Investing in Creator Testing with BGV Portfolio Founder Anthony Privitelli | Ep 73

The main vision right now might be like a boring one, but we want to just, we want to be the number one place that companies, teams, individuals turn to and think of when they want creator feedback or research.

Yeah.

So, I mean, Creator Testing is completely free for creators to sign up and we essentially just display opportunities to creators based on, you know, the platforms they publish on, the content genre.

All right, welcome back to Seed to Harvest, a podcast hosted by me, Paige Finn Doherty. I'm the founding partner behind Genius Ventures and author of Seed to Harvest, a children's book about venture. Today I'm really excited to be joined by BGV portfolio company founder Anthony Privatelli of Creator Testing. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on and spending some time with us today.

Of course. Thank you, Paige.

Yeah, of course. Can you explain to us in a quick 2 sentences what Creator Testing does?

Yeah, Creator Testing is on-demand creator-focused feedback and insights, essentially built for teams and individuals who want to get creator feedback, whether it's podcasters, short-form, long-form video creators, live streamers, bloggers, writers, basically anyone who wants content creator feedback. Our platform is aiming to be the destination To get to receive that feedback.

Amazing. And I think like Creator Testing and this investment specifically is very special to me cuz it's the first pre-seed deal that I led co-investing with Arash Ferdowsi, who's the co-founder of Dropbox, and Kyle Parrish, who's the VP of sales at Figma. Before Anthony hops into his story about how he came to understand the problem that he's solving deeply, I wanted to run through some of our investment framework for how we thought about making this investment. So some of the things that I think about when investing in the creator economy, so there's really strong market despite macroeconomic conditions. The creator economy in aggregate is worth over $100 billion with over $15 billion having been invested into the space since 2021. So we see strong demographic tailwinds in the creator economy. So 86% of young people want to post paid social media. Content with 30% of students aspiring to be a content creator as a career. Anthony has worked in the creator space for nearly 10 years. He was employee number 2 at Patreon and most recently a product manager at TikTok. And he felt the pain point that you're solving for firsthand. He's had a lot of, I'll go into this later, but had a lot of difficulty reaching creators in an easy way to understand feedback and other research platforms don't really cater to creators specifically. And on the creator side, it also creates a new monetization aspect for creators to be paid research. And as you walk through your customer discovery, you realize that 95% of creators contacted would be interested in sharing their opinions since they don't have to like share them publicly and they can just be honest and be paid for that honest feedback. And then some of the reservations and risks that we thought through is like, At an earliest stage, there's always like an inherent execution risk. So we invested pre, pre-MVP, would you say? Like you, you were like working through like early customer conversations. And so it's like, what is this gonna, what form is this gonna take in the future? And then there was like the incumbency risk. So like other survey and research platforms don't cater specifically to creators, but they could build that feature in. And I, I thought about this as Like it didn't seem to be on the main roadmap of most incumbents to incorporate this feature into their products. And then the last one that we thought about, and these are, these are like risks and reservations that came up throughout the investment process. So some of them I feel like we came to terms within the initial conversation we had. Some of them were in reference calls, but the, the last one was while preliminary research indicates there's demand for feedback, a larger sample size would like truly determine companies' willingness. To pay for feedback from creators, which we'll talk about today in the show, cuz this investment memo is written, when was this written? Like earlier this year. So it's been, it's been cool. We can talk about that.

February or March.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm excited to talk about like how the company has grown since then. But starting off, so that's kind of like the context that, that I approached this investment and why I'm excited about it and some of the risks and mitigations that I thought about for context. Might be interesting for like you to hear. I don't know if I've shared them with you directly.

I, yeah, I think you, I think you sent me a copy of it. Okay, cool. And yeah.

Yeah. So let's start with like, when did you first experience the problem that you're solving and how did that happen?

Yeah, so early on at Patreon, I, as a product manager, one of like the main, you know, best practices for a PM is to obviously talk to your users. In our case, just talk to our creators. And after doing that for so long, we inherently just like found these challenges that you might think that are like counterintuitive of the difficulty of just talking to your own users, specifically at a creator-focused company. There's a lot of relationship management where there are creator-focused teams, whether you're like the creator success team or creator relations team. And you really want to be careful around, you know, pinging creators and the asks that you kind of provide them. So as a PM, like we're constantly working on new designs, new strategy, new ideas, and we would find ourselves in these meetings with the broader product team or leadership team. And a lot of the conversation was just, you know, like, I feel this way. I feel like creators will like this. I think this. And for me, I always thought like, we have so many creators, like let's just, like, it'd be so much more powerful to say like, hey, we talked to 10 creators or we talked to 20 creators. creators, and they prefer this design, or they prefer this copy, it speaks to them. So having just that, like, evidence or, like, more analytical data behind why we want to do something and just including creators. And this, Johnny, just goes back to the idea of just being more creator-first and involving creators in every decision. And it was just a challenge to do that at a high frequency where a lot of times, you know, we know if you try to contact a creator, even through email, It's hard to contact them. They don't see it in, in enough time. Like we would get emails back from creators like a month after we had already like run, like made a decision on things.

Was there, I guess, and then like, yeah, I was gonna say, was there like a breaking point for you or is there a point where you're just like, I'm so frustrated right now?

So a lot of times it would resort to like our PM and like designers and researchers just going onto Instagram or YouTube and like just finding emails and sending cold outreach emails. And of course, like we would just try to DM them and be like, hey, we work at Patreon or we work at TikTok and we're looking to talk to creators and you're like the ideal persona. We're paying, you know, $50 or $100 Amazon gift card. Like, will you talk to us? And most of the time, like once creators saw it and we actually had the conversation, it was the best. Like creators loved having the conversation with us, having and forming a relationship with someone at the company. And at the end of every call, I think every product manager, designer, researcher can attest to this, but like after you talk to a customer, the immediately, the immediate thought after you hang up is we need to do more of these. They are so valuable. And one of the, I guess, like the main breaking point was, you know, once you get into research, you want to do unbiased research. You don't want to have the bias of talking to the same creators, knowing they're talking to someone at Patreon or at TikTok or at YouTube. So, you know, we would sometimes just talk to the same creators and after a while we thought, man, like how do we just get new faces, new creators, maybe prospect creators who might not be familiar with our product? And we would start using, you know, the general user research tools out there where you and I can sign up and take a survey and make $10 if we've shopped online. Yeah. Or have flown domestic in the United States. There's just a lot of market research that's constantly, you know, being delivered out there. And we would go to these platforms and have a very specific type of, you know, persona in mind, whether it was a podcaster who is familiar with these types of tools, or a photographer who uses a specific type of editing app. And we wouldn't find the type of creators we wanted on these specific platforms. So again, we would just kind of be, we kind of fall back to just doing our own recruitment, like panel creation for creators and that just took a lot of time. And in like a high, high-paced, you know, work environment, we need to speed this process up. So over time, I thought, man, like, why doesn't this exist? And then I experienced the same problem at TikTok. And like, you would think there's millions of creators on TikTok. And we all know that, you know, the long tail of creators don't make a lot of money, or make a sustainable amount to have this be, you know, a full-time job. And of course, this is just another monetization you know, tool for creators to provide feedback, be in contact with a company or a team that of a product that you use. And obviously just a new way to earn some additional income. I don't think, I don't think we'll have creators making, you know, tens of thousands of dollars from participating in research, but definitely, you know, a couple hundred bucks, maybe $1,000 a month or so would, it is meaningful for creators.

Especially for the long-term creators. I feel like that was, that was one of the things we talked about in our like earlier conversations is like there's a level, there's a level of trust that creators build with our audiences where they'll turn away revenue generating opportunities because it doesn't speak authentically to like them or their audience. And if you lose trust as a creator, like that is your truly like your biggest currency is that like authentic trust built with your audience. And I think that. Yeah. Because creator testing doesn't force them to like share the feedback and they can just be honest and like take off the perfect social media mask. I think that it's like, it's almost a relief to have a monetization opportunity where they're not like stressed about it relating to their brand.

It's more behind the scenes.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a behind the scenes test.

Yeah. Like one of the main things we explain to creators as we're onboarding them and, you know, trying to get them to participate in research is we let them know that like, hey, this isn't a paid, like brand opportunity, you don't need to post anything publicly on social media. This is something you can do, obviously, like from your phone or from your laptop at home behind the scenes. And it's just you sharing the knowledge that you have as a creator, the psychology that you have of constant creation and publishing new content, staying up with trends and This is information companies want to know. Most of the people, I think we're seeing a shift actually in more creators being hired at companies for this problem. But most of the people building these companies, like they don't, they don't go through the like psychology of being a creator or having to deal with thousands of DMs and missing, you know, comments or having to manage an audience that has over 20,000 people. Never turns off. Even 20,000 people. If you look at a video or, you know, uh, an Instagram post or a TikTok with, you know, 25,000 likes, typically like now we're prone to think that like, oh, I'm just gonna swipe. This isn't a great piece of content because it's such a low amount of likes or views. 20,000. Like we only watch things with hundreds of thousands of views or millions of views, but 20,000 people, that fills Staples Center or, you know, most NBA arenas. And that's a lot. So we're a little desensitized to the numbers, to the amount of, yeah. And it's hard to manage an audience. You know, most people don't know what goes into that. So the, just the inherent knowledge of that creators have from building an audience, publishing content every day is so valuable for these teams that are building for creators and new products for creators.

I love that. And one of the things we were talking about before the show is if creators wanna participate in creator testing, how do they do that?

Yeah, so I mean, Creator Testing is completely free for creators to sign up. And we essentially just display opportunities to creators based on, you know, the platforms they publish on, the content genre. So as a creator who signs up on Creator Testing, there's some onboarding just for us to learn more about you. We require creators to authenticate at least one of their social media accounts, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, or YouTube. We're going to be adding more social platforms. But, you know, a lot of the companies specifically want to talk to verified creators. Maybe it's around a specific genre or a follower size. So as part of that onboarding for creators, we learn a little bit about you and we will surface, you know, paid research opportunities that we think you're a fit for. And then we also just kind of display an open opportunity list where you can basically apply to any paid research opportunity. And most of the time, There are screener questions that the company has provided to make sure that they're drilling down into the right creator. So you might have to answer a short questionnaire and you may qualify or you might not be essential, like you might not qualify to participate and then you just move on to the next one.

Awesome. Well, thank you for that context. So if you're a creator listening to this, definitely reach out to Anthony to make additional money and provide your feedback. I guess one of the things I'd love to hop into is What is your, what is your like 5, 10-year vision of success for Creator Testing look like?

Yeah, the main vision right now might be like a boring one, but we want to just, we want to be the number one place that companies, teams, individuals turn to and think of when they want creator feedback or research. And if we can do that, then we would have built a strong and wide, diverse network of creators. You know, think hundreds of thousands, maybe a million creators on our platform. And as you have, as you grow that network of diverse creators, I think more opportunities just generally present themselves when you have a network like that. And one thing that continues to come up in conversation with a lot of the startups that we're working with is when a new product or feature or just company is launching built for creators, the number one problem is just creator adoption. And there's not a single place, there's not a single place for a new product or feature to launch specifically to podcasters or to beauty creators or to short-form editors. And if we can build out that network, maybe we provide a new place for creators to now discover new products, for companies to launch directly to their ideal or target creator audience as well. So that's something that has come up in a lot of conversation.

Wow.

And I can see us, you know, adding that as, you know, a couple years ago you would always hear like, we're building the Uber for X. This would essentially be like the Product Hunt for creators, a dedicated place that companies can announce new features, new products where your target audience are creators publishing content, professional creators, and boom, you could just directly talk to them, advertise to them.

That's awesome. I, I, yeah, it's, it's so interesting. We were talking about it a bit before the show as well, but I think there's like a malleability to being in the early stage, especially as you're conducting a lot of user interviews with both companies and creators, like interesting different angles that come out of the discovery process. So do you wanna maybe share, I don't know if you can mention any of your customers' names, but do you wanna share like some stories of like cool creator interactions that you've had or like calls that you've been on that have been really valuable to your customers? Yeah.

So most of the calls that we're setting up, we are kind of just like the connective tissue where the companies are more using our platform as a recruitment tool to set up those calls. So I can't necessarily speak to the, like the research itself, but I can speak to the types of creators that companies want to talk to.

Yeah, we'd love to hear about that.

And so there's obviously, there's a ton of AI tools being built for creators around editing and content creation and just, you know, helping The, like, whether it's writing captions, editing, and we've seen a ton of, of desire to talk to creators who are focused on using editing tools or have experience using AI. There's obviously more, more creator research being led to, like, in the Web2 space. We have a few clients that want to talk to more Web3 creators who are interested in crypto and NFTs, but like, just from a research perspective, We haven't seen a lot of that, which is just interesting to see that trend over time where, you know, a year ago that was like all the hype. So it's just interesting to see the types of creators that these companies want to talk to and we can kind of see like where the focus is for some of the companies that we work with.

That's awesome. I, I guess, okay, so now we have like a better idea of like the problem that you encountered at Patreon and TikTok and the insight that you had that led to the creation of Creator Testing, what your long-term vision for Creator Testing going forward and where you're at today. I would love if you, like, do you mind sharing like what some of the challenges are that you face as an early stage founder?

Yeah, I guess one of the, like the biggest challenges, even just as we were talking in the early, like the early conversations of like, what are we going to build? Because You mentioned this earlier, but I kind of came to you with this idea and had, you know, been working off of a spreadsheet and had a few paying customers and had no product built. And the number one, like, challenge was just the obvious cold start problem when you're like, we're essentially building a marketplace where the demand is companies or teams wanting to talk to creators and the supply is just having a network of creators. And one of the biggest challenges was one, just like finding that demand where we don't have any creators. Like when we're going out to companies saying like, hey, What types of creators do you wanna talk to? Like, we have this network, you know, we might have, let's say, oversold how many creators we have to get our earliest customers. But, you know, we make a promise that like, if we don't have, like, we will also do that recruitment and we work with teams and, you know, try to find the exact persona type of creator. But just the cold start problem is real and it's, it's very hard to like get over that hump. I wouldn't even say we're over that hump yet either. Like we haven't built that expansive network yet, and that's just something that we're constantly trying to grow. And then just as a solo founder, just the challenge of just like being in your head all day, every day. And I've, Paige, like we've texted about this and you, you're, you're so great at just like always being someone to say like, hey, reach out to me. Yeah. Talk to me like I am your team, which is, which is so great. But yeah, I, and I know that a lot of, you know, I read a lot of YC articles and they have a lot of great content and like there's reasons why they wanna focus on found— like co-founders and having a team and.

Yeah.

I definitely, I definitely see that experience, that pain of just like not having someone to like bounce ideas off of or to talk to on a regular basis. And especially just like being remote and a solo founder, like, I mean, solo founder, you just are remote, but there's, there's value in just having the conversation and just kind of like exploring ideas and talking it out and having someone to say like, hey, this idea, like you are totally off track. Stay focused. Because as a founder, like you're just always trying to think of, you know, like if this isn't working, you know, one of the probably like existential crises that a lot of solo founders deal with is, you know, at what point do you maybe pivot? And like pivot is such a—

It's a little taboo.

A word you want to avoid as a founder. It, yeah. Where, you know, there's been a lot of great companies that started out as one thing that have pivoted to another. But as a founder who's raised money for a specific idea, You know, you wanna give it a shot and just, you have that internal conversation. You might give yourself some arbitrary deadlines.

Yeah.

Maybe not so arbitrary with burn and everything, but you're saying like, okay, we wanna hit this revenue goal. We wanna hit this adoption goal.

Yeah.

Or signup goal. And, you know, there, there's, there's progress, but just having, just working alone.

Yeah.

Some people can do it. I think it, I think the challenges are just being alone and being in your head and really just like tuning out. tuning out everything else and just staying focused. And we talked about this earlier, but like being online, seeing everything on Twitter, like there's a, there's a lot of inspirational things, but there's a lot of things that just make you feel bad. So valid about where you are and just the natural struggles and obviously just comparing yourself to other coaches.

Well, it's, it's also natural for comparing yourself to a win, right? 'Cause I feel like a lot of us don't share our like, yeah, massive L's on social media. I feel like I've been trying. Yeah. I've been intentional about being more honest and like sharing challenges that I've been going through, especially like with the founders that we work with. And I think that's—

Yeah.

It's been really nice too, cuz I think like, I, I guess for me as a solo founder, it's, uh, you're just, yeah, like you said, you're in your head a lot and you want people to like share your wins and your challenges and bounce ideas off of. And I think a, a lot of, a lot of the community building efforts I've done with Behind Genius have been around that because I know how deeply lonely it can be to like be working on something super exciting, kind of like in a vacuum of your own head. So yeah, I always, I love getting our founders together for sure.

There was one thing that you said, I'm, I, the, I like, the thought is escaping me right now, but oh, I had a, I had a point to add to that. You might need to cut this out, but I can't.

No, you're good.

I wanted to say it. I was just listening. What was it? Oh, oh, the part about sharing like the, the hardship or like the massive Ls. I feel like most, most people typically wait to share like the trough of sorrow until they've like—

Feel like I just sold my company for like $3 billion. Here's like the worst week of my life explained and like how it led to that.

Yeah. But like no one is sharing, no one is sharing that point when they're like still in the decline. And they're just like, oh my God. Like, yeah. Where it's like every— everyone waits to share that trough of sorrow until like they're on the up. So it's a feel-good story, but I feel like most, I think, I think most people would find value in just like, hey, we're in this together. Like, I'm struggling, I'm throwing everything at the wall right now. You know, and sometimes you see, you do see that stuff on Twitter of, you know, founders saying like, unfortunately had this, like, you don't obviously wanna avoid that, but you You know, it's very, it's very real. And I think the one thing that, you know, to credit VCs and just giving, giving founders and entrepreneurs the ability to fail and to try and, you know, take a big swing is obviously, you know, the relationship. Yeah. And the value that obviously—

Yeah, I think that's like probably one of the most challenging aspects is like, that's one of the biggest decisions as a founder to make. And I, I like believe that, I strongly believe that it's one that only the founder can make to make the decision to shut down. And I think that, yeah, I don't know, it's like, it's just a really hard decision. And I feel like a lot of my principles being grounded in like a founder-first investor is like, if that's something a founder is considering, like I wanna be there and create the space to Talk through that. But at the end of the day, like it's just the founder's decision cuz it's like you own the majority of the company and it's your life. So yeah.

Yeah, man. I, I, I don't want this to sound like negative when talking about things shutting down, but like, I just feel like this is something that at least early stage founders, like it's always just a thought in their head. Like, you know, I try to be cautiously optimistic, but I, I think I generally lean towards just paranoid about the worst things happening.

Oh, I feel like it's like that. I, I, Especially for like BGB in like the first 2 years, it was just like hectic. Like things were just like, you're doing so many things for the first time and I feel like it takes like 2 and a half years, I'm feeling like, to feel like, okay, some things are repeatable and I have processes and I'm like principles and I've got, I've kind of like made a lot of mistakes and will continue to.

Yeah.

Make them and learn from them. But the first 2 years are just like insane. Such a big learning curve. Yeah. Okay. Wait, I wanna, you mentioned it a little bit, but I would love to hear more from your perspective about what it's been like to work with me and behind Genius Ventures, if you wanna talk about that.

Yeah. I mean, one, the autonomy feels great. Like I, you're there to help, but you're giving Me and I, most of the founders I've talked to is that you're kind of just letting them be themselves and their creative space and just go, like, go for it, for lack of a better term. And just really pursue what they're passionate about and what their aim, like what their main project was about. And one thing I like is that you share your phone number and you always say like you're a text away.

Yeah.

And I feel like email, email is very formal, but just getting a text from you, just checking in is just nice and more personal and has it more of a friendship, like obviously like business partnership, but it's, it's more of like a, hey, we're on the same team. And like, I just feel like the autonomy where I've talked to other founders where, you know, I obviously some pro— like having pressure is, is good.

Yeah.

Like it moves things forward, but it's not like a breathing down your neck. I have to, like, I have to be afraid of making the wrong move type of thing where I just, the experience that I've had is, you know, you're gonna make a decision of focusing on maybe like one thing for a week and it might not pan out. And I don't have that fear of having to be like, to tell you like, oh man, we screwed up, or we learned this and now we're focused on this. And having you be upset about something like, I haven't, thankfully, I don't know what that feels like. I know that some founders are just afraid of talking to their investors. And whether it's a good update or a bad update, I feel like you are there to listen and help and basically like provide feedback. Like you work with a ton of founders, you have more experience than I do talking and working with different founders. So you provide a lot of depth and information to help me think through problems as well.

I'm so happy to hear that. I think that's one of the things that I did, like the pressure thing. I feel like one of the biggest things that I've learned is I feel like most of the founders that I end up investing in all, like, all have pretty strong internal voices that are either like a little paranoid or just like always thinking of like how things can be improved. So I feel like I'm like, I don't know, I'm here to listen and help. I feel like that, that voice is already pretty loud in most of the founders' heads that, that I work with. So yeah, that's, it's, I love that you pointed that out. Do you, what, what questions do you have for me?

Yeah, I guess the main one, just to keep it on trend with you working with a lot of founders and something we talked about was just like the breadth of companies where it's not, it's not a specific vertical or type of market that you're invested in. I guess maybe one thing that you can share that I would be interested in, maybe other founders listening, is like, what are some of the common traits that you have noticed just working with different founders and I guess if a new founder came to you and said, I'm experiencing this problem and it's, you, you continue to hear the same problem or struggle that most founders deal with, like what do you constantly hear about?

Yeah, that's a good question. Okay, so I'll answer the first, which is traits, and then I'll move on to the second, which is like common problems that I see early stage founders running into. Traits, I would say I've developed like a very specific 3 traits I really look for, um, in founders. So the first is really strong storytellers, both quantitative and qualitative. I think it lends to better selling, recruiting, fundraising. The second is a really strong mission, and this can be like a personal or professional pain point that you've experienced that just like, you know, if you had, like, I think this is a reality for like a lot of founders going back, but if you just had your savings and you quit your job, like you would be working on this regardless of whether you had funding. Like it's just like an undeniably annoying pain point that you've seen over and over and over again. And you're just like over it. You're like, I need to do something about this.

Yeah.

this right now. And I think like having a really strong mission at the core of the company is also really beneficial for recruiting, like especially in Gen Z. A lot of my peers are like, I wanna work for a company with a really strong mission so that I can feel empowered to like understand and contribute to that and feel like I'm having an impact. And then the third trait has been high execution velocity. I think this one I, the way that I think about it is just, it's just like great communicator. And then like, there's like a very strong why. And then the last one is like the execution velocity. So that's like how, like if you think about velocity as speed and direction, like a vector of that, it's like the direction is like how thoughtfully you can set the direction of the company. And then speed is like how quickly that you can iterate on this. And a lot of what I look for in my conversations is like how you, like, it was funny when we were talking like originally, you were just like, I'm like, you know, I'm kind of like casually exploring this idea. I've like talked to like hundreds of creators and like a bunch of companies. And I was like, that is not like, like, like the bar for casual exploration is so different for so many founders. And I think that one of the aspects that I'll, I think this is like a good segue into like common problems that early stage founders face is like. Having, not having the context of like what other early stage, like pre-seed or seed founders are doing or what the metrics are, what the benchmarks are, like what is casual customer exploration? I have like one friend in particular who I'm thinking about who has done like so much research and like isn't giving herself the credit for doing it. And I think that's like one of the issues. So that's like also what I focus on a lot as an investor is like providing context as to like where I've seen other companies. land or benchmarks that they're thinking about so you can kind of orient yourself. I actually really appreciate when my investors do this because I think sometimes you can be operating in a bit of a vacuum and you're like, I think, you know, like, here's what I'm doing and I hope you like it and I hope it works. But like, it can be hard to orient yourself when all you're seeing is like social media stuff. And so I think that like transparent context is really important. To help with that specific early stage founder problem. I think the second is like fundraising's hard. Fundraising is hard for like raising millions of dollars is hard. And like having an optimistic mindset is helpful. But I think that there's like this interesting thing I've seen with a lot of founders I work with where it's kind of similar to like The problem that I talked about before, but it's like, oh, I've like only raised this amount and it's like so much more money than they've ever raised before. And I think because startup land moves so fast, you can get caught in like the day-to-day and be like, I'm not closing this amount, or it's not like moving as fast as I want it to be, or I'm expecting it to be. And that internal voice is like going and going and going. And then you're like, okay, let me pause and like look back. at where my life was a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago. Like, company wasn't even started, hadn't raised any money, like hadn't built a product, didn't have any customers. Like, so I think, yeah, rearview mirror doesn't exist.

I think that's discount.

That might be like kind of a common trait that I've seen, not necessarily when I orient my investing parameters around, is like a lot of the founders that I back probably live the majority of their time in their heads in the future. So probably like Very small time in the past, like sizable chunk in the present, mostly in the future. And I think that's probably been my orientation as well. I think it's why investing in early stage is so exciting, cuz it's like I get to see all of these wide variety of investing in the future, as you mentioned. Yeah. Big breath. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

Awesome. Thanks.

As we're wrapping up, wanted to touch on where folks can find you. I'll drop it in the show notes, but creatortesting.com. And then if there are companies interested in participating in Creator Testing, should they go to the website as well?

Yeah, you can go to the website. There's like a registration contact us form for businesses. Obviously creators can sign up and just, you know, go through the onboarding, connect your social media and start exploring paid opportunities. But then I'm also just anthony@creatortesting.com if you wanna email me. And then on socials, I'm primarily on Twitter sometimes, and that's just A Privatelli, A in my last name. So.

Oh my goodness, I'm laughing. This is like very quick. I didn't, I don't, I'll see if I keep this, but one of the things is like I was diligencing Creator Testing when I was coaching my venture capital class at SDSU and I was like, All right everyone, like here's the company I'm looking at. Everyone wanna do like their like deep dive FBI search? And it was so funny. They found something that you had like, you did like, well, you were working like in the gambling space before and they were like, this, does this guy have a gambling problem? And what had happened was like you had had this like incredible, do you start with like $400 or something? And then it ended up being like. This massive pot and, and they were just like, what is he doing gambling all this money?

And I was— I, you can, you can totally keep this. You can totally keep this.

It was so funny.

This is like, if someone wants to like understand who I am, like this is a great explanation. So yeah, what Paige is referring to, and this is why I think like social media presence is such a big deal. I even thought about like deleting all of these tweets cuz I was, I was just like being open. But basically what we're getting at is a group of friends and I, we love sports. We, I grew up playing sports. I play in an adult hockey, ice hockey league in California, and it's just a good outlet to exercise and, you know, meet cool people. So we love sports. All of my friends do, and we love betting on sports. So being a little bit more risk-averse, we all thought, hey, instead of just like placing our own bets, why don't we pool all of our money and, you know, create One lump account. And then together we will all vote, we will all vote on games we like and just place bets as one, you know, one friend will have the account and he'll place all the bets for us. So there's like maybe, I think like 10 of us and we each put in $500. So like not that much money to like explore, you know, what, what could we do? And this was us, you know, maybe 2 years ago. Thinking like, hey, we can do this. 10 of our minds, we could definitely make money sports betting. So we started with our group, like account at $5,000, each of us just investing $500. And every day we would have a poll go out in our group chat around like our, the slate of games, whether it was NHL, basketball, football, college football, or baseball, just like the main sports. And we would vote and then the hierarchy was You know, if 2 games, whoever had the most votes, we would place that bet as a group, you know, and we grew our sports betting account from $5,000 to $35,000. And our goal was to, was to make $30,000 and go on a trip to Cabo and like go golfing. And we thought once we hit that goal, we are going to do it and we're going to stop. If you have an out and you have a goal, like maybe you could do it and we did it. And so what you guys saw on Twitter was I was, I thought like, oh, you know what? This would be, this would be fun to follow. Like I was on sports betting TikTok, sports betting Twitter, and everyone's always just sharing their accounts and stuff. So I started sharing the bets we were doing and saying how much money we were down or how much money we were up and we hit our goal. We made $30,000 in a year. We went on our Cabo trip. We had like an all expenses paid for golf trip. And celebrated and had a good time. And we then like had some remaining funds, so we thought, hey, you know what, let's just kind of go rogue. Like we hit our goal, let's just see where this goes. And this was around like the Super Bowl and we had placed money on the Eagles. So you know where this is gonna go because they lost. And I think like one of the tweets was like a $15,000 bet that we lost. Oh, I'll never forget. Paige, you were like, you, you had a call with me and you're like, hey, my due diligence team like was looking at your Twitter and they, it's like, are you like a massive like gambling addict? So I had to explain, I was like, oh my God, this totally looks like that. 'Cause it looks like I'm—

It was so funny.

The sole owner of this like $30,000 account.

Yeah. I remember them being like, company looks great.

It was—

No, it's awesome. I hope, yeah, I really would love if you would keep it up. And now this story is out there so people have the context. The tweet.

Yeah. No, I know.

I'm not, I just like, it's, it's funny actually, the, the teammate who brought up, like works close by now and he's like working at another like VC firm. And it's funny cuz I, I ran into him recently. I was like, do you remember when you, when you brought up gambling addiction? Yeah, we do our, we do our due diligence here. So good.

So good. I had my friends, like my friends knew it wasn't, honestly, it wasn't hard to find. Like, I'm, I, I was actually glad that you brought that up because a lot of my friends, like when I told them, I was like, hey guys, like they knew I was exploring this idea. And, um, once I told them like, hey, I'm gonna look, I'm gonna start, you know, exploring to like raise a seed amount. They literally told me, they're like, hey, you might wanna think about scrubbing this because, and I was like, it's fine, it's fine. And then as soon as I got that call from you, I was like texting my friends. I was like, oh my God, you're, you're totally right. It's, it's fine.

Yeah.

But you guys were totally right.

It's so funny. But yeah, this was such a wonderful conversation. I'm happy we got that last little bit at the end too. All right, well, thank you again everyone for listening. I'm excited to be sharing an ongoing series of The Portfolio Company founders that we work with at Behind Genius Ventures. And if you're an early stage founder and this sounds like the conversation you wanna be having, let me know. I'm paige@behindgeniusventures.com and yeah, I'll see you next week. And a very special thank you to Seed to Harvest podcast editor Tate Doherty for his amazing work on this episode.