Why Slow Ventures Gave This Woodworking Creator $2 Million | Creator Upload

0:00Josh Cohen:Welcome to Crater Upload, your Crater Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren? Am I a Swifty? Currently, yes. Were you a Swifty before or you're a newly converted Swifty? I wouldn't want to disrespect actual Swifties and say that I was a fan, yes. Go to a concert, no. do I have friends that literally I have a friend a couple who literally flew to Japan to go to her concert because they were like it's actually cheaper than going like in the states to try to get tickets I have another friend who went in Australia and then flew to Poland for her concert so like this is a level that I will never compete with and won't I'm not really trying to so but am I a fan of her music yes I am okay so you're a fan of her music sure and now are you a fan of Taylor Swift the person well a bit of context as to why you're asking me this question Josh might you want to tell the listeners?

0:56Sure. Taylor Swift made her first podcast appearance ever on the New Heights podcast. Sure. Which is co-hosted by the brothers Travis and Jason Kelsey, professional NFL players. Yes. One of which, Travis, happens to be dating Taylor Swift. Sure is. In a very public relationship.

1:13Josh Cohen:She, absolutely. And did I listen to research for my weekly podcast? Did I listen to the entirety of it? I sure did. and I have a lot of thoughts. Namely, she's like real, real. She's like real. She's like real. Is that a Taylor Swift impression or that's just the intonation you have when you think about talking about Taylor Swift and saying how personable she is? That was the impression that Shane Dawson and I used to do and we would like make fun of like basic girls. So, but how I feel about this is that like, it's really interesting because I think that from my point of view, which is not somebody who's like deep in the weeds, but I'm very aware of her relationship.

1:54Josh Cohen:I've watched a lot of things is that I'm sort of like, girl, let's lock her up. Like you guys seem in love. You're in your like thirties. Like, what are we waiting for? But like one thing that I, well, a couple of things that I took, took away from it regarding their personal relationship is that, um, you know, their entirety pretty much of the relationship was when she was on tour. So they were living this magical fantasy life, like traveling and, you know, doing all these fantastic things together. And only since she's been on, on the tour, are they like, he's like, I'm getting to know, like at home Taylor and her like hobbies.

2:23Josh Cohen:And she was talking about her sourdough bread making and, you know, Lauren, I'm sorry. I'm just going to stop you there. I'm sure the audience would love to hear what you think about the idiosyncrasies of their personal relationship. You're asking me a question. I'm answering her. You're my mother. Like, stop interrupting me. The point is, is that like, I'm like fine with Robert on the relationship. And then the other thing that I would notice, this is, is that like, they talked about how like their lives are very similar in terms of the way they perform in stadiums and stuff. And it reminded me, I have a lot of friends that are comedians that married chefs because they have those same like nocturnal weird hours.

2:58Josh Cohen:And it all like made sense. And so anyway, that's my big takeaway. Oh, and she's got an album coming out. That's the big other news. But it was fun. That was the whole pretext for why she came on the podcast is because she's announcing. Yeah, but Jason didn't know. Jason had no idea. It was a big surprise to him. So it was very exciting. Because she went and revealed the whole album cover. He didn't know she was announcing an album at all. the boyfriend knew but the brother didn't know yes the new album The Life of a Showgirl which she revealed she had in this like turquoise briefcase and then she pulled it out of it kind of fancy style I was listening I wasn't watching like because I'm not a monster who watches a podcast I'm just kidding hi to our listeners and viewers that are watching right now so that was a big reveal moment the album's actually going to drop in October this is kind of a pre-tease sure was yeah no it's exciting and it's a it's a happy album and she talked i thought it was actually the one of the things also she talked about all the easter eggs that she is famous for putting in her music and other things and she's like they're never about my personal life they're always about music and she talked about how she got some honorary doctorate um at like nyu and like she gave a speech and the entire speech was basically lyrics from what was going to be her next album and she's like and if you didn't realize that like you just would have thought this is a speech and then if you did realize it later you were like wait what um so that was fun that is super fun that's super fun for her and her fan base her very very last concert of the tour she i guess every other concert she left the stage in one way and a very last concert of these heiress tours she went through an orange door also an easter egg because this new album's cover is orange i mean i'm a swiftie now you guys i mean this is important information that you should learn on this podcast any other questions how is this done for the new heights podcast i'll answer this one it's added around half a million youtube subscribers before all this taylor swift hullabaloo happened about five or six days ago the new heights podcast channel was up to 2.56 million it's almost up to 3 million subscribers now probably will pass that by the end of the day the video itself peaked at about 1.3 million concurrent views so what they did at least on the youtube channel is they released this as a premiere there was a clock counting down the minutes hours seconds until start time and then everybody watches that first viewing together so during that first viewing again peaked at about 1.3 million concurrent viewers there was some kind of glitch with it too it cut off yeah heavens one of the writers of two filters sam was watching it with his swifty counterpart obviously and they were surprised at how abruptly it cut off on the youtube channel so there were some technical difficulties.

5:39Maybe it broke the internet a little bit. New Heights is also trending at number one on the Spotify charts, on the Apple charts. It's not on the YouTube podcast charts yet because they go week by week and they update the charts on a weekly basis. So I'm assuming next week it'll be there. Who knows if it will top Joe Rogan or not, but my guess is probably. Probably. Another interesting note here is that there were no ads in the podcast, which I think is one, an enormously missed opportunity, but two, probably makes sense because Travis doesn't want to seem like he's profiteering of his girlfriend, even though they both are from this relationship in ways that are normal.

6:19That's fine.

6:20Josh Cohen:Sure. Usually the New Heads podcast has tons of ads. They've been sponsored by Audible 32 times in the past year, Buffalo Wild Wings 30, American Express 27, DraftKings, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Perplexity, the AI company. They usually have tons of ads on the program. And I was excited going into this thinking about, oh, who's going to sponsor this thing? Who's going to sponsor this thing? Turns out nobody. Probably a better route for them in the long run. I mean, for the relationship, I think it makes sense. Also, she probably wouldn't have agreed to it otherwise, right? He said. She's so conscious of her image and which branch she surrounds herself around.

6:58Josh Cohen:It would seem so. And he said at one point, he's like, I didn't ask her. She sort of offered. Like, I would never think to ask her. Like, he's like, I don't know, he seems really into her. And it was really cute when he talked about, like, how he, I never knew the origin story about how he met her, which I won't regale you here. But it was like she had this moment where she was like, is this guy a creep? And then she's like, or is this guy doing exactly what I've wanted him like a guy to do based on all the songs I've ever written? And she kind of was like, I think that maybe he might just be a good guy.

7:24Josh Cohen:Like it was like it was kind of one of those amazing things where I think in this world, if we would just zoom out, like everybody's like, especially the young folk are like so suspicious and this and that. And sometimes it's just like a guy who's really into you and like wants to take you out and might be actually a nice guy. And thank you. You know what? Good for Taylor for recognizing that. Hey, let them. Let them. Just let them. Just let them. That shows our age, Mel Robbins. Mel Robbins, thank you. Let them. Okay. We have a very exciting show. Action-packed show today. We have two guests.

7:53Josh Cohen:First up is going to be Evan Britton, who is the founder, of course, of Famous Birthdays to talk about the very new, interesting partnership with Pixability. And then later in the show, we have Jonathan Katz-Moses, who is a YouTube creator and entrepreneur. He's in the woodworking space. And he recently just accepted a$2 million investment from Slow Ventures to sort of expand his business. And so we're going to talk about that. First up, so excited to talk to Evan Britton, founder of Famous Birthdays. So excited to have Evan Britton on the podcast today. He is the founder of Famous Birthdays, which is largely known as the IMDB of creators.

8:25Josh Cohen:He's going to talk about the new partnership they have formed with Pixability, which is a CTV and data media solutions company. Evan, welcome to Creator Upload. Good to see both of you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be seen. So Evan, tell us about this partnership. Of course, you guys have been talking about for a long time that you are able to see sort of an inflection point of when creators sort of become famous, for lack of a better word, because a lot of people are searching them. And it sounds like Pixability has recognized this sort of how valuable that is. And so tell us about that and tell us about this partnership.

8:58You know, we've stayed in their lane, as you've known, since 2012 to be the IMDB for creators. Our traffic has consistently grown. This summer, our search engine was searched up to a million times per day on our site organically. And those searches are just raw user intent. And the most important part is platform agnostic. So it might be from a Netflix show, people are searching somebody. It might be an athlete. It might be a short form creator, long form podcast. Our data does not care where it's happening because it's happening on our platform. So it's platform agnostic intent. And obviously the history, we had Charli D 'Amelio in her office when no one really knew about her from these searches.

9:49And that's always happened.

9:51Josh Cohen:So just to context, you guys noticed there was a lot of people searching this random girl, Charli D 'Amelio. So you said, come, we'd like to meet her. And you had her come over. She had a few hundred thousand followers and she flew to our office for her first ever interview. And we knew when she was in the office that it was rare what was happening. Same thing with Addison Rae. And even for like Wednesday, the Netflix show I put on LinkedIn, this is the most searched show. And 40 hours later, Netflix said this is one of our most popular releases, shows ever, two days into it. So we can see that intent.

10:26And then obviously we have data on what's being searched. So we know programmatically, was this a YouTuber? Was this a TikToker? Was this a TV show or an actor? Because we profile all these individuals. So we also know what was the most searched last month that has a YouTube ID. Right. Because since we do the profiling of folks, we know stuff about them. So we don't do brand or advertiser influencer marketing deals. That's not our business. We don't do deals on behalf of creators. We don't work with brands and agencies. Our data has been used primarily by our users. So when you go to famous birthdays, everyone's ranked based on our popularity, which is entirely driven by the searches I've mentioned.

11:16and a few other signals, but search is the main one. But we started using our data three, four years ago for talent agencies so they can see who to sign. Since we're staying in our lane, we don't want to rep talent. We want to be agnostic, but we license our ranking data so talent agencies can sign mainly creators. New and upcoming creators, yeah. We also license our data to social platforms because they want to see what's happening off platform. So that's been a good secondary business, even though our focus and passion is on the consumer on the website. So that brings us to Pixability. They are the largest advertiser on YouTube outside of YouTube itself because they work with agencies mainly to help come up with targeted lists of YouTube CIDs.

12:11You know, because when you go on YouTube to advertise, you get a set of targeting parameters. Pixability has their own technology and their own additional layer of data and targeting that they offer to agencies. And we really like them. We've worked with them for a few years. They've been around since 2008. So like us, we've been around since 2012. So they're focused on what they do. and they saw a lot of value in our velocity data. And velocity just looks at over the last week or month, who's rising the most. You know, if somebody like Mr. Beast, it could be ranked number one five years ago. And today he's Mr.

12:56Beast. You know, it's going to be expensive to advertise on this channel and a lot of competition. Plus he's already been around. We found that when someone's really rising, There's a lot of action and tension for them. It's a great time to transact with them. So they were interested in our velocity data to see over given time periods, which YouTube CIDs, creators, are rising the most on our site. And that's how the partnership is structured. And Evan, this seems to be getting pretty good results, right? That is the most exciting part is that we've been working with them for a few years. You know, we don't, we haven't done a partnership.

13:35We did the Alexa deal, which Two Filter announced, which was big because they're taking our data. So if you say Alexa, who is Charlie D 'Amelio, since she's not on Wikipedia or IMDB, at least at that time, it reads our bio. We're still working with Alexa. But most of our partnerships have been with the Talented and Caesar social platforms. So this was a different one. So we slowly dipped our feet into it. But we've been working with them for over a year. And they ran multiple campaigns. And the campaigns have worked. When they compare other CIDs in a campaign with the YouTube CIDs that we've identified as having high velocity in our rankings, the engagement was up 58 % and the conversion was up 31%.

14:21So that was really exciting to see. And that was their data they were sharing. We had nothing to do with that. All we did was share the list. So it's working.

14:33Josh Cohen:So what does it look like today? Are you essentially just powering the backend of Pixability? Like where does one go to sort of like access this partnership? It's in their platform. So if you're an agency or brand working with them, you know, whether or not you work on their self-serve dashboard or with like an account manager there, this is like a key targeting option that you're going to have when you come up with a list of YouTubers to market your campaign on. But the beauty of it is we don't, they're doing it. Like we're still staying in our lane. who were just an extra highly targeted agnostic data layer that their agencies and brands can leverage.

15:11Josh Cohen:I love this. I mean, I think data is power and you guys have a lot of it. And I love, I think that the beauty, I'm sure you get a lot of, there's a lot of ideas about how you guys can expand, but I think the beauty of staying in your lane is you can do these really interesting partnerships and people feel like you are this neutral sort of party that just has this data. How can we sort of access it, capitalize on it and build businesses, brands, et cetera, on it? So I love that. The other point is we love doing what we've always focused on, the consumer website. You know, so I think the good thing about this partnership is the stronger our website is and our app also, our iOS and Android app is growing, just the more stronger our data will be.

15:50So we can focus on, you know, the core.

15:54Josh Cohen:Awesome. Thank you, Evan. Thank you for coming on and giving us the details. Very excited to see how this shapes out and what results, what comes from it. Where can people find you? Where can people find you? Where they can find me on this podcast every once a year. No, on LinkedIn. I announced this partnership on LinkedIn. And yeah, I'm a big fan of the podcast. So keep doing what you're doing. Thank you. Yeah, go to Pam's Birthdays. Go to Pixability. Check it out. Check Evan out on LinkedIn. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. Thanks, Evan. Before we get to our awesome interview with Jonathan Katzmosis, Moses, I want to talk about measuring television, Josh.

16:32Josh Cohen:So obviously we're all aware of the Nielsen sort of rating system that's been around forever. But there's really been like sort of a dearth in the opportunity to measure kind of where YouTube traffic is coming from specifically on TV screens. And as we know, the fastest growing surface for YouTube is the connected TV devices. And so a company called Barb is creating human panels by reading router meters installed in select households. Once those numbers are collected, they go through this client portal and borrow Barb's website, creating a snapshot of typical viewership on a program or a channel receives over a set period.

17:07Josh Cohen:So basically, they can draw broad conclusions over and overall viewership trends around connected TVs. Josh, do you want to talk about this a little bit? Yeah. So I think, Lauren, to be clear, this seems incredibly boring on the surface. But I do think it's really fascinating and interesting and shows you a little bit of slice of what the future is going to look like. First off, this is one of my big pet peeves in the industry, is when people compare YouTube views to Nielsen ratings. It's not apples to apples. It's not apples to oranges. It's like apples to shoelaces or something. They just don't match up.

17:41And they don't match up because Nielsen, which is a 102-year-old company, established these kind of rules, these guidelines, these metrics for television 60, 70, 80 years ago. And there's so much inertia within that industry because they were the dominant player for so long. And television was this dominant entertainment platform for so long that this really got ingrained into all the advertisers and marketers and other types of people and companies that really rely on these ratings to inform how shows are doing, whether shows get picked up again or not, whether they get canceled, and most importantly, who's going to spend money on them and how much money should they spend.

18:20What I want to read to you is a quote from a Hollywood Reporter article that says, TV Longview, a guide to the ever-expanding world of ratings data. And in this article, they have a bunch of different definitions for a bunch of different types of television rating kind of idiosyncrasies and metrics. And for total viewers, this is what it says.

18:54I love this definition because to me, it is not self-explanatory at all. If you were going to ask me what total viewers means, I would say it's the total amount of people watching the video, not the average number of people watching a program in any given minute while it airs. Total viewers for Nielsen is not total view counts for a YouTube video. Total viewers for Nielsen is more akin to the average concurrent viewership of any given YouTube channel. So if you want to talk about total views in a television show, according to Nielsen, that number would be dramatically higher. Probably an order of magnitude or so higher than the actual total viewers number that they're reporting.

19:36Are you following this? No. Let me try one more time. So total YouTube views on a YouTube video makes sense, right? It's a total number of people, total number of times that video has been watched. Yes. Total viewers on a television program, according to Nielsen, is not the total amount of viewers this program had. It is the average number of people watching a program in any given minute while it airs. Right. Which doesn't make sense in our current vocabulary of how we think about viewership.

20:08Josh Cohen:I mean, yes and no. I mean, people, by the way, a view, but you could also say the thing that is the big, the sort of question behind the question here is that there's not one universal definition of a view. Right. And so every platform has its own definition. It's like, oh, somebody that watches a video for one second, somebody that watches a video for two seconds, because that's how platforms don't do this. The total viewership could be way less than total. Somebody that watches a view to a show to its completion. So in a certain sense, that's where you could sort of make the argument for apples to apples, where they're taking one, would you say, minute of a show.

20:43Josh Cohen:And platforms are taking one to three seconds of a show calling it a view. Nielsen's calling that minute of view. And so that's where you could see overlap. Lauren, I totally hear you, but I don't think that's what's going on here. A more relevant metric for today would be average concurrent viewers. Like if you watch Twitch streams, you're very familiar with this. There's peak concurrent viewers. That means the most amount of people that turned into the stream at any given time was this number. You had the most amount of people watching the stream at this time concurrently. So that's your peak concurrent viewers.

21:17Your average concurrent viewers are the total number of viewers you got averaged out through the entirety of the program. That would be more akin to this Nielsen's rating of total viewers. In any case, I'll come up with a better analogy in a future episode. We're all waiting for it. But what I think is so cool about this BARB initiative, BARB, by the way, stands for Broadcasters Audience Research Board. It's a nonprofit organization in the UK that measures television audiences, is that because of YouTube's prevalence now on TV screens, it can actually compare YouTube channels and videos to actual television shows.

21:56So this just increasing domination of YouTube on televisions has now created this environment where these ratings companies can actually look at them side by side with the same kinds of metrics that they have been looking at television shows with for the past several decades. I think this, more than anything, is going to be what unlocks those big television budgets and just turns on this potentially, hopefully for YouTube and the creator economy's sake, this kind of like faucet of media dollars that can flow into YouTube at a much higher rate than it was before, because this is now actually apples to apples.

22:40Josh Cohen:Oh, my God. We got through it, guys. Let's see what happens. Okay. What have you all been waiting for? Let's get into our interview with Jonathan Katz-Moses, who recently took a$2 million investment from Slow Ventures. So Ventures, their mandate based on conversations that Josh and I both had with folks working there is to find creators who have businesses in addition to or alongside very sort of big creator YouTube following. And then the goal is to use that sort of platform of video to kind of grow their business. And Jonathan Katzmosis sort of fits squarely in that thesis. And it's really exciting to hear kind of how we got there, how we decided that Slow was the right partner for him and what he's going to do with the capital.

23:26Josh Cohen:Jonathan Katzmosis, thank you so much for being on Creator Upload. We're very excited that you're here. Josh, Lauren, thank you so much for having me. We're going to dive right into it. This is a very exciting announcement, your partnership with Slow. I think my number one question for you is how did you know that Slow was the right partner for you? So you've obviously created this big YouTube presence, a business. You placed a ton of bets on yourself. Did you know that financing was something that you always kind of thought you would do? And then once you realized you would do it, how did you know that Slow was sort of the right partner?

23:57Yeah, absolutely. I think that we had been looking for funding for a long time. It was very clear to me. I think one of my superpowers is seeing the future. And when you grow it two to three times X a year, you just operational capital when you're bootstrapping is going to become a problem. You can outgrow your funds really quickly and it can kill you.

24:18Josh Cohen:And so that essentially means like you were getting a ton of orders. But in order to fulfill those orders, you need money to fulfill it before the money comes in that people have paid for it. And where are you going to get that money? Is that a good way to put it? No, I think it's a part of me. It's more let's say I launch a product and it sells out. I have ordered 10 ,000 units. We do a million dollars. Yeah. I then have 5 ,000 interested parties plus, you know, we're getting traffic every day. So I want to buy 20 ,000 units now. Yeah. So I've taken every dollar I've made on that product and I've now had to invest it in more product plus more operational capital from the funds of other products.