# Sub Club Podcast: From Bootstrapping Your App to Partnering With Sony - Seth Miller, Rapchat

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_1ruMSNh9E
Duration: 46 min
Language: English
Words: 9313
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/n_1ruMSNh9E

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[0:00] we would be dead for sure if i didn't learn how to code and it's an invaluable skill that i'll have in this organization and future organizations it also just helps me like think about things like it's a really great like way to look at the world sometimes [Music] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david bernard and with me as always revenue cat ceo jacob hiding our guest today is seth miller founder

[0:39] and ceo at rapchat seth is on a mission to democratize music creation with rapchat's mobile app it takes the friction out of making music and has helped millions of artists unleash their creativity on the podcast we talked with seth about bootstrapping his way to signs of product market fit raising money from strategic partners like sony music and what it's like to have facebook completely rip off your app hey seth welcome to the podcast how's it going thanks for having me yeah it's been a long time coming you and i uh first chatted way back in 2019 i you were like the first office hours call i

[1:15] ever took at revenue cat so uh oh wow yeah go way back in my revenue cat days it tells you how bad of a uh ceo i am that we've never actually spoken like on the phone in two years or how good david was yeah i was like sold after one call i'm like all right dude where do i sign up how do i get this going we we have a lot of cross cross connections because uh you're also an adjacent portfolio like we nico is a co yeah i have a co-investor um but then uh yeah a customer and like we're also both ohio based so like yeah a lot lots

[1:52] of cover lots of coverage yeah we got to hang out so we should i've been thinking about anyway it's beautiful ohio today but when i say that you're not going to make an ohio podcast [Laughter] but but maybe um maybe kick off and tell like what what is rapchat yeah absolutely so rapchat is the easiest way to make music on your phone so we have an ios and android app um you showed me a wrap you made earlier but you really just like tap in open the app we have hundreds and thousands of free beats on the app so you just pick a beat you can record over

[2:27] it and then you can share that anywhere so you know we have people making full length studio quality songs from their phone and sharing it to instagram and soundcloud and then also on platform we have a social layer as well which is really cool but yeah pretty much recording studio in your pocket with a community with a social layer so kind of kind of similar to like a visco or instagram for music um and our mission is really to democratize music uh by providing access and tools to you know the next billion music creators how how did you get on this idea well i mean like a lot

[3:06] like just scratching my own itch in the early days so i mean almost eight years ago uh when i was in college uh apps were really starting to become a thing and same with social networks and ugc platforms that you know let you create content and share it so you know the day golden era of vine uh snap all that um and there was nothing for music and i also had a hobby of just freestyling with my friends so he'd get together throw on beats and rap and some people would sing and just create all sorts of stuff and it's just something i noticed that was like yeah

[3:44] this should exist on your phone i should be able to do this with my high school buddies that are on a different campus that i used to do it with and that was really it just scratching my own itch and then over time i think we've really come to realize that there's just this massive opportunity to do this at scale for those that really want to make music and take it seriously and so kind of outgrown my own use case a little bit even though we have people that come and have fun but really we're focused on providing tools for the everyday artists that historically has been kind of gatekeeped

[4:17] out of participating in music um and so we try and give them everything we can in their pocket um and still feel like we're only getting started it's not as easy to pirate logic these days i imagine it used to be yeah right what did those early days look like so like did you learn to code did you have a coding background did you um yeah what did those early days look like and when did you get the app out yeah i mean pure chaos and it's not too much different today you know it's just a little more organized yeah the first version of the ios app was june 2014

[4:54] i think it was june 7th and that was really like wouldn't even pass as an alpha version today i don't think like like especially with how good some of the test flights are but uh you know it was very basic it was uh you could open the app record one track over like 10 pre-defined beats that had to come with the app store bundle like we didn't even have server side like sure yeah uh and like we just want to test that people do it and you know of course the first couple months is just getting friends off facebook and family to like download it but then uh started to notice like

[5:29] you know a little bit of traction and then more traction and then basically quit my job i was like all right i gotta i gotta really go after this and it that exactly that's when i taught myself how to code too because i had a lot of help in the early days just from like friends faculty members anyone i could get to like work on it but then after you know i noticed there's just like basically early signs of product market fit i guess if you will now but people sharing it i was like i really want to make updates to this thing and i can't

[5:56] afford any engineers yeah i don't know anything about fundraising so it was like the only way i could make any updates and then wrote really shitty code for like three years and but got enough traction and proof to kind of you know enter the startup space the fundraising space and now luckily we have really amazing engineers and i still write some code here and there that's probably not that great but uh you know i i love it so did you have any co-founders yeah so we i mean we had a team on campus in the early days uh that you know we're helping out we've had

[6:31] a lot of people along the way uh help out in different parts of the journey it's been like an epic journey you know and uh lots ups and downs but yeah we've had lots of different people help us out and um now we have a fully distributed team um and still relatively small 10 people but lots of great product builders and yeah it's a lot of fun yeah david can can probably talk more to the pain of not like having on staff like it's not so much i mean yeah i mean the cost is a thing for sure but like i think a bigger thing often is

[7:08] the the the turnaround time right the iteration time of not having well you know even if you're a you know product person who's non-technical and you have a technical co-founder there's even like friction there and communicating the ideas right if you're not really in sync and so having that all in one mind can really like speed things up and in the early days that's what it's all about right it's all about iteration speed it's all about getting you know different sticking stuff different stuff to the wall to like as fast as possible to see what takes off so uh yeah that's always the advice i don't know if there's anybody

[7:41] that listens there probably are people in the podcast in a similar situation where they're like maybe they didn't study programming or whatever like it it's got to be i mean i don't know so that you can you can go against this if maybe it's not the case but it feels like probably the best way to invest your time is like get to the basics like as fast as you can yeah i think so i mean the amount of time you'll spend trying to like find a co-founder that codes if like you know sure the ultimate is like you find a co-founder you guys gel and like

[8:10] they know how to code and you know you know how to do everything else but like you i don't know we would be dead for sure if i didn't learn how to code and it's an invaluable skill that i'll have in this organization and future organizations it also just helps me like think about things like it's a really great like you know way to look at the world sometimes oh yeah you're not bamboozled by engineers too which is nice yeah yeah and i can like talk to engineers and i think like it really helps me get buy-in like i can go to the engineering team and be like yeah no tell me the

[8:43] real like you know what's really going on and we can have technical combos as opposed to like you know kind of the i don't know if it's just uh whatever stereotype of early ceo that's like i need this and this is why and i'm gonna go sell and you know that can get you into trouble and yeah so anyway i'm a huge advocate i get some people are really it's a scary thing to learn it does take time you're really bad for ever basically i don't think yeah yeah you're not going to be good like every engineer you work with is going to be like oh

[9:15] right exactly exactly but i i do think it's it's really helpful especially those in the early days because like trust me you can look at google and be like oh i need to raise money for my startup which is what i did and eventually we did you know do some fundraising but it's again the amount of time you spend trying to figure out how to fundraise and just jump in this like really deep ocean versus you know a skill that you'll have for life that will instantly you know provide value in your current job even yeah i'm all for it i mean i try to get people to code no matter what

[9:47] i guess like you mentioned kind of that that early stage and like finding product market fit like how long it's sometimes called wandering the desert but like how long did you wander the desert like how long until and then when you first started to see those indications because party market fits this like it's it's a bad term because like terrible it means different things to different people and founders can deceive themselves all the time um and and you know even even yc is like i think one of the best orgs for defining this and communicating this their their definition's not very good right they're like it just feels like

[10:21] it's going faster it's like okay like you can still lie to yourself really easily so what did that look like for you yeah no i could not agree more and could go on lots and lots of rants about this or just in general like you know benchmarks or anything like that um i think it's you know and i'll just speak for myself because like you said it's like totally different for every company um but the the first signs is when i remember i was working the first and only job i had out of college i was a systems engineer at progressive insurance so i was in their data center literally like

[10:54] working on servers had no idea what i was doing but i was there for like six months and i remember i was like at work searching twitter like rapchat on twitter just a term and then over time like more and more people just kept sharing their tracks to twitter and like saying how much they love it and then app store reviews were a big thing i mean it was just clear that we like like people truly loved the product um and that was kind of the first step and you can't really like quantify it's not like oh there's a thousand twitter it's you know quotes or something you

[11:29] weren't measuring like day one retention day 30 retention i was and i learned that i learned all that stuff over time and like we track we track a lot of that stuff but i'm telling you like the most important stuff was like the qualitative in the early days um and then but you need qualitative at scale like it's not just like your friend you know it's like uh plus you know 50 000 maus at that time or whatever it was and i think that that was really key like the first thing is like people were actually able to record music on their phone and share it

[12:01] uh some people were really good at it like this is this is kind of like obvious now but it wasn't back in the day like there was like technical challenges there were you know people didn't think it would be a thing some people still don't think it's like a billion opportunity but like you know we had to prove out that people would really record music on their phone like that was it seemed so obvious what was the propeller heads app uh gosh what was that called they've had a few i think um there was there was i remember that's bad podcasting i don't know the name of

[12:30] it but i remember there being some really key like music apps that were kind of around that era right it's like the phones were finally getting fast enough to be able to do this without like just falling over and dying in like yeah time frame and android's still like really freaking hard to get right but i mean over time now we have like a process of like how we think about you know does our product work for a certain market and it's changed like i would say you never really we're not in a desert but you never stop wandering like your product evolves over time the market evolves over time

[13:03] we've seen different personas evolve and grow in our community over time and now like i said in the early days a lot of it was providing just like a fun uh social media app that was music based for the ev for everyone and now while we do have those components it's much more about providing a really great recording studio in your pocket with a community of creators for the everyday artists like so now we've actually you know zoned in a little more and focused on one or two specific segments and we have really strong metrics engagement uh now subscriptions for that specific persona so i think that's a big thing like in

[13:45] the early days you read all these blogs and uh you know what to look at for retention or what to look at for product market fit but a lot of times it's not married with context of like personas and so for the first three years i mean we're getting whatever millions of downloads a year but like this person in india is here to have fun this person in georgia is here to take it seriously and we were just looking at it all blended and so like once we learned to actually be like no like now we literally ask like why are you here like what are your

[14:15] aspirations and and then we view things through that lens that's been one of the biggest unlocks like it seems obvious again but um if you don't think that way then in the early days you're just kind of like wondering like well why is my day one retention like not changing it's like well you know you're getting 30 of your users from this like really bad channel and they're low intent and like you should filter those out because that's noise you know i it's so tricky though because i i was in a similar position when we were trying to work on growth at elevate and um you can you can really easily

[14:51] that thing where founders are trying to lie to themselves like it's a very easy way to lie to yourself right and be like yeah i have a great retention if i just ignore all the users with bad retention right and it's like yeah yeah i think context is the important thing right it's like okay like what are the actual context for this and i mean it makes me think of um the photoroom uh founder who we had on a couple a couple weeks ago um i don't know the ordering of the podcast comes out but they also had a similar situation where they found it like

[15:19] within their greater user base like a persona where retention was really strong intent was really high and then it's kind of great because it'll gives you i feel like from a founder and product perspective it gives you license to focus right a little bit and be like okay like we found this profile that's going to be our most important and and we're going to like really put our energy here and it kind of clarifies a lot of like things for the you know product decision making well one thing to interject on this real quick is that um i think a lot of people underestimate just how amazing facebook got at doing

[15:52] this for founders because that the feedback loop and facebook's algorithm and how much data they had on people prior to app tracking transparency and apple has kind of unwound all of this but that's part of why facebook has worked as the like user acquisition main channel for so many apps to grow is because all of what you were talking about jacob and you were talking about seth they just do it automatically with really sophisticated i ai and way more data than you're ever going to have to understand people's intent and the the the types of people who are going to work well in your app so when you're feeding

[16:33] those subscription monetization events back to facebook and facebook's experimenting with 50 000 a year money what are they really doing they're doing what you can do and now with app tracking transparency we're gonna have to do it more is they're finding those personas and then advertising to get you that return on on investment and i think people underestimate how great facebook did at finding those amazing personas that work in your app um but now like it's kind of back to doing what you've done so i'd love to hear a little bit more so you know early on just seeing it on uh you know rap chat

[17:14] trending on twitter and like following all that stuff like i think a lot of apps over instrument early and just need to like hit some critical mass first but then as you get a little further along you've talked about building this like product market fit engine like how like what's your what's your stack and then how do you think about measuring and learning about those personas and then kind of building for them and orienting the app around them i mean there's a lot there so i mean again for for context like we are now just getting into that game which is like the worst time ever to get into the

[17:52] game where you know we're actually trying to bring those users in with our dollars at scale maybe but but you know it's it's been disrupted right so there's opportunity yeah you'll have probably a better time than somebody who's trying to adapt from something they got used to right we're going the other way pretty much like so and facebook charged a lot to do it that's the thing it's like they captured a lot of that revenue by figuring it out for you but if you can figure it out and then find those channels that reach those personas in a more cash efficient way you actually are at a at a better place it's just more

[18:25] work on your side of things but then you understand your customers better so there's benefits too so so maybe seth put it on a timeline for me so like you said 2008 or 2009 so you're you're getting on a a decade of working on this right it's been it's been how long have you been working on the app 20 2013 oh sorry 2017 this is before the podcast sorry i'm very broadcaster yeah 2013. so still okay seven eight eight eight years or so yeah when did when i guess like yeah when did to kind of lead into david's question like when did you kind of transition from like

[18:59] maybe it's it's recently but like at some point did you go like okay like how do i grow this thing like what's the what's the um you know i see this happen in a lot of these consumer apps because consumer apps really maybe they're inherently viral but they almost always have to have something like to drive the growth right like some sort of mechanism when did you ever have a point where you like started to transition and start to think about that more as part of the the company building yeah absolutely i mean so i mean to date like you know we've had over 7 million

[19:31] people create music in over 100 countries and over 80 percent of that's been organic so it's like you know we've really that was our whole thing forever because we didn't have capital uh we may have had capital but we didn't have enough to like even have remotely a good budget um so we really yeah we kind of tweaked and refined our viral loops in the early days because that's all we had so when i say scrolling on twitter that was like the first instance before you could there was a time period where you couldn't even post on twitter you had to open the messages in the app and then we made it

[20:04] really simple again all this shit's so obvious now and now every app does it but you know we made it really simple to like post a link to your rap chat to your twitter and your facebook i remember it's only twitter and facebook like two ugly square buttons because those were the things at the time and that worked though i mean we saw a 10x return on that and i mean to date you know that type of flow come in create content share it externally bring your friends in some of them will either have the app some of them will go to the landing page on the website download the

[20:35] app that loop i mean that's been millions and millions of downloads so um you know we're kind of lucky in that sense that you know being a ugc and having some network effects like that's really been key um and and just continuing to like improve the onboarding improve the recording experience improve the sharing experience like at some point we you know added instagram and video where we auto generated a video for you that was a really good moment because people and now that's like our most used feature is like sharing a video of your track because those do better on social network algorithms so i think you know

[21:12] we've kind of had the core loop identified for quite some time it's just been consistently tweaking and investing and making that better now uh since we've had that and that's kind of driven itself and still drives itself um you know we're looking at all these different other components as well so we're testing out some paid stuff um we're testing out like different types of like content marketing and like we have our own podcast now and we really are bullish on like you know creating educational content for the mass music maker across different channels and think we can do some really cool stuff there so we're starting to explore different

[21:49] parts of like the growth stack um and you know even web like seo and web we haven't invested in and we think it's a huge opportunity because we want to expose this content to to everyone and we can create unique experiences per platform and we have the bandwidth to do it now so now it's kind of the fun part um whereas you know before it was yeah pretty much all organic yeah how did you make money with the app like throughout the history and when did you realize subscriptions were the only and best way to make money on the app store yeah nice plug no i mean we didn't it's we didn't make

[22:24] money forever like until last year i think we hit like we're hitting year one so we'll figure out these yearly renewal renewals and all that but um yeah we didn't make money like we basically punted making money jury's still out like i think if i were to start another app company i would just implement subscriptions way earlier but um you know this is what when we started and we raised our first round of funding so we've raised you know three rounds of funding and when did you raise your first round first year was 2017 and it was very much like of course the investors are like no no no don't make

[22:58] money you know grow your user base do what twitter did and then you can always make it i've got some right here yeah just keep raising venture capital yeah yeah essentially like just get on the treadmill of mau's and then at some point you can do an advertising layer and that's how it's done like that's that's and you know it's not like we had any much better ideas either and we're like all right like yeah let's just keep growing the user base how did you get how did you get this four years were you just like eating ramen and and working side jobs and stuff yeah dude yeah yeah

[23:28] i mean so two of them were in colleges like part-time you know like grinding it took a minute just to get the test flight out and then the first version then after progressive i for a year you know i just i mean i cashed out my 401k and made some decent money at progressive and sold bitcoin at like 250 a coin yeah things like that so nice that was great uh maxed out some credit cards i mean whatever though you do what you got to do right i was surviving it was real scrappy until that that that first round so i mean that's that's the trade-off

[24:00] though like you don't either your app makes money and like you can flow and like kind of live off it or yeah you got to do that kind of stuff and then eventually bridge to capital so i was kind of curious like how yeah and and to be honest like that wasn't the only time we had to be scrappy like even after the first round you know like a lot of companies we were kind of like okay we scaled our user base like i think i don't know 10x after the seed round but it still wasn't quite like series a level so we're kind of stuck in between

[24:26] rounds and it's like oh back off payroll okay like here we go again and you know it's there's mo there's been moments multiple moments like that um and without revenue it was like you're kind of at the you know it's it's a safety net right like it's something you can go back on right that that that i i i've i've been the receiver of that advice not not in this round at building revenue cap but in the past of the like just go go and it's it's not bad advice because it does like that's how instagram did it right there's examples of companies that but it's that classic like you you know

[25:03] people with a portfolio of tens or hundreds of companies giving advice to somebody with a portfolio of one and like i know the risk the the the the risk equation is fundamentally different there right uh between people and it's just one of those tensions with venture capital that exists and like you just got to negotiate so um yeah it's it's yeah you know it's a story we've heard all too much i think it's why you know i beat obviously i've got a horse in the race but like it's why i think subscriptions are great right because it just like you can still use venture capital and in fact like i think

[25:37] it can be very accelerative right but uh yeah but like you have options right and you're like less fragile um now i mean and i'm happy to say like after that grind now we're absolutely the best place we've ever been we have you know recurring revenue we have more cash in the bank than we've ever had like multiple years of runway and we should hit cash flow positive like pretty soon so it's like totally different ball game and i think to answer your question we turned on subscriptions yeah about a year ago and it really changed the like perspective of product building too and i think that's a fundamental difference

[26:14] like when we were raising our seed round and you know we had i mean we do we have a social network on top of our tool and people were like hey why don't you just try and get to like a billion users like that really changes how you build product and what type of features you prioritize like yeah you're gonna be more like okay let me put in another sharing like let me really nudge you to share or like eat eyeballs right you don't care you don't care what's behind them right you're just yeah like you basically focus on the top of the funnel instead of the middle bottom of the

[26:42] funnel and like the subscriptions right yeah yeah i mean subscriptions the bottom bottom of the funnel and that's cool because it kind of focus it focuses you more and that's that was just a really it was all a big unlock like last year and you know frankly we had to figure out how to make money we were kind of like in between again and um yeah it just came to us david came to us and convinced us to do revenue yeah i forgot i forgot that that was the that was the the case i mean that was you know part of the thesis of of what we built too was to like

[27:15] i ideally lowered the barrier and and and and stuff like that so um but how has like has has that because i think there's one that you kind of mentioned just like top of funnel versus bottle funnel when you think of an app that's driven by virality there's like disadvantages to reducing right to like yeah so you must be balancing that really delicately right because you still you don't want to you don't want to take the gas out of that that viral loop yeah yeah i mean especially a year ago when we're like oh man we've had a free app we have like you know 400 000 maus or

[27:48] whatever it was at the time and we're about to introduce this like paid product you know it was kind of nerve-wracking and how to do that tastefully but you know we took the approach where we didn't pay well any of the current functionality like you could come in you could do everything you did before in fact we upgraded the free functionality as well and then we built new stuff so like new vocal effects uh new ways to like automatically make your song sound better using algorithms um and a few other cool things that people wanted and we paywalled like additional functionality so i think that was really crucial to do it that way um

[28:22] and we spent you know a few extra months building that but uh that was key and then people converted and they're still converting because it's just like you get the core experience you come in and then you know we gradually level them up and we've launched one subscription product so we have rapchat gold which again unlocks the premium creator tools but now we're working on a second one that we're going to layer on top that helps these artists make money and gets their songs on spotify and apple music and that's going to kind of complete the artist journey so building subscription products can be like really fun and fulfilling for both

[28:55] parties you know it's like we're finding ways to help you in your career and also like we don't have to starve either you know it's like we can both grow together and that probably sounds too happy but like really it is like it's been awesome you know it's almost like an efficient market right where people are paying for value there's a term for the values getting created right like oh it's almost like a good you know way of doing commerce like i like that so tell me a little bit more about um about the the fundraising process um as an app and kind of being i know you know you

[29:30] said there was that kind of in-between time where it's like you you you had all these signs of product market fit you were going after the big opportunity and then when you switch to subscriptions it wasn't too long after that that you you went and raised money right so did the subscription product really take off or was it just early and signs of it really taking off that seed investment i when we close that round you're talking about that's you know whatever public and um that was around nico and adjacent came in right you know we were a couple months into subscription so it's not like we had a

[30:04] ton of data uh and we weren't even like fully rolled out now we had proof that people liked it and good conversion rates and stuff like that but i like i think that was iteration one of the paywall and iteration one of the flow and like like really early uh but i do think it changed the pers like how you know investors perceived our company and we we proactively changed it too we're like no we're building subscription products for our best users and like you know we were able to kind of take control of the pitch more so than before where it's like you're not making money how are you going to make

[30:39] money are you going to be a social network with ads or are you going to be like a tools company it's like nah like this is this is what we are like you know and that really put us in control and um yeah once we got niko and a few other like we it was also just a good time in the market like i feel like in the past couple years you guys have seen there's been a lot of activity on the investors side getting into subscription apps on the market side with ipos on the founders side with building really great apps that scaled i mean at jason's whole

[31:07] portfolio as an example um so i think people were also like that was the first time where the market worked in our favor because before we were a music tech social you're like you're like uh yeah you're like instagram but smaller yeah yeah right like and so it also like it was kind of a perfect storm i guess and um yeah we were very fortunate to get in the right investors that understood the market and also understood like the vision like the vision was a lot clearer um and like i know nico really latched on to it and his kind of thesis was perfect for like

[31:44] what we're doing for music um so yeah it just it was a good fit and obviously like sony was in it and like you know that that was kind of a big key moment to get validation from like the actual music industry where it's like oh they're a lot more open and flexible to some of these new coming technologies and apps and companies and in fact like see value in working together that kind of knocks down that like historical music tech graveyard of the industry killing every music tech started they learned their lesson once probably yeah pretty much yeah i'm really curious about about sony specifically and then you know you've

[32:21] already been talking about nika but you after after raising that round and going through that process what what's your perspective and maybe even any advice to people thinking about this about that kind of strategic alignment and the kind of value add um you know finding that that that company investor founder fit any lessons you've learned from that uh yeah i mean it's hard one like i was gonna say i was gonna ask like what how you because it sounds like your leverage diff change probably right from like this first cause i i can't imagine did you raise those first rounds in ohio uh yeah some in ohio some in the midwest couple

[33:01] you know smaller funds on the coast but mostly it's kind of changed drastically since even in those first couple rounds right like it's gonna be yeah for sure for sure no we have a lot more left i mean we can be a lot more cheesy we've got to pick like really great investors as of late um it's a whole different yeah it's been it's been crazy um crazy awesome but yeah i mean working i don't know you'll get a lot of different advice in working with strategics or big industry partners and depending on who you talk to some will say don't touch them at all some will

[33:30] say if you can work with them work with them you know all i can say is from my experience like it's it's not easy like you're working with a massive usually a public company and they have a lot more process than than you do so like literally getting a deal done is just going to take longer be more strenuous probably have a couple strings we were fortunate enough for it to be like a really good like clean same terms type deal but like um it's it can be really difficult uh and that's kind of up to the founder and the company to figure out like is it worth it um you know for

[34:04] us major record labels are like still kind of the end state for a lot of potential artists in their journey like they still provide a lot of value if you get to that point so like of course we want to like for the long tail for our you know millions of creators give them that opportunity and if we can help bridge the gap to like get signed at some point that's really that's really interesting to us uh but yeah it's hard and again it's very contextual it depends on every deal depends on every company and in general it's just it's going to take it's going to take some time yeah

[34:37] dealing with like a big company like like sony like adventure deals probably the only thing you're probably told for at this stage because like that's a bit cleaner right like a venture deal it's like they invest money yeah if you can get it on the same terms as like another venture investor like it keeps it clean versus like if you're working on partnerships or something like that it gets more complicated and i think those differences and i'm sure i'm sure that's probably something you're thinking about going forward is like how do you actually like begin to really engage on those partnerships i think that's even harder so yeah in this specific case or

[35:07] like maybe a more general case like a venture a small like venture investment can be like a nice way to kind of just like get your foot in the door with with a company or like a strategic just kind of meet people just kind of give them some visibility and then as you grew up but i would be i would i would caution against like trying to engage on some big hairy strategic like partnership deal i would like push that out until you get a bit bigger and like you said like can match the like the bandwidth differences a little bit better yeah have like our own

[35:35] general counsel yeah our partnerships personally like you need somebody to run partnerships right or the ceo's main job right like yeah and that might probably not the best use of your time at this stage right so no i totally agree i mean that's that's that's pretty spot-on and how did you even get an intro i mean if you don't mind sharing like it seems like it is such a perfect fit but even those perfect fits like sometimes it's hard to just even get your foot in the door email ceo sony yeah right can we get a zoom call honestly like that's uh i don't even know i mean i think

[36:08] someone might have intro to us uh or i i reached out to somebody uh i mean we've had a lot of different contacts i mean over the years and and you guys know this but like now okay we've been startups for five six years and have pretty good network and investors partners founders and it's just kind of a flywheel like now you know things come in things go out like it's kind of an engine i think with that one it was later on in my like startup journey so i had a lot of kind of connections out there already with the other major labels too it's like you

[36:44] know we we've talked to we've kept in touch that was one thing i think we've done really well throughout like our time even though we've you know we've been around for a minute but we've consistently like kept people updated whether it's investors whether it's potential employees whether it's partners and you know sometimes like the guy you knew or a girl or whoever four years ago that you were talking to at a specific part of a bigger company is now leading venture right like and that that type of stuff happens a lot and i don't think this is one of those instances like i literally think we

[37:13] talked to one division of sony and then someone like introduced us to another like oh you should talk to the us music department or whatever and um you know all that to say like it's just happens like you just reach out to people or people reach out to you there's there's no like magic forms these big places have venture teams typically yeah or they have like some adventure part of their corp dev wing that's like um has you know funds and and knows what they're doing usually um but but yeah i mean it's tricky too to like pick partners like because yeah you also like we're we're a um interesting company in

[37:48] this inside like we have kind of many implicit partners right yeah right um you know there's no like there's no like cap table you know wedding rings between any of us which maybe simplifies or doesn't i thought you guys owned like 10 percent of rap chat yeah yeah that was that was that's how you got our free plan right in the early days you didn't read the full you didn't read the entire terms of service sorry parody parody comedy hey i did i did want to ask facebook kind of fuss jumped into your space not too long ago where were you because you we guarantee you you

[38:25] remember when you saw this but what were you doing when like you saw like facebook like cloned you guys i i honestly think i might have been sitting right here like i think i was just working it was nothing special like that's like a founder moment like there's these moments where you're like oh somebody just like a bullet just grazed my ear yeah no i wish i could say i was like at the gym on the treadmill and then it came in and i like jumped off the treadmill statistically it's most likely you're sitting at your desk but yeah statistically yeah no it was it was kind of a weird like i don't i

[38:57] don't even know how to describe the emotions i mean i was just like i kind of laughed it was just like okay you know i i definitely wasn't um like scared or super worried or freaking out like you know it's maybe i don't know 2019 me or something or in the early days would have been like oh like now i can't get venture funding or now i can't like keep building like they're gonna crush it but i mean we've been around and cemented ourselves so yeah i just it was kind of funny and ironic and then it went like many viral on twitter with a lot of you

[39:28] know my network and other people and then um i had friends sending it to me like oh dude what do you gotta do and i'm just like i don't know man like just probably download it and see how bad it is and go from there yeah and it was and honestly it was just kind of a fun thing like you know it it did like we got press around the round and then some people could you know write about that and it was kind of a funny story and somewhat of a badge of honor like people you know they copy a lot of the top apps and again it's just kind of

[40:00] like validation that like clearly you're onto something i mean they use the same color scheme emojis at okay one of my most proud things that's the stuff that makes you angry right as a founder it's not that they cloned you it's that they stole the little details right that's what makes me mad the thing that really got me was like for our like button right uh it's a flame it's like an emoji and like when you hit it it like turns into the actual emoji flame and i always thought that was like the sickest thing ever like they did the same exact thing i was just

[40:29] like all right like i mean that's what the little things are what confirmed that they actually kind of like really looked at your your app but um no it's been i don't even know what they've been up to i don't even know if they shipped updates it's zero concern to us and i think um it was just kind of fun it was like funny to share with the team and uh investors and you know a lot of investors are like hell yeah like that's a good sign like keep going and you should hire somebody off that team yeah right oh trust me i would love to cause like

[41:00] just think about like yeah i i think you've got the right mentality about it i'm not even telling you this is like trying to make you feel better because like think how much more skin in the game you have and i don't know who built this it's probably some product managers like promotion packet project or whatever i'm being condescending to people working big companies but you know but but but think about it like this you know this is a this is a one-time thing they're trying out right this is your passion right this is your life yes whatever years right like good luck unless unless they just happen to be way

[41:29] more talented and way more funded which maybe facebook is but like they're not they don't execute perfectly on everything right so i just think you just smile and you just feel like yeah let's go right it's not it's not like apple's competing with you and being like we're pre-installing a chat rap app right on the phone which you know could happen yeah i appreciate that i mean the thing is also like look in the early days we were i'm just sharing this for context like we were you know one of the first apps that actually let you record your voice over a beat and share it like that

[41:59] was like new okay now there's plenty of apps where you can come in record vocals or you know different types of audio over beats and like music making apps are kind of a commodity um but what we've done that i mentioned and we kind of fell into this was like we built that social layer that community layer and you can't replicate that you know like they can come in and replicate the tool and have a feed but like nah dude we already have like hundreds of thousands of like passionate creators have been with us that have been riding with us and my favorite thing was when complex

[42:29] tweeted it out and like complex being like a very like cultural industry outlet and they tweeted out and the responses of that were just like the most hilarious thing i don't think i could say like half of it but it was like basically like zuck this like reptile coming into like you know vulture culture vulture and like all that like would be my worst nightmare people said about us and they don't like it's just we're authentic and you know we really care about the community and that's you know that's number one that's awesome well i think that's a great place to wrap up we're coming up to the top of

[43:04] the hour but i did want to give you a few seconds to uh to pitch yeah i know you're hiring and you got a lot going on right now um any any specific roles at the company that uh that you think our audience might be a great fit for yeah for sure i appreciate that um i mean really just like product builders and i say that like broadly so engineers designers uh growth marketers um we're looking for really great people to help us scale again we're still a small team 10 people fully remote and you know really looking to scale the product and the company and um now that

[43:42] we have some stability it's a great time to jump on board and uh yeah i mean we really like you know we really think that uh this era of mass music creation has begun and we kind of kick-started it but we're only getting started right and um we just have you know a really strong opportunity to provide you know the everyday stack for the everyday artists and that's that's our passion yeah that's amazing i took a look at your careers page it looks like there's some great opportunities there across the whole stack which is fun so yeah which position were you looking at david [Laughter] you guys are welcome to have this

[44:19] conversation but just let me leave the room please i mean i do have a background in uh recording audio engineering it does yes that's true no i'm not in the market i have too much fun having conversations like this with uh people like you said all right thank you for listening to some podcasts no that's a great place to go out on that thank you so much seth for being on the podcast and man it's been great you've been so uh generous with your your time and just sharing and um you know seth's been on multiple other podcasts he's been on uh app promotion summit and so the you know

[44:59] i love it when people in the space are open and share about the successes the failures how they're building things so thanks for your time today and for being so active in the kind of broader app maker community yeah no i mean and i just want to say thanks thanks for you guys uh the podcast is awesome i listened to it uh every episode and yeah not to plug your your product but your product like you know we love it and it's been instrumental in building a uh a real business over here so we're really excited and yeah i just just appreciate you guys getting dusty in

[45:34] here yeah thanks great to meet you yeah likewise man let's let's hang out so let's do it you guys take care to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time [Music]

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