Exordi Founder Carlo Scaglia: Authentic, Creator-Driven Content for Brands

My name is Dustin Betts. Welcome to this Founder Institute livestream. I'm joined today by Carlo Scaglia. He is the founder of Exorti, an FI London portfolio company. Exorti is the platform for authentic content creators, for real brands made by real people. Carlo, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much, Dustin. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Yeah, so before we dive into your company Exorti, could you please tell us first just a little bit about yourself and your own startup story? You know, what were the experiences of yours, professional, personal experiences that led you to founding this creator-driven content platform?

Sure. So I think my story's pretty short, mainly just because I'm 23 years old. So I graduated uni last year and I worked in consulting for a while. Essentially there I discovered a couple of things. One, that consulting wasn't quite my knack, I guess, wasn't really my passion. And then it also led me to find the problem that Exorti goes to address. Why startups? In all fairness, I'm not too sure. I've always enjoyed something that is exciting, new challenges and building things from scratch. It just made sense identifying a problem and just slowly started diving into it, diving into it some more and just ended up here with Exorti.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Yeah. So the next question I want to ask you just to kind of frame the conversation is I know a little bit about Exorti because you're a Founder Institute portfolio company. That's a platform for bringing together brands and content creators. But just please give us your short pitch as the founder for those who have never heard of Exorti before. What is it?

So Exorti tackles the really inefficient process that communication companies like marketing, PR, media agencies have to face when they need to create campaigns for all of the different clients, especially sourcing pictures and videos because they have multiple clients spread throughout the world with different needs. They need to target different audiences, different trends, et cetera, et cetera. We essentially connect them with people that already make content for fun, you know, through GoPros, drones, cameras, even modern phones, and have access to key locations and especially are very knowledgeable about their sectors. So by doing this, we're able to drastically bypass production time and cost while also delivering far more relevant content made by Gen Zs for a Gen Z audience.

Awesome. Yeah, and I want to kind of talk about different sides of that. So, you know, the Xorti platform, it sort of functions as like a two-side marketplace, and I want to talk about each of those sides in turn. So the creators and the brands, I guess. First, the brands, you kind of mentioned this briefly, but what are the biggest challenges that the types of brands you work with are experiencing when it comes to their content creation? So you kind of mentioned about locations. And yeah, do you want to just recap that briefly? And then the follow-up question is, you know, what are the challenges similarly that are, you know, faced by content creators or people who want to become content creators affiliated with brands?

So the two main aspects are time and relevance. There's also the cost aspect, but cost is, you know, if the content's good, these companies are willing to pay a high amount. So as I said, it's It's timing and relevance because by the time a production team is sent halfway across the globe, shoots the content, waits for the right weather, et cetera, et cetera, about 2 weeks at least have passed. And this whole getting them back, editing that content, providing on the right channels. And before you know it, a month has gone by before that content is shown anywhere. Secondly, there's the relevance aspect. We're in a world where it's not so much more sector-specific anymore. And there's a lot of cross-pollination between cultures, trends, sports, music, art, fashion. And so sending even the best professional team to film something that is out of their experience will result in content that fails to relate to that specific audience every time. Meaning that while it could be cinematically incredibly good, it won't have much engagement. And that's one of the key issues that companies face when it comes to the whole content creation side. Yeah, sorry, please.

Oh yeah, no, I was going to ask you what you're just about to say. Yeah, and so how about on the creator side, what are some of their challenges?

So we— Exordi doesn't quite work with the whole sort of influencer world, so maybe our creators don't have the big challenges of people wanting to become influencers. Exordi works with what we sort of called rebels, in other ways, people that just make content as a way to relive memories and experience certain emotions, maybe during gloomy days when they can't be outside living out their passions. And so there's still some issues that these people face, which comes to the idea of relatability in the sense that what they might find on other social platforms is not exactly what intrigues them. So we bring them all together over like-minded ideas and stuff that drives them over a community that shares the same values and where their content is able to be appreciated by the same kind of people.

Yeah, yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense. And it kind of gets to the next question that I wanted to ask, which you actually explained really succinctly at the beginning telling us what Exorti was. But so bringing, you know, these two sides together, why, why Exorti? Tell us just a little bit about that relationship. I guess that happens when you're bringing together the content hungry brands and these kind of authentic creators. Creators in different places around the world and how that works to provide the solution that I guess the brands are looking for as well as the creators. Yeah.

So these companies, for example, let's take a marketing company that will have multiple campaigns under their belt to carry out within a bunch of months and they'll need a whole lot of different content very quickly and efficiently that's specifically suited to those briefs. So when they come to Exordi, we have our own standardized briefs that allows them to put the key elements of the content required to produce, whether it's a video, a photo, where's it gonna go? Is it Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn? Is it their website? Perhaps even a billboard. We have a set of information that then we correlate to tags. These same tags are also applied to creators, meaning that by the time a brief is not even completed, we've already shortlisted the key creators that can complete this brief. As soon as the brief is finished, the creators are sent a notification saying, hey guys, there's this that can be suitable for you, you can make some money off it. And the cool part is that the creators don't even need to change their habits. They're already doing this content for fun. So essentially it's getting a little ping within a couple of hours to finish the content. And then the companies can choose if they want either just the raw stuff that they edit, the full video edit, maybe they just need the creators to perform a little action shot. And so we bridge together the speed through the tag-based system, but also the flexibility by the different competencies of these creators.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I liked how you emphasized sort of the location shoot because I mean, I haven't done any, you know, exotic filming, you know, travel stuff before, but it makes a lot of sense that like you said, the, like leveraging the location of creators who are already, you know, experts in that locality or because it costs so much money to fly people out. And like you said, stick to— schedule. Yeah, I wanted to ask you next about the key features, and you sort of touched on this, that, you know, Exordio creators can interpret the brand's sort of brief, and it's like you said, it's, uh, you, your platform will match basically the brief or the, the creator who would probably fit that brief most, and that they can, you know, do different types of content like videos or photos to fulfill the brief. But, um, are there other kind of key features of using the platform that we haven't talked about on either the brand side or the creator side that you want to highlight here, or if we've kind of already talked about them, like if I'm brand new and say I'm on the creator side and I want to get started using Exordi, what does that process look like for me if I was living in a more interesting place than I do personally?

Okay, so if you're a creator, the moment that you're onboarded, well, we get a notification, the team, and we tend to reach out to you personally and just bring you onto our Discord community. The cool part about that is that you see all of the different other types of creators and that's where we share tips, ideas, share our content, see what's being worked on. Maybe the professional filmmakers will reach out to the amateur one saying, hey guys, let's go shoot some videos for fun. So that's on the creator aspect. In terms of functionalities, right now it's pretty young. It's just an MVP. So we're not yet boosting in some massive algorithms and whatnot. Definitely as our database of creators goes, we'll be able to improve our matching algorithm and also the machine learning aspects to continuously pair the briefs with the creators. One thing we are eyeing, but that is definitely for the future, perhaps in near future, is going down towards the NFT route though on a more democratized level, as in attributing them only as certificates rather than super high value digital tokens.

Yeah, super interesting. That's definitely seems to be a relevant tie-in. I mean, so many brands are launching NFTs now. We'll see how much sticking power it has, but yeah, that's definitely interesting. It makes sense to me. I want to ask you to kind of walk out on a limb for this next question, which is to make a prediction. How do you foresee, I mean, obviously this has been a trend that's been taking shape with the kind of micro-influencer economy over the last couple of years. I know you don't use that term, but so how do you see this kind of brand creator-driven economy changing most over the next 5 to 10 years?

That's a cool question. The part that I see is that quality is now available to everyone, as in no one will win on creating good content. iPhone 13s are pretty much professional photo cameras that agencies had to use a couple of years ago. So no one will be able to win on just creating good content. People will be able to win on creating unique and highly relevant content. And that is done in my belief through passions and through really understanding the world that you're in. There are certain platforms out there that allow for pretty quick videos that can be used as advertising and you might need to promote, I don't know, a razor or something. But when it comes to something a bit deeper, that really needs to connect with your consumers, you really need to leverage a whole set of creators that truly understand the dynamics, the cultures, the trends of those different industries. Otherwise, your content you're gonna get will fail completely to relate to that audience and they'll just scroll by, especially with the amount of information and content that everyone is bombarded with on a daily basis. You cannot simply provide just another good quality picture.

Yeah, yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense with regard to, yeah, the iPhone cameras, you know, that's not the key differentiator. It's definitely that more, uh, just super targeted matching and, you know, meeting people where they're at and, um, yeah, having demographics that like relate to each of this brand's target demographics if there's different ones working with different creators. Um, yeah, cool. That definitely, that, that makes a lot of sense. Um, you've obviously done a lot to push Xorti forward in your current MVP. Uh, what is one of the biggest challenges that you've faced and overcome so far? And what was it that made the difference in overcoming some of the early startup challenges?

That's not a good question because there's a whole load of them, pretty much. Yeah, I think there's two key challenges. The first one was the tech aspect. None of us have tech competencies. And so on this side, an old uni friend of mine, Athina Weber that set up her own marketing and development company called 12 Ahead. She really helped me out setting up the MVP using Webflow, the no-code, low-code platform, which is incredibly powerful and I think is probably the go-to way for anyone that's setting up an MVP because it allows you to be, well, to push out something quickly, cheaply, and just get it tested immediately without too much hassle.

Yeah.

The other side is that we're focused on the creator economy. And it's something that in Europe has not really seen so much. They're focused more on fintech or health tech or SaaS companies rather than the whole creator economy side. And I was speaking with a friend of mine, Harry, that set up a company called FanFix, and essentially a clean version of OnlyFans. It's super cool. And he's based in LA, and it said that that whole environment is completely different over there. And so, you know, I think that's one of the challenges that we're facing right now as well.

Yeah, this whole creator economy, as you kind of mentioned, like the early NFT, I mean, it's definitely still in the early days, it feels like to me. So yeah, interesting that the bastion is more on the US West Coast right now, you feel, and kind of earlier, early leading edge in Europe. So that's good. It's a good place to be for being that platform. The last question that I have for you here is, you just— where is Exorti headed next? Are there any, you know, news or final updates to share with the Founder Institute community or any asks for the audience, for those who might be watching live or watch this video after we're done?

In terms of where Exorti is headed right now, also because of the Christmas period, there are not many clients engaged. We're just building up our community of creators. Pretty intensely. And the thing that we like is that we're pretty focused on not making just another cold online presence. And we actually bring it to life through offline things. Like on the 23rd, there's a bunch of our creators meeting for dinner in the Alps. Then some others are scheduling video creations together. So right now in this specific coming weeks, we're focused completely on our community development. After the holiday period, we'll go back to our client side and we're targeting more the B2B structure. So marketing agencies, PR, media companies rather than just brands. And I think we're gonna start trying to get a foothold in the US as well because that's just a much hotter place for us right now.

Yeah, awesome. Well, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, you're doing some community building over the holidays. It sounds really interesting, even the offline or the online stuff that you were doing in addition when you mentioned the Discord community, I didn't know about that. So it sounds like your creators have some cool ways to connect and some will be connecting in person. So yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome to hear. This has been really interesting for me, you know, do some digital content creation, I guess, but just learning about some of these dynamics happening behind the scenes in the creator-driven and branded content economy that, yeah, I think it's definitely still in the early days of its emergence. So yeah, we're all really looking forward to keeping up with Xorti and where you're headed next. Carlos Scaglia, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much. Have a great day.