Founders Mash Up: featuring Jack Conte, Reed Duchscher, and Ian Hecox

we got to reevaluate life. I mean, the Internet is a big place. I never assume anybody. You're pretty good Internet a video of mine. So, Jacob Kanje has started a small platform called Patreon. We all know it, we all want to be on it. It's the reason so many creators are able to create. And you are such an inspiration because I was telling Jack this before the interview.

As you guys know, Behind the Influence is all about people who are literally behind the influence, the people who create the platforms that allow social media influencers to be social media influencers or creators. And Jack also happens to be very musically talented and has a creator passed and present so you fall on two sides of the coin. How does that like, how do you even balance the two? It's really hard. The first five years of the company, I didn't nail it. So actually that was a real

struggle for me. And actually it was probably a little bit of there was some darkness there for me trying to figure out how to balance it because I felt like, oh god, I'm giving up my creative career and I love being a creator, and so it was really hard because you know, I was becoming like a you know, an operator and building a company and I actually kind of had to stop creating for a couple of years.

So that was that was pretty rough. But then in the last three years, I've really found a way to to still be prolific and make things. I fly down to l a once a month now and I do four music videos with one band for with another band, and then we you know this point, now I'm releasing eight music videos a month. So that's a lot. How do you find the time and you're the founder of a massive, massive platform that you're very much involved and

it's not like you've just stepped aside. Now that's super successful. Yeah, I mean I'm I'm there, you know, of course every single day, and I'm working more than every day, you know, on on the making Patreon a thing. Yes, starting a company is a is a triple time job. It's not the kind of thing you can just kind of not to because you can't have asked these things. No, it's you can't. And yeah, it's been you know, I've I've worked more in my life, you know, on Patreon that

I've worked ever on it. I mean it's been so intense, so so yeah, that has been you know, rewarding hard. Recently being able to in the last three years, being able to combine it with being a creator again has made me feel like so I feel like I got my pilot light, you know, turned back on. You know,

it feels nice. We're really excited to have you here. Obviously, you represent the to me of what we cover on this show, people of influence, and you are a person of influence because you are behind these people and helping them groom into these mega stars overnight. And literally we're going to talk about the numbers of all the people that you have brought forth to us. Yeah, lots of growth, and I think I think it's because of you. I don't know if it's all like. We have an amazing team.

I got into this industry four and a half five years ago by myself out of my bedroom, and to see what night Media has blossomed into today's have been incredible. I think we're just to throw out some numbers. Were over a billion views a month through ten clients, across ten clients, and I believe we're at about that eighty eight million subscriber range. And that's pretty impressive when you consider it's only ten individuals. You represent more than ten people,

that's just your top ten. We actually just have ten. So we keep it so Night Media's philosophy just to get into this a little bit, so we usually only work with family friendly creators, so we don't work with a ton of people that actually we don't have any creators that really swear on their channels. It's something that we're we're not necessarily against. We just don't like to promote it to children. And the second ones, we only work with with creators that want to be entrepreneurs and

business people. And you know, we found ten that you know, want to dig into this industry and want to keep YouTube at its core and want to do so much more, and that's why we stayed small. The reason you're here is because of that. You were one of the pioneers in the YouTube space. And not only did you pioneer in a world that a lot of people didn't understand back in two thousand five, by the way, when people weren't really doing the YouTube thing. Yeah, I mean YouTube

wasn't really a thing. It wasn't a thing. It just recently, I think, in the last decade, has become a thing. In two thousand five, starts with a little, a silly video, just you and your friend. And did you ever know that it would turn into this empire that has employed so many people and made so many people so much money. And yeah, we had no no idea whatsoever. It was just us, you know, messing around with a webcam. We started with lip syncs. We did the Power Rangers theme song.

That was our first slip sync, and then we did Mortal Kombat and then Pokemon and then the Pokemon theme song music video was the video that like really really blew up and for I think a year and a half it was the most viewed video on YouTube. And back in the day, there was no discover ability on YouTube.

So the only way that you could find quote unquote quality content, which that video looking back is not the only way you can find quality content is if you went to the most viewed page like most people of all time. Okay, so all those videos that had the most views must be the best videos on YouTube. That would be the theory. But you know, our videos up at the top, and it was think, why do you think about so many views? Because nothing else like that was on YouTube, and you guys were just kind of

creating your own lane. And people were curious because that's what I would think. Yeah, I mean I think music is universal. I mean that's why all the top view videos are are music videos. So I think that's one thing Pokemon is, you know, the sort of global unifier who doesn't like Pokemon. At that time, a lot of people were doing lip syncs, but a lot of people were just kind of standing there and just lip sinking.

But we were also throwing in jokes into it, so like kind of like criticizing the Pokemon while we were singing the song. Just the fact that they like Pokemon in a strange way is like animal abuse. So we had some like jokes I never thought of it. I don't need to laugh, but I never thought about it. Yeah, I mean, you're you're forcing it's it's it's no different than a than a dog fight, and we don't allow that. So we, uh, we kind of made some some jokes

in the video. I think that's what kind of made it stand out from the other sort of lip syncs is we actually had a take on it. I'm not saying like it's supreme art. But also, back in the days of YouTube, you're not really competing with that much quality content. Anything that's like sort of above like the worst quality ever would automatically rise above everything else. So you have of ten of the most subscribed to followed YouTube personalities in a time where YouTube is it's hard

to navigate right. People die on YouTube, but I don't mean actually die, but their content dies on YouTube because they're not switching it up enough or whatever. The reason is. Is it that you've found people who have staying power, or is it that you have come up with a strategy for that staying power? Man, I don't know how much I want to say here. I think most of it is just lack of understanding of how YouTube actually works. Most of our guys focus on a few things, and

yes they switched their content up. Yes they don't do the same video ten times in a row like some creators make that mistake. But you know, we really understand that a good video starts with a good title and thumbnail, and then once you get people to click on that video, it's all about getting them to stay and watch that video. So it's really just a combination of high click through rate which is CTR and high average uderation. So that's

the two things that we really focus on. And as a creator, when those two dip, that's when it time to either switch it up or say, Okay, my fans aren't clicking on this video. Why are they not clicking on this video? Or why are they not staying and watching this video? For the duration we're going to get into a little bit of your back story before we

give away all the secrets. But there was a time when all of this clicked for you, and there had to have been moments in the journey where you figured out the secret sauce and and to even figure out to work with influencers. Would you remember a time in your career that this all kind of came to fruition for you. There there's a few. I honestly don't even think we're a first space yet, Like, we have so

much more to accomplish as a company. And yes we work with some of the most influential people on the Internet, but there's a lot that we have to accomplish with those individuals, and we really dig into their businesses. But when I was I was an NFL sports agent before I got into this industry, and I met Dude Perfect. So this was two thousand and fifteen. Dude Perfect was still small, not the Dude Perfect we know today. They're like two million subscribers. And I met them, and at

the time, we were working with large NFL clients. We had Odell Beckham jew a year and Richard Sherman and Marcus Allen and Barry Sanders and so like, we were at the top of this NFL chain and it was a lot of fun. But when I met Dude Perfect, advertising agencies and brands were asking me questions that they weren't necessarily interested about Odell and Richard. They were going, tell us more about Dude Perfect, or those trick shot

guys are really interesting. Why don't you come to the office and tell us more and that was kind of like my first AHA moment was Okay, people are actually looking at this to be a viable marketing you know medium. I left three months later. People still thought I was crazy at that time, like nobody's gonna buy a Dude Perfect video, Like people aren't gonna spend money on YouTube. But eventually, after pitching it for six to eight months, people started to spend money. And that first one was

Callaway Golf. Callowe Golf came in in a very conservative golf industry that's predominantly marketed towards older individuals, came in and bought a Dude Perfect video and this was the first thing I had done with Dude Perfect. And then they came back for a second video, and that's when I knew, Okay, this is something that's going to be massive for people who don't know who did you do the video with? Yes, So I did the video with my childhood friend Anthony. We met in like the sixth

grade and we did a share boredom. We just graduated high school. I was seventeen. He might have been seventeen as well. Yeah, at the time he was also seventeen. You guys, go to the same high school. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, So we went to the same elementary school and middle school, high school, best friends, and we're both bored. All of our friends were going off to real colleges. We were staying in Sacramento and we're going to go to a

community college. So we were pretty bored. Over the summer. We had actually started making videos and posting them on my Space before we even knew what YouTube was. And the only reason we found out about YouTube so early was because somebody had stolen our video and uploaded on YouTube. Yeah, so that's how we actually found out about YouTube, was because somebody had ripped our content. So we started upload kind of a compliment, Yeah right, yeah, so we started

uploading on there. It started the views, and to us, over a hundred views was insane. And at that time, you could just refresh YouTube and see the counter go up, so we would just like refresh and see like, oh my god, there's five more views. Oh my god, there's ten more views. So that was that was a weird experience for us. You know how some artists become managers of other artists and they're like, now, where's where's my moment?

Where's my stage? You know, like I would imagine that it could be hard to see other people creating when you really want to create, but you're also creating something but on a different level. Absolutely. Yeah, before I figured out a way to kind of be a creator and do the business, well, let's see, the secret was amazing working with amazing people and letting go a little bit

of all the details. It was really hard because as a creator, as an artist like I, you know, when we when Pablo originally was making music, I was, you know, doing all the instrumentation, all the mixing, all the mastering. You know, Um, it was of a partnership with Natalie, but but I had full I had my hands. I was sculpting the whole thing, from the video to the

editing to everything. And um, now Papa Mouse is like fifteen contractors right and like and we've slowly let go of like Okay, we're letting go to the video editing, Okay, we're letting go to the audio mixing. Okay, we're letting go to the mastering. Okay, now we're gonna let go some of the production. And like one step at a time, you kind of take a step back, but you still get to do the things that are exciting to you as an artist and that give you a voice as

an artist. So I still feel like, you know, before we were able to do that, I kind of felt like I didn't have vocal chords anymore. I was like, oh, ship, like somebody took my vocal car I can't speak anymore. And now I feel like I got my vocal chords back. And even though my voice is a little different than it used to be in some ways, it's like even more exciting and more beautiful and more fun because it combines the creativity of other people too. It's not just

my soul vision. It's like the vision of this wonderful group of fifteen people, and they get to be creative and do their thing. So it's been really wonderful. And so you leave the sports world behind, Yeah, I did. I packed up my car. I worked so hard to get into the sports industry to everyone's hard. That's a hard career to kind of break into. It's almost impossible to break into because there's not that many sports agents. It's very difficult. It's easy to get a certificate to

be a sports agent. It's very difficult to represent a guy that actually makes an NFL roster. And so I saw the movie Jerry McGuire, just like everyone else did when they were younger, and I thought it was a sexy industry. I lived in Las Vegas, and I used to travel back and forth in Las Vegas to l A and literally just sit in lobbies like c A

and athletes first, and like all these different lobbies. I would just sitting wait for agents to come out, and then I would hand them my resume and I'd be like, just give me an opportunity, like I promised, like it's going to be worth it. What was monetization like back that? Did you guys even think that this was something you can make money from that early on? There's no way

of montization. I mean, like I guess we we had sort of like the first Patreon in a sense where we just not like solicited our viewers for donations, but we said, like, hey, we want to film with more than just a webcam that's tied to the computer. We we would like a handicap. So people actually donated money to us to buy a handicam so that we can actually go beyond Anthony's bedroom, and then we put their

names and they're like, donation. I think we can put their donation amounts like on the screen of our videos. So at the end of the video, it's like, thanks to this person for donating thirty So ahead of the times because I feel like that was a very early iteration of what actually ends up happening. In a sense, you were living it because you this was something that

was missing from your life. You didn't just create Patreon because you were like, oh, this is a really cool idea that you'll see like on some home shopping network that you thought was some great invention. This was something that would affect your life directly. Yeah, I as an as a creator. Um, I had just finished a music video that I spent about ten thousand bucks on. I drained my savings account, I maxed out to credit cards to make time. I was twenty eight. Were you married

at the time? Now, I wasn't married. So it's a video called Pedals and it's on my personal YouTube channel. You will love this. Stephen Stephen, our camera guy DP master of all Things. But yeah, it's awesome. It's it's a wild video. Yeah. I literally built by hand. I built a replica of Lennium Falcon cockpit to be the set for the video. I mean, like I built the whole thing, like hot gluing things, and like it took me three months. I mean I was working nineteen hour days.

My hands were like cracked and bloody and painted and like I was, I mean, I was all in on this video. It's a lot of money for I'm thinking about when I was twenty eight dropping ten stacks on something like that's insane. It was insane. I it was not a good idea. I mean it was it worked out, It worked out. It was illogical, though, and I knew that going in. I was like, you know what, I'm going to be illogical right now because my life just

lets there you go. I was like going to home Depot and Joann's Fabrics and like it was a crazy time. But the idea something. I mean, the whole reason that Patreon came up was because I was about to post

this video that I like poured my soul into. When I posted videos at that time, they got about a million view So I knew I'd get about a million views and I came with this video and I'd get my ad revenue check for me to be a hundred and fifty bucks, and I couldn't stomach the idea of having spent ten grand on this thing that's going to

reach a million people. It's not like I'm a starming artist, and I'm like, I can't find an audience, Like I found my crew on the people who like what I have to say, and I put that on the web and then I get a million. I've reached a million people around the world and I get paid a hundred and fifty bucks. Like what the funk kind of system? It's bullshit, total bull And that that was the thing. I thought, There's got to be a better way here.

There's gotta be a way, like if you involve fans, fans want to help, they want to support, you know, you know that. I sort of sketched out the side da for a membership platform like k Q e D or you know, um W B e Z in Chicago or SF Moment where people, you know, the fans of a thing can pay five bucks a month or ten bucks a month in exchange for exclusive access or whatever,

and uh and it worked, and here we are. Once the Pokemon theme song music video was removed for copyright infringement, we were like, hey, you know, we should probably start making more original content that's not using other people's stuff. And so from that point on, pretty much we were we were wholly original content, not using copyrighted music or you know, images or whatever. So we then sort of transition to sketch comedy, and that's kind of the road

we went down. So sketch comedy for the first few years of YouTube was kind of like the king of YouTube, Like everybody wanted to do sketch comedy, and you know, there's channels like Balloon Shop. It really pays me off. Why would you knock the drink out of your hand? What would you do that? Why would you do that? The Lonely Island Lonely Island obviously, Andy Sandberg, Kiva and Jorma, who then went on to SNL and then bigger and

bigger things. Hello, welcome to the party. Hi, I've never met you before, you know, just two guys and we're having a good time. Derek Comedy is where Donald Glover Child's Gambino came from. That was the day everyone and a sad only to you too, Sir sat opposite day, Sir James, good evening, Sir, Can I not ask you something? About opposite day. No, but sketch comedy is really hard

to continue and it's expensive. It's more expensive than just doing a vlog, Like you need to like hire people and you know, writing sketches and shooting it and editing it takes a little bit longer than normal kinds of things. So a lot of people burnt out on making sketches. I packed up my cars, like, Mom, Dad, like, I'm driving to Dallas. We're dude, perfect is Base. I'm leaving for Smartin Management, which is the sport station Seaton. Like wait, what,

I thought. You've worked a year and a half to get this job. You've done it for nine months, and now you're gonna leave. I was like, yeah, I think I can do this, and like, well, you know, we trust you and good luck and you know they supported me, which you know, it was number one and then number two.

It was then figuring out who were the next big channels that are going to pop up on YouTube, And luckily then met typical gamer who was live streaming Grand Theft Auto and saw him pulling five thousand viewers to eight thousand viewers to twelve thousand viewers, and you just continue to grow and that's when YouTube gaming became a thing. So then was your full time focus just kind of scouting this, this next crop of influencers and mega digital personalities.

And how did that day look for you? Were you just sitting there on YouTube all day? Not really. I was sending a lot of cold emails at that time because I was working pretty closely with Dude Perfect, and I was trying to bring in business for them. Wasn't really interested in signing a ton of people. I always understood that talent management wasn't scalable, it wasn't a galable

business model. For me, it was I just wanted to work with individuals that I enjoyed working with, and then I wanted to become business partners with them and do something much bigger than just create YouTube videos. And for me, that was always, you know, where I wanted to take this. But at the time, there were so many different people popping up on YouTube it was hard to keep up like it is today, It's like there's so many channels with a million subscribers, how do you figure out which

one to work with? So I was just getting to know people, sending a lot of cold emails, talking with advertising agencies, and really just building my rolodex. So at that point, what was the game plan for you? Did you think you we're gonna start an agency? Is was night Media? Even in the no, it wasn't even really a thing yet. I just was enjoying what I was doing and I was going to eventually figure out how to make it a business. But at the time, I

wasn't even thinking that. I was just thinking, Man, I'm not making any money. How do I convince CALLOWE Golf and BMW to spend money on Dude perfect so I can actually bring in some income. That's really all I was concerned about at the time, And then it eventually to now what Night Media has become is pretty crazy. I think I never matched. And yeah, so a lot of things happened between that first deal and today. Um

today you represent ten huge personalities. We were going over your your top five and that doesn't mean they're your favorite gonna get me in trouble not. I wouldn't say top five because they're all incredible. But you've got Preston Mr b Sunday unspeakable. You can look at it in a few ways, views per month or subscribers or social reach. I guess we're looking at facts. We're not asking the godfather to pick the favorite child that I love them all today. Yeah, of course you do. And they're all

really talented. So you get this roster? How does how does this happen? So? Okay? So I was working with dude Perfect. Then I met typical gamer Twitch and we talked about you had someone on from Twitch. Earlier Twitch was obviously taking off an Amazon had just acquired. It was called justin TV. YouTube Gaming then starts, and I was starting to work with some of those live streamers that were popping up on YouTube that were just live streaming on the platform. And that's really how it started.

And then two thousand seventeen. But February two seventeen, I met an individual real name Preston Get a Minecraft channel called Preston Plays about three and a half million subscribers. We were in the same city. I was living in Dallas. I had no idea he was in Dallas, and a friend of mine who's also a YouTuber, Nico Vald, introduced us through Twitter d m s. I do most of my business weirdly enough, through Twitter Dms've never recruited anyone

know they slide into mine. I've never like recruited a person to sign them. It's usually them coming to me and asking questions, is how it usually starts. Hey, I saw you work with so and so, Like, can you tell me a little more? And that's how it works. With Preston, he introduced us. We went out to coffee, sat there for about four hours and just kind of talked about family and faith and business and you know,

just had a good time. And eventually, about thirty days later, him and I started working together and that's when night media took off. Right out of high school. What makes you think I'm qualified to be doing sketch because, like you said, it's not just about hiring people like you could have the money. I know people who have all the money in the world. But if you're not a good writer, if you don't have good ideas, it's not

gonna fly. So how did you guys get to the place where you were qualified enough to do successful sketch comedy. I don't think we're qualified at all. Well something made you think you were. I mean, it's really we just kind of paid attention to the feedback on YouTube, and I know that's not always the best idea to read the comments. But some people have some pretty constructive criticism that are acting sucked in our ideas sucked. So we continue to go to community college, but only in classes

that applied to whatever we were doing. So we took some acting classes, we took some writing classes, we took some improv classes, took some film classes, and then once we burned out on those. Once we did all those classes, we just left. But with with sketch comedy, you know, it takes a lot of time. We were out of high school, so we're living in our parents house and you know, start to have bills, so you have to

find some way to create an income. And so the choice was either well you try to find a job and then find some time to make sketches, or you can commit fully to creating sketches and try to build a business doing that. So that then turn our focus. What did family think about? That family was totally don

they were down there anything better? Well, because I think now it would be a lot easier for you know, a fifteen year old or sixth year old to convince their parents like, look, Jake Paul's making two million dollars years, so can I two thousand five thousand and six. Whenever you were doing it, that was not the case. So you don't have a case study to point to and say, these people are making a living doing this, I'm gonna build an empire. You had literally nothing but your own

drive and an idea. Yeah, and we had viewers. You had viewers. I think my dad's an accountant, so he kind of understands business, and I think we had viewers. So that had to event something. It's like, oh, well, if we're getting similar views to like a local TV show or something like, that's gotta that's gotta mean something like, there's gotta be a way to to monetize that. There was no way at that time in regards to add revenue. I remember our first brand deal we did for five dollars.

That was a big deal to us. But we we found other ways of monetizing. We uh started selling merch and I think we were some of the first people on the platform to do that. We knew this like guy that worked out of a warehouse down the street that was a screen printer. Pretty sure he had one leg, but he never showed us. Um, but uh, I need to find out. So we so then we started like marketing our merch and like these little sort of like funny commercials at the ends of our videos. Oh my god,

yess what what look at my shirt? Oh my god, stoppers small shirt. We would have this guy screenprint all the shirts. Then Anthony had a program that would take all the orders in with like their names and their addresses, and then we would package all the shirts ourselves. That we would then load all the shirts into his car and then we would drive to USPS and get very ugly looks from the workers there because we'd be mailing out maybe hundreds of shirts at a time. My god.

But that was the way that we first sort of supplemented the income for the business. That was that was so entrepreneurial. I knew I was going to suck that up. Yeah, every time I tried to say that one. But you know what I mean, guys, entrepreneurial of you. Yeah, I mean we didn't have any I mean, we didn't have any choice. It was like that was our only option. It was trying to sell merch to create an income, to stay out of a job or work a job and not be able to create content. So and you're

so young to figure that out. Yeah, well, I think I think I probably had some advice from my dad to we didn't really have any other choice. It's just like that was the only way to do it at the time. And you're still going to school at this point, Yeah, and what were you majoring in? Was it anything to do with this world? That was just general ad We didn't really know what we wanted to do. I think Anthony thought he would get a business degree, but I

think he didn't really know quite what that meant. He's just like, I don't know, business sounds nice. And he was already he was running the website on his own, and so he kind of already had like a knack for entrepreneurial kind of like, look at you. He just said it the first time, Did I do it? Like?

It was like, Butter, I'm really jealous. You know. We we didn't have any sort of set plan, and our parents didn't have any expectation for us to become lawyers or doctors, so there was nobody pushing us in a specific direction. So that kind of allowed us to kind of just see that this is a big opportunity that it was our only chance to possibly take. So we just kind of went full into it. So I've interviewed a ton of YouTubers who are wanting to leave YouTube,

and they're very, very honest about it. And it's because of what you just said. They put their heart and soul into these the content that they make, and content is getting really good. You know, people are putting a lot of money into their content. And then so many of them have said to me, that's why I put content on Patreon. I put my quality content there. It's like their entrepreneurs of their own world. And that's why companies like Patreon work. And that's why companies like fan

joy work. Which I interviewed Chris who is the founder of fans Why am I stuttering? So I interviewed Chris, the founder of fan Joy. That's why it's hard founder of found the fan joy of founder. Yes, yes, that's

basically was his business model too. It's like these creators are making more money selling T shirts and hoodies than they are on YouTube, which is like, what the hell year are we in and what what system of converting content into paychecks for the people who make the content have we built and deployed globally such that your best chance at making it as a creator is freaking putting your logo on a T shirt and selling a T shirt. That's not what That's not why you're valuable in the

world because you make T shirts. You're valuable because you tell stories that people love that resonate with your fans. Like, we should have a system where the stories that creators tell that resonate with their fans, where that is their business and you don't have to do all the other extraneous bullshit to kind of cobble together a living. That's a dumb system. And unfortunately that's the reality for creators right now. I mean, at the end of every YouTube video,

it's like swipe up for this merch. It's like that's how Joejoe's bows for Jojo Siwa, and like all the hoodies that Jake Paul sells, that's how they're making their money. And I think what we've essentially, yeah, the the kind of state of the industry that we're in right now is we've figured out in order to zooming way out for a second, in order to kind of put up the first phase of the web, we basically made the

web free, right We said, the web is free. You pay with your attention and with your privacy, because what we essentially do to we track every movement you make on the web, and then we sell information about you aggregated, but we sell information about you two people who want to change your behavior, advertisers. You know, Um, I don't know how deep I can get. I'm loving it from

someone's smartest talking. But that's essentially what I just described as the economic engine that drives the production of content on the web. Right now, consumers pay with their privacy and with their personal information and with their attention, and that gets converted into the paycheck for creators. But it turns out that essentially that's a very inefficient system and it takes millions of people, millions, because advertisers are interested

in reaching millions of people. It takes millions of people in order to convert to a paycheck for a creator. Whereas if you have ten thousand people who listen to your show, that's a basketball stadium full of humans who love what you have to say. Like, in what world should that not be enough to make a living like that? We need a system on the web where ten people

is enough. And that system is more like a consumer payment system, it's more like heck, freaking Disney is doing it now, Disney plus New York Times is doing it. They have a subscription portion of New York Times which is now bigger than their advertising business. So consumer payments is you know, going back to what I said before, you know, in terms of phases of the web, that initial phase the web where the primary economic driver is

this advertising model. We're shifting to a new phase. I think over the next you know, decade or two, ten to twenty years, we're going to see consumer payments start to be I hope. So yeah, I think that's gonna happen. I mean, it's already happening. It is, it is, and you're one of the driving forces in that. So you should be really happy about that. Yeah. For people who don't understand how Patreon works, would you mind us giving

a high level explanation of the platform. Yeah. So, the way Patreon works is a fan can pay five bucks a month, ten bucks a month, hunter bucks a month, honestly,

whatever the tears the creator creates. Fan can pay a subscription pledge to a creator in exchange for exclusive community, early access, extra episodes, behind the scenes, interviews, extra photos, basically extra content and community and Interaction, Um and Patreon is this system that allows creators flexibility to build and run whatever membership they want if they want to have, you know, five dollar, ten dollar, hundred dollar, if they want to have twenty five fifty two hundred dollar, and

then you can load whatever benefits you want into those tiers early access, exclusive access, exclusive community. We have integrations with community platforms, all this kind of stuff, so you can kind of do whatever you want to do as a creator. And for creators, it's an amazing way to

essentially build a super close fan base. You own your audience as a creator, like you get their email addresses, Like on what other platform do you get the email addresses of the people that are actually like fans of you, and you make so much more money than you would buy ad revenue. We have creators making literally fifty to two hundred times what they make through ad revenue by just letting their fans contribute five bucks a month for

an extra episode. What did you do? What was your secret sauce and what was your offering to these people that helped them go from three million to say twenty million subscribers. Well, it ultimately falls on them to produce good content. It. The one thing that that we really

focus on that we understand is it's a business. And so most of these YouTube creators that you meet and this was, you know, two thousand ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, YouTube was just an individual in front of a camera editing his or her own videos and creating their own thumbnails.

That is not YouTube. You have to have a creative director, a post production manager, head editor, like you need to have specific people on your team to help where you can kind of take a step back as a creator and just focus on, Okay, what's today's video, Okay, what's tomorrow's video, and that creative director really needs to help you flesh out like, Okay, what do my fans want to watch? Right? So what we've really focused on is helping them build teams internally so they can just be

talent and that's what they should be. They shouldn't have to play fifteen different roles. And as we're looking to start other businesses or whether it's a consumer product or we're starting a mobile gaming company, they can't focus on that things. If they're editing their own videos and making their own thumbnails and coming up with all the creative

it's just not feasible. And so for us, you know, most of our clients now have taken a step back hired the specific individuals that they need on the team, and then they also understand the data behind why YouTube videos perform. Well, what what is the common thread between all of these talent all of this, you know, the digital personalities versus the other ones we're seeing on YouTube. So for us, like we focus on two things. This is what we're talking about a little earlier. The first

pillars that they need to be family friendly. We only work with family friendly creators. It's a little differently if your audiences in their twenties and thirties and forties. But most of the audience that we have for creators is like six to twelve years old. Some of them sew a little older, like Mr Beast and many Latin typical gamer. But for the most part that's where we sit. And so family friendlies one, and that second one is we only work with creators that want to be more than

just YouTubers. They want to have to be business people. They want to be entrepreneurs. They're really good at using YouTube, is that core and then building businesses from that? If that makes sense. So those are like, as I look at all of our clients are are clients. That's two things that they all have in common, is they really want to do more than just be a YouTube creator. It doesn't really sound like you necessarily had an agenda either.

It wasn't like some people start a YouTube channel because the ultimate goal is to be an actress, a series regular, or they want to break into music. It just seemed like you guys were throwing things to the ceiling and seeing what's stuck that you enjoyed doing. But it didn't seem like you had a well we're doing this because we want to be, you know, movie stars in five years. Yeah. I'm a very much go with the flow kind of guy. So for me, I didn't have aspirations. I guess I

wouldn't say like, well, they'll look at you. It just fell into a lot of success. I don't know, but I think you worked very hard for that. I didn't have. I didn't have any I didn't feel like I deserved anything. You know. I think a lot of people actors, you know, they put a lot of time into this dream of becoming an actor, and then when they get sort of a taste of success, then they feel like I deserve this, Like anything anything that comes my way, I don't feel

like I deserved it. I mean, I worked towards it and it happened, and then I just try to, you know, not take anything for granted. And that's just kind of been the way that I've always kind of looked at our career. It's like just kind of go with the flow, go with like wherever this crazy thing is taking us.

Would you say that that has a lot to do with the fifteen plus years of success this brand that wasn't a brand at the time has seen because of your mentality and because of your attitude towards everything you were doing every day. Yeah, I think so. And I wasn't looking to use Smash as a platform to become television actor or you know, a director or anything like. To me, all those things are awesome and I love doing them and I'll take those opportunities if they come.

But Smash has all he's made the most sense to me, as like, that's my sort of base. That's what I understand, and it's what I think that we're good at. And everything else is is nice, but there's probably other people they're better at it than me. So you're creating content, you're making you're getting little brand deals here and there, you're selling merch just to keep things afloat. When did it become something that you felt like wasn't a hustle struggle.

It was more of like, Okay, we have a system going and this is this is a real business. Was there like a video that went viral? Was there a moment a validation? Can you remember a time when it felt real, because I'm sure it took a while to feel like a real quote unquote real Job's say, in like two thousand seven, we were contacted by um, this guy,

Barry Bloomberg. He was a Disney television executive that had left Disney and he was kind of looking for the next thing to folk us on and he sort of saw, you know, online media as being this sort of next thing. So he started working with us and was like, if you guys want to do this for a long time, you need to start thinking of Smash is like a comedy brand. So it was now small at this point you had evolved into Smash. Yeah, I mean Smash was a name that we had actually had since sophomore year

of high school. Okay, so that was not like evolved into the name Smash. You guys always kind of called it Smash. Yeah, that really worked out because, like at the time of like the beginning of YouTube, everybody was like their channels were just like their names. If we didn't have Smash, we might have called our channel like Ian and Anthony Productions, which doesn't exactly lend itself to longevity.

But luckily we had this great name because it was a it was an inside joke that our friends that came up with, and then Anthony created a website for it, and then when the YouTube video started picking up, we're like, well, let's just continue to have it tied to this smash name. At that time, it was just Anthony and myself as the faces of Smash, and it was Barry that you know, sort of said, if you guys wanted to be doing this ten years, twenty years, whatever years down the road,

it needs to be more than just you two. It needs to be a brand. And that's something that we weren't thinking of the time. I don't think that was something anybody's thinking about at the time. Nowadays, every Instagram model is like, this is my brand everything and beauty and positivity. Everybody's thinking like what their brand is now, but back then, it's like, no, our channel is, like

we're just like two guys. But it made a lot of sense to say that we always just kind of like went by the flow that I guess that's not completely true. Like we we did have this vision of what smash could become. I mean just from the beginning, you screenprinting your own merch. You may have been going with the flow and attitude of like where this goes, but you were very much proactive in everything that you guys did, like the merch, the Patriot, your own version

of Patriot. Yeah, that ended once we started, like I actually getting money from merch. We're like, okay, we can't just ask for money from them. We can't just be like, can I have five dollars? We can give you a shout out at the end. Yeah, we stop. We stopped doing that. We're like, okay, that's just kind of wrong. And I'm not I'm not talking Patreon. I think Patreon is great, but you were not. I mean, you were just saying five dollars please. Yeah. Yeah, We're like, hey,

we'll show you on the video if you give us. Okay, so you have such an eye for talent. Is there anybody on YouTube right now that you're kind of that you're not that is not signed to Night Media? Someone on YouTube you've got your eye on. You think that they have something going. I know you have. They're honestly, isn't like I'm trying to think I don't watch a ton of content outside of our clients because you don't even have time to think about signing anyone else. Yeah,

it's I'm pretty focused on our ten individuals. Are there some creators doing some awesome stuff? Yes, there is even people that we don't represent, Like, I think David's content is amazing, it's very authentic. Why do you think people watch David jo Brack. He's funny, he's supporting cast is also awesome. Like they're just fun individuals and they're at that age where they're like eighteen to two years old,

right in that college age. They have a large fan They have a large fan base of probably sixteen to twenty four, maybe younger. I don't know. It's just something about his four minute videos too. They're just easy to consume. So there's all these like there's a Cloud Gang, there's Team ten there's you know, David's career already forgot what they call? Oh yeah, how could I forget the vlog squad? How come you guys don't have a gang name. We don't need to have a gang name. I don't know,

like we're successful without it. I actually Preston, So Preston used to have the pack. It was Vick Star, Lachlin Musel No no no, no, Vick Star, Laughlin Beijian Canadian and Rob and Preston. They were called the Pack. That was a Minecraft blew up. But they've all kind of said, gets a smart marketing play to have your little squad and do collaps? Do they collab? We don't really do collabs. Night media clients clab internally with each other, but we

don't do a lot of outside collabs. There's a few reasons for that. One is we don't want people subscribe to our channels that aren't going to click on videos and sub boxes. So, for instance, if Jimmy would go do a video James Charles and two d fifty thousand James Charles fans would subdim Mr Beast, then that video hits sub boxes and those two people don't click on it. That hurts our ctr So that's why we don't That's

why we don't do collabs outside of our genre. Right, So Preston will do collabs with other kids creators because he knows that, oh, those fans will click on my videos. But we don't do like David Doll refer instance, like I don't know if we'll have to do a collab with David because we don't know if he his fans would click on our videos. YouTubers don't think about it like that, but they should be because the goal is

to have a hundred percent active subscribers. When you post a video, all of them click on your video, Hence you have a high ctr When you just inflate your subscriber numbers by doing collapse, you're actually hurting your channel. What advice would you give someone who wants to go on and Patreon and be a successful creator on the on the site? Step one is make great stuff that your fans love. Um, if you don't quite have a fan base yet, uh, Patreon doesn't work as well for you. Um.

It's really a membership platform. It works great for creators who are who have already kind of found what they want to make and then seen that reach people. So this isn't like a throw ship to the ceiling and see what sticks. This is like a come with your audience. Yeah, exactly. And it's not UM, it's not that we don't care about solving that particular problem, or it's not that we don't want to help folks find fans. It's just we're

being at a startup. You have to prioritize, and so we're saying, Okay, you know the problem, we're gonna solve versts. So you're getting a bunch of views on YouTube, but you're not making any money. That's the problem Patreons focused on. But yeah, advice, make great stuff that you love, that your fans are passionate about UM, and just make it awesome.

And then when you when you're proud of it and when you see it resonating with other folks, start a Patreon page and honestly, at that point, just be be yourself, be honest, tell your fans what's going on, invite them in on the journey. UM. The creators who love their fans and whose fans love them back, they do the best on the platform. And then advice for somebody who is in your shoes now not a creator, but somebody

who wants to represent creators. Yeah, just to add value that when I first started in this industry, I didn't even take a commission. It's like I will literally work for free. I will do a good job, I will deliver, and then we'll talk about it. So it's like you need to provide value before you can just go to someone, throw a contract in front of them and say hey, let me take X percentage of your revenue. So it

just doesn't work like that. And there's a lot more competition in the space, and there used to be when I got started. When I got started, there was probably two or three people that were trying to manage digital influencers, especially in this town. So I think if you're a young kid, find someone that you get along with, that you think you can work with for the next decade, and then provide value. Don't try and sign thirty seven people right out of the door, because it's you're not

gonna last. You seem too good to be true that you have all these knowledge nuggets, plus you have this incredible roster of talent. I'm really excited to see what they all have going on. I know you couldn't tell us much. Is there anything you can tell us? Just give us one little, you know kind of thing. You know. Well, we talked about the tree video, so we're going to see a lot of YouTubers be a part of this Mr Beast Tree challenge. So it's a dollar to planet tree.

So he did get other YouTubers involved. We're gonna have a ton and it's not within the your community, your well, all the night media clients will probably get involved. We have others. I won't say anyone's name yet. We'll wait for those announcements, but some people that have been on

this podcast are probably going to be involved. So yeah, and like I said, the goal is to plant twenty million trees by Earth, so we'll start out so Mr Beast will start out with probably a million trees and then we'll go get nineteen more million planet and yeah, it'll be a that's it. That's crazy. So in hindsight, fifteen fourteen years later, you can whisper into young Ian's ear and tell him one piece of advice that might make things transition smoother, business deals better. Would there be

something that you would in hindsight tell younger Ian. I don't think so I mean I think obviously there was there was things that didn't work out, but that's still worked out in a sense. Yeah, I mean, whether it was like a bad brand deal and we got backlash or you know, some sort of bad business deal, or like, oh we hired this person and they weren't great. Like that's all part of learning. So whatever bad things happened,

they happened, and we became better because of it. Absolutely, it actually shaped your journey and probably taught you, you know, how to get over the hurdle. And you guys are thriving. Now, how many I think I've saw twenty four million subscribers across and might I might even be think we're twenty five some Yeah, I'm sure changed. We were. We were stuck. We were stuck at twenty two million for like, I think, like a year because just our content was not was

not in the right place. And then once once we got things correct and we started doing the things that we felt like we needed to do, it immediately changed. Can you wrap your head around it's a big number, twenty five million people wait for your content. Well, I mean that's a lot that's subs and that's also people that subscribe maybe eight years ago that are that moved on,

so it's not necessarily million people that are watching. Fine, but still, I mean, starting from a couch doing lip singing videos, fast forward fourteen years, you've built an empire that huge beheamoths of companies have wanted to buy it started on a couch, you and your best friend. That's got to be a pinch me. It's weird. It's pretty weird. I mean, you're so in it. It's your life, so you probably don't see it that way, but from the outside it's an insane story. I agree, it's insane, and

thank you for sharing it with us today. I'm really excited to see where Smash goes in the next couple of years. Do you have any do you have a vision for what you think? Let's not even do a big one, but like, where do you see that? Where do you see Smash in the next year. Let's go like super small. Yeah. Well, we we got back on our feet in February with Mythical and if these past four months are indicative of where we're going, then I feel very, very positive about our future. It's been nothing

but good ship. The ship is going to get better. And better, like the biggest best ship you've ever seen. Yeah. Behind the influence of the production of I Heart Radio and TDC Media, the st