Robert Scoble interviews Talenthouse co-founder & CEO Roman Scharf

On talenthouse.com I kept seeing tons of movie stars and music stars and other kinds of stars being interacted with by thousands of their fans.

I wanted to learn a little bit.

More about it and that's what we're doing right now. Who are you?

Hey, I'm Roman Sharf. I'm the co founder and CEO of TalentHouse.com TalentHouse is my fifth startup, the second one in Silicon Valley. I did Jaja.com before. We think that we have something very interesting going on on our side and I'm here today to tell you all about it.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. So what is Talent House? For people who haven't been there before.

Talent House is first and foremost a creative community that is all about collaboration. We have a very broad bandwidth both in terms of creative verticals. We cover film, fashion, music, fine art, photography, dance, all the creative verticals basically. And also we cover everything from very established global superstars down to very young aspiring artists in more than 170 countries of the world.

It's pretty crazy. First of all, how did it start?

So the idea started in 07 with my co founder and friend Amos. Amos Pizzi, who used to be with Culture Club. He used to be a musician and later in his career he moved to the advertising space. He worked at Saatchi and Saatchi and they did a lot of projects to connect brands with urban kids. And in one of these projects they actually casted the first girl band ever. It was a huge success for the brand sponsor, for the agency. They had some chart hits in the UK and so on, but at some point one of the girls just ran away. She was gone. And most of their stuff at that time happened on MySpace. Sounds weird, you know, saying this now, but back in the day everything happened on MySpace and Amos's reaction on, you know, having just lost one band member was very interesting. He put up a post saying that the band member is gone. And he put up another post saying that they're looking for a new band member. So within two weeks, 25,000 girls wanted to be that band member. And it occurred to him that this is kind of dynamite because it's engaging, it's about real things, real opportunity. There's a lot of emotion. It spreads out very virally and it's a good playground for brands to be involved. So in March 09 I took over Talent House. I rebuilt it from scratch. We only took the name and the icon from the previous attempt. We launched in November 09 and between November 9 and end of last year, we kind of found the sweet spot. You know, we launched a lot of these projects, a lot of you could say, life changing opportunities. We had people from Naomi Campbell to Rihanna. We had brands from Adidas to Nokia involved. It was almost 100 projects in the first year. All of them, most of them happened in a different generation of the platform. We tweaked, we tried, we improved. We started with on the screen voting for entries. So the idea was always that people submit their work and get their peers to vote for it and share it so that it gains visibility in the web and gets viral. Click on the screen wasn't very viral. Also it didn't give us any information about the participants. So one of our team members and I thought, okay, let's do sms. American Idol is doing SMS extractors. Doing sms. Let's do sms. So we did SMS and we found two things right. Number one, free SMS is killing us. It costs too much money over 100 countries. Just a pure setup is horribly expensive for a startup. And number two, paid sms, you have to have a huge brand and you have to have television and all kinds of things to get to some reasonable numbers. If you charge for premium SMS with a startup even there's Naomi Campbell involved and so on, you never get into the millions.

Yeah, American Idol had paid for a while, now I think it's free.

Yeah, they changed because they're also interested in more votes than in income. They get the income through sponsorships and it's a lot more money that they could possibly make through the sms. And we figured out the same thing. But I was excited about the social web and where everything is going. So I felt the natural environment for us to solve the problem as a social web. So before Facebook launched a like button, before the API got all these features, we kind of built our own Facebook like and we called it Facebook Vote. And what it did is you press a button and it posts a wall post that says, you know, Robert just voted for Roman to work with Kylie Minogue and all your friends would see it and it was clear, you know, this is this phenomenon about startups. If you do something right, you realize within hours or days that you're doing it right because you start seeing the first project. With Facebook, voting just started flying in terms of virality and so on. So over 2H0 of 0:10, Facebook improved the API. We improved our execution. A lot of fine tuning. We do a B testing on what we show on the walls. So if a kid in LA casts a vote or somebody here in Manlo park or Palo Alto casts a vote. It would probably use different language because it's going to be in the LA framework. Other language is going to be popular than in the Palo Alto framework. And we're testing this out and we are very attentive to detail to increase virality. We are already receiving 2.8 clicks for each Facebook impression that we trigger on our system, which is a proof point. Right.

What are some of the tricks you use to increase virality?

Oh, yeah, we encourage comments. All our projects are ultimately designed to give someone a break, to get someone in front of opportunity that they would normally not have. Yeah.

So you're almost like the Quora for musicians and artists.

Yeah. It has elements. It is. It is something that is part of the social web. Right. If you don't connect into that energy, I think you're missing something.

Tell me, take me around the site as a new user, what would I see?

You would basically see the featured opportunities. That's projects that we promote on our landing page and on the different vertical subpages. We're typically doing 10 new projects a week right now. It's up from five or 10amonth.

Give me some examples.

We're currently hosting a Deadmau5, the most popular DJ in the world. We are hosting Brad Rettner. He turned out to be a fan. He's launched five projects on the same day. He's looking for an assistant director that we had to call production assistant for union reasons in Los Angeles. But what it really is is an assistant director. And he says in the video, sit on the director's seat next to me. So it's an assistant director, it's an actor for a feature film in a supporting role. Then he's looking for somebody to design the logo for his company, Rat Entertainment, because he's not happy with the one that he has. And then he's working with Treats magazine, which is a new kind of lifestyle coffee table book kind of magazine in the fashion space out of la. And for the photo shoot for one of the issues that is coming up, he is looking for an assistant photographer and a model. It's five opportunities that are designed to give someone, potentially give someone a break and get people into Hollywood. Hollywood is more fenced off than most other parts of the entertainment industry.

Now, is this something I could do? Could I have a project for people, or is it only for big stars?

I guess you could participate in a filmmaker project or something like that. We are trying to address creatives who consider themselves creatives in the respective Vertical. I'm not going to judge. Are you a filmmaker or not? Are you a musician or not? You have to judge for yourself. But we're definitely not catering to the consumer. The consumer in Talent House is the audience. It's the social audience. So, and we're often compared with crowdsourcing companies. Crowdsourcing companies have two stakeholders, two groups involved, the companies who issue projects, the hosts and the artists who submit work. It's a two dimensional situation. They all consider themselves destinations, so everything they do happens on their main website. The average of these crowdsourcing projects gets 100 submissions and the average has 2, 3, $500 exchanging hands between the host and the winner. It leaves behind 99 losers every single time. Talent House is of course designed to create a winner and to give this one kid a potential break. But the beauty is, since we're adding the social layer to it, some kind of third dimension to the whole process, we leave everyone behind in a win situation because every single participant, like Steve Bishop, gains in average 80% uplift in the number of reach. So we are logging in Facebook friends, Twitter followers and telling our supporters, today somebody submits to a project and we're comparing it with the same numbers. When the project is over, we get an 80% average uplift. So if we have 1500 or 2000 participants, we're not creating 1999 losers. We are creating one big winner who gets to work with Brad Rettner or someone else. But then we're giving 1999 other people a huge uplift in their social reach. And I believe that social reach is key. Whatever you are, a photographer, a model, a filmmaker, a photographer, a fashion designer, a dancer, a performer in whatever shape or form. If you don't build your audience, it's very unlikely you're going to succeed in the future. So four or five Talent House projects gives you 10 times more reach. And the translation for 10 times more reach in Talent House language is 10 times more opportunity.

That makes sense. What's your business model? How are you guys going to make money?

We have basically three types of projects. The clear cut case is the brand project. So if Adi does Nokia or we have strollers now, Bugaboo. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but all the parents are usually familiar with Bugaboo. So brands pay a fee, and the fee is basically a fee for the reach that we generate, not for the creative output that comes out of it. The winners get money, the winners get jobs, the winners get opportunities in terms of reach and, and Industry access. We get a fee for preparing this and building out the platform and providing the infrastructure.

Makes sense. How is it growing?

It is growing very, very nicely. I think we're still too early to release those kind of Silicon Valley style numbers that everybody's hunting for, but we grew from 100,000 to 500,000 members in the last four months.

That's pretty nice. It's not Instagram yet, but it's pretty nice.

Yeah. We're seeing up to 10 projects a week now. Forecast on the statistics that we see is that with 50 projects a week, we would have the traffic that Twitter has. This puts things into perspective. But let me tell you the other two types of projects. So the second type is projects where artists are the hosts. So we are on those projects, established artists are the hosts. In those cases, we either collect a fee from their representatives, their record label, their film company, their management company, the television network, or whoever is representing that artist, or we are going after a sponsor together. Like Lady Gaga. We had Lady Gaga with Virgin Mobile. We had Rihanna with Nokia. So the business model there is. We share the sponsors sponsorship money that is being raised. And from this model we kind of came up with a business model for our long tail business. We are already in private beta where young artists can start hosting their own projects. The guy who did not win in a big project, a music producer who wanted to work with Ryan Leslie on an album for Macy Gray. He did not make it, but he loved Talent House so he was part of the closed beta group where he put up his own project. I'm Michael Miller. I'm a young music producer in Indianapolis. I have a studio. I invite musicians to submit their tracks. One of you will come to my studio. We will spend a day recording your song properly, professionally. I'm your producer. And then we put it up on itunes. He got 1800 artists submit their tracks. So if you think that there's not one Michael Miller in the world, but millions and millions of micro Millers and you have this as one ingredient and in the other ingredient you have a proven business model that brands are interested in sponsoring these activities on a large scale, you can make it up. Theoretically, we can chop it down to all little projects, allow local small businesses up to global giant corporations to sponsor opportunities of a scale that suits them. And that's it.

Very cool. Where do I learn more about it?

We're catering to our creative community with our blog, of course. We run a Twitter feed.

Is it just twitter.com talenthouse yes, it's.

Talenthouse and we have different for the different markets. We have a Spanish one, we have a German one, we have a French one. But the main one is the right one for you at Talent House.

Well, thanks for coming out and showing to me. It's really cool. I'm going to start submitting some stuff.

Yeah, go work with Brad Rettner. I keep my fingers crossed.

Thank you so much for coming out.

Thanks, Robin.