Adam explains how they built a broadcast studio in 90 days after postponing an event from May to September. Traditional production quotes were too expensive, so they designed a "studio in a box" with a theatrical set. They're treating it as a three-year investment to scale their membership platform.
Chapters
What about the logistics? Tell us about the logistics. How did it start working timescales and everything? I think you've done something very interesting, which to me was just baffled. And I said, okay, their event is in September. They already built the studio. How did that happen? Tell us about it.
Yeah, so it was interesting because anyone that knows me well and I'd freely admit it, would suggest that, you know, very much a big picture guy, you know, so it's kind of like, hey, we've got this idea, we're going to build a studio. And I remember, I distinctly remember the conversation behind the scenes where we'd had a conversation with our, a couple of our key sponsors whereby they'd sort of back the idea and they were excited about it. And we then had a team briefing afterwards where they said, okay, great, what next? And I remember that moment where it's kind of like it's a blank piece of paper. Where do we start? But for us, we spent about. So this was originally, we were just to host the event in May, and we'd already pushed the event back till September, but when we pushed it back to September, we knew when we were doing it that we weren't going to host it in Boston. It just wasn't going to work like that. So we were looking at that studio build from, I think we had a 90 day window, something like that ahead of it. And I remember having a couple of conversations early on with, with a couple of production companies where they would traditionally stream an event or they kind of, you know, they work behind the scenes and that sort of stuff. And, you know, we sort of communicated that vision and we were very clear on the vision that we wanted from the outset. The idea was that we wanted to be able to build a kind of a studio in a box. So it was a, you know, it was a sort of a large, a large stage area, you know, fully dressed as a sort of theatrical TV studio set, so set up like a morning show. But the thinking was that we would basically bring the tech into the room and ultimately once we'd done this, we would then use that thinking to be able to kind of take that studio quite literally and over the course of next couple of years use it to scale up that event. Because we'd always looked at, can we stream, can we start bringing in sort of more tech into the event. And for me, I saw that as an opportunity. And in that tech briefing we kind of realized that actually there was a model that kind of worked in that environment in television. And the model was Kind of like that live morning show or kind of. I think possibly the best example, I don't know how little translate to your audience was, was almost the Top Gear model, you know, so it's the idea where you've got a live studio set, you've got that interaction with the audience and you've got that ability to be able to kind of like, you know, to broadcast to many and you've got a panel that can feed off that environment. So for us, that's where we wanted to start. The challenge was who to work with and how to start unlocking that. And to be quite honest, the production companies that we were talking to, who will remain nameless, you know, I saw some very big numbers against that. And we knew from the outset we were going to invest in this and we wanted to invest in this because we weren't looking at a 12 month cycle, we were looking at our membership platform. So I was, I was really looking at a three year cycle on it and I was looking at the rebooks. But even so, those numbers just didn't stack up and I wanted a fresh approach.
Right.
And that's where that supplier was key.
Yeah, yeah. I just really wanted to highlight this for the benefit of the audience. So Adam have seen this not as a short term aspect and then I wanted to kind of underline that. Then Adam and his team saw this as a mid to long term investment. So that's kind of one of the key traits. The second element is that they have seen that they wanted to. Yes, invest money.
Right.
And obviously how much that money is at that point in time is unknown. Right.
