E330: EuropeanKid: The $32B Future of Influencer Marketing

0:00I charge$30 ,000 to$50 ,000 for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money and being like, how do we distribute this to hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's the shift that I'm betting on in the market. Beats by Dre, Skims by Kim Kardashian, that they started a new model that made them successful. What was that model? even though these are like very celebrity-oriented brands with like one face, is that they're actually activating so many different nano micro creators. Somewhere around a decade ago, the business world started to take media seriously.

0:37You had Mr. Beast, you had George Clooney with his brands, you had The Rock. You're now taking this attention, the 2 billion people, and transferring it into a business. Tell me about what you're building. Obviously, those are great case studies of success stories. But I've seen there's so many stories of like failed celebrity brands. But it's yeah, like when you have distribution, it's everything in business. And for me, the most important thing was what I learned was how to really do influencer marketing. And for me, I noticed that like I'm exceptionally good at it. So I wanted to also build in that space because like from that experience, I noticed that like.

1:18also my background is i've always been very entrepreneurial and for me like being able to innovate in this area was i've always wanted to create startups so for me i was like compelled to do a startup next in that space and that's kind of what pushed me to this next chapter just an elevator pitch what is story time it's a marketplace that allows creators to instantly connect with different businesses i want to say local businesses but we work with you know even huge chains now, but it's supposed to be a very easy way to automate the gifting going on. So especially with like the micro giftings, like a cup of coffee, a workout class, you know, a nail salon studio, they can instantly put offers and like reach hyper local creators to come in and redeem offers in exchange for posting content.

2:06You're not focused on a large influencers, you're focused on these micro influencers. Tell me about these micro influencers. Who are they? and why are they such a lucrative part of the market? My philosophy with Storytime is that the future of influencer marketing is all nano micro. Brands want to work with people that love their brands, right? If you can activate at scale hundreds and thousands of small people, it's a lot more effective as one big creator. And right now what you're looking at, these big brands like Casamigos, Kardashians, you know, they spend a lot of money on like one specific influencer.

2:41I don't think that's going to be the future of influencer marketing. Tell me about a specific influencer and a specific business on your platform and how does story time help them? Imagine Joe and the Juice, right? They want to gift out a bunch of products. The most effective person that Joe and the Juice wants to target are hyper local creators that are going to be able to go in and redeem an offer. I like, you know, in exchange for posting a very simple story. So we're going to be able to activate thousands of creators that have a very relevant reach to Joe and the Juice. But imagine not even Joan the Juice, like Devolution, which is a coffee shop only in New York City.

3:16We're very focused on the data behind activating specific locations from the influencers that are going to help target the business. You have a fashion influencer. She might be 25 years old, has 10 ,000 to 50 ,000 followers. and Joan the Juice wants to reach her audience and they give her a$25 gift to basically make a simple post. So she's getting a free gift for just a story, a brand that she probably wants to share anyways. And Joan the Juice is getting access to her network and being able to distribute to her followers. It's almost like Joan the Juice can instantly kind of use our platform to just reach thousands of creators locally to push certain campaigns that are like a lot more effective as running meta ads or any other type of like pushing right because it's it's supposed to be organically done this is a network effect business of sorts kind of like facebook uber where you have a supply side and the demand side yeah how are you able to get past the chicken egg problem that plagues every single network effect business having my experience as a creator just gives me so much more legitimacy to be going into this space.

4:33And I think like, cause I saw it firsthand as an issue that I had. And for me, that was one of the most important parts of like, when I approached, when I approached the product with my co-founder, you know, very much like considering, okay, what is the issue that I'm facing? Because I know that this issue is being faced by all types of creators. And then really focusing on how do I leverage my network and the ability to connect. I think I'm very good at connecting with other amazing founders. And my biggest objective was getting feedback from all the different founders of that big chains like for instance the founder of sweetgreen founder of oakberry um the founder of kaba and understanding is the market like what's what's the issue that they're having with activating creators and how can i help i've known you since you first started the company and every month you're coming to me with a newer version with a better improved version that's downstream of this customer feedback sitting down talking to your customers just incessantly improving the product.

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6:48that context turns draw signal into conviction the first to see wins the rest follow check it out for yourself at alpha-sense.com slash how i invest so interesting because when i look at companies i think about what is their unfair advantage and network effect businesses are so hard to build you are able to bridge that zero to one because they look up to you you have millions of followers they might have 10 000 followers you're basically what they want to be when they grow up. And because of that, you're able to outreach to them and kind of build this flywheel. Everything that's come from social media, which to me to this day is honestly still kind of quite mind boggling, has like allowed me so much in business.

7:28And that's why I always implore people like start building a social following as soon as you can. Like if you're comfortable taking doing content, you should be doing content because it will it will help you regardless in what you're doing. Were you conscious of doing the first kind of videos? how did you overcome that fear? I've always loved acting. So for me, it's like come naturally to do like, you know, mimic like other people may do funny accents. Like this was always like my personality growing up. So I never had an issue like being in front of camera. Honestly, I view it as fun. Like I enjoy mocking my friends.

7:59I think we all do it and I enjoy making videos about it. So for me, like it came natural. Today, the business model is kind of intuitive. You charge to the businesses, to give them influencers, to give them access. Have you thought about this five, 10 years from now? What could story time be in the future? What story time is, it's like a new type of currency, right? The idea is that every day we can influence our friends. You know, you could tell your friend about a coffee shop that you went to. You can tell them about a movie that you went to that you loved, and it will be more honest than ever.

8:35For me, it's about being able to connect very just people that love brands to be able to be wanting to get rewarded about it. So Storytime is a currency for it's the idea is it's not just like influencers. I don't like the idea of people thinking it's influencers with a hundred thousand dollars. We're very much redefining by focusing on like how real is this person? A lot of the best creators that are on Storytime, they're not influencers full time. They work here in finance jobs. And the truth is those are the most effective people. The girl has 3 ,000 followers, but if she goes out for lunch and she says, I go to Sweetgreen every day, Sweetgreen should be like, hey, we love that you go to Sweetgreen.

9:13You should be able to get rewarded for that. So the goal is to create it as a currency that can be implemented in so many different businesses. Right? And the way that like from, again, from what workout you're doing in the morning, I see you at Othership. You're a loyal follower. Like you're a loyal customer of Othership. You should be rewarded for wanting to talk about other ship on your socials, right? Because it becomes natural and you would want a free session in exchange. So that's the goal of Storytime. So you're really plugging into this authentic desire and authentic connection to the brand.

9:47I think that's something that's really missing in this market is you have from one side, you have these advertisements, highly curated, highly produced Super Bowl ads. On the other side, you have just influencers selling something that they have no connection with. And here you found this niche where it's brands and companies and stores that influencers would naturally want to go to. Now they're just being compensated for. The reality is like once you reach a certain number of followers, like you're it is harder to know that you're not a sellout because it's inevitable. You're going to get crazy prices to post about things.

10:21People are getting tired of celebrities kind of pushing products. It feels less organic and authentic. And I think it's just a matter of time before like there's a big shift in the market of, you know, again, instead of like charging, I charge 30 to$50 ,000 for a post, which I think is obscene. But taking that money that and being like, how do we distribute this to like hundreds and thousands of smaller creators that love our brands? That's what the that's the shift that I'm I'm betting on in the market. here. I interviewed our mutual friend Scott Vandenberg from Hot Start, and he has this fund that invests only in celebrity brands.

10:56And he did a deep dive into the space and he figured out that most celebrity brands actually fail. And the ones that succeed, there's one thing in common, they're authentic to the brand. So you've literally have had some celebrities that don't drink or have gone sober selling vodka brands or tequila brands, and those invariably fail the the problem is that most people only remember the successes availability heuristics so you only remember the things that are big you don't remember the 99 that failed so i think there's this now trend to create i guess fit between the celebrity and the brand which is why i love story time so much you are not only a consumer of the brand but it's it's core to who you are and what you do on your database absolutely last time we chatted you were telling me about beats by dre skims by kim kardashian that they started a new model that made me them successful what was that model what they're honestly doing did a great job of even though these are like very celebrity oriented brands with like one face is that they're actually activating so many different macro nano micro creators like Rhodes was I think they spent so much money on gifting product to creators so it's ironic but they're actually they did it at a very incredible level already so I think which proves it's it's more than just having one prominent face of the brand like Beats with Dr.

12:24Dre they sent out their beats to I think every single athlete like every top particular athlete was wearing beats. That was all intentional. So beats by Dre, skims by Kim Kardashian. That was the first test case of this nano-influencer. You're taking it to the next level and productizing it. What is story time disrupting? Who would have traditionally done this? Or is this a completely new activity? Right now, it's being done in the most manual, inefficient way like from agencies to you know either like the the the owner of a restaurant or trying to hire social media people to like help them with their brand because right now like everyone you go out everyone's like flocking to understand how do we do influencer marketing you have companies like blackstone that created a tiktok this is like unseen every single business is like we need to consider influencer marketing it's the truth because if you're not you're not keeping up with the trends.

13:20So you have all these people trying to, you know, hire positions, work with agencies. And we're just here to help the connectivity by being able to create a campaign, leveraging some of the some AI to be able to create a company that's going to be best suiting for you. Or you all you have to do is say, this is what we want to gift out. These are the people that care and we're going to help you do it in the most efficient way possible. Like, that's it. You mentioned Blackstone. Jonathan Gray is now running around doing running videos. Everyone's trying to get to social and doing influencer mark i think a lot of people have cognitive dissonance and they love to do more influencer marketing they love to do more social but they're also afraid of losing control yeah with a super bowl you have this highly produced ad that they work on for a year how should brands think about scaling in a way that's safe to their brand it's a fine balance and i think for instance like i mean i loved ramps activation in the super bowl like they it was hilarious and it's bold right but i think that like i think being bold is it's obviously we see it like in more like tech tech and crypto you'll see more come to be bold than traditional like finance oriented and i completely understand why i'm pro controversial content because controversial you know obviously with like sprinkling controversial always as well And that's how you can actually go viral on social media.

14:46You need to be daring when you're doing content. If you're going to just do basic content, I think it's kind of redundant. A lot of people are doing it. So I always push businesses, be daring. People think about when they're on social media, they like and they share. They think that it's sort of like enjoying it. You have to really have very strong affinity. People do not give up their likes and shares for free. People really only share excellent content. content that takes risks, content that really took a lot of time and a lot of effort. People think that getting this like and the share is this easy task, but there's a very high hurdle for that.

15:22Exactly. Exactly. Some of the companies that have done it the best are obviously like Duolingo has an incredible like TikTok strategy where they were like, have you ever seen Duolingo's video? Yeah. Yeah. It's hilarious. Like people love it. And they are not afraid to make fun of themselves. And I think that's what's so great. Same with Ryanair. Ryanair is like a low fare airlines company from Ireland that like you never imagined could build a social media presence, but they did. Mention tech companies, crypto companies are more daring. Sometimes I think about this as founder led versus non-founder led.

15:59It's true. The founders are the ones that are willing to take risks. The founders are the ones that are willing to push things to their max. when you're working with brands and story time how much is founder-led brands how much an advantage of is that yeah you're absolutely right like when when a company's go through more like corporate structure like it's inevitable that it's it's harder to be daring because you have just all these different layers of like approvals they need to go by right before this interview we were talking about the evolution of story time you start out in the smb sector where it's either easier to penetrate.

16:34Now you're going into larger brands. Being able to create campaigns with AI in the most efficient ways possible for like being able to activate loyal customers. And we've been doing like an exceptional job with like some of these big chains, like Joe and the Juice and Oak Berry. And obviously our model is very scalable into different markets. So now we're going, we've been going into fitness, we've been going into retail, every kind of brick and mortar store can kind of leverage our platform to be able to help with our gifting um and yeah we're just obviously really cutting out a lot of unnecessary inefficiency because if you look at a huge company they have all these marketing people that are trying to manage manually all the gifting and connecting with creators and connecting with and we're doing it all i mean we're doing it completely autonomously and we've like we're doing over you know 600 different people 600 different collaborations a day minimum in New York City alone of people being able to get connected seamlessly to different brands to do that kind of scale required so much manual power and like and I think that's the power of kind of what we're building it you're really the tip of the spear of AI in media specifically in video tell me specifically how you use AI to produce high quality content with brands behind it we've used ai in a lot of different areas it's based off what the business is looking for if they're for instance like if a business comes on our platform says we want to push very specific wellness oriented creators and they can basically kind of we can just customize it based off what their specific needs are every customer is different but the point is that this kind of just allows it to be more seamless um yeah malcolm gladwell now, I think 20 years ago, I wrote this book, The Tipping Point, which talks about how ideas spread.

18:27They start with these mega influencers, then these nano influencers, and then society. When you work with a brand that's trying to get a beachhead within a new market, how does that work? And what's the lifeline of a brand becoming influential in a new market? The analogy of influencer marketing is like crypto. You have a lot of very legitimate people in crypto, and you have a lot very illegitimate people, like scammy. Crypto has a bad rep. Influencer marketing has a bad rep because a lot of influencers are charging more than they should be charging to businesses. And there isn't like a good amount of transparency going on with who is a good creator or not.

19:05So with me and Philip, my co-founder, we're, you know, coming from the background of influencer marketing, understanding how important it is to be vetting creators, understanding the breakdown of their audiences, which are so relevant, whether they should be qualifying for campaigns or not, as opposed to, oh my God, that creator has a million followers. They must be able to have a huge impact on that business. Absolutely not. There's no vetting process. It's futile. So that's what we're all about. It's about analyzing every single data point of a creator. A brand, let's say it's a 10 store chain in New York City.

19:39What kind of budget are we talking about for somebody that wants to target this part of the market let's think about before story time they imagine they want to activate people that's like just imagine like the thousands of different like either you know emails messages that they have to send to creators to be like hey like we're here in the city like come talk about us we want to work with you like soup it'd be so many hours of unnecessary they can come to us and we can create a campaign in less than five minutes that's going to be basically weighing every single little detail that's relevant to them on like how effective like specific like we have so many different data points to like really kind of align what is the most optimal campaign for this brand and then just put it on autopilot and or it's actively engaging a community of people that love their products posting it about it in the most efficient way as possible where they're just giving out their product as opposed to paying an agency thousands of dollars.

20:40I would say at around a price of$500 to$1 ,000 per month, right? Depending on how much - And then you get the data and then you could decide to scale. Yeah. Unless it's proven how it's ROI. We are 10 times cheaper than any other influencer marketing solution that's out there right now. story time is your first company you founded it you've scaled it now to solid scale what's been the thing that you most underestimated about being an entrepreneur the importance of just having a team that's like aligned on you know just being able to outsource like specific tasks and being able to really leverage like for instance like my time is best spent doing like content, doing specific meetings to engage like specific founders of big chains, as opposed to like, you know, trying to wrap my head around like technical and kind of being able to just delegate all the like forming a team that is able to like work on all the different.

21:44Is that hard to remove yourself from parts of the business and focus on the high leverage? Honestly, no. There was a time where I hate to say it, but I was editing a video for story time I would spend so many hours editing it. I'm like, this is just not effective. And so everything that you do, you have to be like, why is this the best use of my time? It's a paradox because on one hand, when you find somebody that could do the tasks better than you, it's at one time very freeing because, wow, now I don't have to spend all my time on this. It's also very humbling. It's like, what do I do? Exactly.

22:18If I'm not the one that does this, how do I do that? And then you have to reassess where is the high, what could I, Aris, aka European Kid, how do I leverage my time in order to grow the business versus how do I edit this video or how do I do this very specific task? Exactly. If you go back three years ago when you were just starting European Kid, before people knew who you were, what is one piece of advice you'd give a younger Aris that would have either helped accelerate story time in your social media career or helped you avoid constant mistakes? honestly just always be daring like i think like the only reason that i started european kid was purely because of a like a random you know moment where i'm like because of a daringness i was like why not why not just try things so with that like being like when when i see there's momentum picking up i've been being like so like pushing pushing non-stop and trying things i think that's like the most important thing like how long did it take before you had your first viral hit i remember starting around covid where i was like playing around with even having a tiktok account and then after yeah and then i would say around a year and uh i did the kind of the louis video and that obviously like that started the character a lot of people ask about motivation when somebody's made it it's actually pretty easy probably now to make videos you know millions people really watch it and take motivation but the hardest thing is zero to one before anyone's watching was that a hard part for you did you have a strategy to make it easier no strategy very um just kind of you know just posting trying to make it feel more like something that's fun and like not making it feel like a chore where it's like i need to post i need to post and i feel like a lot of the times now people are obsessively trying to post and because i think that you have to be creative i i didn't know a a rich french kid would be the one that takes off right i just was experimenting with different angles that's that's why experimentation is everything don't assume that you know it's going to go viral because you never know until you just try everything and sometimes even when it's working you don't quite know you you don't really know why it works.

24:41You have some theories and some factors, but you don't know exactly why it works. Exactly. Well, I love what you're doing. I'm proud to be an advisor to the company. It's only the second company I've advised in six years. The first one was Bitwise, which worked out quite well. What could I do for you and what would you like from our network? Just being able to get a constant of your advice is always useful to navigate through all the different kind of from raising capital to building a team. Obviously, you have a lot of... I have a great network, but you have a great network. Our networks are very different.

25:16I think it's... I have very few influencers and you have very few institutional investors. No, exactly. And I think that's where combining that... That's the ultimate success. It's actually... It's all a network play. I believe, obviously, you need to work hard, but the second thing is really taking... leveraging the network around you to get things done because that's how you're going to be about finding the right players on your team to fill the different holes where you might not have your strength. If you found this conversation valuable, please click follow how I invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.