How These Twin Creators Turned 450K Followers Into an AI Startup Fighting Loneliness

0:00Fabian Cowdrey:People are lonelier than ever. People are desperate to meet even strangers. That friend of ours spent eight years in her bedroom with a camera. And I went on TikTok and I put the camera there and in one hour he hit 19, so I didn't hit 20, he hit 19 people. And it makes life a lot more simple if you put in the work before. Reps after reps after reps after reps and you get so much better at the reps and then you can grow followings. We can scale into any city like that.

0:23Julius Cowdrey:Fabian and Julius, I'm excited to have you on.

0:26Fabian Cowdrey:Yeah, so good to be here. Love talking to interesting people in the space. and really excited to share our vision for Joyner and what it's been like being a founder in this climate. So, yeah, we're looking forward to it, man.

0:37Julius Cowdrey:Yeah, and I'm excited to talk about your company, Joyner. But before we do that, I actually want to start talking about your journey as a content creator. Because you're both twins, but you're also both content creators. When did you guys actually start creating content and what inspired that?

0:53Fabian Cowdrey:That's probably me. I probably started creating content originally around music. I used to be a singer-songwriter, so I was constantly putting covers out on YouTube. And one day, one of my videos hit 50 ,000 views. And I was like, oh my God, people are liking this. And not just my mom and the dog. And then I did a bit of TV stuff and started producing content. I'm being surrounded by other content creators. People wanting to grow their following was a new thing. Because I'd always had friends in finance or doing different things or working nine-to-fives. I was suddenly surrounded by people who all wanted to grow their following and what that meant and the value of a follow and the value of growing and what that meant to their career.

1:33Fabian Cowdrey:And so I started looking at different ways to grow a following and sort of it changed very much from its genesis of music and then doing reality TV. It actually ended up being wanting to go into the streets and ask people questions and they went very viral and then built a following off sort of interviewing interesting people. So that was sort of how it worked with me. And then I guess Fabs came to London and wanted a piece of it too, didn't you? No, I saw Julius doing really well and smashing his following, obviously, at his time on a reality show made in Chelsea here in the UK, which I think his following went from a very quite low to all of a sudden 50 ,000 overnight or something.

2:06Fabian Cowdrey:But people were very engaged in his personal life, which was quite an interesting transition for us as a family as well, because all of a sudden I was watching Jules on reality TV and everyone had a view on every single thing that he said or he did, how he behaved. And that was interesting. I only could watch one or two episodes because of some of the conflicting arguments. when you're close to people you don't want to see them in in too many fights on television as you can imagine but for me i played professional cricket for six or seven years and i never really focused on content i was more focusing on trying to become the best player i could and then my career went into coaching and i was starting to help people let go and release past trauma and worked with a lot of people around narcissistic abuse and i realized that there was a massive opportunity to to reach those people who needed the support through my content i built that to about 39k and then in the last year or so it went up about nearly 200 ,000 people in about three months by posting four times a day for my niche basically.

3:02Fabian Cowdrey:But the challenge right now is all of those followers need to be transitioned into following our company mission. So it sometimes feels like starting from scratch even with a strong audience which is interesting.

3:12Julius Cowdrey:Yeah I love it but it's so exciting that you guys have both been able to build a massive audience in also different niches and also how you guys have both leveraged content thoughts or reinvent yourself going from like a singer-songwriter to reality tv to then actually like yeah doing street interviews or for you fabian talking about like professional cricket and then all of a sudden like you have your own niche and now obviously you have leveraged that also as a launchpad to launch your own company was that also some of the thoughts that you guys had when you were actually growing that audience like hey we could potentially eventually leverage this as a launchpad to launch your own

3:46Fabian Cowdrey:company you can't hide from the fact that social media and having a personal brand is an unfair advantage amongst the chaos of i don't know there's so saturation with founders aren't there and startups there's so much going on if you could have the power of a following to actually build wait lists to actually promote your business it's been it's been huge for us i mean it's actually quite funny we we felt like we'd hit a wall in our wait list fabian was in charge of fundraising i was in charge of building the wait list and get users signed up this particular week in fabian said i bet you can't get 20 people in an hour and i'd been posting about it i we asked all every single one of our friends i don't know a few hundred were on and we were just no one was coming from the instagram story so we just so we thought maybe we can create i can create something viral but it's one hour so i can't recreate something funny i don't know how do i get so i went on tiktok and i brought 40 000 followers on tiktok and i went on tiktok and i put the camera there and in one hour he hit 19 so i didn't hit 20 hit 19 people went on another hour another 20 people and every day for the next three four weeks i went on and we gained 20 30 40 50 people a day to get to the place where we're like over a thousand people on the wait list so and that all came completely organically now yeah that you have to have a confidence you have to be willing to look like an idiot those are also two parts of being a founder and not just having a following and growing a wait list but god it helped that i already had a platform so when people saw the account they were like oh it's julius how you doing like oh my god you're creating this thing i'd love to join because we will trust you a little bit more if they see your face hey quick one before

5:13Julius Cowdrey:we get back to the episode if you love conversations like this one you would love the fame game our weekly newsletter in which we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands sign up for free via the link in the description and now back to the episode yeah i think that's spot on and that really shows the power of celebrity and creative founder brands that you have that build in audience and also the trust that whatever you do next they're always interested because there's that relationship established. So yeah, I'm curious, like what is Joyner? What is also the real founding story behind that?

5:43Fabian Cowdrey:I mean, it goes back a long time, whether it be traveling to San Francisco with no meetings in the diary, with a previous brand name, which was Safe Space, and then praying overnight that I could find a new brand name, and then a voice coming into my head saying it needs to be called Joyner, which actually means I've got to faith myself actually means joining means the grace of god and so i was kind of confused as to why that popped into my mind overnight as you can imagine but four years ago we had a group coaching company that turned from a very small thing into a nice small business for people who couldn't afford our one-to-one coaching and it turns out you know high percentage of people 80 plus percent of people can't afford one-to-one therapy or coaching so we thought right we'll go back to those individuals and we'll say to them look we we want to create uh some small groups groups of 10 that we can connect with you every week and basically democratize our support we quickly grew that to 10 groups of 10 and we thought right how can we scale this further because we are tired we're dealing with 100 lives a month people are dropping into our whatsapps our instagram dms our tiktok messages saying this is awesome but can you do an 11th group like no we can't we're knackered retired so we we created our first model which was and we pigeonholed as the only fans for wellness we built the infrastructure technical infrastructure which in in essence was like a circle or an only fans but simply for wellness creators but the problem with that model even though it was successful for us is it went away from our core mission we were driving people behind paywalls and our whole mission from day one was how do we drive down isolation how do we get people connecting in real life and we thought right this is this is fine but it's not something which is going to serve us long term and serve our why so we we moved to joiner which is a whatsapp native conversational ai which chats to as a friend learns deeply about you and then matches you to the best events and experiences on your doorstep in seconds and the whole premise of that is we're meeting people where they are we're meeting people on whatsapp instead of forcing someone to download another another app where do we get the inspiration for that was through through another platform that do it another business that do it Bordy they they operate fully on WhatsApp they're a huge company now they match founders to investors and investors to founders and I thought that we thought that was truly fascinating and how we could implement the same strategies but doing a whole new niche and particularly in the rise of people needing community more than ever and how we can use AI as a force for good to operate something really powerful so yeah we're focusing on London at the moment before looking to scale a scale into other cities yeah I love that and I think it's very

8:13Julius Cowdrey:smart to actually integrate it into WhatsApp because what you see is that every time you download a new app, like the churn rate is so high. People might actually use it one or two days, but it's not integrated in their daily lives. And if something is already integrated, it's so easy to just connect it to that. So I love that decision. I think it's very smart. Nowadays, so many people join communities and clubs. I have so many friends that regularly go to run clubs or book clubs or watch parties or whatsoever. Why do you think that's the case? Why do you think that so many people feel the need to connect with others right now?

8:45Fabian Cowdrey:Because people are lonelier than ever. In real life, it's something like 35-40 % up, year on year at the moment. I mean, people are desperate for connection. There's a company called Time Left, which gives people a chance to meet strangers for dinner. They're in over 200 cities in two and a half years. What does that say? People are desperate to meet even strangers. We're very excited for joining because we know that people really want this. It's very hard for people to find things to do because it's all different events and experiences on so many different platforms if we can be an aggregator and also create this beautiful personalized recommendation to people similar to almost like sky scanner but even more focused on the individual what they're into and what they like to do then we're creating such a valuable thing for people and then with joiner there are different there are potential other verticals we could go down those there's hospitality there's travel there's there's flights there's all these different things that you eventually become this full-rounded sort of travel buddy for people but the reason why people are searching is because we're sort of in this paradox of connection Scott I always think we're connected you know we're connected like this but to our phones but we're not really you know we're not deeply connecting and I think that's why people are so interested in wanting to get out there run clubs meet people talk not be isolated yeah and

9:55Julius Cowdrey:do you think that's the case for yourself as well because you're obviously content creators and you have built communities online is there also like a personal desire to actually get to know all the hundreds of thousands of people even though obviously it's not scalable to like reach that type of room in real person but yeah is there like a desire to also build that community for

10:13Fabian Cowdrey:yourself in real life no if Fabian's leaving London wants to get out to the countryside and live with the cows so it sounds but as soon as you go there I reckon you'll be using Joyner to come back up Fabian but I I'm very much more wanting to do things the whole time meet people I thrive off people whereas Fabian less so I think Fabian you like you love your personal space more right would you agree yeah i think there's a balance between the two yeah but look the the main thing is judith and i spent 14 years combined in london right i mean to feed the point when i arrived in london i knew next to no one i'd finished my cricket career i was in a massive transition with my purpose and my identity i didn't really know myself i found isolating was a lot more simple and easy than going out and putting myself out there and it took i would say between three to six months to feel like I'd really aggregated a group of people that I were like-minded individuals and I think that gets forgotten with Joyner.

11:04Fabian Cowdrey:The whole premise of what we're doing in major cities is to connect people to like-minded people through shared interests which separates from the deeper issues of that we might be facing politically across the world where people are so segregated or don't feel comfortable around different types of people and actually the most important thing for us is how we get people in the room where they actually share interests and Joyner does that impeccably well from a technical standpoint the power for us is and the next step is how we can use our our content and bring on some branding specialists and after the fundraise that we're doing to really make the the distribution really powerful so people can use it but we don't just want to be the the tool for someone who feels isolated of course it's a great tool for that want it to be like the most exciting product ever well you know the most efficient exciting product for events and experiences where two people looking to find a spot for a date can quickly type a message into joiner on whatsapp and in 60 seconds have three great options that work for them people can implement it into their group of friends and decide what they're going to do collectively for the weekend people can find things solo so it's not one-dimensional but it does serve the person who is isolated like we were for the first you know three to six months in a new city yeah and let's break it actually down like how does

12:18Julius Cowdrey:it work exactly let's say i'm a person and i'm looking for a date or am i looking for an event how does it work exactly and what is also very different from all the other events and community

12:28Fabian Cowdrey:platforms around let's go to the very beginning when you speak to joiner when you speak to joiner it needs to learn a bit about you so it learns a bit about you learns your your name your age where you're based learns your gender you don't have to give it if you don't want to and learns what you're into and then it will go searching for you now joiner is clever because it learns it has short-term memory it has long-term memory as well we want joiner to get better and almost feel like it's it it sort of holds your hand along the path of your life as opposed to just like you know it's lost me it's lost me it doesn't know who i am it starts to learn more about you over time when you search so say you said paddle right so say you want to search for a paddle or you said run club earlier a joiner will ask you what you're looking for joiner will then go okay i'm looking for paddle okay joiner will go okay are you looking for something more vigorous more intense are you looking for something more socials join awards to basically work out what you're looking for based on because it has information on these events that it can like decipher what's maybe more high quality more lower quality are you beginner are you intermediate advanced so that it can then share send it to you but if you're looking for an art event it's not going to ask you if it's if there's intensity or there's not so it's always going to try and get some more granular information and then it's going to go searching and based on where you're based obviously your age your gender and all these different things, it's going to find you those three top events that suit you most.

13:42Fabian Cowdrey:So if you're living in East London, it's likely not going to send you somewhere west. But say if it can't find you something in your area or that's near to you, it will always tell you, would it be okay if I can look a bit further out because I don't have anywhere near you right now. Joiner currently searches only seven days in advance. We're looking to increase that to a month very soon I bet that's where we began and you can search on the day you can search based on time if Joanna can't find you something on the time it'll always say hey can I can I open this to a bigger radius so it'll always be honest about its limits if it can't find you something that

14:16Julius Cowdrey:you're looking for yeah I love that personalization about it because like last weekend I for example was on holiday in Spain in Valencia and then like you're typing in like where should I go for dinner or like, hey, what type of parties are going on? You always get kind of the general advice, right? It's never tailored to you. And I really love the personalization over that. I assume there's also post-event kind of like a survey or whatsoever that helps you to really understand like, hey, was this the right solution or recommendation or whatsoever?

14:45Fabian Cowdrey:100%. So we're getting the reviews on each event host and then algorithmically on our backend, we can then push things to people who are similar to that person, which are better and higher quality. But the cool thing about Joyner as well is if you look at marketplace businesses, for example, famous ones like Uber, we spoke with someone in their early team recently who's been an incredible source of information for us early stage. And his job was to lead up growth across different regions of the world when Uber were trying to find drivers. For Joyner, we have our drivers through the event platforms.

15:17Fabian Cowdrey:So we already have affiliate partnerships with major event platforms which host thousands of events. Our job is much easier when it comes to finding the drivers of our business, finding the events that people can find. It becomes more of a challenge when you're trying to get people to use it and really pick up that data. But the power of being a content creator allows us to at least get that early feedback and get people using it. So if we do need to amend and we need to adjust quickly, we can. And that's where it becomes that really strong advantage. And that's where the power lies. so next month is all about how do we get thousands of people using this because we have the density

15:53Julius Cowdrey:already inbuilt into our system yeah can we talk a little bit more about that like as we talked about it like at the beginning you guys have hundreds of thousands of followers across both your platform how have you been really able to leverage that to start and scale join out the

16:08Fabian Cowdrey:wait list has been huge building up our own joiner instagram has been mega i think we could even be using it more i think it's very it's actually quite challenging i'll tell you scott being a founder and also being a human away from being a founder you know there are other things that have that are important in life but i know 99 of it is taken up by a joiner but also being a content creator and creating content as well since we launched i posted about four times i have not had time to focus on posting so there's a lot of you know babe and i know you're probably the same thing right when we went into launching waitlist and iterating iterating tech this bug this where do we need to change this we've spoken to users here we need to implement you know or pull this back we've we've in those four weeks we haven't we've posted very a few times because when we post content we're posted we are social media manager we're content creator we're editor we're everything and so i so it's one of those things we they've been even messaged me this morning i think fabs you must be saying let's get back on the social media hustle because we know the power of it the power of growing the following the power of just being able to get us through the door the amount of investors that are more interested just the fact that we have 450 000 combined followers it does help a lot but we need to continue with yeah i'll add to that as well we've we've been able because of our followings to get 60 independent hosts from run clubs to yoga teachers who run experiences on weekends to list with us so it's from the density point of view it's been insane so far being able to have that and as judah said the next step is to really double down on on on social but it also shows that in as a result of the next raise how important the key highs will be because when you're founders obviously you wear so many hats and people listening in who are founders as well particularly early stage will relate with this big time and so yeah it's it's obviously instagram tiktok algorithms reward consistency and that's when we saw our biggest influx of followers and it's now just really pigeonholing it around being a founder not not around the other areas of our life and being super focused on on how we can serve people

18:11Julius Cowdrey:Yeah, but I think that's spot on because this is something that so many creators and celebrity founders struggle with because yes, they have a massive audience that they can leverage to launch and scale their company to an affair and vintage. But it also comes with a price, right? Because the time that they're fully focused on being a content creator, they can build that platform. But now they actually have to spend 60, 80 hours a week on building their own companies. And then being a content creator has to take a step back. So yeah, then you can't actually post as often and leverage that community and also grow it beyond the 450 ,000 followers that you currently have.

18:44Julius Cowdrey:So like what is also the plan going forward? How do you guys plan on doing both? Is that just by simply hiring and putting people in the best seat? So you guys actually have a little bit more hands and time to focus on doing both?

18:56Fabian Cowdrey:It's great. You know all about fundraising. So and it can take up every ounce of your being. Instead of spending months fundraising, we're going to be spending one month fundraising. and and and then then that will become where we can take a little bit of gas off the pedal when we start making some key hires that we already have people ready and but i also i'm also a big believer i don't know what you guys think but like the i have no time is just a crap excuse for not being able to be good with your time if we really want to we will be able to post that five times a week we just have to find the right time and if it means we have to squeeze a four three hours here four hours there then we do it we make it happen so that's i think that's the important thing i think that there's always a constant pressure.

19:36Fabian Cowdrey:I speak to a lot of people with a following and a personal brand about this to always stay relevant. It's actually been very refreshing not posting for a month while we focus on Joiner, but you know, there is a goal. For me, my goal is to get to half a million followers by next year. There are other things in life that I want to achieve once Joiner has exited and all these different things. Like I want to release a book. I want to be able to leverage my following for a new, a future business maybe and what they can do. and so and it's really when you when you've been able to grow a following like fabian has like i have like we have like it it really is just it's it's just volume i mean it is because fabian posted four times a day three months he gained 200 000 followers i mean it's it's not it's not actually a hard game it's just you have to put reps after reps after reps after reps and you get so much better at the reps and then you can grow a following so we don't need and many celebrities

20:28Julius Cowdrey:and creators are nowadays launching their own companies so you guys are not the first what do you guys make of that trend?

20:34Fabian Cowdrey:Yeah, I think it's smart. I think if you think about how founders sit together, maybe over a coffee, maybe over a beer in the evening, and they all of a sudden have a light bulb moment on an idea, and they go through all of that pre-concept stage. The biggest problem that founders I've seen have faced and what we're taking on now is how we're going to get eyes on it. What people sometimes forget about content creators is the time that they put in before they've even launched a product, like the years they've spent. You know, we have a friend who has accumulated over a million followers in the fitness industry.

21:08Fabian Cowdrey:She now has campaigns all over the world and people say, look, she's living the life. She's in hotels and she gets paid to be there and she's doing all these campaigns. That friend of ours spent eight years in her bedroom with a camera, isolating, focusing on how she could build up an audience before she released an app. And now she's smashing it. and so that pre-concept stage it's it's how are you going to distribute this business are you going to have to pay huge amounts of capital raise another million dollars to get other creators to promote it for you or can you do it yourself and it makes life a lot more simple if you put in the

21:44Julius Cowdrey:work before yeah i think so many people forget that and i think like mr beast is another example of this i think it took him like four years to get to a thousand subscribers and now everyone is looking yeah of course he has a half a billion followers and now it's super easy to launch businesses but a lot of people actually forget about those years so yeah I love that you brought that up many celebrities and creators when they're launching companies often they launch one of the products behind me like a CPG brand a liquor brand a beauty brand an apparel company you guys have decided to launch your own tech company do you think that in the future we are going to see more celebrities and creators launching tech companies over Takiyah yeah yes I do because I think it's

22:23Fabian Cowdrey:so much easier to build a tech company. But I think at the end of the day, I think a lot of people will go to these celebrities with the ideas and ask them to be figureheads. And then we'll think that they created the company. Look at Chris Hemsworth. I'm pretty sure Chris Hemsworth was there were two guys that created this app and then gave Chris Hemsworth the app. He didn't build the app. He was a front facing, but people saw it as his app. So I think more and more people are going to use creators to figurehead the company because they come with a huge amount following cpg feels more for some reason it feels more right for a celebrity to release it we we had a mission we never thought we'd be tech founders fabian and i we we we had a mission to combat loneliness due to our own stuff and what and and the loss that we've experienced in our life it it started as a group coaching company that's turned into an in real life tech ai company it's crazy we don't expect life to take you down that journey also i far prefer tech than cpg i think i I mean, like I have friends who have CPG companies, work in food and all these things.

23:23Fabian Cowdrey:I mean, we can scale into any city like that. We're suddenly in any city. We just have to get eyes on Joiner. As long as it works and people want it. The idea of having inventory and factories and just those slitherings of cost and having to worry about cost of produce and all this over and over again. I just, I don't think it's my kind of company to run. I admire it. I think it's awesome. I think it's far sexier than it seems. I don't know what you think, Scott.

23:47Julius Cowdrey:Before we continue, you I wanted to share something quickly at hotstart.bc we exclusively invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators think Selena Gomez Jake Paul Katie Perry if you are an accredited investor and want to co-invest alongside us we just launched hotstart angels allowing you to invest in the same company's we back starting at just 5k per deal interested sign up at hotstart.bc slash angels or find the link in the descriptions accredited investors only and now back to the episode yeah no i i'm like completely on one page and i love that you actually talked also about the mission-driven component right um so many times celebrities and creators they're just looking at george clooney's one billion dollar exit or hayley bieber's one billion dollar exit and are like i have 30 million followers too so why don't i relaunch like a similar product and and hope for the best you know and i never understood why these celebrities and creators that have massive platforms why they're not leveraging that to promote companies that are better for human on Planetary Health and have real missions behind them.

24:46Julius Cowdrey:Because you also see that the companies that have that, look at the Honest Company or Once Upon a Farm, they are massively successful. Rare Beauty with Selena Gomez, massively successful. So I actually would love to see more mission-driven creator or celebrity-founded brands. And to your point about tech, we are a big fan of tech companies being founded by celebrities and creators. And it all has to do with the distribution. Yes, it's nice that you have millions of followers, but if you sell a specific bottle, Most of the audience is not going to be in the United States or in the UK. They can't buy it.

25:16Julius Cowdrey:They can't go into Sainsbury or Walmart to actually pick it up. It's very expensive to ship. But if you actually sell something digital, you can actually target 100 % of your audience. So yeah, completely aligned.

25:29Fabian Cowdrey:Yeah, I love that. And for us, you know, how many times we sat on our sofa as individuals and wondered, what am I going to do? I feel bored. It's the end of the workday. like joiner solves that through a text message in seconds where it gives you meaningful opportunity to find great things to do that actually suit you which will connect you to people just like you like for us that mission i can see the user i can see him sitting at heathrow airport or jfk airport on the way to a new city and thinking okay i'm going there for six or seven days with my partner or a group of friends what am i what should i do but joiner will already know what they like so it can then just find things that really suit them in New York if they're from London right so as we scale and we we put ourselves into different jurisdictions and different cities the byproduct of what we offer is a decrease in isolation which of course helps mental health for people who but it's also an epic thing to use and that's why we truly believe in what we're doing is because yeah the greater mission is the is the greater mission but we want this to be the most cool exciting thing an opportunity for people that solves a massive problem in seconds and that's

26:41Julius Cowdrey:what excites us the most yeah i love it then you guys just launched in london uh what is next for joiner and what is something that you guys are most excited about the moment we're building the