4.10 (V) (Optional) The Entrepreneur's Journey - Interview (1)
I'm Karl Ulrich and I'm a professor at the Wharton school and I'm very lucky to have today with me Lindsey Stewart who's the cofounder and CEO of Stringer. Lindsey thanks for coming in. » Thanks for having me. I want to first give a disclaimer, which is that your co founder Brian McNeil was my student, that's the first disclaimer. You weren't, actually. » No. [LAUGH] » And the second is that I really hope you guys make a lot of money, because I'm an investor in your company. So I just do want to get that disclaimer out of the way. » We definitely want to make you a lot of money, and maybe a couple of bucks for ourselves too. [LAUGH] » Great, awesome. Well, why don't you give us the elevator pitch for Stringer? » So Stringer is a video marketplace, and we allow our customers, major media customers, to request footage, custom footage, and get it back in a very tight deadline. Just drop a pin on a map, tell us what you want, and then thousands of contributors can respond to that request I give you exactly the video that you want to use for a number of reasons. We focused on editorial, initially, » Give me a really specific example. What's some footage you've captured recently, and how did it actually work? » So, we had a number of news organizations who wanted footage when there was that disaster in San Bernardino. There was active shooter, at least, on the run. They went in, they dropped pins all over the San Bernardino county area, asked us to leverage our community of videographers there who then in under an hour's time were able to get shots from patients arriving to the hospital related to the event, the location and interviews with people who've witnessed the event itself. And really just be able to come in and grab a lot of different kinds of what would have been very disparate footage at one time, all into one place and grab it from a single source which was us. » So tell me a little bit, you said drop a pin. So that the producer is sitting at his or her desk presumably looking at a website? Is that how they're actually entering their request? » Yeah, it's pretty simple. They just log in to our website. They put in a topic, so in this case it was a potential shooter in San Bernardino. They drop a pin on a map. » I see. » And say here are the locations we're interested in getting footage from, and then when they hit submit, that goes out to our contributors who are in the area. Our videographers who've signed up to be on our app, in the area, who can look at the nature of the request, decide if that's something they can respond to, shoot the video, either with their smart phone, or handheld cameras and then upload that footage. That footage comes back in real time to our customers. So, it this case it was like the likes of CBS News and The Associated Press. And then they can take a look at that footage, decide if that's something that's useful to them, hit the download button and grab it. All while they're sitting in New York. » Yeah. Who are these videographers? » They range. They range from professionals all the way kind of down the spectrum to people who are interested in videography. One of the things that we have focused on in the last year is we're finding who that population is. At first we cast the net in our marketing effort pretty wide, just to see who would come in. Who would provide valuable footage. And then we captured that data. What is that profile of a person look like? And now, we're able to basically market to a more refined set of people, who have an interest in videography. Maybe had no way to monetize that interest. And now have access to our network of customers to sell their footage. » You mentioned monetized. So there's something in it for them? They get paid? » Yeah, the get paid. So every time a request goes out, or any time they upload something and it sells to a customer, sells to a customer is a real key part of our business model, then they are paid. They are also told what the prospective payment would be from the onset, if it is indeed in response to a request like the one I alluded to before. And so unlike a lot of places where you could put video, like social media, where maybe potentially you just want to tell your friends you're doing something, or you're bragging about going to the The Super Bowl or something like that. This is not that environment. This is an environment where you provide valuable footage to customers who want to buy it. You're not just telling the world that you're doing something. » About how much could they expect to earn? So it basically comes down to the per customer download. So the average for us that we pay out right now is $55. But every single time a different customer buys, they make money. And so potentially you're making $55. Maybe three customers will buy and then it's three acts of that. But that's how the model works. Now we're working on a different kind of model where we have some channel partners like Getty Images where the payments might look more like a percentage of what we bring in so that they capture, if we win big with a particular clip, so do they. We definitely want to make our contributors excited about coming back. » Yeah, where did the idea come from? » So, I'm a former news girl, I spent a lot of time producing. I worked the Fox News channel for almost eight years and then came up to the Bay area, obviously went to the Wharton School, worked at Bloomberg, and my final stop was ABC News. And so, the idea came from just a basic need in the newsroom. We have current Stringers, Stringer is the name of the company, who basically push content onto us on a daily basis or especially breaking news environments. And some of that content is great, some of that content is not so great. Some of the delivery is okay in terms of technology actually getting the content in house so that you can use it and put it on TV or publish it, and some of it is very slow. And so I thought it would be much nicer to have transparency in the system, where there's a marketplace where photographers could upload footage, we could see it, know what we're buying ahead of time, and it would be delivered to us quickly. The cloud has given us a lot of options and there's a lot of speed but that doesn't mean that the average individual stringer has all those tools at their back to make it a fast delivery. That was the initial idea, but then when I was here at Wharton I started basically randomly talking about it and Brian, the co founder said well what if we gave our customers the option to request the footage they want not just take the footage that's available. And that's a brilliant idea because all of a sudden you've just opened up the world to a producer and said I really need this protest in Minnesota. I really need storms in Tampa. I really need snow in Boston. And nobody has put anything out there that I want, and now I could basically request it. » Yeah. » And so that's what we do. It works in both ways, but I have to say the request footage feature is the stickiest feature for the contributors, because they think rightfully so that they're responding to a request from a customer. » Yeah. This story follows a very typical template or pattern, which is the entrepreneur, his or herself feels the pain at some point in their life. And then says hey, I bet I could come up with a service that would address that pain point. So that is the template for Stringer. You were yourself the customer, basically. » Yeah, I was the customer. [LAUGH] » But did you always envision yourself as being an entrepreneur. What point did you say, I'm a news producer. I guess you had taken a break to go to school, is that right? » Yeah, I was still a news producer while I was going to school. » Okay. » And I don't know that I always viewed myself as an entrepreneur. » Yeah. » I viewed myself as a person who had a certain amount of get-up- and-go that I think is associated with being a news professional. But as far as putting all the aspects of a business together, that's a pretty daunting task and even as an entrepreneur, I'd be lying to say that isn't A daunting task now. But no I don't think so, I think that business school and being around other people with different sets of talents, whether it be engineering or business operations, or finance, was really what kind of glued it all together. » Well, so you sort of socialized this idea, kicked it around with some of your classmates and peers. At what point did you say, wow I'm really going to go for this. This is going to be what I do. » I think it was when we looked at the opportunity in the market. Which is something that I don't think, if I hadn't gone to business school, I would've given much thought to. And I think a number of business people actually just get into the market who don't have the training and do quite well without sizing things up so numerically or quantitatively. But yeah what really did it for me was we put an MBP together. » Okay, so that's minimum buyable product. » Yes, Minimum Buyable Product together with our own money and then we started showing it to our prospective customers. We basically took it to some local news customers, some network news customers. And said, if it looks something like this, would you use it? If it looked something like this, would you pay for it? And we got a lot of positive response. I think it was that. And then we went to some investors and said, you know, here's our idea. And do you think this is worth putting your money behind? And I don't think without either one of those coming To fruition, we would have jumped off. Without the next bit of capital to get yourself to the next milestone, it's pretty hard to get there. And without some valuation from the market, your first market where you're going to sell it, it's probably not a good idea also to go jumping and quit your jobs. Especially if I go, good one. » Well you called it a MVP or minimum viable product but it was more of a mock up, is that right? Was it fully functional? Could they actually request footage? Or was it more of a mock up. » It was initially a mock up. » Yeah. » And I mean I literally, you know, with some trusted friends in the news business » Yeah. » said, here's how it would work. Here's how it will look. Here's how the dashboard would look. Dashboard didn't look anything like had initially first. » Sure. » Drew but, what do you think? And, I got a lot of feedback there. And that's important because before you spend engineering dollars. » Mm-hm.
» Which are some of the most expensive dollars you can spend in a startup, at least right now. You want to make sure that at least the initial features that make sense. » Mm-hm.
