00:12:50 · Sachin, Henry Innis
[00:12:50] S1: I think that's easier to do when you generally think that each piece of content you produce could change someone's life. Like, unless you're like, I think that that feels a little bit seedy when you're producing stuff that like is clickbait y content in general, but we won't be able to click on our content and then have an educational experience while they're watching [00:13:05] S0: it and maybe get a new idea that Like people are mostly just watching stuff because it's entertaining. Right? Like, we can say it's an educational experience. I'm selling a fucking uni degree. Like There's this [00:13:15] S1: quote that that that I really like it's like anyone that, thinks that education can't like shouldn't be an entertainment and mutually exclusive doesn't know the first thing about either one which I think is what you're getting at right? Yeah. Is that every good bit of educational content you work is... You watch is still entertaining like MKBHD with his, you know, reviews that's still entertaining and aesthetic like you watch it for no reason. Yes, Theory. Like you, you know, they're going to all these cool places and stuff. It's entertaining, but you also learn about new cultures.
00:13:15 · Sachin, Henry Innis
[00:13:15] S1: quote that that that I really like it's like anyone that, thinks that education can't like shouldn't be an entertainment and mutually exclusive doesn't know the first thing about either one which I think is what you're getting at right? Yeah. Is that every good bit of educational content you work is... You watch is still entertaining like MKBHD with his, you know, reviews that's still entertaining and aesthetic like you watch it for no reason. Yes, Theory. Like you, you know, they're going to all these cool places and stuff. It's entertaining, but you also learn about new cultures. [00:13:42] S0: Yeah. A 100%. I mean, I think I I think the big challenge with growing audiences... And look, I'll preface this by saying this is a very uninformed opinion and and a very like novice opinion. But I always see the great challenge with growing audiences is like the algorithm seem to be they almost find pockets and then they exhaust and that they... Those pockets they find pockets and then exhaust and find pockets and then exhaust and it's almost you need to keep tripping the algorithm to find the next pocket it's kind of like I like I just I just think to myself I'm like yeah if I was in your position I mean call me a lazy founder, but I like to do stuff very repeatedly if I can. So standardization is a watchword in my business. So I wonder how you can standardize that at scale. I mean, do you guys think about, you know, trying to generate it through? I mean, everyone uses LLMs on what I want to say? LLMs for LLMs.
00:14:40 · Sachin, Adam
[00:14:40] S1: A lot of people are building faces content, which I know you were talking about. We've got a team that automates it and you get like cash flow. But another big bet we're making is that the future media is just personality first. Like, you can generate a podcast about, you know, these are the best mixed channel marketing tools or whatever. Right? In two, three years, we're gonna be able do that. It's gonna combine a lot of the great information to do that. So what are you gonna go to content for? It's personality. It's always been personality. Why is Oprah famous? Right? Because of her personality. It's compelling. And like our bet is that when as things move to more generative, personality is what matters. We want to bring this unique mix of like being very vulnerable in our content, but also having like good insight. I think people look at us and they think we're like very classic tech bros, but we want to give like an additional layer of insight. Yeah. [00:15:25] S2: And I think like what Sachin just said, personality is what gives you retention. Like you need a unique value prop, gives which you the attention. The reason why someone clicks on you first, because let's say you've got a show about like how to do marketing in 2024, but then I'll keep on listening to your show week after week, because partly because of your personality, [00:15:42] S1: like feeling in a chat.
00:15:42 · Sachin, Henry Innis
[00:15:42] S1: like feeling in a chat. [00:15:44] S0: I'm not hard. I don't, I don't think I've got the, patience but let me ask you a slightly spicy question which is like and I'm more just curious as to how you dealt with it and how it made you feel like when your cap rates came out I saw you guys got like targeted by quite a few people going like their tech bros. Like, how did they get this fucking money? Like, without an idea and stuff like that. How did you deal with that? How did you react to that? What was that like going through that? Because, like, to be honest, it it it's a... It must have been pretty confronting. Like, like, how do how do you kind of deal with that? Because that's a tough [00:16:16] S1: thing in your first four months. Yeah. It's a it's a good question. So I think the first thing is is that like everyone says don't look at that stuff when it comes out. When is it about you you want to rate it? [00:16:25] S0: 100%. Hard not to like 100%. Read it.
00:16:25 · Henry Innis, Sachin
[00:16:25] S0: 100%. Hard not to like 100%. Read it. [00:16:27] S1: And I think maybe that that day when it started happening, these things kind of just explode and we were like quite anxious. We're just reading these comments. Our our whole strategy was never to respond. Like that's... I think you can do two things. You can like just post through that stuff and pretend like it doesn't happen and then, you know, or you can address it directly. And we thought that the risk of us addressing it directly would be more controversy. And we didn't want to like add, you know, any fire on the flame. And I and I think like the views got complex because like, I... We both very much empathize with female founders not getting the same amount of funding and it's a problem in venture capital in general. Right? But I also think that at the pre seed stage, there's always context associated with a raise. And I think that like a lot of these relationships, we've built them for four to five years. Like literally some of our investors on our capital, we met them four or five years ago. And I think that context is lost in an AFR article. The other bit of context that was lost is that like we basically do a friends and family route. Like we only raised 500 k. It's not like we all led... It wasn't it wasn't like a VC led round. Like everyone put a small amount of money in and I think that nuance was lost
00:17:30 · Henry Innis, Adam, Sachin
[00:17:30] S0: in the controversy where everyone thought this was a venture backed media. Yeah. Yeah. I mean like when you think about that stuff and stuff like that I mean one of the things I think is and you know I sit here as someone who's obviously benefiting from a fair fair degree of, you know, benefits and access given, you know, my, you know, my upbringing basically. Right? I mean, it's undeniable that that's true. So I think, you know, does it make you think about how... Because you're a media company, you can draw attention to these things, like how you might start to challenge some of those things and stuff like that and, like, start to build that into your ethos. Is that something that you've consciously started to think about? I I think, [00:18:08] S2: like, as a media company, there's always this element that we can invite people on to chat about those issues. Yeah. So we don't just have to avoid them. It's like, okay, this is an invitation for us to, like, talk about that more. And I think like that's something we wanna do more, like bring on people to talk about that exact issue and actually understand, like, why particularly is that an issue, what's happening there, and then challenge that issue as well head on. [00:18:30] S0: Good thing. [00:18:31] S1: Sort of interesting that I don't add on to that is that a fair few people that wrote comments about us that didn't know us then [00:18:36] S0: Mhmm.