Unglossy: Decoding Brand in Culture
Welcome to "Unglossy: Decoding Brand in Culture," where we delve into the essence of branding beyond the surface sheen. A brand is more than just a logo or a slogan; it's a reflection of identity, values, and reputation that resonates within our cultural landscape. Enjoy as we peel back the layers to uncover the raw, authentic stories behind the people and products that shape our world.
This isn't your average corporate podcast. Join Tom Frank, partner and chief creative officer at Merrick Creative, Mickey Factz, Hip Hop Artist and Founder and CEO of Pendulum Ink, and Jeffrey Sledge, a seasoned music industry veteran, for "Unglossy" as they get to the heart of what truly drives individual and organizational brand . In a world where where image is carefully curated and narratives meticulously crafted, we're here to explore the moments of vulnerability, pivotal decisions, and creative sparks that fuel the relationship between brand and culture.
Get ready for a thought-provoking journey into the heart and soul of branding – the unscripted, unfiltered, and truly Unglossy truth. Tune in to "Unglossy: Decoding Brand in Culture" on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you catch your podcasts. Follow us on Instagram @UnglossyPod and join the conversation.
Unglossy is produced and distributed by Merrick Studios. Let your story take the mic. Learn more at https://merrick-studios.com
Unglossy: Decoding Brand in Culture
Isaac Hayes III: Reshaping the Digital Content Landscape
Isaac Hayes III, a visionary entrepreneur and tech innovator, joins Tom and Jeffrey to talk about the journey behind Fanbase, a platform poised to change the game in content creation and monetization. Imagine a space where creators can truly own their narratives and get paid directly for their influence—Isaac shares how this idea became a reality. He opens up about the moment he saw the need to bridge the gap between social media platforms and Black culture, inspiring him to create Fanbase’s subscription model, which challenges the norms of traditional engagement.
From the music world to the tech space, Isaac’s journey is full of lessons in resilience and ingenuity. He delves into his experience bootstrapping Fanbase without traditional venture capital, drawing connections between the power dynamics of record labels and venture funding. With insights into pivotal choices—like bringing on CTO Ramiro Cánovas—Isaac takes us behind the scenes to see how Fanbase’s unique subscription model was built to offer monetization opportunities similar to streaming services.
We explore the future of content creation and what a decentralized model could mean for influencers, brands, and the broader tech landscape. Isaac sheds light on his journey to raise $10 million through equity crowdfunding, highlighting how ownership and community support are reshaping tech. Plus, he shares his perspective on a key issue—music rights and how they’ve been handled in recent years, including his thoughts on the controversy surrounding music use in the Trump campaign.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of innovation, equity, and the power of creators to shape the digital future.
"Unglossy: Decoding Brand in Culture," is produced and distributed by Merrick Creative and hosted by Merrick Chief Creative Officer, Tom Frank, hip hop artist and founder of Pendulum Ink, Mickey Factz, and music industry veteran, Jeffrey Sledge. Tune in to hear this thought-provoking discussion on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you catch your podcasts. Follow us on Instagram @UnglossyPod to join the conversation and support the show at https://unglossypod.buzzsprout.com/
Welcome to the "All About M.E. Podcast ," the podcast where music meets the...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
This week on Unglossy.
Speaker 2:I was in the Apple store. I went to the Apple store at Lenox and I said, hmm, let me ask this young employee. I said, who's your favorite artist? And instinctively I'm thinking she's going to name somebody extremely popular. Yeah. So I thought she would name like Ariana Grande or Miley Cyrus, and she named some indie band that I had never heard of and I said, let me ask you a question no-transcript.
Speaker 1:I'm Tom.
Speaker 2:Frank, I'm Mickey Fax.
Speaker 4:And I'm Jeffrey Sledge.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Unglossy the coning brand and culture. I'm Tom Frank, partner and chief creative officer at Merit Creative. This is Mickey Fax hip-hop artist and founder and CEO of Pendulum Inc.
Speaker 1:And that is Jeffrey Sledge, a seasoned music industry veteran who has worked with some of the biggest artists in the business. We're here to explore the moments of vulnerability, pivotal decisions and creative sparks that fuel the relationship between brand and culture. Get ready for a thought-provoking journey into the heart and soul of branding the unscripted, unfiltered and truly unglossy truth. Today, on Unglossy, we're joined by a multi-talented entrepreneur, producer and tech innovator who's making waves both in the music industry and beyond Isaac Hayes III. The son of legendary soul icon, isaac Hayes has carved out his own path, fusing creativity and technologies in ways that push boundaries. As the founder of crowdfunding platform, I wouldn't call it a crowdfunding platform. I would call it a creator platform. Yes, fanbase Isaac is championing a new era of digital monetization for creators, empowering them to earn from their content and own their narratives. We'll dive into his journey, the vision behind Fanbase and how he's shaping the future of content creation. Awesome how you doing, sir.
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. That's a great intro.
Speaker 1:Is that a good intro?
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, it makes me feel like important, you are important.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, sometimes, all right, we got to dive in on fan base because I am a fan. Okay, a fan base. Am I allowed to say I'm an investor as well?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm an investor.
Speaker 1:Oh, I was early.
Speaker 4:I was early too.
Speaker 1:I wasn't well, you might've been earlier than me.
Speaker 4:I didn't know you were an investor.
Speaker 1:I'm a minimal investor. Look, a little goes a long way Every dime counts, every dime counts, right, so you got to. Let's start by this. I want to know your inspiration. Like what? What made you say cause you're what you're doing, you're going up against big, big, big social platforms. Like what inspired you to start Fanbase?
Speaker 2:Black culture inspired me to start Fanbase because I was realizing the economic engine of social media was black culture. So there's this disproportionate relationship, this exploitive relationship, between the infrastructure of social media and the content creators that make the platforms popular. They have trends, and then that trickles down to other creators that may not look like us, that capitalize off the creation of others, and then they're the ones that wind up getting the huge brand deals or endorsements, but not the young kid that creates the challenge or the dance or the skit, that lives, you know, in the middle of Texas, and so the ability to monetize content was important to me. So I was like we need to make it. So there's a direct path for people to support individuals through in-app purchase technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what I mean? It's one thing to have a great idea, it's one thing to do it for a cause, but it's another thing to create an entire social media platform. I mean, that's pretty daunting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy, cause I didn't plan on doing it.
Speaker 1:I didn't plan on making an app but what did you plan on doing that? How? How were you going to? I mean, that was your challenge, right? That was your North star.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, that was your challenge, right, that was your North star. No, I literally had no idea that, had no plans on building an app. Oh, so that what happened is I get ideas and then if I have a way that I think I can build an idea, then I move forward. So this kid goes viral from Memphis, tennessee, dancing in a Spider-Man costume at a GameStop.
Speaker 1:This is the video that really got it going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so he's dancing at a GameStop and he's going viral and I just, you know, supportively sent him a message and say congrats, you're from Memphis, like yo, memphis is going viral for dancing on, you know, social media. And he hopped in my DMs and was like are you a manager? Do you manage people? Can you manage me? He manager, do you manage people, can you? Manage me. He sent me his number. He said I come to atlanta I was like okay, hold on.
Speaker 2:I was just saying, I was saying congrats yeah and then he's like all right, I was like I'll let you know if I think of anything or whatever. Yeah, then I said, wait a minute. I said not that they were, or they have been, because they've been very supportive of him. His name is ghetto spider, but I was like if marvel and disney didn't want him to use that costume, they could say stop using our ip.
Speaker 2:But he could really dance yeah so then I was like you know, we need, we need an app where people can subscribe to people the same way we subscribe to netflix. Yep, and that is so. Then I was like, okay, this is a cool idea. Then I asked one of my friends who was in her mid 30s what she thought about subscribing to another person and she said that sounded like the stupidest shit she ever heard. I can say shit, right. So she was like that's stupid. And then I was in the Apple store. I went to the Apple store at Lenox and I said let me ask this young employee and I asked her what her favorite band was. Or I said, who's your favorite artist? And instinctively I'm thinking she's going to name somebody extremely popular.
Speaker 2:So I thought she would have named, like Ariana Grande or Miley Cyrus, and she named some indie band that I had never heard of. And I said let me ask you a question For $4.99 a month, if you could subscribe to this band, like on a social media platform, and they might show you like them working on their album or they might you know photos of what they're doing, and every now and then they might sell you merch or you can have the ability to buy tickets before anybody else can buy tickets because you're subscribing. And would you do it? And her literal answer was fuck, yeah, it's only $4.99. It walks off. I was like, okay, I got to build this shit Because they get it, because the younger generations will understand, like my brother, they understand, he's 18. He understands Cash App and StockX and the shoes show up and he presses buttons and they understand that culture. Yeah, so then I trademarked the name Fanbase Because I'm always I have a thing about making sure you can protect an idea all the way to fruit.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a smart move, right Cause yeah, wait a minute. So you have and correct me if I'm wrong you don't really come from necessarily a tech background, right? So you're? You came from music, music business. Yeah, so a guy from the music business who did extremely well in the music business decides he's going to build a tech platform.
Speaker 2:Where do you even start? At the Gathering Spot in Atlanta, Georgia. So the Gathering Spot is a membership club founded by Ryan Wilson and TK Peterson.
Speaker 1:Ryan Wilson, who we're hoping to get on this show. Yeah, yes, good guy. So.
Speaker 2:Ryan Wilson and TK Peterson in the show. Yes, good guy, Ryan Wilson and TK Peterson, and there in the gathering spot were people that were part of the membership that were in tech Three of them. Their names are Jewel Burks, Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens, and they had a company called Collab Capital. Jewel had started a company called Part Pick and sold it to Amazon and so she had she had a successful exit.
Speaker 2:Barry was at had his own tech startup and he was working for tech stars, so my first conversations were asking them like well, how does tech work?
Speaker 1:You were, you were. You started right from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like what is like okay, what? How is it structured? How does it function? How is structured? How does it function? How is it funded? How are all?
Speaker 3:these things, you know, and they and they gave me the, the blueprint, the foundation.
Speaker 2:Fortunately enough for me, tech and the music industry are very similar in this way the vcs are like the labels, the startups are like the artists and the app store charts are like the billboard charts. So when you start in, so when? So? If you have an app or you're an artist and you have no buzz, you're just cold as ice and you go to a VC, they might think you have talent or it's a good idea, but the deal is going to be shitty. They're going to give you the seven album deal you know, on half your publishing and all that kind of stuff jeffrey, you'll know a lot about that, absolutely I've seen it a million times, so so I was like, oh so if I pay for it myself, if I fund it myself, then I'm independent.
Speaker 2:And so then I said, okay, so I, I, so I, I made money licensing my music. So I took a chance, I, I, I advanced myself $200,000 from my royalties that I would have made licensing my music and that gave me the ability to build what we call an MVP in tech, which is a minimum viable products or prototype of what fan base would be. But it was a functioning app that worked on the app store. Now, the part about getting to the point where I build that is very, very, very kind of like, I would say, destiny or god or whatever, because I had initially sought out black developers to help build this, because I was really again, my whole goal is we need to build infrastructure. So I was having challenges doing that. Either the individual was just busy, they were just successful people, or some of them might not have gelled as well.
Speaker 2:Fortunately enough for me, my attorney, drew Jackson. He's been my attorney since 2004. He said, hey, I know this guy. He built a website for us when I did this movie. Guy like he built a website for us when I did this movie. He built the website for our movie, but he is a soccer player a former professional soccer player from argentina, but he lives here in atlanta, and he has a development company and the the development team is in argentina, but he lives here. So I'm pretty sure you could get the app built for way cheaper, and he's a really good dude. I was like. I introduced him to him.
Speaker 2:His name is Romero Cannavas, so me and Romero meet, have a meeting, we hit it off and then boom, I pay him to build fan base. So that's how it really happens. I did trademark the name, gave him the concept, had my vision and they built what.
Speaker 1:I and he's still here as part of it, Correct, so that so.
Speaker 2:so part of my education with Barry and Justin and Jewel was, they said, isaac, in the tech space, your CTO has to be usually as the co-founder of the company or has some sort of equity in the company. And the reason why that is important is because when you go eventually, if you decide to raise money from venture capital, they have to know that the buttons are going to do what you say they can do and there's somebody there to make sure that happens. And so if your CTO doesn't have equity in your company, no one's ever going to lend you any money. You're never going to get anybody to invest in you because he could walk away from the whole project. Now, who's here to run this thing? And you're not there.
Speaker 1:It's a great lesson right there.
Speaker 2:Right, invaluable lesson. So, fortunately enough for me, romero had been in business for about a decade and one day he comes to me he says hey, this is after maybe a year of us. Just, I built the app and let it sit. What year was this? So I came up with the idea in March of 2018. Okay, we built it from July to December 2018. Okay 2019,.
Speaker 2:I put it up on the app store and didn't tell anybody that I built it. I didn't want anybody to know because at the time I didn't want to associate myself with the app, because I think apps are non-denominational. They're not Democrat, they're not Republican, they're not anything, they're just apps. And also understanding that typically someone's going to question how you get your users, and I have relationships, so if I can say, hey, I built this app, how many users you got.
Speaker 2:Oh, we have 10,000 users. Oh, that's cool. Well, where did you get the users from? And it's not organic, if I say. Oh well, I called up my friends in the music business and told them to download the app, and they told some people.
Speaker 1:They were like but that's not organic growth. So typically you want to walk into a conversation with somebody where they can't tell you no, which is smart too, because you could have easily went that route and immediately got some traction, but it wouldn't have been lasting traction Right and it would have given any VC the reason to say well, that I was already heading.
Speaker 2:I've already know what you're going to say. It's not organic and I wanted to see if the concept, we had that proof of concept. So in that one year that we left it up, people were making money. In fact, one user made about $6,000 in a year, with less than 10,000 users just monetizing their photos and videos.
Speaker 1:That's pretty amazing through subscription.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Also. Something that was interesting at the time is when I researched, you know, this type of model. It didn't exist. Yeah you know this type of model. It didn't exist, so there was no mechanism for a person to use their phone to subscribe to a human being only to games and like music streaming services and video on demand services, but not to a human being. You could still do that using your credit card through a platform like Patreon or whatever you know, OnlyFans, Because I remember hearing about OnlyFans.
Speaker 2:Onlyfans had come out like a year before I came up with the idea for Famics like 2017, 2016. But it was heavily pornographic and I was doing my research. What's out here? I said, okay, there's an app called Patreon. There's an app called OnlyFans. I said, yeah, but I want the quick trip of social media. I don't know if you have a quick trip where you're from, but do you know what quick trip is?
Speaker 4:It's a convenience store. It's basically like a Wawa.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like a Wawa or Sheetz or something like that.
Speaker 2:There's a unique thing about quick trip. What's the unique thing? It's the most ingenious business model I've ever seen. There's four things that make Quick Trip a model of efficiency. One all the stores have the exact same floor plan. Okay. So if you go on one quick trip, you've gone in them all, so you know exactly where to go. Two oddly enough and you try this, if you ever run so quickly, the doors open both ways. So it's never, you never pull the door and it's jarring. Yeah, it's a saloon.
Speaker 2:You, you never pull the door and it's jarring Like, yeah, it's, it's a saloon, you push it, it opens, you pull it up. It's either or left side. Three they're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every holiday. They never, ever, ever close. And four, it was one of the only convenience stores I know that you could just beep and walk out. You didn't have to sign, you just hit it literally. A cashier could run two registers yeah, they do.
Speaker 2:They do run two registers they run more than two sometimes you do over here, you're over here and it's just a revolving quick trip so I wanted the ability for people to not have to put in a CVV and an address.
Speaker 2:I just wanted people to click and subscribe so with their face or with their fingerprint subscribe. So that whole mechanism didn't exist in and all that. I just want people to click and subscribe so with their face or with their fingerprint subscribe. So that whole mechanism didn't exist and Apple and Google would not let us build it at first. And I was scared shitless. Why didn't they want you to build it first?
Speaker 2:Because the way that they did subscriptions initially was they had this thing called a subscription profile. So basically, on the back end, they let you know they know all the called a subscription profile. So basically, on the back end, they let you know they know all the subscriptions that you have. So they know that you're on Spotify, you're on Netflix, you're on Hulu, and they call it a profile. So their response to us initially was we're not going to let you build an app where, in theory, a person could subscribe to 20 people and you wind up with 10 million users and we have to keep up with 2 billion subscription profiles because they would be each different subscriptions, profiles, yeah, so every so you're subscribing to 20 people.
Speaker 2:That's 20 profiles yeah and then you get. So we got 2 billion profiles to keep up with. We're not gonna let you do that which I can see why and then I was like shit because we had already started building the app and we were like literally way, way, way down the path.
Speaker 2:And Ramiro, being the brilliant CTO that he is, he goes. Well, listen, they have rules. They say each subscription has to have a profile, and we go hmm, he goes. You know what this means, and he goes. Hmm, he goes. You know what this means, and he goes. No, he goes. If we're able to do this the way they say, we have to do it. You're about to do something that no one has ever done before and I was like that's awesome. So we thought about it and we said okay, we want the ability for people to subscribe to multiple people. So what we did is a tiered system. So the MVP of fan base allows you to subscribe to one person, three people or five people but, each one was a profile.
Speaker 2:So if you subscribe to one person, that's a profile. If you went up to three, you swapped out the one for the three. If you went up to five, you swapped out the three for the five, and that's how we were able to launch it. So we launched with that model one, three or five, it's tiered.
Speaker 1:So wait, take a step back then. So, fan base in general, you have content creators that are on there.
Speaker 2:Users Users.
Speaker 1:Users and then you have what are the other ones? So if I'm a user who's not creating content, but I'm subscribing Without it. Everybody is.
Speaker 2:So everybody is a user. Every single person on social media is a user and a content creator simultaneously. Got it Want to know why.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every time you comment that's content. That's a good point. Every time, if you post a photo once a year or once a day, they're running an ad next to it. Yeah, so you are a content creator. Okay, you know, like I said, if you're just scrolling some people just scroll social media yeah but a lot of times people might scroll but they might comment. They might not post that, but they might comment. You're still creating content. You're creating engagement, you're creating a conversation. You're going back and forth in the comments.
Speaker 2:That's content yeah so every person on social media is a user and a content creator at the same time. The problem is that we spent the last 20 years being prime, that our content has no value.
Speaker 1:Cause we're. We're creating all this content and then the advertisers sitting there making all the money for showing product. They're making it on both ends.
Speaker 2:Platforms making the money by allowing the advertisers to run their content in between your content. So, I was like, well, that's, that's not cool.
Speaker 1:So they're benefiting off of all of the production, of all of the content, whether it's a comment, whether it's a photo, whether it's somebody who's actively putting lots of stuff up there 100%.
Speaker 4:It's like free. It's kind of like in the music business. It's akin to when MTV and BET were hot. The labels would make these videos. There was no return on investment, zero. So we were feeding MTV their content.
Speaker 2:And then they're selling advertising. They're selling advertising based on the videos.
Speaker 4:Exactly off TRL and the big shows. But the labels you know, don't cry for the labels, but the labels were supplying the content, but it was nothing. It wasn't like okay, after that then we'll sell the video. It was nothing. You spend a million dollars on a video. It goes on MTV. Hopefully it drives sales for the album, Right, but for the MTV he's not paying you nothing, he's like thanks.
Speaker 2:Matter of fact, to the point it might have made. You got to pay us to put it on here. If we get big enough, you might have to your spot, absolutely.
Speaker 4:It was definitely money involved with going on TRL or 106 countdowns or getting to perform on there and all that. They were just providing content and they're just making billions and it was crazy.
Speaker 2:What was interesting about that is that in that process, social media had determined that. Okay, but users want attention more than they want money. That's exactly yeah. Dopamine. So don't believe that, when you're on these platforms, that they're not spending millions of dollars with social psychologists to understand what makes humans tick, what gets you to stay on an app, what makes you feel good, what makes you happy and it's the attention, it's the adoration, it's the light.
Speaker 1:It's the attention, it's the adoration, it's the likes, it's the views, and so perfect we give you views, you give us content, we make money.
Speaker 2:That's the formula. That's the formula for 20 years now. Yeah, right, but now video is part of social media. So now it's not me just taking a photo of my food or tweeting. Now I'm getting ring lights and cameras and you know, I got labs and I'm using yeah, we're producing content so now there's a cost. My time is a lot more labor intensive, but it's. I'm still giving it away for free yeah so it's just like the mixtape era.
Speaker 2:It's like social media. I say right now is in the is where the mixtape era was where it's like we give you all this content for free. Hopefully one of your pieces hit, you become famous. Then you're able to monetize that fame after the fact and then hopefully you're able to turn that into a career, because for every funny Marco Drew ski and Desi banks there's 20,000 that get burned out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there are people making money on Instagram, on YouTube, on all these other platforms right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but they're receiving. So the issue and they will tell you that themselves is that it's an unstable environment because the percentage that a platform might pay out for ad revenue can fluctuate. So one month your YouTube might make $20,000. They might change the way you get paid out and the next month it might make $4,000. They might change the way you get paid out. The next month it might make $4,000.
Speaker 1:You really never have any idea.
Speaker 2:You can't build a business not knowing specifically how much money you're making.
Speaker 4:And or YouTube can just shut you down or they monetize you for whatever reason they come up with. You got no control over it. It's like nah, we're changing that, that you can't do that, no more. It's like damn. So you know. Hence the reason people would say pew, pew now on tiktok or on a live themselves, because certain keywords they'll just shut you down.
Speaker 2:Then you're making no money yeah and typically in in our, the black community. It's a very unfiltered. So we might be talking about smoking weed, it might be some when we say shit, damn, ass, whatever. And so to advertisers they don't want their ads running next to that. So now the company has to make a business decision. But the irony is that the source of that content might be inspiring or getting used by other content creators to monetize. So you demonetize my channel for cussing, but the white creator that takes my same video, that plays it in the background, gets monetized. It's driving views. So it's OK for them, because you can run a bunch of Starbucks ads next to the millions of times they're cursing. It doesn't matter. But for me the company says no and you don't want that. So that's how you get the Charlie D'Amelio's and the Addison Rae's, and to no fault of their own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because they didn't do anything wrong, because that's the thing about TikTok I say all the time it's like you do the challenge, I do the challenge, you do the dance. There's nothing wrong with any of that. The exploitive side is that to the brands it behooves a platform like TikTok to have famous white creators because you can sell more advertising. Unfortunately, I sell this all the time. Things built by white people are perceived to be for all people. Things built by black people are perceived to be just for black people.
Speaker 2:So as many times as I've gone on interviews and said fan bases we're in 190 countries and territories on ios and android everybody say, oh, you made a social media platform for black creators.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I just I mean, that is the perception. When I ask people about fan base, they're like oh, that's, it's like a, it's the black social media platform, right, which is not true. It's not true, it's.
Speaker 2:It's just a social media platform and I happen to be black. That's a way that they try to marginalize that. Now, with advertising, what we're realizing, what I started to realize, too, is well, wait a minute, why is someone that is very, very famous, that might have 100 million followers, not reaching those many people? I started looking at that question, like like, this is weird. And people start complaining like yo, why am I? I get no views. Like, and it doesn't make sense because if I follow, if my intention is to follow a person, yeah then I intend to see everything that they post yes that is my intention.
Speaker 2:So instagram and facebook know that. So they're saying, well, well, wait a minute. Now. Social media angels, people with like 10 million followers. Now people got a hundred million, 200 million, 300 million. Rock has 390.
Speaker 1:Rock is the perfect example.
Speaker 2:He has 390 million followers. Yeah, that's four Superbowls. Yeah, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Speaker 1:And you're right when you look at one of his videos. I mean he has a lot of views. Oh, it might be 21 million, but it's not as many in comparison. It's not 390 million.
Speaker 2:Because a one-minute Super Bowl commercial is $7 million. So the Rock could be making $28 million just by posting one piece of content on his Instagram page if he was going to reach 300 million people, or 400 million people, because now he's a television network. Once video becomes part of social media, every single person is a channel. Yeah, so I just started looking at the big blocks. You know, okay, every Instagram or Tik TOK profiles a channel. That person programs that channel with content and then advertisers run, run ads on that network and they make money and the user gets a cut of that. But imagine, now that we're in the video on demand area, that if it was subscription based so now I'm like, I'm starting to run the numbers, like, well, wait a minute, if, like, 5% of the people that follow the Rock, just 5% of those people that follow him, subscribe to him, he'd make.
Speaker 1:Like 1.6 billion a year. I was going to say, even if they only paid two or three bucks, five bucks he'd make a bill. He'd be a billion a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then I was like, oh, that's where this is going. Nothing's going to stop that from happening. Yeah, as we say, have this conversation right now. So social media platforms are doing their best to stall that process and war that off, because I'm the one screaming at the top of the hills Like what are you doing? Like why are you over here when you could do that? And what they? And what I can only imagine is that, um, the time that they've spent to understand that humans are very, um, we follow patterns. Once we're locked into something, we stick, and it's hard to break that.
Speaker 4:It's like breaking a habit. That's what I was about to say. Like as back to your dopamine point, like it's hard to break the habit of people get so much dopamine from Instagram, even though you said they're not making no bread, right? It doesn't make sense.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but they just like ah, just you know, somebody walked up on me and said they love my Instagram and that's enough for a lot of people and they don't want to lose that. And they don't want to lose that by going somewhere else and it's like oh, I don't, you're not here anymore.
Speaker 2:But Somebody walks up to them and say, yo, that shit you posted was dope, or they're happy. Well, they think. But it's also been a way that advertisers and brands utilize creators to advertise their products. Influencers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So influence again is the influence over spokesmanship. Spokesmanship is dead. You can no longer say hi, I'm Bob Sobody and I tell you to go use X, y, z, nah. But if you happen to be making a piece of content and you might pop some candy in your mouth and they're like what is that? You're eating, or you're always wearing this certain piece of clothing, I'm like what is that? Because you're famous and you're rich. So if you're doing that, it must be good. That must be good.
Speaker 1:So what is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So influencer marketing became the thing where it's like, okay, we influence people to buy things as opposed to I'm the person, Cause now everybody's that's like a club flyer. We just see that you're paid to do that a mile away. We know that that's not authentic.
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Speaker 4:Let me ask a question. Why do you think I don't know if I've asked you this before why do you think Twitch has become the place? A lot of the influence goes like Academics, obviously, and Kai and those guys are there and they're on the other platforms, but they focus so much on Twitch. Why do you think Twitch is the one that they focus on? I think because a couple of reasons. They focus so much on twitch. Why do you think twitch is the the one that they focus on, I think because a couple of reasons.
Speaker 2:First and foremost, it was tied to gaming. So young people play video games, yeah, and gaming was almost considered like unserious or juvenile yeah, like you're in the basement of your mother's house.
Speaker 4:You'll be nothing, you know.
Speaker 2:You eat pizza and then e-sports and gaming became popular to the point that people are millionaires off this shit. Now it's a real business and it's funny, because I would have never thought in a million years that of all the mediums of entertainment, that gaming would be the one that would surpass all of them.
Speaker 1:but I would have never thought that either but there's something.
Speaker 2:But, but I tell you there's a. There's that. The reason why, in hindsight, is that there's an inter. There's two types of interactions that you don't get with any other form of media, particularly one. It's not competitive either. Either when you're playing computer, you're challenging yourself, or you're challenging another person. Yeah right, so there's. So there's a competitive nature. So you don't get that from music, you don't get that from tv, you don't get that from movies, right, and then it's also you don't know a lot of times what the outcome is.
Speaker 1:You don't know who's going to win?
Speaker 2:who's going to lose?
Speaker 1:And it's the ultimate interactive.
Speaker 2:I mean you're actually in it, You're doing it, you're part of it, you're immersed in it, and so that's what makes it kind of like very powerful and popular. So I think that became something that Kai and all that. And then those platforms started paying, so they had subscriptions before anybody. So I said the original subscription pioneers were the sex workers, so cam girls they started. The next level were the gamers, and then the podcasters started getting into it. Yep, and even to this point right now, there are podcasters and gamers and sex workers that are making far more money than musicians and actors, yeah, and they just flew right by them.
Speaker 2:And my point is, the actors and musicians are still doing the same old things. I couldn't be, I could not be the same age as Kai Sinat and say Kai, what are you about to do? I'm about to go stream for the next month and make $800,000. What are you about to go do? Oh, I'm about to go do a somebody. Go to the studio, record a song, get in the car, drive from city to city, make 10 bands here, 10 bands there, 10 bands there. Go sit down with a bunch of radio promoters, pay them. Go do a club walkthrough. Maybe I get shot at. Fly to New York, talk about my deal. I would be like what am I doing? It's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile and this proves my point Meanwhile some girl's about to go home, set up a camera, pull her titties out, people about to subscribe to see it. But another girl's about to go, pack her bag, go to a strip club, stand there till four in the morning, have smoke all around her, be in a violent grab on her in a comfortable environment and make a tenth of the money. So that's what I mean People. When people are locked into a behavior, they stay with it. They stay with it. Yeah, because when I saw OnlyFans I was like OnlyFans is about to kill the strip club industry. It's over with. I just thought it was over because I know women that have gone from the strip club to OnlyFans, from making, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to millions. I have a friend of mine she's a millionaire that used to strip way in Atlanta. Georgia called Follies and she went from Follies to fame or OnlyFans and a comfort of her own home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it has built, has built other like managing other creators. It has a creator house and lives in Miami, and I mean now she's everywhere. Yeah, you know she so.
Speaker 2:So the content creation space has evolved and, like I said before, nothing is going to stop it. So these platforms are recognizing. We were talking about views and stuff like that. They were like well, wait a minute, we have a problem here. If we show everybody the Rock's content, coca-cola is going to come and pay the Rock to sit that can of Coke in his video and pay him and we'll never make a dime on ads.
Speaker 2:So what we have to do is crush the Rock's visibility and force the advertisers to come to us. Yeah, you think you're going to be able to work with the Rock. Try it. His video will get five views. Give us our money and run our ads. So that's where content suppression and shadow banning became a thing that they denied existed. But no, it's real.
Speaker 1:It and shadow banning became a thing that they denied existed. But no, it's real, it really was happening. So do you think it's the same trend as I mean? If you think about TV, the future of TV, the future of I shouldn't even call it TV the future of programming? It's going the same route, right, Because everybody had cable and it was a big thing I remember, even in my household to switch from cable to's say, cut the cord, to cut the cord. It sounds like it should be an easy thing to do, but everybody's just familiar, Everybody's easy, Everybody just likes to be able to go to these channels. And now we have all these streaming services. But it is kind of weird because we're all moving away from a consolidated networking system to all these streaming services. And then there's a part of you now that's like, ah God, maybe it would be easier to go back to that. No, but think about it. You have Netflix, Now you're subscribing to all of these different things.
Speaker 2:So here's where this is. What I started talking about with Fanbase is that it's going even smaller. So I'll use three words or three phrases broadcast media. So I'll use three words or three phrases broadcast media. So broadcast media were large cable networks with hundreds of channels, with thousands of shows. Yes.
Speaker 2:And it was massively unprofitable for the, for the, for the studios. So old TV used to be, let me ball up 20 or 15 shows, throw it against the wall and see what sticks pilots, you know, friends, and Seinfeld, and dah dah, dah, dah, dah. And then it gets canceled and we spent money and it's not working. And dah dah, dah dah, okay, cool. And so that worked for a while. But then people say, well, I want to watch this show when I want to watch it, yeah, and I want to watch this specific show with cursing or with, you know, a little bit more hardcore, whatever, violence, whatever it is, comedy or whatever. And so we moved to the narrow casting era where we subscribe to apps that have hundreds of shows now.
Speaker 1:Like a Netflix or something. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So now the networks and we've gotten broadcast and narrowcast. The next level down and this is where the young people are going to take over, and they already have is no, I want to subscribe to Kaisanat Because he's providing the entertainment. This is something that, like I said, when you think about TV or music, it's really just attention. If you're advertising, all you need to do is to garner someone's attention for a long enough time to run them an ad. It doesn't matter if I spend $300 million to shoot a season of Loki, or someone like Reese Atissa sits in her car and makes this content on her phone. I've got your eyeballs, that's all I need. It doesn't matter what you're looking at, as long as you're looking at the screen, and in between that I can throw you an ad.
Speaker 2:So younger people are sacrificing the big screen for a mobile screen that's smaller, that can move around with them, that is also sending them content. And I was just saying this to my friends earlier today. I was like I live my life as if I'm a Gen Z person. I'm 49. I live like I'm Gen Z, so I find it extremely uncomfortable or hard to watch a movie. Now I can't watch movies.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I watched Bad Boys 4 on Netflix, but I waited. First of all, I waited for netflix. Like we always talk to somebody about this the other day, the whole, you know, yo, friday night, bad boys for us, I'm gonna take the whole family the popcorn. I think that's just kind of dead. Yeah, I'll be like I mean, some people still do it, I guess, but like I'm like, oh, bad boys for us, come on, I'll wait till come on netflix. Yeah, and that's exactly what I did and I watched it the other night.
Speaker 1:Are you watching it on a big screen? I watch it on my laptop.
Speaker 4:I watch everything on my laptop. The only thing I watch on a big screen is sports.
Speaker 2:I watch everything on my laptop and that's if I turn the TV on and he over at the house and I turn it on. We watch that Because he'll watch some shit, because really this doesn't, this doesn't need. Your eyes don't need to be stimulated more than your ears. If I can put on a pair of headphones and get Dolby 5 sound and watch the Avengers on this, I'm good. The auditory part is the part that's more engaging. It's stimulating your senses, your eyes. We're looking at a two dimensional screen. Nothing changes. It's stimulating your senses, your eyes. We're looking at a two-dimensional screen. Nothing changes from here. It's just the size. I'm still seeing the same thing. I might have to have a little bigger phone or a laptop, but it doesn't change. If I can hear that and really sound good, that doesn't change anything. So what I'm realizing is social media is now no longer pictures and comments and tweets. It's literal TV. Social media is now television. So instead of hitting a remote, you're swiping.
Speaker 2:So tiktok is just channel surfing, yeah so so it's like and so those pieces of content? So the cool thing about where I'm again when I'm, when I just break things down as simple as I can break them down, I'm like oh so, wait a minute. So Disney Plus and Netflix and Hulu are screwed because they produce the content and then charge for the content, and they are producing high quality content, like again a season of Loki, both seasons of Loki together $300 million for season one and season two. Yeah, all right. So you know how many subscribe At $14.99 a month, how much you got to subscribe?
Speaker 2:I got subscribers, you got to have a ton just to pay for Loki. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they're not making any money. So I'm like, well, wait a minute. Hmm, if I'm fan base and I'm just a distributor, you guys are the ones that shoot, produce the content. I give you a cut of the revenue of the profits. Then I'm good, that's a record company bond. I don't pay for the production of any of the content. You produce the content, you make the lion's share of the revenue and you call the shots.
Speaker 2:If you put a TV show on HBO, they're going to hire the showrunner, they're going to own the show, they're going to tell you what you can and cannot do and they're going to make most of the money. So now I've decentralized television, because you're telling me that in fan base we have six functionalities, so six ways that you produce content which is posting with your photos and videos, stories which are like short videos, live flicks, which are just like short form videos, like reels and tiktoks, audio chat rooms, so audio conversations. And then we have fan base plus, which is like our version of youtube or netflix, so you could post a podcast, a tv show, a movie, put it behind a paywall and charge for it.
Speaker 1:So if you had, if somebody came walking in and they had a 10 part hour long series and they wanted to call the shots, they could literally load it up on fanbase pro plus plus, plus and run it like it's a netflix and put it behind again.
Speaker 2:Put it behind the paywall. People get charged to see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah and you think that's the future. Yeah, the future is not necessarily Disney Plus all of these other places, it's the individual creator.
Speaker 2:So I can answer that question easily for you anybody. Do you have Netflix? Yeah, how much do you pay for it?
Speaker 1:What do I pay? $14, $15?
Speaker 2:You have the HD 4K version. I don't know.
Speaker 1:You have the HD 4K version.
Speaker 2:I don't know If you have the 4K version.
Speaker 1:See, there's my other problem. I don't know, it just gets charged to me.
Speaker 2:But if you have the 4K version, you're probably paying $24.99 a month.
Speaker 1:Maybe I am, I don't know Okay.
Speaker 2:So you're paying $24.99 a month, all right. How many shows do you watch on Netflix? I mean, in what amount of time? I don't just all the total shows that you watch. Probably, I don't know 10, 12, okay, how many? How many shows are on netflix? A lot, thousands, thousands. So you're paying 24.99 a month to really pay for 10 000 shows and only watch 10 yep, which is back to the original tv model right.
Speaker 2:So my point is well then, if I really like, I don't know um snowfall, and why can't I just make snowfall and pay 3.99 a month for every episode of snowfall and then watch it on my phone or watch it on my laptop or streaming? On my tv through fanbase. Yeah so now? And it opens up. And it opens up a brand new universe, right? Because now every single person, production, company, anything on earth is now a network. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that means you're a television network, tyler Perry's a network, drewski's a network. But guess who's a network now? Domino's is a network. Krispy Kreme is a network. Domino's is a network, krispy Kreme is a network. Mercedes Benz is a network because now they can produce content and people can, because my reason to be counting it fan base is everyone is a fan of something and everyone has a fan base. So I know people that are huge fans of Louis Vuitton and I know people that would pay $9.99 a month to be able to get exclusive content created by Louis Vuitton that shows the details of all the products that they sell the fashion shows. The fashion shows. They might call in someone like Pharrell and sit down with them and let them talk about the whole line in depth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and really produce that content and charge $10.99. And here's the caveat, a perk Guess what you can do now? And you can buy it before anybody else can, and you can own it before anybody.
Speaker 4:Yeah, maybe get a discount or something like that.
Speaker 2:I always said that I was like I want fan base to kill the sneakers app. I asked any sneaker head would you pay $4.99 a month or $9.99 a month to always get your shoes? Yeah, because Nike's trash. Yeah, like $9.99 a month. So while we're right here, let's play a game, right? So how much is a pair of Air Force?
Speaker 4:Ones. They used to be for round number. They're about $100. They might be a little more now. They're like $135. Let's say $150.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's say a pair of Air Force Ones is $150, right? So let's say a pair of Air Force Ones every week, so times four, that's $600 a month. Times 12 for a whole year, that's $7,200 times for 20 years, that's only $144,000. All right, cool. So now let's do some other math. Let's go to Nike and look at the and how many people, how many subscribers are you I'm sorry, Followers Nike has. So Nike has 303 million followers. Okay.
Speaker 2:All right. So let's take 5% of those people, that's 15 million people, right, of the 303, 303 million a little the 303 million A little 15 million. So 15 million people subscribing to Nike for $9.99 a month. They're going to get half the revenue. Times $5 a month right, it's a lot. That's 75 million a month. Wait, I did that wrong, but times 12. Yeah, that's $900 million a year. So Nike could give away If I told you that a bunch of stuff for life. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or I'm subscribed to Mercedes Benz, but every week they give away a g-wagon you're never, not subscribing you're staying forever it would be worth their side yeah, yeah. So everybody's on the future perks and subscriptions and all these things are going to be built into ever into life. Because content creation is not going to be the draw because I've been diving into ai so much for the last three weeks. It's not going to be the draw because I've been diving into AI so much for the last three weeks.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be. Even what we're doing right now is going to be able to be done by computers in the near future, to the point where you'll be able to take your consciousness and create. You know, you'll be able to say take everything that I take, every email, every post, every tweet, everything that I've ever said, load it up and now be me and respond as I would respond with the same emojis, with the same, like you know, exclamation points, and capitalize these words.
Speaker 2:Not only that, let me clone my voice and then you can say it Now I'm going to serve you a it. Now I'm going to serve you a subject, and then I'm going to serve you a subject to talk about, and then you're going to talk about that subject in the same way that I would say it, in the same vernacular tone that I would, and I'm just going to leave that up and monetize that all day long. So what's going to matter is what do I get out in the real world from this? What outside is going to matter way more than inside. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and that's the thing about it, I've been diving, which is why, if you look at, if you look at content creation, now, the only things that really people are really pay attention to are sports, because you don't know.
Speaker 1:It's the last thing that we have, that you don't know the outcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or the award shows yeah, or the debates yeah. So of the year when there's a presidential season of the top 100, most programs 98 of them are football games. I mean college football and professional football.
Speaker 3:And then one of them is a debate. One of them is the Oscars and that's it.
Speaker 2:It's like Oscars, Grammys, the debate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all live shows. They're live things.
Speaker 2:Things that you don't know what he's going to do when John Cena comes on his show, or Kevin Hart. So that's why I say reality and hence why networks are scaling back on that. That's why you know the Bachelorette and the Voice and on Netflix. They love his blinds because you don't know what's going to happen. The balloon you don't know what's going to happen and also what's interesting about that.
Speaker 4:The other phenomenon with, like those shows uh, the lovers blinds and the bachelors, they spawn now a huge industry because there's all these people that comment on them. Yes, it's like the show comes on and it's like, okay, now go to this person and they're gonna review the show with comments about it, and it's a whole industry of like you go about it and it's a whole industry of like you go on TikTok, it's a whole industry of bachelor reviews or lovers blind reviews. So it's people making bread off these shows that are not employed by the network at all. They're in the crib.
Speaker 4:They're in the bedroom.
Speaker 2:I've never watched love is blind, but apparently some black dude got was engaged in the see I have no idea what you're talking about, but it's like they're invested in that.
Speaker 4:Those are basically the new soap operas. Right, but they're real. Yeah, nobody's writing the script, but their soap opera is what General Hospital used to be 20 years ago, where he was like, oh shit, he's cheating on her with her that's now Lovers Blind or Bachelorette or whatever. It's why Survivor has lasted so long.
Speaker 1:And big brother, yes, because big brother always fascinated me, because that's 24 7, I mean you, I mean it's a show, but then you can go on all the websites and watch it 24 7 and it's real life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh man. We could go a lot of different directions here, but I want to get to a completely different subject cool, I want to dive into now. Fan base is growing. Fan base is getting bigger, but you're doing something interesting and I think you're one of the leaders in this space. I don't know whether to call this equity crowdfunding or, as our friend from last week, John Price called it community round where you're letting people now invest in in the future of fan base.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How's that going for you?
Speaker 2:We've done really well. We wouldn't be in the position that we are without equity crowdfunding, and so this is going to tie into something political, because I had I was having a conversation on fan base and the conversation was about you know, I think Barack Obama was one of those conversations, and sometimes in our community people say, well, what did Barack Obama do for the black community? And sometimes we look at, we look for things that are specifically for our community, but what we don't understand is that typically they are every everything is for our community now in their deficits. So you go, everybody can go walk into a bank and attempt to get a loan. Doesn't mean you're going to get the loan. Everybody can attempt to go try to buy a house Doesn't mean they're going to let you buy the house. So what equity crowdfunding did was it was a law called the JOBS Act that Congress passed and Barack Obama signed into law.
Speaker 1:We heard a lot about the JOBS Act on our episode.
Speaker 2:Right. So the jobs act wiped out the accredited investor role. So who that benefits more than anybody are people like me that that I'm a black founder and out of all the venture dollars that have been given in the past two years, black founders have received less than half of 1% of all those dollars. So the labels are not investing in the black startups or the black businesses and the banks aren't loaning us money. So for me to be able to go to my community or people that find value and interest in what I'm doing and invest, that's invaluable, because now I have a way in. And that's very dangerous, because now Instagram, these platforms, are going to be like, oh, like, he's got the ability to raise capital and he knows what he's doing, they know what, they know how to build product. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He has culture on his side, because we can only move with the speed in which we copy culture. He moves at the speed of culture. I'm in Atlanta, georgia. So whatever the phrase is, whatever the phrase is, whatever the song is, we're going to hear it first, we're going to make it. If it's Lemon Pepper Wings, I already knew about them 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and now everybody talks about Lemon Pepper Wings, swag surfing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, swag surf.
Speaker 2:You know, mcdonald's, sprite, just things that people talk about, right, so they're behind. So the infrastructure and the culture are in one space, and so equity crowdfunding gives me the advantage of being able to scale my business and do that. So we did three rounds of Rexy of crowdfunding and I raised $10 million in three rounds for Fanbase, which is incredible. I'm the first black person to raise $10 million in Rexy of crowdfunding ever.
Speaker 1:Well, now I would take it even further. You might be one of the first people period Black white.
Speaker 2:No people, no people. Equity crowdfunding people are raising. Well, there, it's the way that they raise money. There's different ways to, there's different levels. So, there's the reg CF space, but if you're talking about the CF space, yeah, the CF space, yeah, I've done pretty well and done it in a way that's very, very unique, because I never spent money to promote my raises.
Speaker 1:Now tell me more, because every time I talk to any of these, the biggest thing to raise money is you have to put money into it to raise money.
Speaker 2:You have to spend $200,000 to raise a million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how are you doing this without?
Speaker 2:So relationships All right. I've always been a relationship person and so prime example is this podcast is happening now because I know Jeff and Jeff knows you and then you knew Hill and then I worked with Hill and Hill was able to come on the Investor's Throne and became a fan based investor.
Speaker 2:So I've always had the belief that I always tell everybody that I have a phrase be careful how you climb the tree of success. I say tell everybody that I have a phrase be careful how you climb the tree of success. I say the branches that you break on the way up are not there to catch you if you fall. So if you're an asshole making it to the top, if you slip, there's nobody to say can I have a job, can I have somewhere to stay? Can I borrow some money Like no bye? You're at the bottom, fly right down, yeah.
Speaker 2:All the way down to the bottom and so through equity crowdfunding, um, I know people, so the cost to get on or I don't even know if there's a cost but the, the, the stature that you have to have to appear on the breakfast club. You got to be pretty famous. But I know charlamagne and we're cool and he, he liked what I was doing. It was like yo, you're a black biz. We need to highlight you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And when he did that, my first raise went viral and it created that first wave of of dollars into fan base. Or me getting on clubhouse when there were 4,000 users and then calling all of my friends telling Jeff and Dina, marto and Hannah King and all these people to bring all these people to Clubhouse. And then they bring their friends and I bring I invited Charlamagne and Killer, mike and Snoop Dogg and then they come on the platform and then Fadia gets on the platform and then then Meesee gets on it and then 21st Saturday, before you know it, clubhouse blows up. So it's that, it's that network effect and that's the ability to, you know, reach massive amounts of people through the relationships that you have. So I've always been a relationship person.
Speaker 2:I don't. I want to be able to be able to pick up the phone and call whoever and say, yo, can you connect me with someone? So, yeah, here's his number. Yeah, I'm the same way like, oh, you need this. Yeah, here, let me hook you up with this guy. Y'all do what you need to do. I think it's, you know, popular to do that. That's just because you're sowing seeds, because you never know, like the interesting thing that I think that's phenomenal and great about life is that people have like there's so many chapters to your life as a person. I would have not. You know the things that what I'm doing right now I would have never told you I was going to do 10 years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not even, not even seven years ago. I'm like, I'm not gonna be a tech founder. What talking about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here you are. This is what you are now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I'm saying and it changes. And my point is who knows what I'll be doing another seven years from now? Yeah, I could be fan base could blow up, I could exit and be like well, what does Ike do? Well, now he owns the Hawks, now he's a sports owner, sports team owner, I hope you do own the. I want to buy them. I said. I want to buy the Hawks I'm all for it and make it the Lakers of the South.
Speaker 2:Yes, I want Showtime. I want the seats filled with all the movie stars that are here filming movies. I want to make sure we go get Anthony Edwards back to the A and I want to do all that, but I got to build my billion-dollar empire first. But equity crowdfunding again is the gateway that does it. Um, but equity crowdfunding again is the, is the is the gateway that does it. It wipes out that accredited investor role and and also, what's more important about that is and again, I'm just. I'm always. I'm very transparent about things that I see in my community and a lot of my friends do get gamble. But I noticed that when I see these commercials that advertise gambling, I don't see a lot of white people advertising the gambling commercials. I see Kevin Hart, I see LeBron James, I see Jamie Foxx, I see Drewski. So I see DraftKings, I see PrizePix.
Speaker 1:I haven't thought of it.
Speaker 2:I see, mgm, I'm like well, where are the tons of white people telling people to go out and gamble? So if you're telling people to gamble, you're not necessarily advertising. If all the people advertising gambling sites are black, then how come they're not commercials telling you to invest, to take that same money? To the point that I actually said this on Fanbase. I went and chatted to GPT and asked and I said what has better odds gambling in Vegas, sports betting, playing the lottery or investing in a social media app? And Chad Giviti says well, investing in a social media startup, you have better odds because you're investing in technology. You know the future. You you know sports and gambling has been on luck. It's not any of that.
Speaker 2:And also and so there's a participatory part of this where you can actually, you know, be part of the outcome of of what it is. So if I'm a famous celebrity, I can invest in fan. I could put a hundred thousand dollars in the fan base and then join the platform and make it a billion dollar company in two weeks. And we all could do that collectively, even the guy that the app just went viral like last week just off one guy making a video, we got a number 24 on the app store charts for social media just off, two videos that change it. So the virality of that, so the ability that equity crowdfunding provides us to fund our businesses. And then and I keep saying this all the time, I'm just going to be honest, cause I know they're going to make this illegal one day I'm just telling you there's no way that they're going to, there's no way in the future.
Speaker 1:They're going to make crowdfunding.
Speaker 2:No, they're going to make. They're going to make investing in. How would they do that? Because what gives a social media platform its value? The people, the people. Yeah. So you're telling me that in the future they're going to say oh well, here's a startup here, cardi B, here Kai Sinat you can invest in it. Then go on Twitter and tell everybody to move over there. And now your platform is worth a billion dollars overnight and then you can sell it.
Speaker 1:That's a good point, you just do it over and over again. Yeah, get every app, raise some money sell it.
Speaker 2:They're like no, that's pumping dumps. You know what I'm saying? Because I can't control the value of a soft drink company by just drinking it, but I can control the value of the social media platform by using it, Absolutely.
Speaker 4:They're going to move where you move? Like with Clubhouse, it just became, especially during that time. It was pandemic as well, so everybody was sitting around and it just became a huge thing. Everybody just went over there. Stars.
Speaker 1:What happened to Clubhouse?
Speaker 4:It's still there.
Speaker 1:Remember it did?
Speaker 2:It skyrocketed and then just plummeted well, a couple things that that I I was there and then I left. First thing was they segregated the app. So in the midst of this, four years ago, we were in the midst of this very tense time with biden and trump and covid yeah and so there was.
Speaker 2:The rooms were very, very. Clubhouse was a very interesting place because you could be a fly on the wall of any conversation in the world. I could go in a room and hear people talk about politics or have people talking about religion or whatever, and I remember at one point some users came on the platform that were saying anti-semitic things and scooter braun had to be on the platform and he posted a tweet is clubhouse anti-semitic?
Speaker 2:and the clubhouse was trending for all the wrong reasons yeah and the next thing you know, the app changed and said well, now you're only going to see rooms from people that you follow yeah, which you can see right, because I could have easily recorded, yeah, all this crazy stuff and put it out there.
Speaker 1:Right, and people did.
Speaker 2:It did, but it eliminates the beauty of social audio. Yeah, absolutely it's being able to just tap in and see what's going on. Yeah. What other people think, Because I was part of conversations that were about Trump and I would go in there with Trump supporters and have very, very candid conversations, but they wouldn't be tense. I can disagree with you. We wouldn't be cussing each other out X, Y, Z. So it became an echo chamber.
Speaker 1:It did, but there's too many people who tried to take it and do the wrong things with it.
Speaker 2:But my point is that is what you have to deal with as a startup. You got to go through those tough times and figure it out. You don't put everybody in their perspective. Corners.
Speaker 1:Which is what they did.
Speaker 2:They did and then the next thing they did is the platform got to a million users. From the time I got on in August to January, it went from 4,000 users to a million users, man, it skyrocketed Right Everybody was talking about clubs.
Speaker 4:It was an exclusive club when it first came on. Yeah, because you had to be invited in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was like oh, people were selling invites for real money. I got in only because of Lupe. Lupe Fiasco was very early on, got me in and I was a fly on the wall. I was constantly just listening to weird conversations.
Speaker 2:So there were rumblings that the app was about to raise a round and the first million users were like hey, we helped blow this thing up. Can we invest, can we be part of this round? And Clubhouse apparently said no. They went and raised $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation. And then I turned to my CTO and said we're going to build audio in the fan base. And we built it in two months Because and again this goes back to the point of people being locked in I well, this is going to be easy, I'll just build it, and then they can own this one and they'll move over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that didn't happen because people were already they were, they were locked in yeah, used to using once you get once you get used once you're into something it's hard to break people out of it.
Speaker 2:to this day that a lot of the people that have left con the clubhouse what remains is largely black audience that keep that platform relevant right now to this day. Yeah, so you know, I mean, and I think at some point the the energy will shift and every app has that moment, that viral moment, to be in the position where it's there to assume the throne, like, honestly, right now, you know we're having this conversation. I wake up last night at like three in the morning and I'm like, and I'm just again, I'm a Gen Z-er, so in my mind. So I pick up my phone and say, well, what's going on in the world? And I heard, I saw about Liam Payne, but at the very, very top of Twitter trending was blue sky.
Speaker 2:But at the very, very top of Twitter trending was blue sky. And if you know what blue sky is, blue sky is like the Twitter alternative and I was like, why is blue sky? It was number one on Twitter. And why was it? Because Twitter announced that they were changing X, was announcing the way that they were changing the blocking functionality.
Speaker 2:And now on X, when you block someone, they'll still be able to see your content, but you won't be able to engage with them. And everybody says, well, I'm moving to blue sky. And if you probably go on, if I go on X right now and look at what's trending on X blue sky maybe a couple hours ago blue sky was trending at number three on X. So if I'm going to go look again and see where we are right now and trending and look who's number four Blue sky, blue sky. Look who's number four Loose Guy.
Speaker 4:So they're benefiting from I mean, they're probably getting millions of users right now from their competitor from apps plus people hate Elon Musk now too, so there's going to be a backlash to that too well, I got three.
Speaker 1:Man, we could be talking forever here, but I got three more things I want to get to. One of them is going to be that, but let's go back to investing. So I think it's interesting. You have a lot of investors who have invested in Fanbase. Are you allowed to say, like, what are the numbers, like how many people have invested and what's the average investment?
Speaker 2:We probably have over 16,000 investors 16,000 people.
Speaker 2:The average investment size is $1,000. 16,000 people. The average investment size is $1,000. The minimum to invest is $399. Or you can take the whole round in a reg A. So we're raising $17 million and we're at 2.9 million. Okay, so I almost said 3 million of the 17 million, but when I do the math again I try to break things down that are digestible. We're at the point right now that we need to raise $14 million. So if I say, if I go to my calculator, which I always use, you have your calculator up a lot.
Speaker 2:That's it 23,500 people investing $600. Now, remember there's 48 million people that are just black people that live in the United States alone. Yeah, so just to the black community out there, all I need is 23,500 people period in the United States of America out of 400 million people. What number is that?
Speaker 1:That's 14 million 14 million.
Speaker 2:That's all I need. That's all you need 23,500 people.
Speaker 1:So how does? Okay. So let's say you invest in Fanbase. What's the future Like? When will, how? Is that person who's invested a thousand bucks how are how? How is that investment going to turn into something for them?
Speaker 2:So let me, so let me explain seed investing. There is not a person that has ever invested in seed investment rounds which are round before a company goes public, pre IPO or acquisition that that doesn't see a return on their investment until a liquidity event. Yes, so liquidity event is when a company gets acquired, it goes public or emerges with another company. Yes, so that can be. That can be anywhere from two years to 10 years. But the upside is that you're getting in on a potentially lucrative business in the very, very sweet spot that you weren't even allowed to get in.
Speaker 2:So, if you're investing in fan base now, you're investing in the same spot that you weren't even allowed to get in. So if you're investing, in fan base.
Speaker 2:Now you're investing in the same spot that people invested in Instagram and Tik TOK and Snapchat way before. So, way before. So when, those, so when, when, when Instagram was around and getting raising money in 2010, you're investing in fan base Like it was Instagram 2010. Now Instagram is, at that time, instagram. I think they raised half a million dollars at the time when they, when they started, it was called bourbon and they got venture dollars. But now.
Speaker 2:Instagram sold for a billion dollars like two years later, and then now Instagram is a $200 billion company. So, and at some point Facebook went public. So you're thinking about okay, if I invest now? You're talking about, okay, if I invest now, you're talking about a 2500 x return, a 5000 x return, mind you, in in, in retail investing a win is like 12. Yeah, you put a dollar something, get a dollar 12 back, you won yeah so you're not.
Speaker 2:So that's not even. That's 12, not, not, not five thousand percent. Yeah, you're talking about 12%. Yeah, so that's why I always talk about Orrin Michaels, which is the guy that invested in Uber. He put five grand into Uber as a rich person already, because he was allowed to, because you and I weren't. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that 5,000 turned into $24 million in nine years. That's amazing. But number one, he had the capital, he had the five grand to do that. Two, he was the only one legally allowed to do it. But now imagine you and 10 of your friends can put 500 into a tech startup and then, nine years from now, it turns into 2.4 million dollars. 2.5 million dollars.
Speaker 2:That's the reason why I'm looking at it, that perspective. So so yeah, the minimum investment is is 399 and we're valued at 160 million dollars. Now we've gone through four different valuations 20 million, um, 50 million, 85 and now 160 million dollar valuation. But I believe that fan base just just a positioning of what where media is and the ability for every user to monetize their account on the planet I think fanbase easily is a hundred billion dollar company, just just based off content monetization on. We're not even getting if I want to run advertising or I want to do other things like e-commerce or things down the road just off people monetizing their content around the planet. It's already there and and the upside to that is that there are 8 billion people on the planet. I think 6 billion people have smartphones. Let's just put that on the map. There's 6 billion people. I always do the math, I'm always mathing. There's only like 240 million people that have Netflix on the planet.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of room for growth.
Speaker 2:There's only like 650 million people that have music streaming services. All the music streaming services combined, there's only 650 million people that have them out of like billions of people on the planet. So the potential upside for people to initially stream music or subscribe to people that's why I say people subscribing to people is going to be bigger than Netflix ever could be. Because you only subscribe to Netflix once. I can subscribe to five people 10 people if I want to, and wind up paying the same price that I would for Netflix to watch 10 shows out of 1,000 that I don't. But I can pay the same price to watch the 10 shows that I want and they're all different and there might be perks involved and I might be able to get tickets to the show or I'll be able to buy this product. So that's the logic behind it. I hope it sounds genius when people are listening to this. I hope so too.
Speaker 1:I hope so too. I'm an investor. I can't wait for 10 years from now, when this thing's worth billions and billions of dollars. That's right. That's right, all right. Last thing I got to ask you about because I've seen this in the news a lot yeah, we're in a very hot political season. I am curious about this because I've seen you speaking all over the place about the rights of music use, especially in these political campaigns. I just assume novice, yeah, I can play anything anywhere, but that's not true.
Speaker 2:Well, yes and no.
Speaker 1:Tell me more about what's going on with you, and and this whole music debate, so great debate.
Speaker 2:So we have a. We have a situation with trump. I can talk about some of these things I can talk about, but mainly with the trump thing I just said. Basically, trump was playing uh, a song that my father wrote in 1966 and we terminated that song and got the publishing back in 2022 called hold on, I'm coming by salmon day. It was his exit song.
Speaker 2:He always played every time he left okay so typically how this works with venues a nightclub, an arena, a stadium they do a deal with a pro performing rights organization like bmi, askAC, and they pay per average of what they think the attendance is and they pay a check and they have the right to play anything under the sun for that.
Speaker 2:There's a special caveat for political campaigns, because they are agenda-based and ideologies and stuff that artists might not want to be involved in. So there's something called a political use license that you have to apply for and once you pay for that license, you have the right to play the music. The same way. The only issue is that if a person decides that they don't want you using their music a songwriter or an artist they can ask, they can send a letter to BMI and say take my music out and have this person stop doing that. So that's for political candidates. So in this particular situation with Trump and myself, Trump had used the song and right after we just got the rights back and I had asked him to stop using it, like, posted a couple tweets and we sent a cease and desist. But the political use license thing came into play when he just like okay, he kept playing the song yeah so I had to hire an attorney.
Speaker 2:We hired an attorney, we discovered that he had played the song 100 and I don't know 150 plus times maybe, and so he and there's a good portion of the time that he was playing it before he got his license and then, after he was served notice, to stop playing the song.
Speaker 2:So to any artists out there, if you don't want politicians using your music, you can head out, hit up your PROs or your publishers, because your publishers are not necessarily going to speak on your behalf because they want to remain neutral. The difference and the benefit for us is that I own the publishing or my family owns the publishing to my father's music, so we can make those decisions that sometimes an artist like Celine Dion can't, from my heart, will go on, because James Horner wrote that and whoever owns the publishing on that has the right to say that he can play that or not. They can honor Celine Dion's wishes, which they probably did because she's an icon, but technically they don't have to. So that's the reason why it's such a touchy subject, and so when you're seeing Donald Trump play all these opera songs and stuff on the stage that he was doing the other day he just ran out of music. Everybody's told him they don't want him playing this music, and now he's just grasping for straws because there's nothing else left to play did he?
Speaker 1:did he stop playing? Yes, he did?
Speaker 2:we got it. We got it. Uh, we filed for a temporary injunction. We won that, which is very. I mean, I don't know law, but I guess injunctions are hard to get. So if my turn is like you know, you won like. This is unheard of.
Speaker 2:We're the first person to actually do this in the era of music and a lot of artists are following suit and saying they're going to sue Jack White. He's filed a lawsuit. Other people are coming forward saying they're going to sue Donald Trump. I'm happy to set a precedent for artists and songwriters, because that's my generational trauma, which is why I'm even here, which comes full circle to why I even made Fanbase, because my father lost the rights to his music a year before I was born.
Speaker 1:How did he lose the rights?
Speaker 2:He had to file for bankruptcy, and so they actually acquired his writer shares in the bankruptcy and then subsequently sold him without his knowledge to other people about nine years later in a private auction that he never knew about before sampling even became a thing. So imagine these people buy his writer shares. So I've always grown up in the music industry and in business saying I only want to be a part of building things that people can't steal from me. So I never did a publishing deal the entire time I was in the music business and it cost me, I think it, I think it. It cost me a lot of opportunity because there were opportunities that I could have been on a larger product.
Speaker 2:but I said I'm not selling my publishing, but the irony is that that very same publishing that I have was the one I could dip back into to borrow money to build fan base, and then now it's the same thing about fighting for creators rights and ownership of your content, and so that's what's so full circle. Like I want to build a business that that people can't steal from.
Speaker 1:It can't happen. What happened? Do you have the publishing rights back now?
Speaker 2:To most of the songwriting catalog we still have. So we have two more phases. Phase one is songwriter Isaac Hayes, Phase two is artist Isaac Hayes and phase three is all the rappers that have sampled his music over the last 30 years, 35 years, that phase, and that's the last phase that we'll terminate those rights and then we'll have all that publishing back.
Speaker 4:You got to be prepared, though, when it does come back, to know what to do with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah or even to know to do it, because if you missed the window, your publishers aren't going to tell you, they're just going to keep it. Yeah. That's what? Keep it. And I tell you, and then you lose, and then you lose the opportunity to get it back forever. Wow, we've already filed our first badge of term. I mean, now we've gone through the first rodeo, so now we've got two more. Yeah, and it's lucrative because those songs make, like we were just saying, like Queen's catalog sold for a billion dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's incredible. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 1:It's incredible yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're talking about the selling of it, but that's also the rights to it. So every time I watch a movie that has something that your father did is yeah, it's amazing, yeah, it's, but that's ownership is so important, yeah, and so I think we're getting in the air right now, with technology, where you're allowed to own yourself, it's going to be so much more important because people are able to duplicate those things now duplicate images of myself or my dad or queen, or recreate freddie mercury's voice yeah, so whoever owns that intellectual property is going to be able to monetize that in perpetuity, mm-hmm. So that's why owning is just owning your stuff is so much more important.
Speaker 1:It's so much important. Yeah, and thus fan base.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Kind of went full circle there, Jeff yeah.
Speaker 4:Yep 360.
Speaker 1:360. I feel like we could sit here day, but we probably can't you got to work, you got to get this thing.
Speaker 2:You got things to do, man. I have something to do in about seven minutes.
Speaker 1:Seven minutes, but, hey, this has been great, thank you. Thank you for your time. We're here live.
Speaker 4:We were trying to do this for a long time too, so I'm glad we finally got it done and we got to come here in Atlanta. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Live At Fanbase.
Speaker 1:At Fanbase. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is Isaac Hayes III.
Speaker 4:I'm Jeffrey Sledge and I'm Tom Frank. Thank you, I did it for him All right, folks.
Speaker 1:That's our show. Tune in to Unglossy, the coding brand and culture on Apple Podcasts, spotify or YouTube, and follow us on Instagram at unglossy pod to join the conversation. Until next time, I'm Tom Frank. I'm Jeffrey sledge Smicky, that was good.
