AI, Intimacy & the Future of Fan Culture. With Harry Fitzgerald, Co-Founder of Fanvue ($100M Creator Platform)

0:06How do we enable creators to make the most money in the least time possible while connecting with their fans.

0:14Welcome to Curious Customer, the consumer podcast. This show is for anyone curious about the world of consumer. From insights, trends, companies, brands and design, we'll uncover the hidden stories from the people at the forefront of consumer industries. The show has a wide range of guests, from marketing leaders to startup founders. So whether you're in the world of brand building or the startup ecosystem, or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. my name is matt i hope you enjoy the show harry thanks so much for coming and joining the show today really i really appreciate your time so you are co-founder and coo of fan view and before that you were at cage warriors you've got a marketing background and fan view is in the creative economy enabling creators to to connect with their fans you've got a whole range of different tooling to help them run their businesses more seamlessly and you enable fans on the other side to deeply interact and engage with the creators that they want to.

1:14And I've pulled some public stats to save you the embarrassment having to talk about any of that stuff now, but you've got over 150 ,000 creators on the platform. You crossed 70 million in annual recurring revenue and various forecasts have you pushing way through 100 million just to give folks listening a sense of scale. And just to start with. I'd love if you can give a bit of a primer and a bit of a history on the creator economy. And the way I think about it very rudimentary is in two phases. First, you had the one-to-many through Instagram. It was quite brand-led. And then you had the likes of OnlyFans come in.

1:49You had one-to-one. You had private messaging. Where are we today in terms of the creator economy and where do you sit within that? Yeah. I mean, broadly speaking, as you said, you've had one-to-many And the ways that creators have been monetizing have been, the way that we like to phrase it is largely like audience dilutive. Their brand deals, their ad revenue, their maybe merchandising, but that's a smaller percentage of how creators are making money. But they're essentially brands coming to them and saying, hey, sell to your audience. And creators make decent money doing that. As we know, it's a colossal market, but they are diluting the connection that they have with their audience in doing so.

2:27where we come in and where we see things moving more and more like you mentioned only fans like patreon obviously another one sub stack there's a bunch of these products that or platforms that are there enabling creators to connect directly with their fans but still only two percent of the overall creator economy have any form of subscription like direct fan monetization so a colossal amount is still coming from ad revenue essentially and you see it across the board it's not just in the creator economy look at every entertainment economy you've got the likes of Netflix coming in and changing the way that the TV is done.

2:59I think this is just another way that has happened with creators where they're moving away from ads and selling to their audience and actually connection becomes the currency. And we pretty strongly believe in that as a rule in that fans don't want to be sold to. They want to connect with the influencer or their favorite athlete, musician, whoever it may be. Connection is what they're after and essentially their audience totally to pay for that so where we sit in the space is enabling creators to earn more money from their fans like faster than anywhere else more efficiently than anywhere else and it's our firm belief that the connection with the creator is what fans believe it most or want most as opposed to ads and necessarily more content and can you rewind me back to 2021 2020 when the business started was that the original thesis and the original insight and in order to get there you actually had to have these technological changes in AI for example it was very difficult for a creator to actually scale themselves and have those one-to-one interactions back in 2020 but that's becoming more possible now so maybe you can just break that down and what the core insight was when you first launched the business to what the insight might have evolved into today yeah absolutely I mean I guess there's two parts to that one if we were to sit back and say oh this is we knew exactly this track that we were going on and ai creators were going to be a big thing and ai was going to enable creators to do xyz back in 2020 we could see this tech coming but i'd be lying if i said we knew exactly how it would look but i think the reality was we knew that the tools that were on the market for creators looking to monetize directly with their fans were subpar if you look to youtube as an example the tooling and And the data and the platform that creators that are using YouTube have is phenomenal.

4:51And then you look at these direct-to-fan models and the platforms that are available and the resources that are there for creators. And they're just not up to standard. So we looked at that as an opportunity for somebody to come in here and do this much better. But with the thesis that still nobody has really cracked the mainstream market for direct-to-fan monetization. And we believe that we're going to be the ones to do that. and we're already showing the evidence of that. And I mean, the way that I compare it internally is when we talk about this is Reed Hastings, when he started Netflix, knew that direct-to-customer streaming was going to be the room, but the tech wasn't ready and neither was the market.

5:30So they started the DVD-by-mail business with the view that over time, they would build to and always be the forefront of this space. And that's what they did. And it took them 10, 15 years for that market to become something that was viable. I believe that this is going to be less than 18 months. So to be successful in the early days, you had to start capturing the supply, right? You had to start attracting all these different types of content creators. How have you done that? How were you different? They had various different options to choose from. And just to give a bit of an understanding, what types of content are your creators making?

6:04Can you try and break that down into any segments that you might have internally? To be very transparent, we went after the largest market, which was the not safe for work market, if you will. We didn't have the resources to go from the zero to one of building all the functionality. But what we did have was a personal touch and the care that didn't seem to exist anywhere else in the market. And by that, like actually showing creators that we care about them and offering support and create success function, for example, that works directly with creators on everything from helping them with personal issues all the way down to specific things around their accounts and how they can grow them and how they can grow on social media and whatnot.

6:43And I think it was really, it was quite mind-blowing actually when you looked at the size of the market and how much money was being made. You look at these other platforms and you have to email and you might get a response in 14 days if you're lucky about a particular query. Even now to this day at the scale that we're at, you reach out to us on live chat support and one of our internal team members will reply within a minute and a half. That's something we are committed to maintaining the whole way through. So really, initially, our differentiation was in the service that we offered and just showing creators that we cared.

7:14And that was largely towards the not-safe-for-work market, if you will. And again, though, still, it's the connection that people are paying for. It always comes back to that. Even with the not-safe-for-work stuff, it's the connection that people pay for. And then as that time's gone on, we've innovated much more on the product. We've got more resources. We have a bunch of AI functionality that enables creators to connect with their fans at scale, which has then enabled more mainstream, say, to work readers to come on board. So we've got musicians, athletes, info, people in the info space coming on board and using our tooling to connect with their fans.

7:47Can you give an example of some of this tooling? Are you talking mainly about chat functionality? Yeah, so I suppose right now, yes, the chat functionality is the big one, just because, as I mentioned, the connection part is such a big piece that the more that we could do to enable chat at scale, the better. So if you're a really big YouTuber, for example, and you want to drive your followers over now, realistically, to make good money without actually ripping off your fans, you have to chat with a lot of them at the same time. And that's just not feasible if you're having to do that all you manually.

8:17So to make that possible, we've built the AI chat functionality where you feed it all the information about you. It has all the context. Now, there's lots of enhancements coming. We're going to be one at the moment. And then the AI chats on your behalf. We've got AI voice notes. So again, you train it off of your voice and then it has a conversation with the fan via voice notes as if it was you. We've got voice calls in beta at the moment. So someone will be able to have a thought conversation phone call with you and then you can see how that evolves to video calls and whatnot. But again, we're going very heavily on that kind of connection piece.

8:51Fascinating, these AI calls. What are you seeing in terms of the authenticity piece? piece are you seeing that the fans or the other end of that call is there any change in behavior when they learn that it's in ai talking to them rather than the actual content creator directly are they ambivalent right it's still got the same voice it's the same tone of voice do they really care yeah all signs pointed they don't seem to care that much it's completely transparent everyone knows that they're speaking to an ai version of the individual and fan spending is up pretty consistently engagement is high you only need to look at a lot of these other platforms where a character ai where it's not even the other the individual hasn't the creator themselves hasn't signed up and said yes train it off of my data it's just they've just gone and done it and the engagement is still crazy high on those so it's more authentic than that where the creator themselves is feeding in the data and saying this is me this is my ai that you can come and have a conversation with i think our stance is as long as it's transparent then it's authentic in that sense I'd love to say what kind of trends are you seeing in the underlying chats what are people talking about and maybe if you break it down between the not safe for work type chats is that generally quite sexual and then the safe for work chats with the band that you follow and love what are people talking about there honestly I think you can bucket it pretty similarly obviously there's a layer of intimacy that comes with the not safe for work stuff where it goes that that kind of step further but generally speaking and I know I've said it a hundred times already it's the connection bit so someone wants to talk to them about their day they want to problem solve with them they want to talk to them about the events that they've got going on throughout the week it's very it's just very conversational and i think to be honest like a lot of us can probably compare i don't know about you matt but i use chat gpt all of the time and i'm speaking to the voice all the time it has so much context on me and the things that i'm working on and how i like to solve problems and whatnot not.

10:49And I have that conversation with Chattopsy all the time. And it doesn't feel unnatural. It doesn't feel unauthentic because I know what it is. But now imagine you do that, but it's your favorite life coach on the other side, or it's your favorite athlete on the other side, or it's your favorite fitness influencer and you're in the gym. It's that kind of thing where you're just having conversation, you're problem solving, you're talking about things that are coming up throughout the day, but it's the person that you admire on the other side talking back. Yeah, sort of in the companionship space.

11:17Are you seeing any things where it overflows into real life? Say you follow a sports star and you're talking to the world fan and you develop probably over time pretty intimate, very close level of friendship, depending on how people quantify that. Are you seeing that actually the content creators in real life might be struggling to stay on top of the scale that they're seeing in a digital environment and seeing that overflow into their physical life? Like all of a sudden the fan queues coming to get an autograph get insanely long and people start claiming that they've spoken about very intimate things, you know, the night before.

11:48Like how are you seeing that play out in the digital physical crossover? Yeah, it's interesting. To be honest, we haven't seen that is the short answer. But maybe that's because it's still pretty early. And although our numbers are big in the grand scheme of things and the whole creator economy, they're not that big yet. And I think these are all significant obstacles that we're going to have to figure our way around. And you've got, broadly speaking, two types of creator on the supply side. You have a human creator that's enhanced with your AI tooling. And you also have completely AI creators as well who are synthetic through and through from the images, the voice, et cetera, the connection.

12:25Can you talk a little bit about that? When did you launch pure AI synthetic characters and how's that going? It must be almost two years ago now when the first AI creators started becoming a thing and joining FanView. And again, this goes back to the Blue Ocean strategy of we were competing in a market where there were lots of other platforms available for creators to go to. we saw as ai became a more prominent technology the masses were using these kind of ai avatars propping up and gaining a following and then you look in their comments on instagram and there are people interacting with these ai avatars in exactly the same way as they would with a quote-unquote real influencer and you know what's different about this to what a real influencer is surely people will also want to speak to them so we just had our team reach out I had to speak to a couple of them and sign them onto FanView.

13:15And again, they were running the accounts exactly the same as they would if they were a real creator. There was no fundamental difference there. And it was all disclosed. It is an AI creator. And we saw, frankly, a better performance from these accounts than a lot of our real creators that we have. So it was a little bit of a light bulb moment for us. It makes sense that moving forwards, there's going to be a lot more of these AI avatars, AI influencers. So you speak to a lot of people and they want to be creators. They want to put themselves out there, but they don't necessarily have the confidence to do so.

13:46This AI is enabling them to do that, but it's not their face. We work with Aitana. She's the kind of pink haired AI influencer. She's one of the first ones to really blow up. And we work very closely with her and her team. And these are incredible, talented artists that are building this person's story and their personality and the way that they look. and the things that they like. And they really are artists making these individuals. And she's just launched a gaming account, for example. So she sits, she again, sits streaming and playing Fortnite and posts all those videos on socials. She's getting really strong engagement, which drives people back to FanView and to monetize it directly on FanView there.

14:28So yeah, it's a very interesting trend. And I think it's only something that's still come way more prominent. Just want to pick up on you mentioning that the AI content creators have better performance. And I get it from a business perspective, because for human creators, you give them roughly 80 % of the revenue that they generate through subscriptions, there might be other parts of the business model, we'll get into that. And the margins with an AI content creator will be incredibly high. And we'd also love to talk about that in a minute. But how are you actually balancing the performance and what metrics you care about in terms of, sure, they might be more revenue generative, but actually is the end user the fan are they getting that level of engagement and companionship and trust whatever matters most to them like how do you balance those two different parts of performance yeah to be honest i think that all ladders up to fan retention is what we look at mostly what's the average revenue per user of a fan interacting with this account now if they're staying for a long period of time you can bet that they're getting what they desire from the account right and so we focus very much on that kind of fan retention metric.

15:37Just on your point around margins, we run those accounts exactly the same. So it's 80-20, the same as every other creator. So from a fan view perspective, AI creators from a business model standpoint are the same as real creators. Got it. Totally clear. Okay. And do you have any guardrails in place as to how you can ensure that the connection is healthy? And that can both be in terms of the type of content that the either the human enhanced creator or the AI one is delivering to the end fan, but also in terms of trying to make sure that they don't create unhealthy, maybe addictive behaviors where the AI becomes so smart, understands your personality so deeply that actually you can be on the app, on FanView, engaging with your creator all day, every day, which is probably not a good thing.

16:20Some of the lessons that maybe we've learned from social that actually in hindsight, I think a lot of the world would have done things a little bit differently. How do you make sure that we don't fall into that trap again. I think it does all come back to that fan satisfaction, fan retention standpoint. Now, a good example is say a candy crush, for example, right? Retention is their metric, but they're trying to get people to keep coming back and playing the game. However, they also know that if you give lives that make people have a long break, they have to leave, retention expands a lot longer.

16:49So for us, it's the relationship needs to feel authentic. So it needs to be, the person needs to be saying, I'm going off to the gym now, I'll chat to you later. and it creates that separation point that then there's the intrigue and the novelty that keeps the person wanting to come back so it's for us it's way less about how do we keep this person on this message 24 7 it's and it's more how do we keep this sustained over a long period of time yeah okay can we talk about the fans what is the typical demographic it really does depend on the niche of creator that we're talking about and obviously you go to not safe for work we're talking largely male.

17:22If you go towards the athlete training info, you see a vastly different audience depending on the creator themselves. If you've got an info creator who's creating fitness instructionals on YouTube, for example, if their audience is 80-20 female on YouTube, you'll see that translate over to FanDue. So just continuing on the fan side then, I'd just love to hear, are there any stories that you can share in terms of just these amazing connections that people have made where they come back to you and they say, actually, thank you for enabling this? Yeah. So we've got a kind of sub brand called the World AI Creators Awards.

18:01And it's a vessel that enables us to acknowledge what people are doing in the creator space using AI. The first one that we ran was like an AI Influencer Award. So we judged it on the realness, the social engagement, and the connection that they had with their fans. We ran that last year. It went really viral. It was a very successful campaign for us. This year, we've won one called the Future Sound Awards, which was people that are using AI in music. What we were looking for was an individual who had musical talent and was using AI to leverage that and enable them to do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

18:39and one of the people that entered was a guy called lucas who when he was 17 and suffered a brain hemorrhage and it left him unable to walk he can't speak particularly well and as a result he said this himself he's felt helpless along along the way and he turned to music and he would always write his own music but then unable to turn that into what he would call a proper artistic song now through ai and the tooling that's available now he's been able to make that music into successful tracks and entered our awards. He would not have been able to do that pre-AI. It's an interesting one. It's making me think about where the future goes and what something like FanView and AI enables for.

19:23And is the vision that you see one where actually there becomes concentration from a fan perspective into fewer and fewer creators because those creators are now able to go really deep with tens of thousands or maybe one day millions of individual fans? Or do you actually see the distribution grow where more people can become content creators and therefore people can find really niche, very personal experiences with creators through better search interfaces? You can actually gravitate towards those people. How are you seeing that part of it evolve? Slightly both. So in the future, and when we're talking about the future and how quickly these things are moving, I don't think we're talking very long.

20:01There will be largely kind of discovery platforms, your likes of Instagram, TikTok, ads, where people go to find something new then there'll be consumption platforms and connection platforms now you could argue youtube is both because they've got a phenomenal discovery mechanism but a really good consumption mechanism as well but i think actually like look at consumer behavior and even consumer sentiment people are pretty frustrated by the amount that the big social platforms are trying to draw their attention away from the things that they care about the amount of your feed that isn't the things that you follow the things that you care about is pretty prominent.

20:37Like I said, we're already seeing it on Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, us. You're moving people away from these platforms where they're trying to push new things in front of you and it's becoming sole focus. I'm going to connect with this person. I'm going to consume this person's content and that's what I'm doing on this set platform. Now, to your point, the introduction of AI enables more people to become creators. So inevitably, there's going to be a massive influx in the number of people that do become creators, the connection will become much deeper between a fan and a creator. And where does it go in terms of different platforms?

21:10So let's, I want to hear your 10 year view. What does FanView look like in 10 years? And in that moment, do people also have a Patreon subscription? Do they also have only plans? Or does everybody start coming to FanView because you become the one platform that services everything? If we do fast forward a theoretical 10 years, our kind of vision is that we're enabling creators to do all the bits that they love in their workflow and outsource all the things that they don't to an AI. And FanView enables them to do that and monetize in the most efficient way possible. Now, we just fundamentally believe that all of the reasons that mainstream, safe for work, whatever it may be, creators aren't doing direct fan monetization right now is because they don't have the time and the tools at their disposal to do so.

21:56So whoever solves that problem and arms those creators with the tools to be able to do the direct-to-fan stuff at scale will capture an obscene amount of the market. Now, you said in 10 years' time, will creators have a patron and only fans and us? Only 2 % of the creator economy have a subscription platform right now anyway. Our goal is solving that problem. How do we enable creators to make the most money in the least time possible while connecting with their fans? And if we do that, we believe we'll capture most of the creator economy. Harry, in that case, I'm going to let you get back to building, but there's one more question given that we are a consumer podcast i'd love to hear if there's a service or an artist or a band or anything that it might be that you're loving at the moment that you want to shout out there's one straight off the bat is an app called yukka y-u-k-a you scan food and cosmetic products and it tells you all of the additives that have been put in and all the things you think are healthy you scan and you realize i'm not and it's been a bit of a game changer for me over the last few weeks and i've been shouting dead one about it what shocked you what have you scanned recently that you realize is really unhealthy oat milk was a big one not oat milk as a whole but there's one i'm not going to shout out the brand name but it was one that really pushes itself as being like wholly organic like really good for you you scan it and there's nine different critical additives in it so yeah i couldn't recommend that one enough it's completely free as well it's so good there you have it good man thanks so much harry really appreciate your time thanks for coming on the show appreciate it man thank you very much and that's it folks Thanks so much for listening.

23:28As mentioned, please do provide any feedback or ideas of future guests via the website curiouscustomer.co. And please do click subscribe if you did like it, because it really helps improve visibility in the algorithm and makes the podcast more discoverable amongst a sea of great content. So that one click does really help. My name's Matt. I hope you enjoyed the show.

23:56Thank you.