario. Like who do you want in your round? Like who's gonna help you your company the most? And you might as well start with that because why not? Like I think that's the thing you you look at like so many options for investors now, especially and like a lot of these a lot of these operators are either angels or solo capitalists, and you can get access to them. Through Twitter, through LinkedIn, through a friend of a friend. Like it's not as hard as maybe it once was a long time ago. I've seen like people reach out on Twitter DMs and I just had a coffee this morning with in the Disco Grind community. There was a few people in there we met up in real life for the first time, and one of the people there was like, "Yeah, I just like cold emailed like thousands of people and found the right people." I was like, "That's insane for the amount of people, but you find the right ones that are like aligned with what you want to do, and it makes a lot of sense." So I love hearing that story, and then. From there, so raising that first round of capital, obviously, there's like a whole different level of expectations after you raise capital. Take me through how you grew the company from there. What were some of those next steps? Obviously, it's a few years ago already, but I'm just curious on how that changed what Catch and Release did.

Well, I certainly didn't stop learning. I mean, there was a moment after raising that round where I started setting up regular meetings with my investors who I had just raised from. So, because again, they were adding value. I was looking for people who I wanted to use their time.

Yeah.

So to use Gokul as the other example, he and I would meet every couple weeks. I'd go into, he was at Square at the time and then Caviar. So I was like just going to his offices and sitting down and meeting with him and showing him the roadmap and bringing in other team members to chat through challenges. So setting up that cadence of communication was really important. We didn't have a board. So, in the early day between seed and A, there was no board. So, we didn't have any of that going. So, I just set up cadences for checking in with people and getting their advice and updating them on the business. I would say the biggest, one of the biggest turning points for me between the seed and the A was recognizing my role as a founder is different than my role as a CEO. And I think that's something that kind of hit me over the head pretty hard where I, you know, at the beginning when you're working with like 5 people, 10 people, you don't have to formalize a lot. Company values, mission, roles, it's all fairly flat and kind of like understood. Yeah. You don't have to say it. And it feels kind of awkward to say it at first, to say these are our values to a group of 15 people you've been working with for a year and a half. And they're like, yeah, I get it. You know, but— We're here. Yeah. You're building something that's gonna scale. So you're, you need to put those frameworks in place. And it's actually really, really important to put those in place. And so, I remember learning at a moment when the company was having a challenge with one of our departments. I remember we were having a really hard time with our sales department, I think it was. And we needed to make some changes, not just in terms of the process, but also the speed at which we were moving and learning. And I remember looking around because as the founder, I knew very well what the mission was. And I could detect when something wasn't pointing in the right direction. But I had this realization where I was like, man, it's just not working. Like, when is someone gonna fix that? And then I realized, oh, that's actually my job. I'm actually the one that everyone's listening to to help fix this problem. And this is a company that now needs leadership, not just founder direction. They need leadership. They understand where we're going. We've created the values and the mission and the vision. were all on board with it. And now they need someone to make hard choices so that they can keep going.

Yeah.

And that is a very different— that was a really big learning for me right after raising the seed and getting toward the A. That's what growth kind of meant in a way. It wasn't just customer growth and revenue growth and user growth. It was personal growth. It was, am I ready to lead this company on the next stage of its journey? And that wake-up call was really, really important when I look back on it. And it's hard as a founder sometimes because you're so caught up in the thing that you've created in your head that you have to be able to look objectively at the company as a CEO and say, what does it need now? Without my sentimentality, without the vanity of my connection to it. And I would trick myself. I told Gokul this once on a call. I said, sometimes I have to trick myself that I was just hired as the CEO of this company by the board. Not that I'm the founder. And that helps me make better decisions.

To that point, with the team itself, then I have a lot of questions I could ask around the team. At what point did improv come into play here for the team, for the squad? Like, where does that come into play? Way late.

Way late. I would say that the— so it's really interesting. So team is such an interesting thing. I feel like we hear this a lot. You need an A-team. Yes, we all need an A-team.

Sure.

But I think in Silicon Valley, we tend to think about that as a collection of A-players. Like, you need great individuals from great backgrounds that are really great at execution and can also be strategic and are just gonna come in and really take ownership and kick ass. And that's true. It's like building any kind of— you want athletes, right? We want athletes. We want people to come in, they understand the objective, and they're just gonna like, Work like crazy, crazy hard to do it. But there's also, there's also how the team works together. There's like, is the team an A-team? Are these people really collaborating well? Are they leaning on each other? Is there a culture of trust and support in this team? In basketball, I think about like blind passing when somebody's just like, I know I can pass the ball and he's gonna pick it up because that's how well I understand and can rely on my teammate.

Yeah.

That is another level of A-team to me. And that has to be just like in sports, that has to be practiced. You got to practice that. So improv is a way that we practice that. It's, it's like our rehearsal. It's our, it's our basketball practice. And, uh, and it's super fun, but it's also really serious. It's really serious work that we're doing. And the results speak for themselves. There's so much alignment. And the ability to blind pass is crucial in startup when everybody's moving as— we're moving as fast as possible with imperfect information. We need to rely on our gut and our instinct and our data. And those things have— and we all have different perspectives, which is a huge competitive advantage if you can really get access to someone else's perspective. The way you really do that is to make sure you're creating a space where that perspective can be openly shared without ego, without inhibition, without— or with inhibition, I guess. Without inhibition? What's the other word?

Always tricky. Always tricky. I understand the sentiment.

You— yeah. And so you— so creating that kind of environment, um, that welcomes multiple perspectives, that welcomes collaboration, has to be— has to be practiced, and it has to be set As an expectation and a culture from the top.

To that point.

So improv's not just like do a workshop every, you know, a couple times a year for team building. It's like every few weeks we all get together, we do this work, and we talk about it a lot between sessions too.

Okay. In like, in like 4 years and 400 podcasts across like 3 shows, improv has never come up as a team like development type of thing. Where did this come from in the first place? And how were you like, all right, guess what team? Like, We're doing improv every month or every couple weeks. Just take me through that real quick.

It actually happened at a really important time for the company. So startups require thoughtful planning, great market, and also they require luck. And luck is about being open to opportunity you weren't expecting and being ready for it when it comes. You just got to be ready to jump. And improv is definitely one of those lucky moments for me. We had just raised our Series A from Accel. on the back of the first year of the pandemic. So it was our first time raising on Zoom and first time raising an A, first time working with a tier 1 investor, really excited about where we were going.

Yeah.

And we had to start to build a leadership team that was going to— I had to start building a leadership team that was going to take the company from where it was to where we wanted it to go, the next level that the Series A was going to take us And in a lot of cases, there— in some cases, I had to really rethink some critical roles. I needed new engineering leadership. I needed to bring in a partner in engineering and product who was really going to take the next wave of this technical vision forward. I needed a new finance— I needed a full-time finance partner. So my CFO advisor that I worked with in the early days was like, you're ready for a full-time person now. You've got a Series A. It's time for you to get this full-time function in. And I was like, you're absolutely right. So, brought a CFO in. So, the team was dynamic at that time. New people were coming in. A-players were coming in. How do I really think about the culture of this team differently than I have in the past? We had an offsite virtually, and my chief of staff, who's on our senior leadership team, suggested Mike Birbiglia come and do a set. And he's, if you don't know Mike Birbiglia, he's an amazing comedian.

Yeah.

and performer. And I had been a fan of his for a long time. I've been a fan of standup comedy for ever since I can remember. I used to just like watch Comedy Central until 3 in the morning when I was in college.

Right.

So I just, I'd been following his work for a long, long time. And I thought like, perfect, he's gonna come in, he'll do a set at the end of our big strategy kind of kickoff on the backs of raising our Series A. Accel is going to come and speak, and then Mike Bobbiglia will come out. I was like, this is going to be the most awesome summit ever. And it was. And he did such a great job. Mike was awesome. And we did a bunch of Q&A, and he and I got a chance to talk. And he also pulled in people from the company to do stuff. And it was super interactive. And candidly, I think he thought he was doing like a corporate event.

Yeah.

And I think he walked away feeling like, that was a really interesting company that's filled with really creative people and with a leader that was kind of fun to improvise with. Whatever inspired him, I don't know what it was, but he called me after the show and said, hey, that was really fun. And we talked for about 10 minutes. He said, I'd love to introduce you to my improv coach. I've been working with her for a long time. I just think you guys would hit it off. So her name's Liz Allen. She's based in Chicago. And we did hit it off. And we started to think about— our first couple conversations, I nerded out with her on improv because I was just super interested in that anyway. But when we started getting into the— underneath the principles of improv, what's the foundation? What do you get from improv? Why is improv awesome? It's awesome because you're watching a group that trusts each other do stuff collaboratively in the moment that they haven't prepared for. What they have prepared for is they've prepared themselves with each other. They've prepared one another, and you're watching support on stage. That's essentially it.

Yeah.

You're watching— it's like watching an amazing basketball team. You're like, wow. Like, you're not really watching great technical athletes. You are, but you're also watching how they rely on each other. That's the other thing you're watching. So I thought that was fascinating. I knew I was at a point where I wanted to build a great team culture at the senior level because I had players coming in that really needed that and expected that and warranted that. And the culture of the team was changing. And I thought, okay, this could be really interesting. So we tried it. We did 3 workshops with Liz. The team liked it. I saw the results. I, I was looking for. And we've been doing it for 2 years now. Now we do it every 3 weeks. Team members have come, team members have gone, the group has always stayed with its constant doing that.

That's very unique. And there's a lot I want to go into. So I want to transition into going to this point, you mentioned the Series A, then this kind of happened after that. 2014, you start this company, you basically are bootstrapping, you mentioned for a couple of years, but going from the point of Bootstrapping in 2014 to then 2022 post-Series A with a tier 1 investor, what fueled that growth? Because there's a lot of companies that don't make it even to a seed from a pre-seed or to an A from a seed round. Like what's fueled the growth of your company? Like why have you been able to get to that point? I'm just curious. And I'm thinking from a lot of like the marketing perspective, cuz my mind goes there always, but like what actually fueled growth? Yeah.

Okay, great. Well, thanks for sharing the, where you wanna come at it from. I think it starts from having— this was solving a real customer problem from day one is a big part of it.

Yeah, definitely.

It wasn't ambiguous. It was really, it was like, this is really solving a customer problem. And then that customer problem started to grow and the opportunity then started to grow. And then it became obvious that we needed to build something and raise money and scale it. So what allowed us to survive in the early days was the fact that we had a service we were providing, that we were solving that problem. Let's put it this way. Because investors hate the word services. And we had a really hard time raising money in the beginning.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, we would go in and we would get meetings because we had $3 million in revenue and investors were like, yeah, I'll take that meeting all day long. What's that? Show me the product. I'd be like, well, we're building it. Where's the revenue coming from? Services. Okay. Call me when you've made the transition. So it was hard. It was hard in the beginning. So there's like kind of, there's 2 sides to the coin. It's— the revenue was great because it helped us stay alive, to your point.

Yeah.

And we were so close to the customer problem, we knew how to speak. Marketing was a function of talking to customers for 8 hours a day and knowing how they spoke and what they expected and trying out new things. Like, it wasn't anything, and it all spread word of mouth. All of the growth was word of mouth. We didn't spend any money on advertising in the first few years. And so, so it was, it was that revenue that helped. It was the revenue, the proximity to the customer were the two things I think that really were the key to our survival. And then I had to develop skills outside of those two things, which, you know, was pretty significant achievements, like being really solving a real problem and making enough money to fuel the growth of a team. But I needed to then develop the skills and fundraising and showing investors how this, how this vision could shift from One thing, one business model to another. That was really that was challenging and interesting, filled with lots of learnings too.

And from that, then you mentioned a lot of the kind of customer-led growth through referrals, and you know the customer so well. So obviously you have that experience around that. So they love this. It's a clear kind of like need being fulfilled by this. Is it the same today in terms of how you look at the next phase? So you you know obviously you're post Series A. There's different expectations, more growth, faster growth, whatever. There's a lot of different expectations. Is the same? Things in terms of growth marketing you're looking at today than it was even a few years ago? Or has that evolved as well?

That's super— such an interesting question because in some ways I feel like we're coming back to our fundamentals again. Right now we don't have a full-time head of marketing at Catch Emily, so I am the head of marketing. And I knew that really quickly when I started to see that we needed that function. I remembered from that day where I needed to come in and help the sales organization. I was like, ah, here's another one of those moments. I need to come in and run this function until I find the leader. So, you kind of learn as you go. Ricky, become your instincts. You can draw on past experience. So, as the head of marketing right now, I am going back to those fundamentals. I would say what's different, though, is that we're now going after a broader set of customers. So, we're exploring new markets and new needs. Where else is this pain felt outside of our core? core group of customers that we already have. And so that's, I would say, presented new learnings, right? Is this positioning that we've used with this first set of customers and early adopters the same positioning that's going to work for the next set? So that's really fun. I feel like I'm kind of almost starting from the beginning again.

Yeah. And it does change a lot from early adopters and even looking at other companies who spend money on customer acquisition. Obviously you said it's been kind of led by customer growth, but you look at how the increasing cost to acquire customers, cuz you've kind of hit the low-hanging fruit and then you evolve as you're trying to branch out and bigger. You're like, oh, it's like, how do we reach these new people? Being that you're in this kind of right now, even from just like a strategy perspective and process perspective, like how are you thinking about that? Or what do you wanna see in terms of the next customers to hit? Is it like combination market size, how you'll reach them? What makes sense is like tangentially, I'm just curious on how you're thinking and where your headspace is at.

Yeah. So, so I think we want to reach them in the same way, which is that they come in and experience our product, love what it does for them, and they refer the next person in their— on their team or in their network to, to the product. So we really want to see that. We want to continue seeing that organic growth because this is an industry of people who really know their stuff and they know what works and they have very high expectations for what they're creating in the market. And the tools they use, they're very discerning. And so we love that a customer can say, you know, I was referred to you by someone who I really trust. That just feels really good. There's kind of nothing better than that. You can't really pay for that. That's just beautiful. So I think we want to see that continued organic growth. I think what we want to learn is the market that we've gone after, especially since we had a service for the first chunk, the first stage of the company, we were working with you know, the world's top leading advertising agencies and brands. We were working on Super Bowl commercials, like big media. I mean, stuff that you've seen and probably still remember seeing from brands that are household names. And it was a great way to introduce the market to not just our solution, but the opportunity of the internet in general. Found content, which is what we call it, all the content you can find on the internet is found content. Is such a huge opportunity for marketers to connect with their consumers and build a sense of trust. And it doesn't mean everything's amateur. It doesn't mean everything's shot by people who don't have the technical expertise. There's a huge spectrum of content being created by professionals and amateurs alike that are all ending up online somewhere. And so if you're a brand wanting to create a beautiful, glossy, high-production cinematic campaign, You can do that with content you find online end to end. If you're a brand that's interested in leveraging more of a UGC look and feel where you're, you want to show like moments of like fails, for example, or like hot dog eating contests.

Yes.

Or whatever it might be. Parents having like difficulty changing their first diaper. I don't know. Like not, you're not going to get like perfect, perfectly lit shots. It's really less about the technical composition of a thing and more about the emotional engagement of a thing. Like, oh my God, like it's like America's Funniest Home Videos, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So the first thing actually to, when we're going after a new set of customers as we are, is to say, do you realize this is a category that you should be tapping into first and foremost? Because it's still very early days for the license to the internet future. In the future, it's going to— most of advertising is going to be powered by internet content. And as a result, we're going to get beautiful, memorable, amazing stories in very personal ways delivered to us as consumers in a way that today's production methods can't deliver. If we had to shoot everything ourselves and assemble a cast and crew and get a director and craft services and that whole beautiful industry, It's not that it goes away, but it absolutely has to scale. And there's just so much you can do in a period of time with a fixed budget.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is the future, but it's early days still. And so we have to, when you're, which is what's fun about that is that we're really creating a category. So we have to tell our customers, this is the, this is the promise of found content. And if you want to access it, catch and release is the best solution. So it's kind of a 2-tiered A 2-tiered approach. And the way we're thinking about it now in a post-Series A and post, you know, kind of taking our growth further is how do we use the amazing credibility we've built working with the top agencies and brands and making these incredible spots and commercials and use that to educate a new market of broader customers that are doing a lot of this, more of this work themselves and not necessarily with big agencies like Wieden and Kennedy and—

Yeah.

And Goodby Silverstein and Partners and a lot of these large, amazing agencies. How do we give them the self-serve tools to do it? So it is a slightly different marketing message and it's a slightly different flow through the product. And we still have a lot to learn about that customer group. And that's really exciting. It's exciting to be at this stage and still not knowing a lot.

Yeah. Still learning, always constantly. And I know I just wanna make sure we get to one thing before we kind of Stop here. New product being launched soon, maybe already launching. Take me through the latest. What's happening with Catch and Release?

Yeah. So, since raising our Series A from Accel and really building a new leadership team and bringing in incredible capabilities into the organization, we have basically evolved out of our first version of our product that we created. on the back of the service that we really kind of used to prove out the market and prove out how this was going to work. And we've completely rebuilt it and have relaunched Catch and Release with, and including with that, a rebrand. So we actually changed our logo from this awesome ampersand to a plus. And we just posted a blog on that on LinkedIn yesterday.

Love it.

And the whole backstory of that transition. So it's really, it's a really exciting time. You can go to catchandrelease.com. As a professional storyteller, somebody who works on a marketing team, someone who works in an advertising agency, and start engaging with the internet and licensing content that you're finding. We also have an incredible group of curators at Catch and Release that are constantly finding amazing nuanced things and are adding that to evolving galleries on the site. So there's lots of places you can also browse. It's really exciting. And this is the foundation really for our license the internet vision. Lots of tools coming soon for creators as well to make it easier for them to be discovered and for them to license their content proactively. So yeah, the future is now.

I wanna just, as we kind of wrap things up here, I'm just curious, 'cause you go from creator and this creative side, you mentioned earlier in this interview, you didn't necessarily know what's it like to be a CEO and this venture-backed startup thing and all this. And that was like 7 or 8 years ago or something like that at this point now. So it's not that I want to ask if there's anything that was unexpected, but I don't know what you expected back then in 2014 in terms of this journey. So I'm just curious on like how this journey has been for you as a founder and the evolution in the last 7 years. Any thoughts on that as we wrap things up?

Absolutely phenomenal. I feel so fortunate that I've been able to be on this ride. It has not been easy. I mean, there's ups and downs. Early days, worried about payroll, trying to figure out how to, I mean, a million things. It's so hard. It's so hard. But I think that the thread that connects it all for me is it used to be one thing and now it's two things. The one thing has always been, I'm absolutely in love with this problem.

Fair.

Like, I just can't stop thinking about it. It's like a puzzle. I just, it's just infectious to I've not lost any curiosity about this problem from the first day that I discovered that it might be a thing. Like, I'm still just obsessed with it.

Yeah.

And it's nice to have built something that I can point to now because so many of my early friends and family are like, oh, okay. I guess this is why you could like talk my ear off forever about life.

Exactly.

Because it's like a real thing though. Like, now you know.

Yeah.

The other thing now, though, that I've inherited or I've put into my proverbial backpack that is now carrying me, I think, through the next thing is the leadership component. The amazing honor and opportunity is to lead a large group of amazing people to achieve something huge. That is going to be my legacy, I think. That part's really exciting. I get even a little I get a little bit verklempt about that because it's just so powerful.

I mean, yeah, you're in such an interesting position now with where you're— the companies that, like you mentioned, with like tier 1 VC, raised $20 million plus overall. And you're like, even companies just surviving past that long, like just to be 7+ years in, whatever it is, like that on its own is like incredible. I mean, the journey.

So it is remarkable. It is a journey. It's not— we've by no means like figured it all out. And there's still so much more to do and build. And the risks are just as big as they were at the beginning. It's not in the bag by any stretch.

Yeah.

So, and I know for founders that are listening, it's kind of like, wow, you know, it sounds so easy. Or like, if I could only get to that point, then it would be like smooth sailing. Like, no, that's not it. You have new problems every day. But I think if you're motivated by the problem that you're solving and the customer who benefits from solving that problem, and you love to lead people and you want to see, you want to be in a position to grow a company, I think this is a wonderful journey. And for us, it's not even just about growing the people of the organization. It's about leading the market. Leadership is actually so important from a, like, how do you lead a market?

Yeah.

That's the whole thing. And so building those skills as a CEO, as a leader, beta testing your skills on your early group of people, and then taking that outside the organization to the customers and to the marketplace. It's really fun. Yeah, it's really, really fun.

I know you mentioned where we can find obviously more about the company itself, but where can people connect with you as well, Annalisa, if they would like to?

I'm always happy to connect. As I mentioned earlier, one of the first things that really changed the game for me was meeting other founders. I talk to founders all the time who are ahead of my stage, behind my stage, at my stage. So annalisa@catchandrelease.com. Just email me directly. Happy to, happy to chat. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. You can DM me there if you want to.

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Justin.