Stareable - The Future of TV

My name is Adric Ashore, and my company Cerebowl is the largest community of web series creators and fans. We're building the future of television through collaboration and discovery. Anyone can create online video, but filmmaking is an intensely collaborative effort that only succeeds when talented people work together. But online creators are isolated and fragmented, unable to effectively build the relationships they need. Our community solves the problem. We know communities work because they've driven serious value creation in other industries and effectively crowdsourced research, resources, and expertise. We know web series are on the cusp of something big because television networks are increasingly acknowledging that talented creators are going web first. This will only continue as production costs come down, distribution options improve, and audiences shift online. Starebulls Community works in a number of ways. Connecting audiences to creators with our consumer placing platform, where users can browse across platforms, read reviews, and take advantage of our machine learning recommendation engine. Connecting creators with their peers so they can find collaborators to work with and learn how to hone their craft more effectively. Along with creators with mainstream television networks, who are realizing, following the footsteps of networks like HBO, Comedy Central, IFC, Adult Swim, and Showtime, that online creators represent their talent pipeline and will pay to discover the next great voice. And creators with brands, helping companies create authentic promotion from engaged and talented filmmakers outside the traditional advertising space. So they're not just getting the same old ad. We are seeing impressive traction with 18,000 unique users on our consumer site last month, growing at a 21% CAGR since launch. 2,300 web series creators in our community, growing at a 30% month-over-month clip. Partnerships with a dozen web series festivals, Tribeca Film Festival, Series Fest, one of the three largest television festivals in the US, Seed and Spark, a major film crowdfunding platform, and we're being incubated at the Made in New York Media Center. A collaboration between the city of Newark and Independent Filmmaker Project, the largest indie filmmaker nonprofit in the US. We're going after big markets. Connecting creators with each other represents a $750 million market. Connecting creators with brands is a $3.5 billion opportunity. Competitors ignore the community-driven approach. In doing so, they only address portions of the opportunity and don't effectively leverage the power of their user base. Content creators evangelize for us. A scalable, cheap, and targeted strategy. As we list their shows, they ask their fans for reviews. As fans visit, they stick around and attack new creators. The cycle builds on itself. We're two engineers and an award-winning web series creator, an advisor with 15 years of expertise in traditional television and a background at HBO. We love television and we're passionate to build the future of the industry. With that in mind, we are raising a seed round, giving us 18 months of runway to hit 20,000 runways, hit cash flow breakeven, and leave the space. Thank you.

All right, thank you, AJ. Good job. All right, so let me highlight you on here. Definitely couldn't tell you just got off a 15-hour flight.

Thanks, that's very nice.

Um, okay, so I— once again, if you have questions for AJ, get them in on the chat. I'm just going to start out with some basic ones. So definitely in your, your growth chart, right, when you were showing some of your traction there, something happened there in the May-June time frame. What was that?

You know, I think it's one of the interesting things about building a community is you start to lay the groundwork and a lot of things, they don't happen linearly necessarily. You meet creators and you meet consumers who believe in the product and they start to mention it to each other and the network starts to densify in this nonlinear sort of fashion. And so increasingly we find ourselves now in a position where We've met creators 6, 12 months ago who are now coming to us saying, when you first met, we were in the early stages of putting together our show, or we had put together one show and now we're putting together our second or our third. And so we're kind of reaping the rewards of what we've really been building over the past 18 months. It's a little bit hard to put our finger on one specific thing. That said, we have built up at this point a lot of different properties, all kind of focused on the same community. So we started out with our consumer-facing platform where show creators could come and list their shows, get in front of audiences, um, uh, have users leave reviews. From that, we evolved to a content marketing strategy on our blog where we, um, brought on this award-winning web series creator, and she essentially put together a soup-to-nuts guide to how to create a web series. Because one of the interesting things about online creators is they don't necessarily go to film school. They don't have a background in filmmaking. They don't have studios or agencies. How do they learn about pre-production or crowdfunding or social media marketing? So, and from that, it evolved to, well, what if instead of us being the central node in this whole space where we package the information, which is inefficient because we're required to be the ones packaging it, but also we're not necessarily the experts in all these different fields. What if instead we created almost a Stack Overflow or a Reddit for the creators themselves so they could ask and answer questions? Okay. And really tap into expertise within their community.

It makes sense. And some of the questions I'm getting from the audience is a good corollary to that is, you know, communities are great. How do you monetize it?

So we're starting to have those conversations right now where— Speaking to Comedy Central, IFC, Time, who's interested in creating PeopleTV and is looking to tap into online creators to understand who they should be giving shows to. I was out in LA 2 weeks ago talking to pretty much all the major management companies in Hollywood, UTA, Throughline, because they're all interested in having the visibility into these interesting show creators that we're bringing into our community. And so that's gonna be the early stages of the revenue. And the other interesting thing about that is that not only is it meaningful revenue for us, but it's also an incredibly important thing for our brand. As you can imagine, the first time we place a web series creator at Comedy Central, every single web series creator is gonna come knocking on my door saying, "How do we get the exact same deal?" The real venture-sized opportunity is connecting creators with each other and thinking about the job opportunities that way, but also in connecting creators with brands and building a business where a brand can basically think about our community of creators as a resource so that they can get more authentic promotion and ad campaigns for their products.

Okay. Roby's asking about VR technologies. So Roby is saying that— do you see— I guess the question is, do you see VR technologies coming into play for you guys in the very near future?

It hasn't really been a focus for us. I mean, so one of the interesting aspects of it is because we're a community and not so much a video hosting platform, We're kind of agnostic about the types of content that our creators are producing. And so whether it's traditional television or if it's VR/AR, so long as we're able to be that connective fabric between them and brands, between them and more mainstream organizations, it doesn't really matter for us.

Okay. And then you had mentioned as well, and there were some questions here, to, um, on the, the funding that you guys are raising. What are there specific milestones that you guys are going to be trying to achieve through that funding?

Yes, so, uh, we're raising right now for our seed round, um, and the, the seed round is 18 months of runway that gets us to 20,000, uh, creators given our, our current growth trajectories and what we think we're doing within the market, cash flow breakeven based on those sorts of conversations that we're having with, you know, networks, with management companies, with new online platforms who are interested in getting into the space, and then with the brand opportunity, which where we're just starting to reach out, but where we think there's significant growth ahead.

So does that involve, does that involve the hiring of sales staff? Or where will that money be spent?

The vast majority of it is going to tech talent, really to build out the platform and build out the tools that we're going to use. The really nice thing about all the things that we're building is that it's very scalable. And that television especially, there aren't a lot of touch points. So, you know, our ability to, you know, we're already having these conversations with these networks and with these agencies. And our advisor who has that traditional experience has really been almost a de facto biz dev person for us. We don't really need to staff up on the sales side so much as just in going after the growth and putting together the platform that lets us tap into it.

Okay. So another question here I had from Harold. So the creators, did the creators don't pay to use the platform, correct?

No. No. It's entirely free. I think Stack Overflow is a really interesting model for us in that you don't necessarily, as a programmer, come to Stack Overflow to think about the job listings. You come because you're trying to learn how to do your job more effectively. You're trying to figure out a problem that you might be having. The vast majority of Stack Overflow's revenues is from job listings. And so once you build up that community and that really engaged audience, you can do a lot of interesting things around it that don't necessarily involve specifically charging the, um, each individual on the platform.

Right. And it seems like, I know you mentioned content marketing before, is that kind of the genesis of, uh, the user acquisition strategy, at least from the creator front?

So we've spent the last 18 months really building a number of different ways. It kind of speaks to the opportunity that there isn't a central place to find content creators. And so we started out with the consumer-facing site where creators came and found us. And we did that through social media. We did that through partnerships with a dozen web series festivals. Content marketing on our blog and now our forum has been a big way to do it. We've started a live event strategy, which has really been important for other community-building startups like Airbnb, Pinterest, Etsy. So we hold regular screenings here in New York. We held our first one in LA a couple weeks ago. We're expanding out to various other regional filmmaking hubs from there. But we focus a lot on how do we get in front of creators and really bring them within our fold.

Okay.