#424 Why content creation might be the next frontier for clinical impact: Oscar Ferguson from Deaku

0:00Welcome to the Health Tech Podcast. Here we talk about everything healthcare and technology. and I'm your host James Someru. Hey everybody with me this week I have Oscar Ferguson co-founder CEO of Deku who is an ex-doctor and is now very much in the creator economy but trying I was going to say trying to help us all as if I'm a credible creator I don't know if I don't know if 19 ,000 linkedin followers counts as that and making the video i would definitely say so but 400 odd podcasts 400 odd podcasts yeah maybe maybe but that's a lot of content you did try and hard sell me on the platform earlier so i'm joking you didn't i did um you did a little bit but and it kind of worked i'm kind of intrigued so looking forward to getting into this man but um yeah how are you how are you crazy that we've not fully met or done this podcast before it is mad it is mad Honestly, I'm super excited to be here.

1:00Thank you so much for inviting me on. I will say actually that this podcast has a really big part to play in my story. Oh, really? A couple of years ago, yeah, like a couple of years ago when I was kind of starting my journey, where I was kind of peering out of the, away from the kind of traditional medical path, looking maybe towards like health tech. I started listening to this podcast and it played a really, really big part in my story which i'm sure i'll get into in a in a moment but yeah this feels like a circle moment very kindly to say and i'm glad i've got no idea who listens to this as you well know from creating content you have absolutely no idea who is behind the little pixels on a screen that say a number it's quite i love it like it's so nice when actually people get in touch so no i really appreciate you saying that man was that like was was there an episode or like a group of them or like i'm gonna push you now i'm like uh yeah so because i was looking just before we started chatting at my notes from that time because what i would do is just listen and write on my phone at the same time i was traveling at the time um the main one that i've written loads of notes from there's there's an llm one uh i think with aolas and then there's oh yeah the youtube health one yeah rob brisk oh yeah that really got me into like really understanding LLMs and obviously it's everything since then he was really quality guest that one um and the other the other really big one that actually really properly contributed to my kind of light bulb moment that sort of started this squiggly career path was the Vishal Varani one with about YouTube health um and obviously YouTube health is like a huge part of my life now so yeah major thanks i'll i'll i'll message him i'll tell him that you probably have done already but yeah that's awesome yeah i saw him on thursday i appreciate it yeah well listen it'd be good to know then like how how you got here because you're you're building a sass product for the creator economy to help creators do stuff organize their lives um and yes the more creative of us can certainly struggle with the organizational side of life or other things that because you know some people are so creative that you can't have everything in life and so we all need support with something or other so yeah it's really interesting we're starting to manage creators now through SOMEX and we've got yeah news coming out in that regard pretty soon so we um we're very much in this and i took a look at the platform i've yeah it's it's interesting it's really really interesting even to me as even to me as someone who yeah faux creator or whatever you call someone you keep saying that i think you need to back yourself a bit more james i probably do i don't know do you know what it is i actually this is quite an interesting point i think because because i shy away from short form so i don't do youtube shorts i don't do tiktok i've done a i've put a few videos on there and just sort of tested the water and tested our platforms and that kind of thing but i think i think the definition of creator or influencer is sort of synonymous with that short form content loads of views like all of that side of thing whereas like actually the reality the reality of it though i suppose particularly because we're connected now to so many of the clinical creators is that actually smaller audiences with really deliberate partnerships that get messages to a certain group of people is also making impact so perhaps that definition is changing or whether whether it's just something about me and my personal brand that i don't want influencer attached to it and i'm actually just rejecting it for that reason i don't know it's a pejorative at this point like to people like me to be fair a lot of the like clinician creators as they prefer to be known really don't like the term influence i think you're right there is a bit of a synonymous uh like people associate it with the kind of entertainment prank yeah like i want i want attention grabbing content maybe a bit clickbait but as you say that's that's absolutely not the case like creators you know smart creators who know how to you know deliver value to their target audience to achieve you know a very specific mission can do incredibly well with like a small amount of views it's not about um quantity often sometimes it is if you're like a you know you're looking for broad uh awareness from like a large kind of you know non-demographic specific audience but if you're like really niched down then you know a podcast like this provides such like high value to i guess you're a small like niche which is fantastic yeah definitely definitely and it's that storytelling piece isn't it i actually think it's easier with long form like this to pace your way through a conversation or just have a conversation if you're used to it or you do interviews or you're a good conversationalist at a party you might be all right at this type of thing because you can feel your way through a chat and it's not really a big deal actually the skill of doing that storytelling piece in short form i really respect it i genuinely really really really respect it because there's that thing isn't there of like oh sorry so my speech is 10 minutes long because i didn't have time to make it any shorter it's true like it's easy to do the long thing it's actually much harder to to get all the information across or to get enough of it that makes the impact and you know find the needle in the haystack and get rid of all that hay you know that's a really that's a really tough job to get a video down to 15 30 seconds but i digress already i know we're going to talk about a lot of this stuff because this is very much i have so much to say just on that point go on then let's finish this and then i'll get your backgrounds people know who the hell you are at this point they've got no idea yeah who is this guy who's just can't stop talking about content strategy uh quit his job in medicine to just talk about it all day um i will say like on long form actually like a theme that's kind of come up with a lot of like creators and clients that we've worked with recently is about like the value of long form versus short form obviously short form is fantastic for like broad awareness using that you know discovery algorithm to find lots of new people but the value of long form you know something like this or you know the for those that don't know obviously long form is the sort of landscape videos that we typically see on youtube that are like 10-15 minutes long sometimes four hours long um the value of like someone who sat and watched your video for a really decent amount of time not just like you know scrolled through tiktok or instagram reels i think the value of a follower like a subscriber on YouTube is something like six to 10 times the value of like an Instagram follower or a TikTok follower, because they have, you know, taken the time to really get to know you.

8:14They're much more likely to trust you and, you know, move down that kind of marketing file to potentially advocate for you and tell their friends about your channel and, you know, maybe subscribe to your newsletter or purchase your product all these things so long form is the highest value but short form definitely has its place in that you know awareness sort of funnel to move people towards long form yeah definitely it's actually one of the reasons i really like audio is because the the audience is so loyal so unbelievably unbelievably loyal yeah completely and it fits into people's routine whether that's on a commute or doing the ironing or if anyone irons anymore i don't know why i said that but i've not ironed something in like 10 years i don't know why i said that i ironed for the first time today in like a year did you actually yeah i'm not kidding well it looks great well it looks great and i'm glad you did any both people that watch this on youtube will be will be delighted that you've exactly when you and i watch this back later yeah exactly we're the two people um mate let's get a bit of your background because um yeah you mentioned that you're a medic you mentioned that you left you took you took the bet on yourself and congratulations for doing so you've raised money for a sass startup are you a technologist have you have you coded this yourself have you vibe coded this uh how have you got to this point um what other stuff have you done in your life and career why don't you tell us the tell us the story gosh how far back do we want to go well some people answer this by going i had my first business at the age of two i sold that to my uncle at four and then i launched my fourth business at eight so some some born entrepreneurs will start it that way but you could start at university like wherever wherever it fits the vibe man definitely not a born entrepreneur this has been like lots and lots of very fortuitous um moments in the last few years that has led to this point it was never my plan to be a tech ceo like even like a couple of years ago i was still like really i want to be i want to be a med reg that was genuinely like in well it was it was like autumn of 2022 that things really changed so i guess i could start after med school so i did a neuroscience undergrad uh did grad medicine um graduate in 2020 hell of a time to graduate bit of a baptism of fire i started on respiratory for eight months um yeah in 2020 goodness me oh yeah yeah yeah it was um do you know it was it was really really obviously really rough time um but i really like i really enjoyed it but enjoy is not the right I was going to say, was it like, and there's layers to this, right?

11:14Like, of course, as a human, you can appreciate it's bad for humanity. But at the same time, you're in this privileged place, aren't you? Where you can actually help, which is very satisfying. Yeah, even as like an F1, you know, like a first year doctor, I was really doing a hell of a lot of the work and a lot of the conversations. And, you know, a lot of my days, I mean, obviously with your medical background, you'll know all of this. But a lot of what I was doing was, you know, looking after wards full of people on 15 liters, the top, the maximum oxygen. And I'd go around and I'd do arterial blood gases and then I'd call ITU.

11:54And then we'd have to make the decisions about who's suitable ventilation and who unfortunately was not. And then I'd have to call their families and have those conversations. And yeah, enjoying is not the right word. I think that this, I think I felt a lot of relief and satisfaction when I realized that I was actually really quite good at that. Like my communication skills were good. And I really felt like I was having a really good impact through that whole year or two. Like I think for a lot of med school, I was really actually quite scared of being a doctor. Obviously you study really, really hard.

12:30You have all your clinical placements and things. But I think the reality of actually like being on the ward, making those sometimes life and death decisions, even as a junior doctor, really frightened me. So actually just being thrown into the deep end and just realizing through the act of just doing it that actually, OK, I'm quite good at this. And, you know, that was, yeah, like a really big moment for me. And that's when I actually thought, yeah, I think I just want to do medicine. I want to be a med reg. But obviously that completely changed two years later. it's a really interesting one about the difference between you know in enjoying something that in human terms is actually quite morbid versus it being satisfying and it actually reminds me of i get asked a lot do you miss anything about medicine and what i often say is um like oh i miss being thanked i used to get thanked a lot i used to do things that someone used to say thank you for and actually you don't really get that a lot in my in my day these days but that's that's actually reminded me of something else that i a different feeling that i miss actually about delivering certain anesthetics i used to find it much easier than some of my colleagues to help someone that was really anxious that was really anxious about having an anesthetic or having a cannula even i found it easier to deal with that with someone than most of my colleagues and there was a feeling that i used to have where they had a really weird term that just had a really nice anesthetic like like they they dropped off really well and they weren't anxious and they were and they were happy and and they woke up well because of that because their final emotions weren't bad and i and i used to have this feeling of like i'm glad that was me i'm glad it was me that did that i'm glad i i had the responsibility of doing that that that's a really interesting feeling that's incredibly satisfying knowing that there's no way of this person not having this bad thing the bad thing for them is happening they're having an anesthetic they're scared of it end of story like that is happening it's just that i'm glad it was me that ended up doing that because i know that i found that satisfying that that it went well type thing which again is definitely something else that i'm here for sure i think i think for me it was oftentimes the communication like the difficult conversations like the breaking bad news or um you know the kind of resuscitation discussions all of that sort of stuff like i knew i was good at and those conversations generally went really well and yeah you'd get a kind of a um yeah a satisfaction that you did a really good job um that's what like with palliative medicine like i see in my f3 i did um i chose to do like a clinical fellowship in like care of the elderly which had a lot of palliative elements um which really surprised me that i actually found that really i get it still sounds morbid saying satisfying but you know with palliative medicine like everyone goes through that process everyone dies but in palliative medicine you're able to help that person and their family make like have the best possible experience of that obviously awful moment at the end of their lives um you actually have a lot of power to really you know make people comfortable and support them through that process and that's again really like an important part of the job that's really satisfying and it doesn't have to be bad it can be made into something that is at least you know an experience for that family that is not necessarily a bad experience i 100 % agree so what specialty did you want to do at the time so i thought despite you know the baptism of fire horror experience of like respiratory i thought i was going to do like respiratory or really interesting acute med or just something along those lines i think i quite liked um the the acute situations and how quickly you could turn things around with those specialties i found that really satisfying um but obviously things really changed yeah what happens like so so it was in my in my f3 like i'd done my you know two foundation years i thought i'll start you know getting my application ready you know collecting the points for you know applying to imt had like a research fellowship as part of that role i was you know doing projects and it was actually i think this was a feeling that was shared with a lot of my colleagues was you know as the pandemic kind of passed i kind of thought things would get better but I really felt on the ground that like the work was a lot harder it felt like the cases were a lot more challenging we're a lot more thin on the ground and it was actually in sort of towards the end of 2022 I had like a run of night shifts that were just horrific like we were so short staffed like we were like half staffing levels um and there was like one night in particular where it was just like medical emergency after medical emergency you know we had to split up and you know there was only one registrar for a big you know tertiary center just your f3 year f3 yeah yeah so and there was one there was one emergency towards the end of the night where you know we had sort of one person on one side of the hospital that needed shocking they were in um svt and they were really unwell um but then there was another emergency so i was to that emergency and i turned up and it wasn't just an emergency the person was dead and they didn't have a red form so i had to obviously then turned into a cardiac arrest and it was it was just just horrific and and i came away from that shift and actually it took me a long time to really recover from that moment obviously you know i i reached out to a lot of my peers and my supervisors and had lots of you know conversations and i think that's when i was really thinking that's where i started thinking what is my place in the nhs in the future can i really see myself doing this for a long time when actually things seem to just be on a bit of a downward trend in terms of like each shift just feeling worse than the last um and i'm glad that happened because you know i wouldn't be here today like doing what i'm doing now because that kind of you know realization then triggered me like making a linkedin and starting to look at i just thought i'll just get a job in health tech obviously i was very much at the top of the dunning-kruger curve of like maximum confidence zero knowledge i'm a doctor i can do anything of course it's yeah right exactly they'll want me yeah that kind of started the i think we all go through this that that initial process when we you know step off the the path and find these alternative careers that naivety and then the realization which is also like a really exciting realization like quite quickly within a few months of just like browsing linkedin and booking in with people to say oh will you have coffee with me or have a video call like i'm really curious about what you do i realized like just the staggering range of jobs that exist for clinicians in industry it's really like crazy like jobs that i never would have even conceived of um and yeah obviously that around that time was when i started listening to this podcast and um it there was a day where i saw a post by vishal verani on linkedin about youtube health about health misinformation online and you know how these clinicians were making content to try and combat it and i had just this like light bulb moment like it was like electricity i was like oh my god this this is what i need to do with my life i need to help combat health misinformation i need to build trusted experts again which obviously you know after covid that had kind of been shattered for a lot of people and i wanted to contribute to a more informed and healthier world um through content um and i also immediately kind of knew who to speak to about this this was like one of my childhood best friends harrison who'd built this really great really successful video production company he was working with many of the biggest youtubers in the world um you know editing for people that had tens of millions of subscribers and i sat him down one day you know this is after i'd made all my notes about this podcast and kind of formulated everything together into a pitch um i sat him down i gave him a glass of whiskey i put the dune soundtrack on han zimmer to be as epic as possible and uh i just pitched him this idea like mate can you like take like hire me into your company as your health content director teach me everything that you know about content strategy and video production and what what you know what it is that actually gets views and let's work together to upskill healthcare professionals to actually make content that can you know outperform the misinformation and actually start building trust again in in in healthcare professionals and he said yes and that kind of you know started my next chapter basically it's an amazing journey man and like that's it it's it's a you've definitely skipped skipped through a bit quite quickly that is worth us talking about which is that kind of valley of death between i'd like to leave medicine and do something that pays me a salary and then doing something like leaving medicine and getting a job that actually pays you a salary that isn't actually medicine like that's that's a valley that i think a lot of people will fall into and have to climb back the same side that they fell in out of unfortunately but definitely we can definitely talk about that but before we do i just want to touch on because it was a very it's a very emotive story you told about those night shifts you won't be alone in in that kind of thing you know forcing you out of medicine or giving you enough of that activation energy to then make a change you definitely won't be alone in that there'll be people that feel similar i just wanted to use that as a as a chance to say for when it was when when it happened to me i i had some p some neonatal night shifts that are very similar i then had an a and e or itu night shift that i spent mostly in a and e and felt somewhat similar and i i think a lot of people will battle and i say this for the people listening that might be going through something like this a lot of people will battle with the idea that it's a selfish thing to leave because if you leave then someone else has still got to do it and I really want to just make the point that in my mind at the time and I don't know I don't know if you feel similar it's kind of what I'm bringing up to maybe chat about it a little bit but I thought there is absolutely no way that these problems are going to be solved internally by me here it might as well be someone else doing this and actually another thing is i'm not big-headed enough to think that i'm gonna leave medicine and solve all of these problems i might go some way but that's not even that really isn't on my mind at the time really i was thinking as well i can't i can't be complicit in this i actually can't be part of this system because of how it's affecting me mentally because yeah i was a worrier and i'm happy saying that now i was i was a sensitive guy like i was worried about i was the person that rang the on call at one in the morning when i was sat bolt upright in bed going oh my god i didn't check those bloods and i should have checked those bloods and i'd call the uncle like i was that person and i actually couldn't i knew i wouldn't function in a system that was behaving like that and i knew there was you know in part the person that replaced me even if they were average was probably better than me like because i just wasn't handling it in the same way that other people were and i think it was just a realization that i wasn't right for that but also i just want to say like it wasn't selfish to leave like it was just the exams was eventually what forced me out that's for me that was the system working right i failed the exam it's perfect i'm out i should have been out it should have been out a while ago actually but actually that's kind of the system working work working right but i don't know like did you did you feel any guilt for leaving or anything along those lines that you had to deal with yeah i mean to be fair so i i officially quit medicine in august this year so only a few months ago i actually was part-time for a couple of years um partly to do with you know i think there was a bit of fear around you know salary and you know paying bills and just natural things like that but but definitely there's there's a lot of like guilt and there's also a lot of identity wrapped up in like being a doctor you know we we like you know I think there's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy as well like oh god you know I studied so long for this you know I did eight years of university I've been a doctor for five years like there's there's so many different bits of emotion but I think some of the things that really tipped it over the edge for me um one being just realizing that i think it sounds like you've experienced this as well like realizing that actually the work i was doing i found so physically and emotionally and cognitively draining um and and more so i think even just in the last couple of years so i did actually go into gp training uh for a year just thinking yeah i could do that be a portfolio gp do tech stuff on the side have a bit of freedom um but you know as part of that gp training i had a lot of a and e shifts and the kind of theme that the the buzzword that kept coming up in my sort of trade trainee group was moral injury like it's a really depressing thing to be such a theme but you know there'd be so many days where we genuinely we'd have more than 60 people on trolleys in the corridor in A &E and some days there'd be people that were you know under the lights of A &E majors for like multiple days at a time and you know obviously this is absolutely at no fault of any of the staff all the staff are absolutely working themselves until they just completely burn out and can't do it anymore um but I knew you know obviously there was a feeling of guilt of oh you know if I leave then that can you that doubles the work of the the person next to me but I could not sustain that for myself um it was and actually luckily I never felt like it did affect my work but I was always worried that it would end up affecting my work like what if I make a mistake and I'm really just worn out like because of you know the physical emotional exhaustion of the shift like I didn't want to stick around long enough for that to happen because I think that would have been really uh it would just been awful um and also luckily I mean around that time because you know from that moment of joining my friend's video production company a couple of days a week I felt like those days were like that's how my energy was filled back up like I would I could just be creative and problem solve and work with these creators and learn you know like filmmaking techniques and like interpret content analytics and it was literally like my physical emotional and cognitive energies were like refilled ready for them to be depleted again by the next medical shift um so that that also yeah played a big part in me choosing to leave but then actually i know i know i said you know five minutes ago or so about my fear of the sort of insecurity um you know financially of just having the you know just having a training number especially at the moment with obviously so many doctors being unemployed or underemployed be they gps or f2s you know half of f2s don't have a job it's absolutely crazy um i actually ended up putting my notice in in june with no plan for a salary in august um we had we hadn't had investment at that time we you know maybe I could have got some locum shifts um there's actually been very few locums out there so thank goodness I didn't have to learn that but it was actually my very last night my very last shift as a doctor I haven't done one since uh it was the beginning of August it was an ENT night shift it was absolutely crazy um like you know like you know draining quincy's major epistaxis um having to you know put a scope down someone's tracheostomy loads of crazy stuff happened but i left that shift and on my way home i got a ping on my phone from my bank from our business bank saying that we had our first six figures of investment wow and like that was like obviously like a really emotional day because i I literally had no no locum shifts but because there was none available and no plan to pay my rent in August but that investment came through at like the perfect most like poetic time possible what a beautiful moment that is knowing that security yeah that's unbelievable man the obviously not all of us have a friend that runs a production company that we could go to to get a health job However, you had the now to ask him or her for that, right?

30:26Like you, you, you put yourself out of your comfort zone to go and ask a friend for a job. It's in, it's in, and to create one. It's interesting. What did you learn in that moment that you think is applicable to other people that might be in that situation now? I mean, similar to what I was saying earlier about that beginning period for me with LinkedIn, like just reaching out and having those conversations with as many people as Will will agree to have a chat with you. And I think you'd be surprised, like particularly on LinkedIn and in this kind of health tech space, particularly like clinicians that have left and then, you know, gone and done something else.

31:03I don't think I've encountered anyone that's ever been resistant to just having a chat, like having a coffee, a cup of tea or just a video call. And just don't be afraid to ask for you know mentorship or ask for help because all these people like like myself and and like yourself i'm sure like we want to share these experiences to show that these things are possible and make and kind of help lift lift each other up because we know what it's like to be in their position so i'd say yeah don't be afraid to reach out to as many people as possible and make asks because the worst case scenario they're just going to say no but they'll have in their mind the question that you've asked of them and they might then go to a colleague or someone else in health tech or whatever industry you're going to and say oh actually like i met this person they really want to get into health content like would you have a chat with them like it's absolutely there's no downsides to making these kind of asks of people and no it's true i also think as well that is a skill that has to be learned and developed to put yourself out your comfort zone and get involved in the messy world of actual work because in medicine we're just taught that conveyor belt aren't we like tick your boxes and move to the next stage it's like the real world doesn't actually work like that that's not how i say the real world that's that's rubbish but like i don't mean the real world i mean like everything else other than medicine or so many things that are clinical pursuits don't work like that the the world of work is very messy and finding your place in it for who you are and trying to match who you are with what you do for most of your day which is your job it's a constant it's a constant battle to try and iterate that and figure it out and god knows it's a moving target particularly for me but definitely yeah you say real world but it does feel a little bit like i'm plugging from the matrix jokes yeah to be honest stepping off the the you know the train track of medicine um there's a lot of mindset shifts that are kind of i had to go through as part of that process as well which obviously i haven't even i haven't touched yet but you know changing your mindset around failure is such a massive thing that i know it's been talked about this podcast before um but that's something that um like a lot of doctors think that they need to do lots of qualifications and courses and all these different things to be in a position to even make an ask of like you know speaking to someone but that's really really not not the case you can actually brand yourself into bullshit your way now that's absolutely right yeah yeah yeah no no it's just just pretend you know it or say that you do or just don't bring it up they don't bring it up and yeah all these all these things now in play but it's because we're we're evidence-based creatures medics for And we have a very high level of integrity.

34:01And so if we've not done something before, if we've not done a procedure before, we say, not to the patient, but to at least the senior, I have not done this before. If they ask, have you done this before? Absolutely. You don't lie and say, yeah, I've done 15 of them and they've all gone really well. That is literally what so many people will do in a sales call for a business. Have you done this before? Yeah, done it loads. Yeah, done it loads. Don't worry about it. and then you're like looking up what all the terms mean and like you can't say that about an operation like a surgery you can't say about the surgery oh yeah i've done loads yeah no no no exactly but you know again that's just it's just a a nice little quirk of how the actual world it is but like the state the stakes are different like you know in med school we're taught not to fail because you'll be you'll drop out and you'll you know that's that's horrendous and if you fail as as a doctor in practice, a patient comes to harm.

34:55That's horrendous. Whereas if you fail in real life, as you said, like in industry, you actually, as I've found over the last couple of years where I've had many, many failures, like many times over, all of those failures, you end up learning from each of them. And actually, if you track them over time on a graph, it all trends towards actually, you know, the right decisions, the right pivots, the right iterations um so actually like i really embrace failure now which is so in stark polar contrast to how and you know how i was as a doctor how i was trained to be well no one's died right not yet well not not for a mistake for in uh content creation although baked into that is obviously the integrity required to be a good content creator but we'll come to that um just briefly before we move on to to uh everything that you're doing now as a health con a health content director i think you said for yeah your friend's company who were producing videos for a lot of youtubers and things like that what and you were doing that with the goal of tackling misinformation at least from your perspective in your role there what did that actually look like what were you doing day to day because it sounds super interesting yeah i mean it was like fantastic hugely formative experience and obviously i wouldn't be here now had i not joined that company and learning about content strategy which has all been super super fun basically what i was trying to do was learn all of these essential skills that make these sort of more broad entertainment content creators successful that actually what gets views what builds um a following what builds a community and i was trying to basically direct that towards health professionals part of that work was making my own health content so okay a lot of my days was actually um you know learning by doing like yeah the first couple of months actually kind of as part of my training although though Harrison didn't explicitly say this, was he just got me to write a bunch of scripts for like long form content and then record them.

37:12And then, you know, we had our editors cut them together into a thing. And, you know, the first couple of long form videos I made were awful. So bad. We never published them, but they were actually like they were training moments for me. Like Harrison said, like, I needed you to go through this process to understand some of the principles that I'm teaching you around like energy on camera like I see when I watched it back the first one I just seemed so dull but in that moment I realized one of the top tips I give a lot of particularly health creators is you want to try and elevate your energy for the camera kind of 10 times more than you think is appropriate because the camera will always dull you down 100 % agree with you and i i have an anecdote on this i was i was asked i was asked to do a voice over for an animated video as part of something you're producing for a client amazing and um i did the voice over i like really soundproofed this like square half a meter here with like loads of like soundproof foam that's over there and brilliant i've done that before as well over over this camera considered shut myself in the airing cupboard to do it like the acoustics and they're amazing but i would have literally amazing on my knees in the corner underneath the boiler so that seemed a bit dodgy but anyway you did it here and like i went for it i was so i i i put so much into this of like i was using inflection i was i was really trying to enunciate and i was of bring the end i listened back it was like i was delivering like something awake it sounded horrendous like it just sounded so that i was like how on earth does it feel this dull so what you just said there about 10x i can completely appreciate i don't know whether it's that if you're in conversation with someone you you sort of do it automatically and therefore you don't need to try as hard because i don't feel like i sound like that on the podcast i just think it's to sound all right but i think when you're isolated you're not actually you're not actually vibing with another human being the level that i had to go to to just sound passable was like it was unsustainable and you don't lie down afterwards it's unbelievable that's partly why i i ended up switching to getting a teleprompter because i'd often particularly in the early early days of making health content i would i would have my script kind of next to me on one screen and then i'd just stare down the camera lens and often like i'd just do it like a sentence at a time so you know these these script these recordings might take an hour for like a 10 minute video and i'd just be absolutely wiped afterwards because i'd i'd also not only be doing like the 10 times more energy but i'd also be very conscious to include like my own kind of natural reactions to what i'm saying and like have those kind of authentic moments that you know as an editor in the video make for really really compelling authentic content that people connect with better but you'd just be wiped so now like i just whenever i'm recording stuff i just have a teleprompter in front of me so i can look down the camera just say the script obviously still having the energy i put pauses in the script if i'm you know if there's an occasion where i think i'm gonna react or kind of exclaim i know that sounds weird but these kind of little details all compound to actually making an overall better visual experience with higher value for the viewer exactly and this is 10 of the reason i have so much respect for the content creators that either get this so innately that they just do it or they've learned and honed the practice that they are thinking about all this in inverted commas cringe stuff and pushing way beyond it and they did that long ago that now it's just ingrained behaviors and it is fascinating so when you were so when you were there then you said you know you were learning about what gets followers what gets views what builds community what what were the things that moved the needle most there that you learned what i mean the most important lesson that i learned really is that it really differs depending on the creator what their goals are like actually going right down to the foundations, figuring out what that person's mission is, and then figuring out from that mission, well, a commercial and a social mission usually, then figure out who their audience is.

41:40Because often you'd be really surprised that actually a lot of health creators in particular think that they need to spend loads of money on having really high production value, lights, an amazing camera, amazing audio. Well, audio is one thing that you shouldn't skimp on. Audio is the most important thing but all those other things actually but if your target audience is just like members of the public who are kind of interested in you know in information about pcos or something often like a lower production value much more authentic feeling video people are going to engage with that much better and actually you know in those situations sometimes i know we said about short form being so difficult but sometimes short form just videos that are just filmed on like the front facing camera might actually be better in terms of strategy than having a like a really expensive setup yeah it's interesting because it's less cognitive load to watch a video like that than it is to sit down and watch something like our ludicrous camera setups that we've got going on now it's like yeah i've actually got to sit and concentrate here yeah they really mean this i've got to i've got to match this energy so yeah it probably requires something a bit more when did the idea for everything you're doing now like hit you like what was the what i mean you talk you talk about the light bulb moment right when you when you were listening to vishal and all that sorts of stuff but what i guess what was that idea initially so what we ended up doing was we actually a little over a year ago well 18 months ago we made a kind of brand oddity health where we were like specifically marketing ourselves as you know a video production and strategy company for healthcare professionals and you know we we spent loads of time building out you know what we thought would be a really great offering for people and we did end up working with a lot of health creators and you know a few health businesses on their strategy but you know it didn't take off in the way that we had hoped to be honest um and it was a it was like july august last year we were like looking through our finances and we've realized we were spending something like 450 pounds a month on like this messy stack of disconnected software so we had like frame notion uh google drive chat gpt asana monday like all the like this crazy stack of software like none of it talked to each other yeah if anything was just like slowing us down in terms of our workflow and also we realized that all of our creator friends and our you know creator clients were all in exactly the same situation oh yeah that's that's when the 150 that we use yeah definitely yeah right like it's it's absolutely everywhere like the whole creator economy is is kind of balancing on a like a crazy stack of of tools that are costing tons of money and just wasting loads of time and that's when we had a light bulb moment where we were like do you know what we can solve this like this is a problem that we can see all of our friends and all of our clients have and and we know it because like this is a pain point that is our own and we had this light bulb moment of like why don't we just build the solution to this let's solve this because this is a massive pain in the butt for people um so we started by building like our own video review system and then we were like oh wow like this is way better than what we were paying for and then we built like uh you know a media storage system a chat system how did you build it was this computer scientists or was this so luckily so harrison uh the same same you know owner of the video production company you know taught me everything he had become quite proficient with uh building software like a lot of it was like his like development force was enhanced with ai but he had a good understanding of like the fundamentals which is like yeah really important for vibe coding um so we were able to actually produce like some really decent stuff like quite quickly and then i did my first keynote at google um like october last year and like i i showed it i literally just showed like a an illustrator mock-up of the dashboard to like a room full of creators and everyone was like when can we have this like we like is this available soon so that was kind of like the the validation that we were like okay we're really on to something here and then basically we spent the last year building that out and we've actually ended up creating some really revolutionary features that aren't aware aren't available anywhere else in the creator economy um hence why we've managed to raise a bunch of funding and interest from content creators a lot of so quite a few content creators themselves have invested in this product now because it's solving their it's solving their their own problems which is yeah super exciting knowing someone that can build software knowing someone that can vibe code themselves to an mvp and then either tidy it up or rebuild properly once they know this traction is amazing that seems to be like almost a new form of okay that's what the cto is or that's what the cto is doing let's get to mvp let's show them something and then let's either get rid of the tech debt and build it properly or or actually this is tidy up a bull from where we are and blah blah and then the power of the company is really in the distribution and things like that now i think there's there's a really interesting position that you have in the ecosystem obviously as an ex-doctor ex-content creator from in some regard yourself and then actually almost academically understanding what makes good content which is the tools of their trade so you're understanding to a very large degree what they're going through on a day-to-day basis because you've lived it yourself and then you've you've dealt with the experts you almost know their whole journey from beginning to end is this something that you see as relevant for their whole journey and is this relevant to every content creator no matter how big they are and i guess my follow-up to that is what story you having to tell for fundraising here because it must be somewhat of the latter for for a market size big enough to well it depends who invested in you whether that's angels or venture or whatever but yeah link link those two things for me yeah i mean so we've built this product our vision is for this to be the back the future backbone of the creator economy.

48:13So we want all content creators and their teams and marketing teams to be able to use it because it's solving the pain points that are shared amongst all of these groups. We want Deque to be like the logical place to start, you know, because just by, you know, logging in as a brand new creator or business that is thinking of, you know, dipping their toes into content marketing and realizing how important that is these days. deku actually helps you at the start of your journey we've got courses it's we've got a strategy planner interesting okay yeah so the courses are actually available for free so actually even now if you search deku you can claim your username and just start taking our courses completely d-e-a-k-u for anyone that's listening that can't be bothered yeah exactly thank you for that um and you know so i should really explain what deque is it's basically a workspace for and a community for content creators and marketing teams it's got all the tools that you could possibly need for your workflow taking you from basically zero to one and once you're at one it helps you grow faster create better and earn more through several means obviously we're basically taking away the need for 13 different apps and just putting it in you know all into one space so in your workspace you can connect all your social accounts you can use our ai strategy planner to actually figure out how to achieve your mission what audience you should be targeting what kind of content you should be making how to make it and the our assistant is also so it's trained on all of our production training documents from the video production company so it knows all of our kind of trade secrets of like what content strategy works and what doesn't and it's also context aware of everything that's in your workspace so it knows your individual like writing style and knows how your videos are performing it uh it will know like trends in your niche so it's able to provide assistance far far better than any like gpt or gemini model where you have to just faff around with loads and as a prompt engineering then the output is just nothing that's like how you actually communicate.

50:29So yeah, and so you could schedule all your content on there. You can manage your projects, assign it to all your different team members. You can have your editors, your strategists, and we've got our community features, which are going to be, I think, one of our biggest moats. So, you know, these are going to be spaces somewhat like Discord servers or subreddits where we'll have public ones, like we'll have, you know, say the health niche or the fintech niche where creators can actually share their videos um and and their their learnings with each other because importantly this isn't just health care no no it's not um but we should say and while i'm thinking about it because otherwise i'm going to forget we are so that social mission that i had that light bulb moment for in 2023 of combating medical misinformation building trust and experts again and contributing to a more informed and healthier world that social mission is still very much something that i i'm determined to deliver on so so while dq you know helps all i mean the addressable market is a couple a couple of hundred million content creators uh globally we still want to deliver on that social mission and the way we're doing that is we're going to be setting up the dq lifetime health creator program where we're going to give DQ for free for life to a group of health creators so that we can help them grow faster, create better and earn more and have that impact and deliver on that social mission.

52:02As a story for investors, the fact that you have or had some of your users invest in the platform, clearly that that's quite a lot of uh proof in terms of the value but tell me tell me a bit because it's not been easy raising money recently when did you raise that so our first investor actually i found through south by southwest london um so not a long ago no no yeah it was wow okay that was in june yeah yeah that that was our that was our first big investment um and i haven't of course because you told the story about receiving the cash yes exactly it's now coming together yeah and that was actually uh luckily sort of i i found that oddly kind of because of the nhs um because i joined the nhs clinical entrepreneur program um in the cohort last year started in october and it was through them that i i managed to get a spot in the startup village at South by Southwest London.

53:10And it was there that, you know, luckily our stand, I mean, you know, our expertise is all around grabbing attention. So our stand had a lot of attention like the whole day, just through our branding. We had flags and lots of, yeah, it was busy, which was fantastic. And yeah, it was a chap there who actually really, I never would have imagined would have invested, but he was really excited by the product. product i think he saw how many people were excited about it as well at the event um and yeah that's that's where we got our first investment and then in the last couple of months we've been demoing it to a lot of uh creators um particularly like larger creators but also actually agencies like we we demoed it to a really large us-based sort of content creator management agency who you They're managing the talent of like 30, 40 different creators who all have like millions of subscribers themselves.

54:09And we demoed it to them. And their feedback was amazing. They immediately wanted an enterprise package of DQ to replace their current stack. And as I say, these content creators, we weren't actually demoing it to them to try and get their investment. We actually just wanted their feedback to, you know, on the platform, what they think and what could be improved. But, but yeah, two of these guys who like their combined followings is nearly 15 million followers. We finished the demo and they just said, like, are you still open to some more investment? Like, we really believe in this, which is amazing because obviously they, they validate the product by using it.

54:53Like they're already, they're in the system testing it out with their team. and they're going to promote it for free to like all of their 15 million style isn't it exactly exactly and there you know we've got lots of meetings over the next few weeks with you know we've got a meeting with the strategist behind i don't want to say the name but you know someone who's involved with channels that have hundreds of millions of subscribers like you know we're demoing it to him very soon and yeah it really feels like it's starting to snowball now especially as we kind of we're looking at launching our early access uh just in a few weeks now can i ask a slightly challenging question about sure the the speed of ai's progress and this is built for the now have you got an eye on what the future is in terms of and there's a few different moving parts here there's content creation there's media broadly there's ai and what the product might need to be there's other competitors that might have different things and and i guess do you think about all of that in in how you're building this and where your might might be because i guess the human first thing as well is becoming no that's almost becoming a thing isn't it of of like actually where does the human fit in and that being a differentiator and it's something that we've never had to consider before but now where people put the human in is becoming more interesting and stuff like that so yeah do you think about the future in all those different parts oh very much yeah so we've got a couple of philosophies around ai that are really core to our like our structure at deku um one being that we are a creator a human creator first business you know we want to you know one of our core missions obviously is to help people earn more with content creation and we would be doing a disservice to the creator economy professionals if we replace their jobs by putting ai video and audio generation into our platform like we're absolutely not going to be doing that because we want you know the talent of editors to be just boosted and super powered by dooku rather than replaced i think you know it helps that we're such a big part of like the content creator community, you know, with YouTube and, and, you know, Instagram, TikTok.

57:20So we, we can see the growing sentiment around AI, which is generally, I think quite negative, particularly the generative AI in video and audio. Like there's a lot of concern about that. Obviously we also have in the back of our mind, like we've had, we've said this for a couple of years that, you know, I don't think it's going to be stopped. Um, it's, it's, I think we are really heading towards a time where, you know, on your video streaming platform of choice, you know, Netflix or whatever, in a few years time, you could just go on that, uh, and just say to it, can you just generate me an action movie where I'm the protagonist and, you know, I'm fighting this politician or something like that.

58:06And it would just generate it and you'd have an hour and a half movie and it's, the visuals and the audio are all actually mixed really well. And that's all AI generated, but there's no human touch. It's just AI slop is the term that's going around. And you can see with Sora 2 being released a week or two ago, that's immediately gained the name slop talk, where it's just a nonstop algorithm of just AI generated content that's purely designed to grab your attention. I think honestly that that is, I may be wrong, but I really think that the interest in that is going to go because people are, so in this kind of attention economy, I think people are really mindful that their attention and the time that they have to spend is actually a finite resource so people are being really careful about where they spend their time obviously there's so many different platforms competing for people's attention so many businesses competing for their attention but i think people are becoming a much more discerning and judgmental and and picky about where they choose to put their content and and i'm seeing in in various niches that people are actually starting to tag things saying human made and and people are really seeing the value in that um and yeah so i realize i've just been monologuing for a few minutes but i got loads on this man i i i i got loads on this i can rescue you don't worry about it because i've been following this a lot as you can expect some someone like me in this industry looking at of course ai video generation and where where does where does gimmick turn into utility like i'm not i'm not sure at the minute like where ai generated video actually turns into any use for me and us in this industry beyond just some b-roll that i could get anyway or like it like or some weird like i don't know so we like health tech pigeon being the jokey brand that it is the stuff that we could do there but like beyond that there's no real utility for me and then i think about okay where's where's the actually the utility for for this like what's the point that there has to be some reason behind it and i know that in society when we experiment and when we think about new technology and we bring new technology in the first phase often is very gimmicky and it's very playful until it and it's and it is a solution looking for a problem quite a lot when the iphones came out we were all using that stupid like beer drinking app which was just you tilted the phone yeah like well like the whip button like this is like all these stupid things but then eventually you know the gyroscope turns into a spirit level rather than someone tipping a beer like all of this sort of stuff right but i don't know what the point is and i've seen a few creators actually talk about this there's one that i follow cat gpt she talks about um like as you can imagine like ai stuff she bills it as like non-pretentious ai education like for the masses and i find her stuff really interesting thing i think she she put out something that was similar that was like i've i've asked all these people they said i don't know what the point is and then i saw an interview with sam altman about it who was he was challenged on why have you brought this to the world and why have you given it out and his answer was well it's coming anyway we were just we're just the first ones to do it and actually if we release it to everyone in society then society can actually get to terms with the fact that all of a sudden you might watch a video and not really know whether it's AI generated or not and actually yes it was a creator asking him the question yes your face might be on loads of video of you there might be video of you doing things that you've never done and that's out into the world like sorry but it's happening we've just brought it to the world before anyone else has and the like you see the creator being like okay that didn't really answer my question but fine and i'm sort of like i've seen some commentary that has thought of it well if you now go to your phone and all the content that saps our time and energy right now you can no longer trust whether it's real or not or maybe actually we finally get to the point where we can just put our phones down and go yeah i'm no longer actually interested in this and content creation goes into something completely different but i was just i was just playing my phone early because i was going to show you this about how close we are to going to netflix and just getting a movie generated with you with with you as the protagonist yeah so gemini have you seen gemini's storybook thing have you seen this yeah is that with the vo3 models it's uh it's it's not vo3 it's the nano banana stuff i think but oh right yeah yeah literally i don't know if you can focus on that you can literally see my child and my dog let me focus yeah yeah there you go child and my dog and there's a whole storybook of their adventures yeah like going on holiday like it's unbelievable it's um it's unbelievable like how it's just generated all of this yeah the step for that to become a video is just upload the things and press make me a video yeah it's so that's not so it is here and that was generated in seconds it's a really tricky one like i do think certainly in the state that it's in at the moment really like most content creators goals are going to be something around building a community right and i think trust and like authenticity is so so essential for that to happen that and i think at the moment we as you say a kind of distrusting of ai generated content i i can't really see how you could actually you know build a community without without that human touch i mean i know that i mean already we can see so many channels i mean there's loads of channels and there has been for a couple of years that are just only ai generated content and just ai generated medical content that's misinformation which is you know a whole other conversation and you know like i I remember, so last year in a different talk I gave at Google about like health content and, you know, why we need to be making health content.

1:04:31I put a video up that I just, I literally opened TikTok and this was the first video that came up. I had 5 million views. It was, you know, AI generated voice, AI generated B-roll. And it just said, like, drink this tea to cure your uterus of all disease. And then, you know, went on for like another 60 seconds of just absolute AI slop nonsense. but all the comments were like you know obviously a lot of them would have been bots but people people end up believing this stuff um which is yeah which is obviously uh it's harmful in many cases if people are actually taking these things seriously um and where does the responsibility live for you do you think it's responsibility of the platforms i honestly i think partly i think a lot of the platforms are waking up to this um i think youtube has kind of led the way with this with their like youtube health program and you're really setting out their policies and starting you know introducing the health shelf where they're you know promoting um search optimized health content higher up in the search there's still a long way to go i've i've i've seen misinformation uh actually mostly ai generated misinformation content on youtube recently um So it's still there.

1:05:43But then, you know, I think Instagram reels are slightly less ahead of the game. But again, you know, Meta does have their kind of clinician creator outreach, as does TikTok. You know, they've got their own health creator community where they at least seem to be opening these conversations with genuine clinician creators to explore how they might be able to improve. I'm going to one of those events. I think in November they've got one coming up. Is that the winter TikTok thing? Yeah, I'm going to that as well. i'll see you there nice one it brings it brings something up of like what's the point of content creation as well because i think for so many people it's for if you're getting five million views or likes etc like if it's likes got not many views you're getting but then you're in the you know you're in the creator fund and then you're making a bit of money you might make a couple of grand a month at that level but very very very very few people are actually gonna make that sort of money so there's 200 million content creators around the world like i'm i'm not sure like that that will be a very weirdly shaped graph of how steep it gets towards the end of you know it's a very very high peak I imagine of the amount of money that you can make with a very long tail so it's sort of it sort of starts out breeding the question of like what's the point and is everyone a content creator to some extent now if you just put a couple LinkedIn posts out and is it one big sliding scale and therefore do you really have to consider like what's the point of content creating but i know that i i don't know i know that you've said before that that people content create for the wrong reasons and and you probably learned a lot about that with um with what you've seen when you were working at the production company of like what that very high peak looks like but how do you view it now in terms of clinicians and in health and people in health care that want to content create they might have a view that it makes them money but they might not but how do you view the purpose of it i think as i said before it's one of the essential foundations of any content creators journey and and something that so many people skip over and end up trying to cobble something together later when it sometimes a bit too late is to really be confident about what your mission is like why are you making this content and actually it's important with each video why am i making this video what's it what's the purpose um that's really important question to ask um and it with the missions so i always get people to write down their commercial mission and their social mission now with clinician creators we all have generally a pretty similar social mission sometimes more niched down into our like particular area of expertise where we've got we already know we have tons of value in our expertise um to to communicate to you know a target audience where i think a lot of creators particularly health creators maybe fall flat is is with the commercial mission side um possibly maybe that's because as clinicians we kind of don't really talk about money we don't really think about money we're not good at talking about that at all we're not yeah and we're a bit more kind of purpose driven which is great you know it's having that social mission that really uh really core purpose is essential for building an audience.

1:08:56It's essential that they understand what you're for. Like you are the endometriosis health creator or something. But yeah, where people fall flat is that commercial mission because ad revenue and fame or like sponsored content happens really quite far down the line. Sometimes you can get lucky with some really great content that just kind of kicks off straight away. I mean, I'm about to, I mean, not luck. I'm not going to say luck for Dr. Simi, but Dr. Simi, for instance, she has very few videos. It's not luck. Her content's just that good. But, you know, she's got something like 3 million subscribers after a really small amount of videos.

1:09:40But that really rarely happens. She's done an amazing job. She's an incredible communicator and GP partner, makes amazing, amazing content and she's got a really clear mission as well which is amazing for building community but the commercial mission is so important and you know i think we mentioned this earlier but you know having an idea of like just a basic marketing funnel of how you're gonna if you want to turn that content pipeline into something monetizable is so important especially because content creation takes a lot of time and you know once you get to a certain level it can take quite a bit of money in terms of, you know, hiring people and, you know, the actual admin involved.

1:10:23I mean, that's a problem that Deco is solving. But having a marketing funnel where you can either, you know, pull some of those, the audience from those short form platforms towards, you know, your clinic or a newsletter or something else that's actually there's a plan for where you might be able to earn a bit of revenue that isn't just reliant on ad revenue. um yeah is really important it's so true because i think a lot of businesses well yeah a lot of businesses will think about this the other way around they'll be a business already and then they use the content creation as a means of starting a marketing funnel creators are afforded the privilege of doing that the other way around they can build the audience they already now have the distribution so then it's a case of well who have I got this distribution to what would they pay for that I can offer that makes the world a better place whilst I'm doing all of that that's basically the the the list of questions that you've got to answer because you already own the distribution and I think in some way I met I I don't think I came from one way or the other with that I think they both happened at the same time because I already had this podcast I was already at the back end of doing accelerators and jobs and all that sort of stuff and then and then the two things sort of married up of like well i'm recording with so many health tech founders that i might as well just ask them like how are you doing for you know comms marketing pr design all this sort of stuff and do you need anything and so yeah i sort of monetized at the time 10 000 followers into a million pound revenue business or whatever like so incredible because when you've when you've yeah you only need you only need 10 of the right followers in my model and all of a sudden you're making like that sort of revenue right so so again that's the thing you don't need millions of followers if what you're selling is a high ticket item so yeah that's the thing do you find that people are aiming for big followings more so than they need to be do you think that's a pattern or do you think that's reversing now do you think people are waking up to this I'm a micro-influencer intentionally?

1:12:36No, I think people are still chasing the follower count and will go to any means necessary to try and chase that follower count, which is not the right approach. A lot of people chase virality and virality actually, in many cases, it can actually be a bit problematic. I'll give you an example of a couple of creators that we were working with at the video production company, one had something like 5 million subscribers, say, and they'd had a bunch of viral hits over the years. It had 40, 50 million views. And their average view count on all their videos was actually only like a quarter of a million.

1:13:26Whereas there was another creator who had like half a million subscribers and hadn't had that many viral hits, but hadn't really ever changed their sort of content recipe and what their content was about. They were pulling in half a million to a million views per video because they were so much more consistent and the algorithm had a much better understanding of who to serve their content to, like which audience would value that. And obviously they were making much more money than that creator that had many millions more subscribers. so I think actually sometimes the follower count and I see this interesting I see this on LinkedIn as well I see a lot of LinkedIn people who have massive followings who get like so little engagement with their posts whether that be you know because they've changed the kind of content that they're putting out over time I think that that's often the case you know because it only takes a few times for LinkedIn or any of these platforms to serve your audience a piece of content from you and if you change that over time and they don't engage with it enough times LinkedIn will just stop showing you that content and that's when you get these ghost followers or ghost subscribers who are just contributing to your account uh your follow account but providing no value to your engagement or actually to your mission I actually think LinkedIn's done a relatively good job of also also rewarding you if your intentions are good with the way that they've done some elements of the algorithm so i know the algorithms have got minds of their own or how it's developed basically because there's an algorithm report that comes out i forget the name of the guy that does it now but he releases this report every year and it and it he's looked at millions and millions of stuff and but anyway what linkedin tends to do like last year's was very much like well yeah if you if if you write long comments on other people's posts and you stay on the platform and you look at lots of other people's posts and you write comments on them and then you write your own, it's going to do way better than just someone that's already just cut, just straight on copy, paste, post gone.

1:15:31And actually it's rewarding someone that's, that it's, you know, if you look at it, cause I remember putting a, putting LinkedIn post about this or someone did that was complaining about, Oh, like there's so much to think about now. I've got to go on the platform. I've got to comment on three posts and then I've got to post my my my response to it was just if you're a giving member of the online community you don't need to think about any of this they've just found a way to reward you for doing that that actually if you're browsing the platform and being productive and and chatting to people and do you know that kind of thing that's what's being rewarded so it's not as if this is a list of things you need to remember but really you just to focus on being a good online community member and most of this is taken care of so don't worry about it um but i kind of like that side of things definitely i mean fundamentally that is the goal of all these platforms is is just to keep you on the platform for as long as possible so that so that it can show you more ads that's that's like the the most basic um requirement but obviously linkedin themselves like i've been to workshops run by their social team and their goal is to you know obviously be delivering as much value as possible to their audience to keep them on that platform you know and and that's why they're promoting people who engage well with others and you know uh write posts that are kind of uh adding to adding some value to the people reading them whether that be kind of insights into their industry or something new or information or entertainment all these platforms are yeah exactly the same in that sense yeah I think it's an interesting one of content creation isn't it because it seems quite often you know chasing followers and and you know being obsessed about your own metrics and watch hours and all this stuff it can become a very individualistic self-interested self-promotional activity that can end up feeling quite hollow i imagine and that's in direct contrast to the people that are doing it for the right reasons and i know that multiple times on this you've said about finding the actual reason you're doing this and being clear on that i think that is so important when i i wrote i wrote down here like what dream is being sold and i think on some level the dream of a content creator is being sold of you know millions of followers and you can charge this for a post and there's all this travel and there's all the all the things that you see on instagram it is a dream being sold and i think that has to mature now into it's a mechanism to deliver some impact that you want or it's a mechanism to get what you want commercially at this kind of level because that matches what you're able to talk about in the audience you can follow it's a far more nuanced conversation i think that isn't the millions of followers is available to absolutely everyone that gives it a go um yeah it's probably not you're probably destined to not do that if you're a certain like type or in a certain place in life or whatever but i think a lot of it also for a lot of just the creators that i know is actually the creative fulfillment it's coming back to what i said earlier about you know my days where i was doing content creation and strategy and stuff my energy levels would fill up and i think for a lot of creators certainly who've been doing it for a while the reason they've been able to sustain it for so long is because actually they get a lot of satisfaction just from being creative and making some cool stuff um and you know if it's purpose-driven even better that just adds to how sustainable it is but i think where people start to you know when creators start to burn out and lose interest is it's usually because of admin and like the amount of time it takes to edit a video and having to keep on top of trends or you know those sort of things or it's or it's the isolation like we did a survey at the beginning of this year to try and um just better understand our target users for deku and you know we got a couple of hundred people uh hundred creators responding and 91.9 percent of those people who responded said that they felt isolated as a creator which seems crazy because like these some of these people have like tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers but yet they feel so isolated so you know all these different small things compound towards burnout and that's when creators quit they lose interest like i think you you need to have that creative satisfaction and that purpose to to keep going through the the difficult times which inevitably happen yeah with that in mind then how are you building the community element of what you're doing at deku so we're gonna have public communities that just anyone can join you can just search your niche and and join that community we'll have uh and these are just forum type yeah so a big part of our sort of our value in in deku is obviously our learning resources and being able to share your lessons with with other people but also like our video review system so being able to go on to uh to upload your video before you've published it and have it watched by people in your team or you can share it in your community and have people you know add timestamp comments that's so interesting yeah so this is an interesting one that we realized actually partly because of you know i'm in lots of creator whatsapp groups and people are constantly posting content that they've already published into that community and what they're doing and i like i keep banging my head on the wall like i said it so many times to people like do not share your content particularly if you're a small creator with your friends and family and colleagues right after you've published it because what you're doing so say say your target audience is uh people interested in women's health i keep using women's health examples in my head if you share a video say about um endometriosis with a big group of doctor creators that will and they watch it that will signal to the algorithm that the audience that want this video are other doctors so it will start showing that video to a bunch of other doctors who then won't engage with it because it doesn't have value to them they already know this information it's not that's not that's not the target audience so that signals to the algorithm that this isn't a good video so it stops showing them to people and then it kills the video whereas in deku because you upload your video, you get timestamp feedback, people can draw on individual frames.

1:22:22So it's great when you're interacting with an editor and you're trying to like speed up the actual sort of review process before you publish. And then you just click schedule and then it gets published to, you know, whatever platforms that you want it to go to. And then you can just let the algorithm do its job. And that'll be a really vital part of those communities. I envision, you know people having their own sort of private communities um you know you might have a som x one where you just got a bunch of like people just in there they're all commenting on each other's videos that they've you know given the right permissions to and then they just publish them and let the algorithm do its magic um and one one really cool feature that i don't think i've mentioned yet um is that our system if you don't want to wait for your team member or your friend or community member to give you feedback on your video our ai assistant will actually watch your video it will watch it at 12 frames per second it understands all the visuals it understands the audio it understands the transcription understands the whole narrative of the video um and then it can give you time stamped feedback that's based on all of our content strategy secrets and then and this is like the really, I think the really big golden ticket, it can predict viewer retention, which obviously is like one of the key metrics in terms of video performance.

1:23:42So you can actually see a model before you've even published it, where all the drop-off points it predicts, you know, they're going to be and then you can make the revisions and then, you know, act on them before you've published it and before it's too late to fix that disaster. So yeah, communities are going to be really, really powerful, I think. Wow. What's your pricing for the platform? So when we're launching, we're starting with a founding partner program where for the first 500 people, you get 60 % off. So the pricing is going to be about£139 for a year. And that price is locked in for life as well, if you get into that first 500.

1:24:26And you're getting like a terabyte of storage. You're getting all these AI features. You're getting all these different tools. you're getting the communities you're getting the courses and there's lots of other stuff on our roadmap so this is our early access you'll be able to go on our website and see all the things you can get the early access but over our six month early access our users will be you'll actually be able to vote on the roadmap of features you'll see what we're going to be building but you can actually vote on which ones seem the coolest and we'll bring them forward in the roadmap for you um and a bunch of other benefits like anyone who joins at this stage is put in a private community with us the deque team so you know we will feed back on your videos um and you know we'll have sort of uh quite regular office hours but we'll just have video calls and everyone can just come in with their feedback because we want this to be built for create for creators with creators um like anyone who gets in at this stage is going to have a real uh impact in shaping um what DQ actually becomes hence why we're calling them founding partners count me in man I will um yeah I'll do it definitely definitely sweet yeah I'll send you a link absolutely no absolutely no brainer like absolutely yeah no brainer economics as well yeah literally yeah literally um that's incredible dude I've just spotted the time like I can't believe how long we've been speaking sorry to have kept you from whatever you were doing i've gone like half an hour over the calendar invite which is outrageous no honestly james i genuinely talk about content strategy when i'm not doing development chats and you know accounting and legal i'm just talking about content strategy and like creator economy stuff like as i say this stuff gives me energy so thank you for that like this has been a really well no you're welcome man but i mean as well as like i mean this is all like the domain stuff that we've talked about really but the other side of it is you built a tech company like you've built a tech company you've raised money mad you've built a sass company and you are selling a sass solution to a load of people it's just that you're so connected into the domain that you understand it well enough in order to sell it as well as you have on on this podcast to be perfectly honest so mate congrats to you i know i know it's been a journey i i i know i know how hard it is man like it's it's uh it's really deeply unpleasant quite a lot of the time building a company and like getting to the point for sure going through a round of funding to the the stage that you're at and all that sort of stuff it's not easy so you've done you've done incredibly well um thank you yeah it's a steep learning curve every day but it's it's an amazing journey i wouldn't change there is there is and that's the thing as well it's it's you know what what would the alternative be and that's where so many of us find ourselves of like yeah actually we can complain about it but actually this is probably where we're best it definitely is for me anyway um but dude listen absolute pleasure um for people that want to learn more in fact there's a few different bits here some people are going to want to get in touch with you to have a chat to you so i imagine linkedin's probably the best place to do that definitely i have so many chats every week uh it's like i said earlier like i am what i am one of those people that just loves talking to people about their ideas and particularly you know clinicians that are looking to maybe they're a little bit earlier in the the journey uh to me i have i have probably five to ten of those chats a week so reach out to me on linkedin just you know dm me and we can we can book in a chat and for deku there's a couple of bits isn't there there's obviously people can go to the website um let me just pull it up what's the website deku at deku.app d-e-a-k-u.app um but there was also the health program that you mentioned do you want to just briefly cover that again sure so so you know to fulfill that social mission that we've talked a lot about we're going to be giving deku for free for life to like a really exclusive group of health creators to help them contribute to a more informed and healthier world and if you are a health creator or a health business that making content then you can apply to that program by going to deku.app forward slash apply forward slash health dash creator hopefully you can put this in the description or yeah click on that um sign up and yeah hopefully we can get bunch of you on board into that early access program where we're going to basically try and support you in making content in a much more sustainable way that achieves your social mission.

1:29:13Amazing. Oscar, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, mate. Likewise, James. Thank you. It's been fantastic. Hopefully I can come again, maybe in a couple of years. Hopefully I'll still be doing the same thing. I think before then, dude. Yeah, awesome. hey everyone thanks for listening and making it all the way to the end of this episode remember to subscribe rate us and leave a review and you can head to the description of this episode to follow me on all of my social media so you don't miss out on any of the latest health tech content