Interview with Nerdeo Founder & CEO Caroline Pires

Okay, my name is Dustin Betts. I'm the Community and Content Manager at the Founder Institute, and I'm here with Caroline Pears. She is the founder and CEO of Nerdio. It's an FI London and Founder Institute Select portfolio company whose online visual effects marketplace is bringing together creative professionals for both budgeted and non-budgeted projects in the film and games industries. Caroline Pears, thank Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So before we dive right into your startup, Nerdio, I always like to ask first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself or your personal story? What were the experiences, professional or personal, that led you to founding this company to provide a collaborative marketplace for film and gaming industry professionals?

Sure. So I worked in the visual effects industry as an artist and supervisor for over a decade. I did everything from blockbuster films to no-budget independent, like music promos. I've always had a passion for independent projects. And while I was progressing in my career, I was working in some of these bigger companies, I would always join these other people's passion projects. So to progress in my career, basically, and to do what I didn't have the opportunity to do in my day job. And I quickly realized that there was a market for this, that there was a place where we should build a place where people could connect and where indie productions could benefit because obviously these had budget restrictions. So you should be able, there should be a place that would connect all these projects with budget restrictions to recent graduates and students from the best universities around the world. So that's how it all started, but obviously we've progressed into something a lot bigger.

Awesome. Yeah, let's dive right in. I mean, so I know because I'm a little bit familiar with your company as a Founder Institute portfolio company that you're, like you say, connecting artists, creative professionals on these indie projects so that they can get the projects finished. But let's kind of hear it straight from you, the founder. Please give us your short pitch. What is Nerdio?

So I guess, well, Nerdio is a creative collaboration platform for film and games. And we connect the right artist or student to the right budget. So now we do everything from high-end projects to no-budget collaborations. If you want to hear the short pitch, then it's Nerdio solving the way we pitch and fund collaborators for your film and games project, no matter the budget.

Perfect. And so kind of to dive right in, I guess for those, you know, who are non-industry professionals, Can you tell us a little bit more about, I guess, the context of like the problem, you know, how do creative professionals tend to collaborate now and like, what are the limitations in the ways that they're collaborating or not?

Well, there's a few problems. And so I guess like, especially when you're talking about high-end, it's like 2 out of 3 projects, they need to expand their team sort of mid-production. And it can be really time-consuming to find those artists. High-end productions will either depend on recruitment, which can be expensive, and they don't always get it right because it's quite a niche industry. And it causes a lot of delays, and sometimes projects don't— well, they get delayed up to 3 months, or in the independent sector, then they can't even afford that, and then sometimes they don't even get made. So this is why there is a need to connect the right artist to to the right budget. And also there's very few websites that are sort of post-production specific, which is our industry. So there's— you either have to trawl through a lot of websites to find the right person. And LinkedIn isn't— it's terrible for the creative industry. It's just not made for that. Our CVs don't look that way. They're showreels or images. And they also don't provide the tools for you to get that team in a sort of quick social way. And they don't provide the tools for collaborations, like collaboration projects. Most of these, even the websites that are like the dots, we're getting closer to something more linked to media. There's always like the creative collaboration side for no budget or small budget projects is always like a a part of the website that's left to die somewhere. And so we want to, you know, give people the tools that cross over not only from no collaborations to high-end, and we give them the tools to succeed. And this only will— this will only make the independent market stronger, and there's always money to be made in the independent sector as well. So this is it.

Yeah, that kind of leads well into sort of my next question, which is like in contrast. So tell us about the user experience on Nerdio. So say I'm a digital creative professional, I'm a VFX artist, you know, what is the process like for me signing up and getting started collaborating through the platform?

It's super simple and free. So when you first access the website, we let you browse both the paid and collaboration-only projects. And if you're interested in applying to NEA, then you can sign up for free and you'll have to create a profile before you apply. That's it for an artist perspective. If you want to post project, then you just have to sign up and post project and there's a near instant notification goes out to the community and then they apply to work on it.

Very cool. Very cool. Okay. So what are the opportunities, I guess, through Nerdio to get other people involved on my project? You've kind of touched on this a little bit, but yeah, say if I don't have a project budget, I'm looking for like volunteer collaborators, that kind of work the same way, or how do I go about getting other people involved?

When you're creating a project, you have options to create paid projects and collaborations. When we first built Nerdio, we had no-budget collaborations in mind. So we made it really easy for people to post artwork and videos, project awards, and most importantly, show who else is collaborating on the project. So that always attracts— the more collaborators a project has and people can view this, the more it attracts more people to work on it. And so if you have some really cool artwork and, or just the premise of the project is really creative, sometimes you don't just attract students. Sometimes you attract senior artists that just want to do it for fun because they want to do something really cool for their portfolio. So that's how we get it working. That, once you post that project again, the notification goes straight through to our community and by an email that has like some of the images already on it. And it shows if you're looking for a diverse team as well, the roles you've created and that sort of stuff.

Awesome. Yeah. So it's kind of all like makes it easy for you to go out and basically outbound, like search for those people through the network. Really cool. So can you contrast, or how is it different from a paid project on the platform? That's for like a paid subscriber, if I'm like, I guess, hiring for this project.

Yeah. So now we have the options. So we have a commercial partner now that has helped us build our high-end section. So our commercial partner has come in with a portfolio of high-end clients for broadcast and film. So we post projects with them and these projects have offered senior day rates. So what they do is it goes out in the same way to the community, but with, but then there's a vetting process. So we vet and cross-reference artists and place the best ones into these companies.

Awesome. And I kind of want to, I played a little on your website actually last week when I was kind of taking a look at it and I can see that you can click like view talent, and it seems like there's a lot of people, a lot of creatives on the platform. So can you tell us a little bit about your traction today, or, you know, how many creative professionals are on, on Nerdio right now?

Yeah, so we have a sort of 7K-strong community with our mailing list, and we have 2,500 registered artists from 55 different countries in our platform today.

Wow, that's awesome. Really great. Now, yeah, I understand that you've also begun recently making revenue. Congratulations. So can you just tell us a little bit more, I guess, about the launch of your new freelancer subscription tier?

Absolutely. So freelancers now access, they have to pay to access our paid project section, which consists mainly of our portfolio of high-end clients who pay senior day rates. So they pay a small subscription fee monthly to access those projects and to be able to apply for them. And we keep a small commission on the artist that gets accepted into the job.

Very, very cool. Well, yeah, congrats again on the launch of that. That's really cool. I want to ask you now, this is a question I don't know if I prompted you on this one, to kind of make a prediction. So how do you envision, you know, the future of collaboration within creative industries or among creative professionals, you know, changing over the next, say, like 5 years?

Well, our industry has been sort of notoriously difficult for remote work, basically, because of not only the tech that you need at home, which, you know, depending on like a workstation and some of the software licenses that you need, that could be like up to £13,000, like just as a one-off payment in the beginning for you to start. You also need a really, really good internet connection because because your file transfers are massive when you're dealing with 8K-like footage or 4K footage even. And so it's always been quite difficult. So I'm guessing that as the internet connections become, well, faster and can deal with bigger loads, I think what's going to happen is that obviously now we have to be able to work this way. What's going to happen is I think some software companies that provide licenses are going to have to move to monthly subscriptions to help their free out. So that might be, I think, the way that the industry is going to go. And also there's, you know, some people have really been innovating in the way that we can work on remote virtual environments, so moving studios online. So Teradici is one of these companies, and yeah, they're doing something great for the industry at the moment. And I think there's going to be more of those popping up soon.

Really, really interesting. Yeah, those are definitely some predictions. They seem to make conceptual sense to me, but yeah, with the hard limitations around like bandwidth and things, but definitely with the new remote-first work culture, yeah, definitely seem like apt predictions. So yeah, thanks for going out on a limb on those. I always like to kind of wrap up by asking your advice. You know, you've obviously made a lot of progress to build Nerdio to where it is now. What advice would you offer to early-stage or aspiring entrepreneurs who are just getting started? Maybe something you wish you'd heard a year or two ago.

Get into an accelerator program from day one. I wish I'd done that. And it's just making sure that you get expert advice from people who have done this before is going to save you time, heartache, and money in the long run. So for me, that's my advice.

Awesome. Awesome. That was not requested specifically to say that, but that's great that the structure has been beneficial. Awesome. Final question, where is Nerdio headed next? What's next? Any other kind of news or updates to share with the Founder Institute community or any generic asks for the audience who might be watching the video?

Absolutely. We've just, we've literally just launched our diversity filters. So I'm super proud of this. So people who are looking to hire a diverse team or want to showcase diversity-led project and have, or have a diversity theme on one of their projects, they can really easily not only post this, but be searchable for this, and where we can apply this at scale for the film and games industry. It's not something that's been done before. And we're, yeah, we're hoping that this is going to help showcase the diversity in our industries. Yeah, so this is something that we've just launched. And then we're going to launch a couple more features for Concierge and Ratecard, which is for paid projects. Where we take care of everything from managing the artists, vetting the artists, contracts. So this is coming very soon, and we're looking into some new tools for universities. So where universities can, because they already use our collaboration site quite a lot, and they provide, because it provides practice material for their students, which is much needed nowadays. So We want to build some new tools for them so that they can— the universities can showcase what their students are working on.

Awesome. Well, yeah, lots coming down the pipeline. The website is nerdio.net. We've shared it here in the video description and everywhere that we're going to share this video. So you can go there to check out all of the newly released features and coming features. This has been really interesting for me, you know, learning about how you're using technology to foster better collaboration across creative industry professionals. And yeah, we're all at the Founder Institute, you know, looking forward to keeping up with Nerdio and where you're where you're headed next. Carolyn Peers, thank you so much again for joining us.

Thank you. It's been lovely.