Media

January 27 2018

RadioPublic

Joseph Zhang Entertainment, Media Audio Entertainment, Better User Experience, Creative, Entertainment, Jake Shapiro, Media, Podcasts, RadioPublic, Recruiting a team, Startup 1

Jake Shapiro.jpeg — Founder Jake Shapiro

What are podcasts?

There isn’t one exact definition to describe them. They can be fiction or reality. They can be rigorous investigative journalism, or they can tell horror stories. The types are endless. What they all do have in common is that they’re strictly audio, and usually involve a narrator.

These days, you can find your favorite podcast on apps like podcast or spotify, but before 2014, they had remained a relatively niche medium, catering to radio lovers and those who loved audio content. From the beginning, The Public Radio Exchange, PRX, was one of the original distributors of audio content that helped popularize them.

Background Audio

PRX was co-founded by Jake Shapiro. After graduating from Harvard, he had started an internet record label and struck it big with his band, Two Ton Shoe, after selling off his MP3.com stocks. Afterwards, he had gotten an internship at The Connection on WBUR, and later went on to be a producer on NPR. With all his experience in the audio entertainment industry, he went off to lead PRX.

The story there is for another day. What’s important is 2014 when everything began to change. PRX had launched Radiotopia, a network of curated podcasts, and it was gaining popularity. All of a sudden, Jake started noticing trends around him. The audience for podcasts had been steadily growing since their introduction, leaving their unique audience and disseminating to a broader listener base. Furthermore, the growth of on demand media with apps like Spotify and Soundcloud had led to a boom in the consumption of audio entertainment, whether it was music, audiobook, podcast, etc. In October 2014, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, appeared on The Tonight Show to introduce the podcast Serial. Jake said the launch “was like a water cooler moment for most audiences who haven’t heard of podcasting before.” With that, the pieces started falling together. Major podcast producers like Gimlet launched, and iTunes came out with the podcast app.

That year Jake decided to branch off from his old company and start RadioPublic, a service that would bring podcasts to new listeners with an easy to use interface and features designed for newcomers.

Design in a Growing Industry

Jake had built his whole life around audio, starting his own company and building it into a large corporation. Thus, when he left PRX, it was almost like a step backwards. Jake found himself in the position of an entrepreneur again, but many of the skills like “managing people, financing, and overseeing product development” that he had in his previous position came with him to his new job. Coupled with the fact that RadioPublic was spun off from some prototypes that had existed in PRX, and the transition became much easier.

RadioPublic at its core is a public benefit corporation dedicated to introducing new listeners to the diverse world of podcasts, which for Jake means that they have “a stated public good and mission” to help the “tens of millions of new users who are just now learning about podcasting.”

Since the beginning, RadioPublic has put its energy in achieving their goal all on a purely podcast focused platform. Some of the design features and nuances that he points out are so sneaky that the average person might not even notice them. For starters, he’s focused on reducing the confusing terminology that can exist in podcasts. Jake explains that “we don’t talk about subscribing because we found that’s a misleading word. Some people think that means we have to pay for it as opposed to just following it.”

Introducing people to new podcast series has also become an area of improvement. The company allows creators to flag gateway episodes to help get people hooked immediately. These episodes can be the most popular, the most explanatory, or the most intriguing in the series, and they exist to make it easier to get started.

Podcast Playlist

The Podcast Playlist

The most notable attribute of RadioPublic is the podcast playlist, something they pioneered and have used to their advantage. Basically, podcast playlists are like song playlists. They’re made up of episodes from multiple different shows all woven together into a single feed, revolving around a theme or idea. The concept started out as something that only the podcast librarian (He curates and assembles playlists) could make, but they evolved to become a much more popular curator and publisher feature. Jake says that “a podcast playlist has been one of the effective vehicles that really checks a lot of boxes at once: discovery, marketing, and influence.”

Team, Resilience, and Recruiting

Jake lucked out. He had good experience, created an intuitive platform, and he had also started his company at the perfect time. As he described, “We’re building into a growing industry, so there’s a sense in the community at large that podcasting is seeing this tremendous explosion of interest from all corners and so there’s a lot of room for growth for all the players in the game…So podcasting is still very nascent.” 10-11 months in, and they had already begun to see widespread adoption and validation of their beliefs.

All the carryover from PRX was not enough to make running RadioPublic an easy job. There were still all of the trials and tribulations of running a startup. For example, there was “raising investor financing, recruiting a team of top engineers, establishing an initial product roadmap, and getting something out into the market.”

At one time, Jake and his team had tried to create a discovery scan mode on the app. They had spent lots of design and engineering time developing the component, only to find out later that it wouldn’t work because of network connectivity. Moments like these test Jake’s resilience, but in the end his persistence always wins out. “Failing back, failing forward. Those are the opportunities that you learn from and you wouldn’t want to hold back on,” he said.

All these hardships tied back to one major thing: creating a minimum viable product.

Having a group of dedicated people working together simplified the job. He attributed a lot of the work to his CPO and CTO who had come from PRX with him. Working together with a team that he trusted and had already built prototypes of RadioPublic made it easier to release the product as soon as possible. That along with the fact that the group was already “familiar with the twists and turns of product development” allowed for them all to be less worried about experimenting, throwing things away, and tweaking the product.

Jake has learned a lot of lessons. He has learned to develop a keen eye for recruiting talented people who bring passion to the company, and holds conviction that one of the reasons RadioPublic has been able to succeed has been because it has “a vision deeply embedded in it.” Most importantly, he’s just glad he’s made it this far. Leaving PRX, a company that he had nurtured and grew was painful, but ultimately, standing back, he sees two thriving companies and is proud of the new management at PRX and the hope on the horizon for RadioPublic.

From the beginning, RadioPublic has always been about helping listeners discover, engage with, and reward the creators of podcasts, all while toting easy to use features to attract new audiences. The path to that goal may have changed. Tactics have shifted. Ways to tackle problems have changed. But ultimately, their public mission serves as their roadmap, and that’s a roadmap that Jake intends to follow to bring podcasts to more people.

Entrepreneur Advice

Jake said,
“I feel like taking the leap early and often either when it feels like its wobbly or unstable is the right choice and trying to continuously figure out what your venture’s mission is, not just a product or market but the actual reason for it to be in the universe or the world…I think it’s really important for every company at every stage to understand what are its relations to the rest of what we do in society. And that exercise I think is a really good thing for any entrepreneur. Often it seems like you’re just staring at the five inches in front of you when your working on these ventures, but reminding yourself of the bigger picture all the time I think is a healthy exercise.”

Find out more about RadioPublic:
https://www.radiopublic.com/

December 2 2017

Gfycat

Joseph Zhang Entertainment Dan Mceleney, Entertainment, feature, Gfycat, Gif, Jeff Harris, Media, Programming, Reddit, Richard Rabbatt, Search Engine, Startup 0

The 80s was the era of excess and vibrancy. As Gordon Gecko from the 1987 film Wall Street put it, “Greed is good”. But as the 80s jumpstarted the colorful leg warmers phenomenon, it also started the GIF trend, one that would dip beneath the waters of pop culture and make a resurgence in the 2010s upon the rise of the smartphones. What made GIFs so popular? First, they had a unique appeal – packing lots of information or something funny into a short animation. Next, with the introduction of smartphones, short form content began to take off because it was easy to watch. For example, if you were in line at Starbucks for a coffee, you could go onto Reddit and watch 4-5 GIFs before you had to order.

Only, in most cases, you probably couldn’t look at those GIFs. They took too long to load. Two avid redditors in Edmonton realized this, and figured that the GIF was only popular for what it represented, short form silent animations, not for its format. Realizing this, they created a free video encoding platform that would turn a video into a GIF like format, best suited for the platform it would go on. These days, their free tool has expanded and become the biggest GIF search engine on the internet, but it had a much simpler start.

The Gfycat Encoding System

After the great migration from Digg to Reddit, Dan Mceleney and Jeff Harris saw the problem with GIFs. They were large files. There weren’t that many colors. People liked them, and they were good to view in a variety of circumstance, but they took too long to load.

What made Gfycat so special was its cross platform capabilities. You would start with a specific file format and upload it to the platform. Gfycat would then speedily change the filetype to match whatever the user had chosen in the beginning or to match the platform they wanted to use it on. For example, if you uploaded a .mov file, Gfycat could change that into a GIF, mp4, or WEBM. What this meant was that even though the file format might not have been a gif, it kept the essential qualities of one: short, silent, animated, and interesting.

Using this new tool, Dan Mceleney and Jeff Harris started Gfycat, disseminating it on different subreddits (reddit communities). As Dan explained, “We selected different subreddits that we thought would benefit from it and we sort of said, ‘Hey, you really like this GIF; check out Gfycat, it’s the same thing!’ And later people thought it was amazing. It looked better, and it moved faster.” Dan, who was already an established member of some subreddits was able to gain many users from there. They even got banned from some communities because people were using Gfycat to create bots to spam certain subreddits and the moderators thought Dan and Jeff were manipulating them.

Most of the traction the company gained in the beginning was from this grassroots movement on Reddit. Many people liked the tool, and told others about it, slowly increasing the popularity and gained a life of its own.

Silicon Valley

Gfycat started off as a garage project in Edmonton, more of a tool to help those who needed to reduce the file size of the GIFs that they wanted to share. As they grew, they had to figure out ways to sustain themselves. Dan pointed out that, “We saw a progression from a utility to more of a social GIF platform, and we thought the best place to be would be Silicon Valley.”

Down in Silicon Valley, a consultant helped introduce Gfycat to some people who might be good for the business. Through a serendipitous meeting with Richard Rabbat, they were able to move the business there. With the entrance into a new world filled with wealthy investors and a diverse startup culture, they incorporated in 2015 and were able to engage in a series of important business partnerships.

Getting these partnerships, like many other aspects of business, was not easy. It involved lots of cold emailing, networking, and in person meetings. It took building a strong relationship and trust for things to actually begin taking off. All the hard work paid off, and Gfycat all of a sudden saw a huge change. They got a Reddit bot. Working with Microsoft, they were also able to get functionality there. They have a large presence in Skype, and most of all, they were one of the first apps to launch in conjunction with Apple’s iMessage. Even more, they were also able to create partnerships with major film studios. This skyrocketing fame allowed them to pursue other areas to expand the humble GIF into.

Creating Mass Appeal

One of the most interesting things that Gfycat has been able to do is host a hackathon. On January 28, 2017, they started a 24 hour hackathon to encourage people to use the Gfycat API and SDK to create all sorts of creative projects with. The rules were simple: come in with an idea/design; program; give a five minute presentation. Many of the projects that were submitted were incredibly creative. They ranged from a neural network to suggest memes and a virtual reality gif explorer. The event was a success and showed the increasing interest in both Gfycat and creative applications of the GIF format.

A GIF made by The Wonder Woman Film Promotion team

Besides a hackathon, Gfycat has also expanded into the movie industry, and more specifically, marketing for films. Partnering with big studios, Gfycat helped revolutionize a new way to advertise films: through GIFS. These days, movie trailers usually range from one to two minutes and require audio for the full experience; the only problem with this old-school method is that most people these days don’t have the time or motivation to look at them. What Gfycat hoped to do was to bring these trailers into GIFs, shortening them down so anybody could watch them with their limited schedules, and pack a lot of action into a short animation.

From Tool to Experience

Gfycat has come a long way. Much like the GIF started out as a humble animation and has exploded onto pop culture and the world around us, Gfycat’s story also shows parallels. From a small cramped office, they’ve expanded, communicating between two teams in Edmonton, Canada, and Palo Alto, California. They’ve gone from a free tool on the internet for people who wanted to make a fast-to-load GIF to a silicon valley startup, set on revolutionizing the way people experience content.

November 24 2017

Dealflicks

Joseph Zhang Entertainment, Media Creative, Deals, Entertainment, Entrepreneur success, Inspiring Business Story, Kevin Hong, Man Van, Media, Movies, On the Road, Priceline, Priceline for Movie Tickets, Sean Wycliffe, Zachary Cancio 1

2011 was a good year for Adele, stem cell research, and royal weddings. It was not a good year for Sean Wycliffe. After creating his startup DealFlicks, talking to hundreds of theaters, and being dropped by multiple cofounders and employees, nothing was turning out well.

At certain points, giving up and accepting defeat became a feasible thought for Sean. But along the way, milestones like closing the first deal, getting the company launched, or selling the first ticket have kept him invested in an originally part-time project. These days, the company is thriving in its market and is almost unrecognizable from its scrappy beginning. In five years, there have been countless peaks and valleys, but each new experience has taught him something new.

The King’s Speech

Starting in high school, Sean began to watch more movies, becoming enchanted by the silver screen. Little did he know, this love for films would land him in a theater a decade later and become the inspiration for Dealflicks.

Graduation in 2001 brought him to UC Berkeley. During freshman year, he started a job at Excel Communications, a company selling long distance phone service. Starting out as a senior representative, he began to work his way up the corporate ladder, landing a position as an executive director in two years. Wanting to focus on this new profitable job, he dropped out of university in 2003.

Running multiple branches for the business became incredibly lucrative; Sean said, “We got over one million revenue by the time I was 21.” He was not well-equipped to handle this rush of money. The newfound success went to his head and his spending habits got out of control.

At the end of 2004, the company went bankrupt and he lost everything. Starting out high and rich then crashing down to being penniless was a humbling experience. Sean moved back in with his dad and began reconsidering his life choices. From 2006-2007, he got involved in his local ministry and studied the bible more. A new man, he returned to school in 2008 as an economics major. During graduate school, he started a student tutoring business and project Pueblo, a volunteer service to aid native american reservations. Come 2010, as graduation loomed around the corner, he considered getting a job and settling down with his girlfriend. After applying to numerous places and getting his application rejected at each one, Sean started to think about starting a business. He had a girlfriend. He wanted to settle down. He needed money. The idea of a startup wasn’t off the table, and looking back at his previous experience as an executive director at a billion dollar company, he thought the skills could translate.

felix-mooneeram-222805

During December of 2010, after graduation, Sean went to a movie theater to watch “The King’s Speech”. While he was enjoying the film, he looked around and noticed many empty seats in the theater. What made it even more bewildering to Sean was the fact that it was only several days after the film had been released. That night, he went home and thought about the empty seats in the theater and wondered whether he could buy them for a cheaper price. After a long, frustrating search on his computer, he could not turn up anything. The more he looked into the issue, the more he felt like a business opportunity had fallen into his lap. Sean explained the statistics he discovered, “I found that over 40 billion dollars were spent on movie tickets and popcorn, and at the same time over 80% of movie theater seats were empty”. As he kept reading, this idea of a Priceline for movie tickets began to form in his head. This idea would eventually become Dealflicks.

An Empty Start

Because no company like Dealflicks had existed before, Sean thought the idea would sell itself. At the time, the only other companies selling movie tickets online were Fandango and movietickets.com, albeit at full price for the convenience. Sean envisioned a dynamically priced marketplace customers could open up on either their phone or computer to buy tickets. The costs would fluctuate based on supply and demand. Alas, it was a just a dream in the beginning.

Idea in hand, Sean went out looking for a team. Going through multiple friends, he finally found one who was a developer and was willing to try the concept out. At the same time, Sean began looking for theaters. He first pitched to the theater down the street. They agreed. In a strange turn of events, he explained, “I went back there a few weeks later, to learn that they fired the person I made the deal with…so that deal didn’t happen and even to this day we still don’t have that theater.”

After that first setback, things kept going downhill. Most theaters balked at the idea of his company because of disagreements over pricing. Sean’s first pitch was premised on just ticket discounts, but as he went through theater after theater, he realized that they wanted to include concessions into the pricing. Then he started pitching bundles. After pitches, Dealflicks would get quotes, but then the deal would somehow fall through and they would have to restart with another theater. At one point the revenue share was even cut down to zero, but even then, no theaters signed up.

At this point the first cofounder had pulled out, and the subsequent one got a job at Google and decided to leave DealFlicks. Sean also had to drop another cofounder who wasn’t doing his job. As Sean pointed out, “we probably went through roughly ten different co-founders before we had the three that stuck.”

This coming and going of cofounders created a weak team, and in the beginning, it hindered any progress that the company was making. Because of this, most theaters were reluctant to sign up because he did not have anything to show them except for a sales deck and an incondite rendering of what the product would look like.

Sean remembers one story in particular.

We finally got a theater that wanted to sign up and the theater says, “Okay, I’ll sign up if you guys can integrate into my point of sale system.”…So at the time I was thinking that’s great. I go back to my engineers and they’re trying to build this thing and I work part-time and they’re still in college, so it’s really just not progressing at all…I realized we were not getting it done. It was not good at all. So right now I’m just working on getting this thing up myself and we were never really able to get that up. The theater just eventually pulled out, and we didn’t really sign them up until two years later

Sean explained that the majority of the disappointing experiences went somewhat like that one. His team would be met with a challenge; they would try to address it; nothing would get done. Sean would then have to learn how to do the task himself. Most of these deals ended up falling through.

First Theater Problems

A year later, when they signed up their first theater, the marketing venture did not turn up any big profits. Realizing theaters served a mostly local population, the company experimented with a variety of marketing tactics to appeal to this target market. The first theater they signed up was one in the poor area of Gardena, California. To market, they had to meet two criteria: locality and cheapness.

They tried many ideas.

Sean said, “when we first got started we got some flyers printed and then we put them on cars and then handed them out to people who were near the movie theater…We went to a Walmart down the street of the theater and put them on cars and handed them out to people.” They even went to a high school. Sean and his other cofounder sneaked into the school and stuffed lockers full of fliers; they posted them on the walls of the locker room too. They were not caught, but they only manage to make one sale from the whole ordeal.

The amalgamation of these situations proved frustrating at the time. Sean admitted the passing thought of just throwing everything away and giving up came at times. Starting a company and having the first year-and-a-half be nothing but setback after setback can deteriorate the human spirit.

Sean stayed optimistic.

Even if he could not sign up theaters instantly and even when he could not come out with a product fast, he learned other important lessons. He learned from his mistakes. He also learned new technical skills like programming that he would not have learned otherwise.

Making Deals with Deal Companies

dealflicks team — (From Left to Right) Kevin Hong, Sean Wycliffe, and Zachary Cancio

Just as it looked like the company could not survive any longer, the final two co founders got on board. With a stronger team and better synergy, the company officially launched in April of 2012.

That’s when things started picking up.

Soon, the company was able to start signing up more and more theaters. Sean attributed this to the new team. With hindsight, he realized that Dealflicks could have been more successful faster if the new team was there first.

With a new, invigorated crew ready to go like sprinters on their starting blocks, they had to figure out the age old question of customer acquisition. Learning from his previous marketing failures, Sean tried out some new methods. They began to change their strategy, moving more towards media based marketing.

Before they had launched, they learned about another company that was doing a similar dynamic ticket sale system called Chick Flicks. Chick Flicks had gotten some coverage in publications like Killer Startups. Dealflicks played their cards and launched before them. Once they became official, they contacted these places and got some coverage there too.

The media started helping the business more after – in September 2012 – they got into 500 startups. In December of 2012, they got a segment on NBC and CBS bay area. They also got some pretty big coverage in the Oklahoma City Tribune.

Outside of the media, their most successful marketing strategy to date has been daily deal companies. The idea went something like this. Dealflicks would get their discounted tickets sold on daily deal companies’ sites. This way, they could sell their tickets and get the word out about their product better to the existing consumers of websites like Groupon. Even more ingenious, this idea solved for locality because people who wanted to buy tickets to a certain theater would see dealflicks on the site and know to buy it from there in the future.

Although the concept was tossed around in the beginning, Sean decided to call up deal companies and pitch to them in hopes that they would sell their discounted tickets on their websites. The first company to take them up on this was Dealchicken. When they first launched on Dealchicken’s site, they immediately sold 50 tickets, which to them at the time, was incredible. With this momentum, they were able to get bigger daily deal companies like Groupon to work with them to sell discount movie tickets. Sean considered this the company’s first big home run, and as investor money started flowing in, they were able to expand their market strategy to more expensive but targeted social media.

Staying True to Himself

Through this rollercoaster of emotions running Dealflicks, Sean’s cofounders have kept him grounded. Sean explained:

You have other co-founders, and you start to realize: this guy is really excited, he’s made a commitment to this thing, and I don’t want to quit on him or her. So you start to think about the people that you’re working with and you don’t want to let them down.

Sean further praised one of the cofounders, Kevin Hong, for helping him go all in for his company. When he first joined, he quit his job at an options trading firm. He woke up early every morning, dressed, and sat at a coffeeshop all day working on Dealflicks. For two years, he also lived out of a van pitching to theaters. The van sales strategy helped increase the close rate of deals and sparked national coverage from The New York and LA Times. Dubbed “Man Van”, Hong and some of the sales team traveled across the country and helped close 45 deals in three months alone. They showered and exercised and gyms, and they slept in the van. Seeing his team working hard and watching the company gain momentum has helped Sean stay confident about his path and his decisions.

These days Dealflicks looks different from the struggling startup of 2011, but the goal has not changed. From the beginning, Dealflicks has always been about the movies and dynamic ticket pricing. This objective has not shifted, but the methods they have used to achieve it have. They went from solely selling tickets to selling bundles to customers. They reconfigured software and their dynamic pricing system. These days, the company’s vision stays strong. In the future, they want to change the movie industry’s pricing methods by using demand, and become the one stop shop for movie tickets.

Entrepreneur Advice

Sean’s advice boils down to two concepts: Network and Learn. Sean realized that if he had networked better when he was younger, he could’ve fixed his cofounder obstacle much faster “because if you want to start something and you’re passionate about it, the first thing you’re going to have to do is build a team.” Furthermore, he said “learn a little bit about the stuff that’s not your core expertise…so you can understand that value that comes from it, and you can have an intelligent conversation with someone that’s not of your background.”