So welcome back to Civic Cipher. I am your host of Ramsey's job is rams' jah. I am q Ward. You are listening to Civic Cipher.
Yes, indeed, once again, as promised, it is time to bring on our special guest, a man who is a hero in.
Both of our books. This is Ebity Excellence, folks. Yeah, yeah, so that's why we didn't need to even throw to that.
You know, we did mention before on the show a platform called fan base, and of course we're going to get into that a little bit more. But this man, you know, for the biggest part of his life I'm sure was associated with his famous father. Obviously he's made incredible contributions to the culture that we know and love and we.
Call hip hop.
But really nowadays he is making a difference, giving us our voice operating in a media space, specifically a social media space, and you know, we are incredibly proud of him. He's a hero of ours, dare I say even a mentor someone that we look up to. Absolutely, and he joins us today and we are honored to have mister Isaac Hayes the Third with us.
Welcome to the show, brother, thank you for having me thank you for having me absolutely.
So, you know, for folks that may have missed our other episode where we went in depth about fan base, talk a bit about what fan base is.
So, fan base is the intersection of social media and what I call like micro casting or micro subscriptions. It is the first social media platform that allows you to have a follower and a subscriber on the same page via in that purchase, and that was a significant milestone for us and technology because no other app had done it. And fast forward to where we are now in twenty twenty two, subscriptions are all the rage. You know, Instagram
is talking about subscriptions. Elon started his subscription based service today on Twitter Blue Launch. They're giving away blue Chat like it's nothing. But yeah, so it's fan base is just that I think the world is the world is going to open up in a way that allows people to monetize their content if they so choose. So it's free to download, free to use. You can have followers and subscribers on the same page.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Q and I are both early adopters of fan base, and Q is an early investor, yes, and based as well. But one of the things that we felt was really important on this show is that.
This story is a story of.
Black ownership, black leadership, and really telling our own stories using our own voice. And that's one thing that I really love. I know that fan base obviously exists for all people, just like any other social media platform, but the restrictions that are often put in place, or the undervaluing that takes place in terms of black creatives contribution on the legacy sites, we'll call them your facebooks, your twitters, those sorts of sites had.
Just gone on long enough.
And I understand that you know, you were inspired to create fan base because of a story about I know it had to do with a kid and a Spider Man costume. Why don't you share that with us?
Yeah, So this this kid from Memphis, Tennessee, that my hometown I was born in, went viral dancing in a Spider Man costume in a game stop and I just shout up a message and say congratulating Memphis, And he reached back and asked him I was a manager frantically trying to figure out how he could take eventage of this moment because he got like the three hundred thousand fowers pretty fast.
Wow.
And so I told him I don't really do artist management like that, but I said, you know, you know, he wanted to have a meeting.
I said, well, send me your number and I think about it.
And that was like in March, right, and then fast forward to I didn't really talk to him again until probably the next year. Sounds crazy, but I left that conversation was like, Yo, he's having the moment of his life and doesn't know how to make money off of it because there's a there's a really a very I guess wild and I don't I guess risky or risky way that people go viral and try to turn that.
Into a business. It's inefficient, you know what I'm saying.
You go viral, you try to turn them into a business, hopefully end up on Loving hip hop or you know, you get brand endorsements or something like that. So I said, people need to be able to subscribe to him like you subscribe to Netflix, because people need to be able to learn how to dance like him. And so that was the birth of fan base, where I was like, Wow, you can have followers and subscribers on the same page.
That's it. That's the idea.
I can follow you but if I want, you can post content and I can subscribe to you. And then that was the idea that kicked it off.
Sure, sure, you know it's incredible.
I've seen you talking about the inefficiencies and the lack of equity with regards to credit, attention and financial gain to black creators, you know, on those legacy apps, on the tiktoks and the Instagram, these these businesses that we've made that we've grown the evaluation for we're the reason that these places are cool. They take the culture, they take the ideas, and then they profit from it and
we don't. I watched you take kind of the frustration of that the idea that you just said you came up with with this young man, young Memphis, and turn it into something that's living and breathing. Like we're looking at you. Our listeners can't see it, but you're sitting in the headquarters of fan base. I don't know if it's as incredible to you as it is to us, because I remember when it was an idea and then
you let us all invest in it. And I remember I had a conversation with my mom and when I told her what it was about, she was so excited my mother from making Georgia, you know what I mean, having a conversation with her son about black tech and essentially creating our own capital. It really really blew her away. How has that experience felt for you?
It's a surreal experience. It's the joy and honor of my life to be able to build something like this. It was unexpected. I was, you know, I was managing my dad's estate and still doing music from here, you know, from time to time. But I've always loved social media and I've been able to use it in a way to effectively communicate to the masses. What I recognize, which isn't a bad thing, is that social media is kind of like a shared experience between people where we mimic
each other. You know, you do the dance, I do the jams. You do the challenge, I do the challenge. Advertising is the part of social media that that's messed up for the black community. And I'm gonna tell you why not not making this about race, But the overall goal of a platform like a TikTok or an Instagram is to generate ad revenue. So therefore, as many eyeballs on content that they can run ads in between, it's
beneficial to their business. So therefore, it behoo's any of these platforms to have very very famous white creators because that is a larger audience of advertising that they can serve to rather than very very famous black creators. So what happens is our community creates the trends and the culture and the dances, and then these other creators duplicate them, which is not a problem at all because it's just we copy each other, but to the benefit of the platform.
And then the creator that copies they see all the rewards and the benefit of you know, the financial gain from doing that, and the originators get left in the dust. So this has been a great process for me to start from something that's in my head that I feel like I can help our community and help everyone monetized,
but especially the people that are underserved from it. Coming from an idea to building it and it actually works because you know, the first thing that I guess, there's there's a there's an assumption in black tech, like or technology sometimes like we build it.
Do do it work? The log on? Does it crash? Like? Does it you know?
It's like you know, and fan base is a really solid solid product built by an amazing team. So I'm fortunate to have them and love working with them.
Yes, sir, So one of the things that I know is very frustrating for any content creators.
Uh.
And you know we're we're focusing on you know, black creators, which you know Q and I are with the show Civic Cipher is trying to best the algorithm. Now, this show exists on radio stations, but obviously we have to play the social media game as well, and these algorithms,
there's sometimes sometimes they help out. Obviously in recent you know, uh weeks, we've seen the benefit of that, but there were years of toiling in the dark, and had not a fortuitous series of events happened, we may still be toiling in the dark with respect to social media. And I think that fan base has kind of addressed the algorithm issue with some of these legacy platforms as well.
So can you speak to that as well.
Yeah, so it's not necessarily an issue. It is the design and function of our platforms that are built off advertising.
Right.
So what that means is is, and I say this all the time when I ask this question and the light bulb goes off in your head, and sometimes you know something is so simple that you don't think about it.
When you think about it, you're like, yeah, it makes sense.
I tell people, why would Instagram let you reach a million people when they're about to charge Target and Walmart to reach a million people through ads?
Wow?
Because if you could reach a million people through ad through your generic posts, the posts that you make, and Walmart and Target would just come and pay you and they would never run ads on Instagram. So for that very reason, they have to suppress everybody's content down to a level that allows them to make money from these brands. So someone like Kim Kardashian that has three hundred and thirty million followers, that's three times the visibility and the
viewership of the super Bowl. The super Bowl only comes on one day a year for four hours, and they charge seven million dollars for a commercial. So if Kim Kardashian could reach three hundred million people twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, she could charge twenty one million dollars a post and never have to do anything again for the rest of her life because she has more visibility and reach than major network television stations.
Take the word following and turn it into viewership and then it all makes sense, like, oh, she has three hundred million viewers. Wow, that is insane. That's an insane amount of that. That's the population of the United States of America at the click of a button going live. Three hundred million people posting a photo, three hundred million people posting a video, three hundred million people.
That's insane.
So that is why the algorithm, that's why content is suppressed, because nobody would ever run ads. I mean it's like you would brands would be able to reach the exact demographic that they want to reach it. But I know somebody has twenty million followers that's seventeen years old, that's black, that likes video games and Oreo cookies. I'm going to go on his page. But they have to go through Facebook and Instagram to figure all that kind of stuff out, and that's how they do it. So we don't do
that at fan Base. I want to lift the veil of suppression off because I'm more focused on subscription than ads, and because subscription is the future of what social media is going to be, and.
I think that that's very important. Having a black man give his black insight to a business and being able to create something that speaks to maybe needs is a strong word, but sort of the shortcomings that we find in our black communities, that is able to address that. And I think that the bigger picture here is that black ownership really matters. I think this is what I want our listeners to take away from it. When we say support black businesses, We're not just talking to Black people.
We're talking to all people because ideas like this deserve to exist, because there are white creators that would benefit from this same business model as well. Absolutely so, in your own words, I want you to speak, because you've built something from the ground up, speak to the importance of black ownership, black thought, black entrepreneurship, you know, black leadership, those things that obviously are very important and instrumental in getting this endeavor off the ground.
Well, one of the things that I'll say is being black is probably the biggest gift that a person on this planet could have being an African American person. And I know, you know, I've had conversations about the lineage and the legacy in the in the heritage of black people, but African american Ism, as I call it, is the hottest ish on the planet, like it is the hottest thing on the globe. You it is literally impossible for
you to market and promote anything as being cool. Not sentimental, exciting, or adventurous, but cool without the assistance of black people. You need our music, you need our slang, you need our dance, you need our fashion, You need one of our top artisans, one of our top you know, musicians
to sell cool and cool is what sells things. So being black is like we are the cool of the world, as I say it, And so what comes with that is innovation, and so we innovate industries, we freestyle infrastructures off the top of our head, and don't understand that we're actually doing those things. I've said this a bunch
of times before. Shout out to Graham Master Flash. I had a chance to talk to him about a month ago, and I always tell people I use him as an example, and I say, look, man, the first time you DJed on two turntables and a mixer, someone should have pulled you to the side and said, do not show an mffort what you just showed me. Let's go figure out how to make turntables and mixers. Because everybody that's going to do this is going to need turntables and mixers
so you can innovate, you can. So he created DJ culture to the point now that his innovation is in one device, one piece of hardware that pioneer cells. So Serato and Techniques and pioneer owned DJ culture when it should be owned by all those original DJs. All those guys should be billionaires just sitting back in their sixties chilling like, yo, we invented this and we we innovate that culture. The same thing with mobile cultures, like we
we're the ones that did TVs in the headrests. You see Maybox with those rims led lights in the ceilings, really amazing sound systems. But we don't own a Ford, we don't own Chrysler, we don't own Mercedes, we don't own any of the automobile companies.
And then you get to social media.
We give our dances to TikTok, our clapbacks to Twitter, you know, our skits to Instagram, but we don't actually own the infrastructure of any of these things that we make. And so it's it's time that there is a black owned social media company that a social media platform that serves the benefit of all users, because given the current construct of social media, it's an exploited relationship. They let some people through. There's some stars that make it, you know,
Cobby Lame. Shout out to Cobby Lame, and the people that you know become household names off social media.
But as a whole, there are billions and billions.
Of dollars in ad revenue being created, and none of that is ever finding way back to the Black community, not time of it.
So rams is mentioned earlier that I'm an early investor in fan Base. Now you know that there's a reason why you and I weren't invited to invest in Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. The fact that I'm an investor in fan base is a really really cool thing that I'm ridiculously proud of. Kind of explain why the way that you're even you know, generating revenue and raising money is so much different than the way other tech companies did their startup and their and their seed rounds.
So let's talk about accredited investors. That is a term given to wealthy people that meet a qualification to invest in early stage companies. It's a law, It was a law made by rich people to give them the opportunity to have the early access to the best investments. So the qualifications of being an accredited investor is you have to have a network in excess of a million dollars might as your house, or over two hundred thousand dollars
a year for two consecutive years. The average American salary is about forty seven thousand dollars. Now, mind you this this law was put into effect in like nineteen thirty three, So I don't care what color you were. This was really about wealth versus poverty. So all the companies that you've seen throughout you know, American history, the ibms, the Microsoft's, the Apples of the world, the facebooks of the world were all invested. Uber were all funded by angel investors
who are credited. So I use an example of a guy named Oron Michaels. He put five thousand dollars into Uber in twenty ten, five thousand dollars, cool money. When the when an Uber iPod in twenty nineteen. Nine years later, his five thousand dollars was worth twenty four million dollars. Now, I'm not trying to be funny, but like I could get ten of my friends together, we put five hundred dollars a piece and walk away with two point four
million dollars in nine years. Right, But the IRA and all of that is, you don't have to be accredited to buy five thousand dollars worth of lottery tickets to win a two billion dollar powerball jackpot, how very much money they made. You don't have to be accredited to go to Vegas and put five thousand dollars on a crap table or blackjack. But I can't put five thousand
dollars into Facebook over all of these companies. So shout out to Congress at the time in Barack Obama creating this law called the Jobs Act that allows any person to invest in an early stage startup. So any company can raise up to five million dollars in a calendar year, and the accredited industry rule is wiped out. It doesn't matter,
It doesn't matter, your network, it didn't matter. So I got introduced to start Engine through a colleague of mine, a good friend of mine, and she said, you need to go to start Engine because fan base is a people's product. And when you think about social media, the users generally, you know, effect the value of the startup.
No users no startup.
Everybody left Instagram to day be where zero dollars and zero cents, clubhouse zero dollars and zero cents, TikTok, same thing. So who better than to give opportunity in owning a platform than the people that actually use it. So I got accepted the start Engine. Only two percent of people that
apply to equity crowdfund and get accepted. I got accepted, learned a lot more about my business going through that process, and my initial goes to raise one million and I wound up raising three point four million in the first round that I did, which was amazing. And then I launched a second round about a year ago and I raised two point six million dollars and I just launched
the final This is the last one. I'm doing the final round to invest in fan Base, and we've already raised about nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars in five weeks. So I tell everybody that wants to own part of the future of social media, in the future, the future tech giant of social media, you can invest in fans Base and have ownership in this platform and use it by going to start Engine, dot com slash fan Base and investing now the minimum to invest is two hundred
and forty five bucks. That's a price. That's the price of a pair of jays. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. That's a that's a state incredible, that's a stake dinner, Ruth, Chris to get you some equity and a startup that has an upside and a very very bright future that we're working hard to continue to scale. And so I've done these three rounds to get people the opportunity to
have equity in the company. But like now, we have to move to that level where we do let institutional investors in because they cut the checks that are big.
They cut the.
Twenty million dollar checks, the forty million dollar checks in one one fail swoop, and that's how you scale faster.
Yes, sir, so I invested in round one and two. Rams Is said, do not close round three until you let him invest. And I'm about to invest for the third time.
You better hurry up for this round closed. I gotta don't worry about it.
Because was what happens is when I do amazing programs like these, we see a spike in investment. Okay, so you know, like one time at one time, like when I did the Breakfast Club. I raised probably two million dollars in like in twenty four hours.
Wow, So it was like that fast because it just went viral.
So thank you for having me on the program to even let people know that they have a chance to invest in opportunities like this, because these raises tend to go viral. And the fact that we've already were almost halfway there in like five weeks, when typically they give you about six months to raise the money, it's incredible.
So I gotta say this before I pass it back to Ramses. I see people complaining all the time about us not having our own space. You probably see me tagging you and fan base every time I see somebody say that, Why do you think people are so slow or so hesitant when they're begging for it? You know, RAMS does not have this conversation all the time. We watch people say, man, we really need to have our own We really need to have our own space and
our own platform. Why do you think now that it exists, we still have to urge and urge to get people to come over, especially when it's a position that would be far more financially equitable for them. Like I see you letting people know how much money they're missing out on by allowing all of that fan base to live somewhere else.
Two things. For the black community, it is unfortunately part of our uh I don't want to say programming, but part of our our existence in this country has been the spaces that we don't feel welcome, and we fight harder to be a part of.
Yeah. Right.
So it's like, you know, tell us, tell us you don't want us to shop in Gucci and we want to buy more Gucci. Tell us you don't want us on Twitter, and we fight harder to stay on Twitter. Take tell us you're gonna tell us you you know, you take my TikTok away because of you know the fact that my my butt is bigger than an extract. I'm a fight harder to stay on TikTok when to the to the direct left or right of you, there's an alternative place where there is none of that, and
that happens, so people fight hard. I call it the velvet rope mentality. It's like, you know, you ever bet like you could go to a night club on a Tuesday and then come back on the Saturday, and they got a velvet rope over in the same vinyl furniture, and you will break your neck to get on the other side of that rope. And that's what people do. Is like when you put those barriers to entry, people
fight harder again. And it's just psychologically. As a human we all have these dysfunctional relationships with social media, like real relationships with people like girlfriends and boyfriends. And what I mean is like the platform. I hear so many people complain about Instagram and TikTok not treating them well and how they do them wrong, but they stay. It's wild. It's like, yo, h okay, then leave. But we're afraid to lead because we've having it. We've been in this
relationship since twenty twelve. If you've been on Facebook, you know, you might have been on Facebook fifteen years. How you gonna break up with somebody after fifteen years? That's the marriage you are. You are in a relationship with your Instagram page and you don't even know it. You know what I'm saying. Instagram came out in twenty ten, You twelve years in. If you started in twenty ten, you started in two thousand, you know you're in. You know what I'm saying you're all you are all the way
into this thing. So what I tell people is date apps. You should be dating apps. And what I mean by that is you should never have a loyalty to one app over another app, including fan base. Don't have loyalty because every app isn't for every person. And I use examples like DJ Khaled DJ. If d DJ was faithful to my Space and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, he would have never met Snapchat, which wound up being the love of his life. It changed his life. He would
have said, no, man, I'm sticking with Instagram. I'm gonna stick beside her, right, you know what I mean, I'm gonna stick beside Ig.
Man Ig been there for me. And he was like, no, I'm going out with Snapchat. Hey snap And they clicked.
And it propelled his career matter of two or three years, to the to the you know, the pinnacle of success of his entire life. And then I think of someone like Jason Derulo, who as a musician was probably all but forgotten about in the realm of popular music. He's still as talented as he ever was, but he got on TikTok and became a superstar. On TikTok. He's one
of the most popular people on TikTok. And so if he would remain faithful to the my spaces and the Instagrams and the snapchats, he would have met TikTok, and TikTok changed his life. So date apps, you never know what app is going to change your life. Someone's going to someone's going to get on fan base and have a relationship with fan base that blows all the other relationships away, and it's going to be one that is a financial gain, and it's going to be like, oh, I really been bsing.
I could have been over here making millions money.
Yeah, and I've been giving away my content for free for years and now I'm over here making money.
You know, I like what you said about dating apps because you know, one of the things that I don't know how true this is, but one of the things that I learned about from you know, the legacy platforms is a thing that is called shadow banning. Again, I don't know how real this is, but effectually, what it means is that you'll put some content out and you'll notice an appreciable drop in engagement for this specific piece
of content. Let's say, you put out something and it misrepresents what you think, and then you follow up with another post that corrects, you know, people's impression that they may have taken away from it, and it doesn't get the same sort of reaction that the initial post got.
And so.
There's no reason it's not necessarily algorithmic because you can point to certain keywords or maybe there's you know, there's things that you wrote in the title this sort of thing. And I think that you know, to your point, having someone else exact control over exactly how you interact with your followers, the degree to which you can reach people, the amount of influence that you're able to have over your own subscribers, that is giving away way too much
power dating these it takes the power back. As you mentioned Jason Drulo being one of the biggest folks on TikTok.
I have a son, my older son.
He went viral on TikTok and it's a video of him playing some really dirty music for his dad, and that blew up millions of views, right and everyone's on there like, oh my.
Gosh, Jason Drula, Jason Drula, it looks like Jason Derula, I look a thing like this guy, but this is what everyone was saying.
I was trying to say, you look like Jason Derula though I was thinking that, but that's funny.
Well, anyway, on the app, everyone's you know, tagging him and then I go to his page and I see how many followers you have, and I'm like, oh my god, so absolutely to your point, you know, I love that. Uh, before we let you go, I want to make sure that you let folks know where they can get fan Base if they want to invest, and that you know, and I'll say this, it is open to all investors of all people. It's black owned, but it is a
brilliant site. But please let folks know where they can go and how they can invest and how to download the app.
So fan Base is on iOS and Android. We're in over one hundred and eighty countries. It's incredible for me to get on the app and see someone from India using one of our verticals called flicks, which is like our TikTok Yeah, and making videos like this is crazy to me. It's like people are utilizing all the functionality. Fan Base has six amazing verticals photos or photos and videos what you call posts, stories, Live audio Flicks which is short form video like reels and TikTok, and fan
Base plus which is long form. Con your Netflix, your place to put your podcast to your show, and everybody can monetize. And if you want to put that content behind a paywall and have subscribers, you can do that. We just actually launched a brand new feature today. I don't know if you guys saw, but you can actually take a YouTube link that's unlisted and share that and put that behind a paywall. So now YouTubers, and let me tell you something about podcasting and podcasts out there.
You do a podcast and you have video component to it, monetize your video component, especially black creatives. I say this all the time. I have a friend of mine who's been in the apparel space for over a decade and we've been working together, and he recently started helping podcasters and comedians sell their content through subscription and utilizing tools
like fan Base, but other platforms like Patreon. But he didn't know about fan Base, and he didn't even know that I had gotten this far with because I didn't talked to him so before the pandemic. But let me tell you, people that are not black are making two hundred thousand a month off of podcast, and then they may have thirty thousand subscribers, forty thousand subscribers, they're making two point four million a year, and you would walk past them and never know that they're making that type
of money. The issue is people that look like us give our content away for free, right and then expect to get paid for it. So it's like the mixtape game. It's like I'm gonna go I'm gonna do one hundred dances, then one gonna go viral, and then I'm gonna make up for all of that.
Like by doing that one, you know.
You gave away all your hot stuff and now now you've got to turn that into a business, which is the most inefficient thing to do. So utilize fan base. It is a tool for the planet. I keep saying, subscriptions are going to take over the planet. It's going to be bigger people subscribing to other people is going to be bigger than Netflix and Disney Plus and Hulu combined.
There's seven and a half billion people on the planet with a smartphone, and there's nothing in between you and them except two clicks of a button or a face scan or a fingerprint that is an incredible amount of reach. Yes, so you can invest in fan Base on start Engine, go to start Engine, dot com slash fan Base to invest. The minimum is two hundred and forty five dollars to invest. This is the last time. So I'm telling everybody I
want people to own. The reason why I want people to own part of these these platforms is because, especially from the standpoint of being African American and knowing our value that we bring to these platforms. Bob Johnson created the most black millionaires in history when he sold the et I want to obliterate that one day wow by
people that invested in fan Base. I want to say, like I made four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand millionaires because these tech companies, mind you, you know, get to valuations of three hundred billion, four hundred billion. Fan Base is valued at eighty five million. Now, we started at twenty, we were valued at fifty in our second round. We're valued at eighty five million in our
third and final round of equity crowdfunding. But fan Base is easily one hundred billion, two hundred billion dollar company. You know what I'm saying, So imagine going from that, and then some sort of acquisition or ipo and then everybody makes all this money. I don't care what color you are you've invested, but especially in our community because we do the heavy lifting of making these platforms incredibly valuable. So it'll be the largest distribution of wealth to black
people in the history of America. It's like, all right, you want you want to talk about reparations. Investing in tech startups and walking away with a big check is one way to get there, and you can control it because the users directly affect the value of the company.
Meaning oh, okay, let's say, let's let's hypothesize some dude starts a social media platform and allows everybody to invest, and then we invest and we move on the platform, and then the value of the platform goes up, so our investment goes up.
Who would do that? Crazy enough to do that?
I don't who'll be crazy enough to let people invest for two hundred and forty five dollars and try to make a startup go, you know, be one hundred billion dollars.
I know a guy, but you know sounds crazy, Like, yeah, well, we love it. I love crazy, I love crazy.
Really proud of you. Obviously, we're on fan base. You can find us at Civic Cipher. I am q Ward at Rams's Jah. Tap in with us like dirty, go ahead and drop your fan base handle as well.
It's at Isaac Hayes three. You can find me over there. And if you're looking for me on all your other socials, I'm not leaving those as well, because I'm in those relationships too. I just got I got more girlfriends. I got more you know what I'm saying. I got more than one.
Lady when it comes to social media, and and I love them all. I like that. I like that.
Isaac Hayes the third, thank you for coming on to Civic Cipher.
Man.
We appreciate your insight. Let's have you back again real soon, please absolutely. And that's going to do it for us here Civic Cipher. I'm the host Ramsy's Jah.
He is Rams's Joe.
I am q Ward.
You have listened to Civic Cipher once again. We appreciate y'all and until next week, all right.
Peace