Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Liam Linski, welcome to this techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. Yeah. Thank you. A really exciting thing. One of my joys in life is going to a new city and finding the, like, underground small comedy club.
Mhmm. And maybe I'm not the nicest person about it, but, like, getting the audience and seeing people trying things out because comedy and entrepreneurship have so much overlap in that you're trying to discover an audience and what they're gonna respond to. You're trying to build something that excites and then gets them backing what you're doing. But you're doing it without a lot of feedback.
At least with comedy, you've got an audience but it's a limited audience, right, which doesn't necessarily give you the best feedback. And to my point earlier, I'm not the best audience for somebody trying things out because I'm pretty snarky individual sometimes. But it is a joy. There's a couple things that I find really fascinating about entrepreneurs and comedians that overlap. The first is they tend to be hyper intelligent.
They're able to find something interesting in the world, put a new lens on it, think of it in an interesting way and then put it back out in the world. And that takes a really high degree of intelligence and empathy also. The second is that most of them that I've interacted with closely tend to be pretty dark in how they view the the world, and then they're trying to find a way to make it enjoyable by putting it back out there. And, I have that in spades myself. So I I feel like it's my tribe.
Right? Mhmm. Definitely. But what you're building with plausible, I really wanna hear the journey here. Like, you went from being a comedian which you still are, I assume. Like, that you haven't thrown that away. Yeah. I consider myself still to be I mean, I don't go out in person anymore. I do everything online. Mean, that's my business too. So I I'm very satisfied. I'm very satisfied with where it was.
Yeah. I sit in a room full of people when you can do it on behind being from the whole world. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So was it meant as a tool for the comedian to find an audience? Like, one of the hard parts is finding your audience and knowing what they're gonna respond to. Like, how did you come up with the idea? Why did it need to exist? So I actually came up with the idea because I was trying to solve my own problem. And this happened back in the very end of 2014 beginning of 2015.
And this is when I moved from New York City to California. And I suddenly found myself, like, spending all my time on the freeway and none of my time on stage. I'm like, this is bananas. Also because I wasn't living in LA. Someone told me, oh, you could live in Long Beach for cheaper, and it's close. No. It's not. Lired It would take forever just to get to the grocery store down the road. The loan drive into the city. You know, it's like, oh, twenty miles, 20 minutes. No. That doesn't exist.
I was like, how do I work out my material without breaking the bank and also spending all my time in my Buick. Yeah. Exactly. I don't Buick also. Buick in LA. Wow. You were you were freaking out of place. Well, coming from New York and not driving for many, many years, And then getting into a a car, I was like, I wanna feel safe, and that seemed to do the trick. How much metal can I put around myself in the foreman of a bill? That was the goal. Yeah. Pretty much.
If you're like, who's that lady, you know, in the right hand lane riding the brake the whole way? That's me. That was me. Oh, that's sorry, LA, but I thought, okay. So how do I do that? And I'm like, oh, I could go online, you know, with Skype because people are familiar with Skype. Remember that? Yeah. Everybody remember Skype. Yeah. I was actually working remotely for a company in New York at the time, and I had been using Zoom for quite a while.
And that's like, do Zoom. And then, you know, I started producing in person shows. I started doing a podcast. I started doing all the things, in California. I put it on the back burner and let it Hammer, but it was still warm. That idea was still back there waiting for me. So finally, I was like, enough is enough. I I just geographic. Was really challenging. I really missed my comedy community. I mean, I had run an open mic in New York for seven and a half years Wow.
And shows and, you know, did those things. And I really missed that camaraderie. And I'm like, I wanna bring that back. So I'm just gonna do it online and connect to people now that I've met in. California with the people I know and love in in New York. And so I did and the comedians, you know, it's a small but mighty group, and they're like, wow, this is amazing. Why aren't you charging us for us? And I was like, what? Why aren't you charging us? I was like, wait a minute.
We don't like to pay for anything. So maybe I'm onto something, then I was like, okay. Well, I was cobbling together all existing technologies, which is fine for doing what I was doing, but I was like, if I could do more? What if I could solve some of the other problems? Like, how do we earn money? And I Hammer an, office manager of a theater an improv theater in New York at one time while I was there. And none of the performers got paid.
We made most of the money through classes and the bar and the shows and stuff like that. And I was like, what if we flip that model on its head? Because even stand up clubs, you know, they don't pay everybody And, yeah, it's a rough go at a comedy. And I was like, how do we change that? How do I change that? And so I started mixing up all my ideas in my spaghetti like brain, I was like, okay. I can do this. I just need to be in the right network of people.
Like, how do I get the right people around me? You know, I started doing some outreach. I'm like, I don't know the right people. I'm not I'm a technical founder. So I went back to school with master's in innovation and entrepreneurship at University of California. At the age of fifty, I was gonna say I'm a much better student now than I was, you know, 30 years ago, but it it paid off.
Because I've met the people I needed to meet, and I got accepted into an incubator and then an ex a couple of accelerators. And I was able to actually hire people and build a team. And actually bring this vision to life in real life. That's a great story. So I I've got a bunch of questions about the product and all that because as an outsider looking in at a comedy, I I think of it very similar to music in that the problems are very similar.
You, as a comedian, you've gotta find a way of making money, and and that's controlled by a small subset of people, which means you probably need somebody to represent you like an agent to take you around. Right? You're competing with a bunch of other people that are hungry for it they're often giving it away for free, which makes it hard to monetize. But if you hit the big time, it's a life changing experience.
So you've also gotta manage that on the other side because you don't wanna blow it all because you all of a sudden hit it well. Right? So the the discoverability problem in music was largely, like, there's ANR groups that don't go out find bands and sign them, and then they upsell them to the bigger labels and develop them and all that kind of stuff. And comedy has a very similar set of problems. You've gotta develop a you gotta find the town first. You gotta develop them.
You gotta help them continue to grow and expand their audience and expand, you know, their sets and all that kind of fun stuff. And eventually, hopefully, they get to a point where they're that star, and you can put them up on the big stage and take them to the big label. In this case, it'd be, don't know what HBO doing a special with them or something like that. Right? Is that still a thing? I don't even know if that's still a thing, but it seemed very similar. Right?
Yeah. People still want, like, the Netflix special or the HBO special and, of course, all of those things, you know. But I've learned in my own life experiences. There's no one way of success. And everybody's mission of success may be different. I didn't set out to do stand up. I just happened to take a comedy writing class because I did a lot of public speaking at work, and I wanted to, like, do a Johnny Carson type monologue. And then from there, I took improv classes, and I was improvising.
And it kinda led me here, but to your point, yeah, comedians are always searching just like musicians of, like, how do I get to that next level? How do I get representation? How do I make money? How do I get in front of people. And both artists are always doing a zillion things for free, you know, and then we're like, oh, we want money and we deserve to be paid. And then someone goes, we're great. How much do you charge for it? And they're like, I don't know. What's your budget? It's like, okay.
They can't put no value on yourself. Or people are like, I'm so expensive. You could never afford me. And I'm like, okay. You made out some really good points of, like, getting a manager. And then the manager has to make sure all these things have to happen. When I had a manager, that's not what they did. You know, they submitted me for things and did that and maybe made some Christian, but at the end of the day, it's on me to make sure I'm ready and prepared, and I'm doing the work.
And same with an agent, you know, I'm still supposed to as an actor, go out and look for my own stuff, I just can't sit back and wait for my agent to do it because that's just in reality not how it works unless you're at a very high level. You know? So with plausible, it's like, what if I give the tools to the comedians and they can run with it instead of having to wait or ask permission or wait for someone else to discover them.
It's like, I see the people who Hammer really done really well, went out and started producing their own shows or wrote their own one person show or or created a series on YouTube. Like, those people got picked up because they actually just went and did it. And so, unplausible, I'm giving people the opportunity to go and do it for people who are specifically looking for comedy.
Because, you know, on YouTube or, you know, other big places, the platforms are so big, which is fantastic, because that means there's a lot of people But to go and sort through, if I put hashtag comedy or comedy my title, I'm also competing with a twelve year old, who you know, you know, just did something funny in his mom's kitchen that has been entitled at comedy. So how do you filter through all of that and how do people really legit find you.
So I think by bringing it together in a platform such as plausible, we can further define how people find people by their personal preferences and comedy you know, when you signed up, you're asked, what do you like? What do you not like? Just like you would on Netflix or something else. And then it's all comedians. You don't have to worry about some randal, like, heckling off of a, you know, roof or something at work or, you know, pulled her chair out and look at me do comedy.
So it it's interesting because one of the first things when, the worldwide web was created that a lot of us realized was a fundamental problem was the discoverability issue. Like, if all of a sudden, all the world's information out there is all of a sudden available here, how the heck do I I mean, I don't have a librarian. There's no like, going back to television and movie reviews before things like the internet, there was Sysco Niebert, and they would tell you, like, thumbs up or thumbs down.
And he was like, well, I tend to follow Ebert's views more than Sysco's views. So, like, he gave it a thumbs up. I'll probably like this. There wasn't a taste maker role within society. Which I'm not saying that was a better world. It's not. It's a lot better to be able to set that view myself and say this is what I like what I don't like, but the discoverability problem has come so much more difficult to overcome. And the people that get noticed are the ones that know how to use the systems.
They know how to trick tube and deciding that the kid pulling that the chair out from underneath his sister is comedy, and so it shows up as a top comedy spot. Right? So if possible's role then is become the discoverability platform for comedians. I mean, that's a huge part of it. Right? Like, I I need to get discovered that I develop an audience so that I can I can actually start to build my show and my brand, I guess? Yeah. And I'm plausible. Like, it's not a social media site, if you will.
So I, like, you're not innovated with a feed of, like, look what I had for breakfast. You know? And, like, everyone's dream of consciousness, thoughts of this is what I did today or this is how I feel on this topic. Actually, you know, a directory of talent, like, a TV guide. Like, here's your show listings. Here shows you might like. We're on a Netflix. Like, here's all the things you might but they all actually happen in real time. Everything's live.
It's not like video on demand because that would be YouTube or, you know, another video on demand service. We're actually live in real time. And when people go to a show Unplausible, the performer and the audience can all see and hear each other. And so it's designed differently. It's not like, oh, I'm streaming from the back of a club, you know, on my iPhone. Like, I mean, Someone could potentially do that, but that's not what it it is. It's more interactive. That's really good.
So the the benefit of the the streaming service is is the content is consumable when I can consume it. Like, I I'm, as a consumer, deciding that. But it lacks that interactivity. So it's more, much more like an interactive streaming session with the comedians. Like, do you buy tickets for it? Like, if I wanted to watch can I buy tickets? You can.
So what we provide is on our platform, the comedians when they log in as a comedian and create their account on their main dashboard, they have scheduling tool so they can schedule either a free event or a paid event. That's up to their discretion. And they get the majority of the revenue of their at sales, and they only have to sell a minimum of one ticket to earn money. You know, there's no minimum of, like, you need 500 followers and 3 shows under your bell.
And then we'll convert your beans into coins. It's not it's like nothing like that in principle. It's like, you sell a ticket, you earn 60% of that. And there you go. And if you'd prefer to do a free event, you could do that too. And alls we ask is that it's all comedy related. So it could be comedy podcast. It could be a comedy show. It could be a comedy open mic. It could be an improv Hammer, you know, like someone's hosting today, or it could be a class or a work shot on comedy.
So people can put it in. They can create their show listing. It populates in the dashboard for fans and comedians so that people can register comedians can set their own price. They can limit the number of attendees if they want it. You know, like, maybe they're trying out new material. They only want five or six people in the room. They can limit it to five or six people and sell that out. However they wanna do it.
And then fans can go in and they can kinda sort through all of these things and they can choose what they like. If they don't like this, then go see something else. Somebody was telling me that if you wanna be a comedian, but you can do anything else in the world. Do the other thing every time. But if you can't, I'm not because you don't have the skills or anything like that, but you just can't imagine a world in which you weren't a comedian.
If you could think of anything else that you could be doing, go do And I was like, wow. Is it that brutal? And they were like, yes. It's so much worse than you think. It's, it's very hard. I love it because of the challenge it brings. I really do. I think it it's really I don't know. It's giving me a new I look at everything differently because of it. It's made me much more resilient person than I ever thought I'd be. I guess that's why I'm an entrepreneur. Either way, you don't make it.
Yeah. Could you choose 2 more painful paths to go down at the same time? I'm gonna be a comedian and an entrepreneur. Ouch. Yeah. Well, I wanna send everybody to plausible. I'm very excited to check it out. I signed up for it just before the show and started clicking around trying to understand love the idea of the live show and being able to find convenience that you can interact directly with.
I I'm really excited by this, and it's currently in beta, which means there's more to come, I imagine. There's a lot more to come. So I fully believe in building a very solid foundation before I start putting all of the bells and whistles in. So we've got a ways to go I'm very excited about how far we've come because we just launched just over a year ago. So we're moving along, and I love seeing people get Christian and I don't know. Like I said, it's a work in process that'll never end for me.
I mean, I love what I'm doing, and and I hope everybody else enjoys it as much as I do. Well, in shows. Leanne, I I love having you on. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much, and I'm gonna definitely have to check out plausible and recommend everybody else do it too. Do you wanna give anybody the last words before we stop recording? Well, if you are looking for a laugh, look no further than plausible.com. With Tuesdays. Yeah, check us out.
And if you are ever thinking, hey, everybody tells me I'm pretty funny. Maybe I should give it a try. Check out one of the open mics you can get a spot on open lake. It's a really friendly and welcoming community, and give it a try. Why not? It's a it's a great place to start. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. I wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening.
If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe It really helps us out. And if you are a regular listener, thanks so much for your continued support. Overwhelmed by tech debt. Discover Vala AI. The solution to tech effortlessly tackle tech issues, freeing up your time from tech headaches. Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where your tech solutions are just a click away.