$100M Without Paid Ads

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Everyone says you need massive marketing budgets to scale fast.

Speaker 1 Stephen Galanis proves you just need the right idea. The co-founder and CEO of Cameo scaled from zero to $100 million in revenue in four years without spending a single dollar on marketing.

Speaker 1 The show starts now.

Speaker 2 All right, everybody, welcome back. I'm excited for today's call.
This is an individual who has done things that I don't think anyone else I know has possibly done. We'll get into it.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 3 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 So you've done things. And for the audience that don't know who you are, give a quick debrief on who you are, what you've done.

Speaker 2 I've always been blown away by it. I'm so happy to have you on.

Speaker 2 Tell us a little bit about you.

Speaker 3 Hi, my name's Stephen Galanis, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Cameo.

Speaker 3 Cameo is the world's largest marketplace where you can book first slides video messages from tens of thousands of the most exciting names in pop culture.

Speaker 2 It's amazing how you've gotten these people as well, because there's people I grew up as a huge fan of that I was like God I just I want to get a happy birthday from him You know one of them was a pitcher.

Speaker 2 He's in a major league ball player and I was like I just want to get a happy birthday from him So the idea that you actually made that happen before we get any farther Thank you for making that dream happen for me I really appreciate that getting that little birthday wish from him was was huge for me

Speaker 2 Okay, so you created something that most people haven't the idea that to execute this on a lot of the businesses and a lot of things you do executes on ways that most people only dream of what are some of the things that you've run into as you've created the success with cameo that has radically changed your environment?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I think there's a number of those, but I think it really starts with a few things. Number one,

Speaker 3 it's really important that as a founder, you're building in a space that you want to work in in a really long time.

Speaker 3 And when I was pretty early in my career founding Cameo, I ended up meeting this founder in Chicago. who had sold his company for a billion dollars and was kind of one of the tech luminaries here.

Speaker 3 And he introduced me to a framework that I love telling founders about. And it's called Ikigai.
And it's a Japanese philosophy.

Speaker 3 And basically imagine a Venn diagram, but instead of two circles, there's four.

Speaker 3 And the idea is that, you know, to really be the best in the world at something, you have to be at the intersection of what do you love to do? What does the world need?

Speaker 3 What are you great at? And what can you get paid for?

Speaker 3 And, you know, when I think about cameo and, you know, kind of the ups and downs and, you know, the things that get you through eight years of building something and hopefully I could work on it another 80 years.

Speaker 3 Like I love what I do.

Speaker 3 Being at that EQ guy point, it kind of gives you perpetual energy. It almost is like Iron Man's heart.

Speaker 3 And one thing I see so often is people kind of, you know, founders kind of jumping to the next hot thing.

Speaker 3 And just in the last eight years, I think about the venture hype cycles that I've seen happen when we were raising money for Cameo at the beginning.

Speaker 3 If you weren't doing a micro-mobility startup, you know, you weren't getting funded. This is like the bird and lime craze days.
And then it was AR VR and then there was blockchain.

Speaker 3 And then the creator economy got super hot, like right after, you know, companies like us and OnlyFans, you know, really exploded. And then, you know, everybody was building creator economies.

Speaker 3 Then it was Web3. Like the tide came in so hard on the creator economy and everyone was building a Web3 business.

Speaker 3 And, you know, today, a lot of the founders that were building Web3 businesses or the investors that had Web3 on their LinkedIn profile

Speaker 3 or their Twitter bio, suddenly they're all doing AI right now, right? So I've seen that and it very rarely is sustainable.

Speaker 3 And I think oftentimes, you know, that's just one of those things, like finding your EK guy point. And, you know, I thought your intro here was pretty interesting, right?

Speaker 3 You're talking about there's this picture that you loved.

Speaker 3 And that's where, like, I think of all those four buckets that you know building something that the world actually needs is the one that i think gets ignored too much right like when there is one of these vc hype cycles you know it's it's all about like what's going to get funded that's how a lot of fun founders think but ultimately it always comes down to product market fit are you building something the world actually needs So finding that product market fit along with the Iki Guide, the something that you love is very hard for people.

Speaker 2 There's a bunch of people like, I like to sit on the beach and become a shore erosion technician, just watch the ocean go in and out. That's not going to make you money.

Speaker 2 Or someone says, hey, you know what? I really love making sandals in the Philippines. I'm like, well, that's probably not going to hit your six, seven, eight-figure goals.
How do you find the balance?

Speaker 2 How does someone find that thing that they love if they don't know what they love? How do they get to that point?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I think it comes back to like, what are you doing in your spare time? Like when nobody's watching, like, what are the things that you're doing?

Speaker 3 And, you know, I think about my career free starting cameo

Speaker 3 you know avid sports fan while I was an options trader my first job out of college I started a movie production company right so you know since kindergarten my nickname's been the mayor I've always been somebody that brings people together and connects them and and kind of unlocks you know whatever experiences whether it's in Chicago or at Duke or any of the places that I've been you know I like him the classic guy that like opens the red velvet rope and brings people in So I think most, if you were to go to my kindergarten teachers or my college professors or my friends from any era of my life, I don't think, you know, maybe people didn't know exactly what I was going to do.

Speaker 3 But once they found out that I was doing this, like this just made all the sense of the world, right? And it, it brought my love for social media and for fandom,

Speaker 3 you know, and, you know, it also solved a problem that maybe everybody doesn't wake up thinking about, but as somebody that, you know, went to Duke and my,

Speaker 3 along with one of my other co-founders and our third co-founder was an athlete at USC.

Speaker 3 We had really good friends that played Duke basketball and won national championships or were at USC, played on those Matt Leiner, Reggie Bush era teams.

Speaker 3 And, you know, years after selling out the Coliseum or Cameron Indoor, you know, they're, they're basically middle school gym teachers or they're working as parapros at their old high school because, you know, the reality is, unless you become like a top, top tier player you're not going to make enough money to sustain yourself and you know i remember uh right as we were starting a documentary called broke came out it was a 30 for 30 and in that it said that 85 of unfellow players go broke five years after playing their last game and that was a staggering staggering you know stat and again it's not the type of thing that like that's that problem doesn't necessarily bother everyone but as an athlete myself like all of us you know we had our friends that were impacted by this this is the era where college athletes couldn't get paid.

Speaker 3 So, you know, you go from selling out the Coliseum in LA to suddenly like, you know, not being able to make money doing anything if you didn't make the NFL or if you made it and got hurt or you made it and got cut.

Speaker 3 Right. So

Speaker 3 I think it just comes down to, you have to have the passion for the problem set that you're doing. And

Speaker 3 it's just, it can't, that's, it's, it's so underrated, but it's so critical.

Speaker 2 So wouldn't, and I agree with you. I'm former athlete.
I get it. Once Once it turns off, you can't feed the bills, you can't pay the bills on glory from like two, three, five years ago.

Speaker 2 It just doesn't work that way. You mentioned that you had multiple co-founders, and that's something that as people are trying to scale, those relationships are dynamic.

Speaker 2 And people don't understand when you have co-founders, there's different type of co-founders. There's silent ones, there's ones that are actively involved with you.

Speaker 2 There's ones that are operating with you. How do you find that balance? I've been very lucky with the people I've co-founded things with.
Very, very blessed, but there's a strategy to it.

Speaker 2 I'm curious, how did you navigate that? When you have multiple co-founders, you know, multiple kitchen people in the kitchen cooking with you? How do you find that balance?

Speaker 3 There's a really smart investor that I like that I met at a, you know, a Duke founder and investor forum they held on campus. His name is David Cummings.

Speaker 3 And David is a partner at Atlanta Ventures, backed a lot of, you know, the early stage companies that came out of there.

Speaker 3 And I remember hearing him talk one time and he said that in consumer, he often found that the best founding teams had these three co-founders.

Speaker 3 Now, these attributes could all be in one person, could be in two person, could be in three, but he's like, I've never seen a company that doesn't have the hacker, the hustler, and the hipster.

Speaker 3 The hacker is somebody that finds a new and novel way to make things

Speaker 3 happen.

Speaker 3 In our case, that was like, how do you go from Hollywood or NFL agents, which are the biggest gatekeepers in the world?

Speaker 3 And how do we cut through the agencies, cut through the noise, and like go direct to the talent? And, you know, it really took a hacker to go and figure that out.

Speaker 3 And in our case, it was like Instagram DM. Like we built an army of people that were DMing celebrities on Instagram and just the sheer volume and getting through.

Speaker 3 And then once they came on and liked it, we asked for referrals. Like that's how we built our business brick by brick.

Speaker 3 And today we have tens of thousands of talent on the platform, which would be bigger than all of the agencies combined. Right.
So that's number one. Number two, you need the hustler.

Speaker 3 The hustler is the person that can like build FOMO and hype and and get people excited about it. Critical for raising the initial seed capital and getting angels excited about it.

Speaker 3 Even more critical, even harder than raising capital is like, how do you get people to quit their great job to come, you know, the best people?

Speaker 3 Cause you really need great people to do it to come work on your crazy idea before there's product market fit, right? Because if you don't have that, you're not going to be able to attract it.

Speaker 3 So you really need that hustler that can do that. And then lastly, this one's one I think gets forgotten about, but in consumer, it's so important.
You need the hipster.

Speaker 3 The hipster is the person that's going to see like what's cool in the future.

Speaker 3 And, you know, oftentimes, like as the hipster is kind of doing their thing in real time, it seems weird, it seems interesting.

Speaker 3 Like in our case, when we started Cameo, the Instagram, you know, aesthetic, the highly polished, you know, lights, camera, makeup, that was the in vogue, you know, aesthetic for video content.

Speaker 3 But one of the things that, you know, we had conviction about was to build authentic over high quality so instead of having our celebrities come into a into a studio and and like film the videos with the productional crew we're like the iphone cam is cool it's actually it's even better like this zoom setup i have it's more authentic you know even though i've got the great lights and the great camera it's actually more authentic for what we sell like the selfie style video them walking around like oh what's that who's behind them you know what do they have like what are they making like what's that boot on there?

Speaker 3 Like, that's the authenticity that really worked. And as TikTok has risen in promise, that, that authentic aesthetic actually ended up being the winning one.

Speaker 3 And even in our B2B business today, you know, we find that the brands prefer this content that looks like real videos that people are posting as opposed to the Madison Avenue glossy.

Speaker 3 So this is a long way of saying in my case,

Speaker 3 our co-founders had each of those attributes, right? Like, like, uh, you know, Devin is very clearly the hipster in the group.

Speaker 3 Martin was very clearly the hacker, and I was very clearly the hipster, or sorry, the hustler. So, the nice thing about that is we never stepped on each other's toes.

Speaker 3 The division of labor was great, you know, Martin, you go get the talent, Devin, you go build the product, Stephen, you go run the business, right? And that's, that's how we've been.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I'm very blessed that eight years in, all the co-founders are still at the company. Obviously, roles have evolved as time has gone on and we've hired great other people to come in.

Speaker 3 But, you know, I think at the end of the day, like the conviction of the founders and all of us like working on something that, you know, is our EK guy that we really care about, it's been critical.

Speaker 2 So I think one of the other things that's unique about you guys is the acquisition of either talent and or customers, because I didn't know what cameo was until I got my first cameo, until it was sent to me.

Speaker 2 So I was sitting there and, you know, someone got this for for me. All of a sudden, it's this picture and it pops up.
I'm like, oh my God, this is, and I was freaking out.

Speaker 2 And I love the authenticity because it was literally him just sitting on his couch. I was like, oh my God, that's in his house.
This is, and he's saying my name. And he's doing it.

Speaker 2 It was just this magical experience. And then I went from there and I started looking at all the other talent and I started looking at all the videos and all the other talent.

Speaker 2 I was like, oh, what is this size?

Speaker 2 And it had this idea. That's a different approach than most people have to growing their audience.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 2 when you're in that environment and you're taking this different approach and you're trying to convert differently, what are some of the ways that you found above and beyond the just, hey, I'm going to buy it for it and it'd be word of mouth.

Speaker 2 Because you said word of mouth is so important of getting new talent in.

Speaker 2 What are some of the ways that you have seen that a success to creating this that people could use now to get more clients and get more clientele?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, look,

Speaker 3 I think a lot of that had to do with the really unique, a couple of unique attributes of our

Speaker 3 particular product, right? And the lessons that I have, they worked excellent for us and we understood them early and we really executed well against those.

Speaker 3 But these lessons may not be true for everybody, whether you're building a marketplace or you're just trying to get your word out in a direct-to-consumer brand.

Speaker 3 But really, the Cameo flywheel was simple.

Speaker 3 Our marketplace, unlike Uber or Airbnb or DoorDash, is particularly unique because our supply can beget their own demand. Everyone on Cameo is famous.

Speaker 3 They have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers on TikTok, on Instagram, on X, on whatever platform you care about.

Speaker 3 And one of the things they can do that an Uber driver can't do or an Airbnb host can't do is they can post and the people following them are probably the most likely people in the world to buy, right?

Speaker 3 So that's a really interesting dynamic. So as we were starting with our marketplace, you know, the classic chicken and the egg, like there's no talent on, nobody, there's no customers.

Speaker 3 We had absolute conviction that if we got the supply side on, then the demand side would follow um you know one of the tactics that we did and now this has become commonplace but you know we were one of the first companies to not ever ask people hey don't don't

Speaker 3 like we never asked people to promote cameo we would create a link for everyone you know cameo.com slash steven would be like my profile and i would ask you to tweet that out that would go to your page and then once you're on your page you could go browse and see who else was there but we never asked people to like go to cameo.com we always asked them to go to their unique link and the value prop made a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 You make three times as much as we do for every sale and we take a take rate. So we're completely incentivized for you to be as good as you possibly could be.

Speaker 3 And we've really worked on creating great tools that talent could share their own links out. So that's number one.
Number two,

Speaker 3 our product is pretty unique in that over 80% of them are bought for other people. So it's not you buying for yourself and watching it on your phone.

Speaker 3 It's me buying it for you and then sending it to you in a text message, in a group chat, maybe posting it on your Facebook wall back in the way or tweeting it out to you or posting it on

Speaker 3 my Instagram story and tagging you in it. Right.
And then that created this phenomenon where like it was getting shared. Right.
So we always say every cameo is a commercial for the next one.

Speaker 3 And one thing that we had on there, every video is watermarked, right? So you see this video, you're like, holy shit, how do I do that? And then you see cameo, right?

Speaker 3 And then people watch the video, they Google Cameo, they come into our site, and that's really the flywheel. So it's supply side acquisition, count promoting, user sharing, and then

Speaker 3 the customer sharing to the recipient. And then the recipient tending to share it on social in their group chat or just taking their phone out and being, holy shit, look what I got.

Speaker 2 There was a lot of that holy shit when I got mine. I was like, holy shit, holy shit.
And then there was the other thing that happened was I literally fell down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 2 I was like, who else is on here? Who is this? Who is that? What are they doing? What are they going to do? And it really just became this, this ran down the rabbit hole with it.

Speaker 2 People will sit there from the outside and say, okay, well, yeah, I see the end of it. Cameo just started three days ago and magically now is with these people.
We make all this money and da, da, da.

Speaker 2 They don't see the years of effort. They don't see the trials and the tribulations.
They don't see the lessons. They don't see the hurdles.
They don't see the times where you fell down.

Speaker 2 What are some of the biggest lessons that you've had as you've gone through this? And yes, you've got something that's, you know, a massive USP.

Speaker 2 When you're into this, how, what are some of the things you're like, God, I wish I could go back and talk to Steven 10 years ago and say, hey, dude, you're going to run into this wall.

Speaker 2 This is how you handle it.

Speaker 3 This is what's going on. How do you pivot around it? Yeah.
One of the really unique things about Cameo is that we kind of found product market fit almost right away.

Speaker 3 You know, we had a really disastrous launch, which I can tell that story in a little bit. But, but shortly after that, like,

Speaker 3 you know, first we started just with NFL players. We thought like there was this big need.
And then it really wasn't until we started, we, Devin, my co-founder one day was like, hey, I think Cody,

Speaker 3 his roommate Cody Ko, who has 10 million followers on YouTube, and people like Cody might do well on it. Cody tried it, he put it on a YouTube video, like we went viral for the first time.

Speaker 3 And we really found our product market fit with like ex-bind stars, TikTok, YouTube, and then reality TV became big.

Speaker 3 And, you know, while athletes still probably represent the largest number of people on the site, you know, it's, it's maybe 14, 15% of our total business.

Speaker 3 So we ended up finding product market fit, you know, as we expanded out.

Speaker 3 The business kind of worked right away and worked really well for the first four years. I mean, this is a business that went from zero to 100 million top line in four years with no marketing spend.

Speaker 3 There's not many businesses

Speaker 3 in the world that did that. So interestingly, our biggest problems actually happened like after massive success, after we became a unicorn.
And it really started when we,

Speaker 3 you know, basically we were, we were trying to like conquer the world,

Speaker 3 not just like in our core market geographically, which we did. We found ourselves having Amio Japan and hiring people in the UK and Australia and all over Europe and South America.
And

Speaker 3 what we also did at the same time was we were thinking about all the ways that town could monetize. And we wanted to make sure that we had an answer in every space.

Speaker 3 So broadly, the four ways that town can monetize their fame on the internet. They can have a subscription business.
So think OnlyFans Patreon.

Speaker 3 In 2020, we launched our answer to that called fan clubs and suddenly you know we had some of our best engineers working on you know uh basically all of the same features that you would see on only fans or patreon you know things like uh subscriptions and you know mass dm and all those type of products secondly um you know we we built a cam a live and calls product um you know which uh in during covid all of the you know meet and greets weren't happening anymore that you would see at a concert or a comic-con.

Speaker 3 And we felt like we could fill that in a digital way.

Speaker 3 It worked a little bit, but then when the world opened up, we built great tech, but there just wasn't the same product market fit to sit online and

Speaker 3 talk to someone on FaceTime versus meeting them in real life.

Speaker 3 So we kind of missed on that. Third, physical goods is another thing that people can sell on the internet.

Speaker 3 We bought the world's largest celebrity merch company, a company that really focused on A-plus

Speaker 3 you know, actors and athletes. You know, think Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matthew McConaughey.

Speaker 3 And, you know, we bought that company and we really felt like when the world opened up, merch might be something that was a little easier for talent to sell.

Speaker 3 And, you know, after that, we saw some big changes in Facebook and Instagram and TikTok's algorithm, which made it a lot harder for talent to like promote their own stuff.

Speaker 3 So, you know, we would have eight years of sales data on certain people and their drops were just making less and less than they ever would would even though like you know they didn't become less popular so you know that was another roadblock we we ran into and then you know lastly the b2b side um you know people can get brand deals and we had cameo for business and that team started rapidly rapidly expanding you know cmos and ceos that had used our product as consumers

Speaker 3 or during covid you know buying them for all hands or you know how many team meetings had cameos in them during covid all of a sudden they're now trying to use it for their marketing marketing content.

Speaker 3 You know, this is a really exciting thing. But suddenly what happened to us was, you know, we went from a team of 100 to about 437, but our best people were focused on all different things.

Speaker 3 And what often happens in startups is that people forget that if you optimize your core business by 5%, 10%, it's almost always better than building the next thing.

Speaker 3 And, you know, we were certainly guilty and I was guilty for signing off on this stuff of, you know, chasing the shiny new object. And part of that is we found product market fit

Speaker 3 so quickly with what we did. And now we had a better team than we ever had.
And we let that loose and we just got, we overextended ourselves. And now looking back on it,

Speaker 3 I think about all the money that we spent and all the great efforts that we put in. And ultimately, if the team that I had hired was all working on, you know, the one thing, right?

Speaker 3 And just continue to make that that better and better and better. What could those compounding games have been? So

Speaker 3 I would say that for me,

Speaker 3 if I were to come back and look at myself in 2020 or 2021, it would be to really resist chasing the shiny object and continuing to embrace the grind of just making your great core business as good as you possibly can be.

Speaker 2 So you talked about, you know, your team went from really, really small. All of a sudden went, you know, 100 people, skyrocketed up to 400.
And I don't care how much training you've had.

Speaker 2 I don't care how much, you know, theoretical, theoretical, academic level training. Walking in and having to lead that level of unit, leading that group, takes a special set of skills.

Speaker 2 And you have to advance your skills on that little high level.

Speaker 2 What are some of the things that you've learned to create a culture to lead these individuals who are, as you said, attracting the best of the best, that they're willing to leave their business, their current jobs, to come work with you?

Speaker 2 How have you learned how to lead those individuals?

Speaker 3 It took a lot of coaching.

Speaker 3 I was really fortunate throughout that era to be working with a CEO coach

Speaker 3 named Bing Gordon. And Bing's kind of a legend in the valley, one of the founders of Electronic Arts, 30-year GP of Kleiner Perkins,

Speaker 3 had served on the board of Amazon from like Seed Stage all the way till probably 22.

Speaker 3 You know, was,

Speaker 3 I think, chairman of Zynga and, you know, so influential in Duolingo and, you know, so many of the great consumer companies of the last, you know, 30 years. And

Speaker 3 Bing introduced me to a framework that has become my like core operating framework as a CEO and something that I like to teach every founder that I talk about when they hit a certain scale.

Speaker 3 And he has this concept of forever OKRs.

Speaker 3 If you're familiar with the OKR philosophy, this is a philosophy that

Speaker 3 the guys at Kleiner, very famously, like people like John Dore

Speaker 3 rolled out to Google and

Speaker 3 LinkedIn and so many of the legendary tech companies of the last 20, 30 years. And OKR stands for objective key results.
So

Speaker 3 basically, what it would say is you have some large objective and it might say,

Speaker 3 I want to grow my talent base. And then the key result would be specific, measurable, and time bound.
So I want to go from 1,100 talent to 1,500 talent by November 1st. So having some specific goal.

Speaker 3 Bing's idea in watching, in his experience, watching, you know, so many great CEOs, whether it's, you know, Mark Pincus or Jeff Bezos or, you know, Daniel Eck or like any of these, you know, great CEOs that he'd worked with and mentored, he, he basically distilled like what made them great, what separated the, you know, the top 10% from the rest was really people that could nail like these five very specific things.

Speaker 3 And the idea of Forever OKR is as a CEO, or let's use a head of sales as an example. The forever OKR of a sales leader is beat planned, right?

Speaker 3 You don't know what the number is going to be today, you know, might be 2 billion today and 5 billion next year, but it's always beat planned.

Speaker 3 As a CMO, your forever OKR is, you know, build a legendary brand for your employees and customers. Like no matter what the product is, like that's what you want to do as a CMO.

Speaker 3 As a CEO, in Bing's experience, he thought that there were five things on the forever OKR front that every CEO should be thinking about.

Speaker 3 And really, at scale, every other job that's not these five things are stuff that other people could do.

Speaker 3 So the first of these forever OKRs is product market fit, something we've spent a lot of this call talking about.

Speaker 3 Find it. And when you find it, you know, continue to make sure you don't lose it.

Speaker 3 And then as a CEO, thinking about when you have product market fit and you feel like it's solid, like at what point do you start finding product market fit on other things?

Speaker 3 If you don't have product market fit, all of the rest of the things that I'm going to talk about, they don't matter. So as a CEO, like that's where your time needs to be spent,

Speaker 3 you know, exclusively, and especially if you're building new initiatives, right?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, you got to be as in the weeds on that as possible to make sure, like, should the investment, like, am I making the right investment by starting this new product or expanding the geography?

Speaker 3 So product market fits number one. Number two is build a world-class executive team.

Speaker 3 You know, at scale, you know, when you're, you know, 437 people, and again, like there's 4,000 person companies and 40,000.

Speaker 3 And so this will just exponentially get more important, you know, as a leader, and especially as a leader that was leading a company that's fully remote during COVID, right?

Speaker 3 You're not going to be the person that's like in the weeds on every decision. So making sure that you have a world-class executive team that can come and take your vision and execute it, right?

Speaker 3 It's like they're the people sitting with the pencil behind their ear, taking notes with what you say, but then taking the things you're talking about in the exec room and actualizing them on the front line.

Speaker 3 You got to have a world-class executive team. And there's, you know, then the next natural question is, how do you know that your executive team is world-class?

Speaker 2 Right. Well, that was my next question.

Speaker 3 Well, number one, you do that by meeting world-class. executives, right?

Speaker 3 So if you're like, hey, I want to see what world-class looks like in marketing, go talk to your VCs, go talk to some of your investors.

Speaker 3 I guarantee you that some other company in their portfolio has an industry leading or many industry-leading CMOs. So go talk to those people and

Speaker 3 see what good feels like. Go get a coffee with them.
And then you start to, you know, over time, you start to get pattern recognition. You have a bar.

Speaker 3 Bing would make me do this exercise with them once a quarter.

Speaker 3 where I would have to rank my executive team five to one, five being this is the best person in the world that could possibly do this job at this stage, four being their 90th percentile, three being their industry average, two being their below average, one being, why the fuck do they work for you?

Speaker 3 Right. And what you do is you take all those scores, you add them up and you divide them by the amount of direct reports you have, and you get to a number that's somewhere between one and five.

Speaker 3 And most CEOs, when they do this for the first time, end up ranking their executive team 3.5, like the average that's just where it ends up being and what bing has found time and time again is that a world-class executive team has a 4.25 or higher average so as you're thinking about the the members of your executive team today's three like could potentially get coached up to be tomorrow's four but at a hypergrowth company it's actually much more likely that you know today's five is tomorrow's three right so constantly you have to think about okay where do i up level can i continue to bet on this person like what coaching can we get them?

Speaker 3 And, you know, when we became a unicorn, we had a really unique case where every single one of us was doing this for the first time.

Speaker 3 And every time we hired someone, we were running the biggest company we ever did.

Speaker 3 So, you know, probably a decision at the time that seemed like a great idea was up-leveling my executive team, you know, from this team that I...

Speaker 3 you know, was excellent, had built the company, you know, had the passion, had the knowledge, but we were really bringing that next level leadership in because we were working on

Speaker 3 our ultimate goal, which was to ring the bell and to become a private, you know, a public company.

Speaker 3 And, you know, in that time, we hired the global head of people away from McDonald's, one of the biggest employers in the world, absolute world-class leader. We hired, I had a product away from Uber,

Speaker 3 you know, someone that was responsible for building the driver's side and the rider side app of the company, like you know, a marketplace that's very similar to ours. We hired the CTO away from

Speaker 3 that that had been

Speaker 3 the head of engineering at,

Speaker 3 oh my God, I can't believe I can't.

Speaker 3 Hulu, right? Like Hulu, we had the global head of ops from LinkedIn came to be our COO. Like at every position, we had just built this like all-star leadership team.
But ultimately,

Speaker 3 what you learn when you hire those people, then great people that they worked with in the past want to come work for them, right?

Speaker 3 So suddenly you hire the C-suite and then the vps want to come and those vps have their directors and this led to a huge inflection of talent in the company like it was it was embarrassing like how stacked our bench was you know people three four down rows down the level were like you know insanely high ceiling great people um and and that's one of the reasons that having a great executive team is important because great leaders will get you know amazing the best people they ever worked with to come follow them so that's the second one uh the third is mission, vision, values.

Speaker 3 So this is really about like alignment, communication and alignment. Does everybody at the company understand what the vision of the company is? Do they know your mission? Do they know your values?

Speaker 3 Are they living up to it?

Speaker 3 When you're sitting making decisions, is everybody, do they have the same

Speaker 3 rubric? Because there's a common language and a common framework.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and at LinkedIn, you know, where I worked before Cameo, I think every person that's ever worked at LinkedIn could recite recite

Speaker 3 the mission, vision, values of the company. Like

Speaker 3 they would hammer it in. So every Tuesday at All Hands at Cameo, I start with our mission.
Our mission is to create the most personalized and authentic band experiences on earth.

Speaker 3 I will bet you that any person that's ever worked for us could recite that mission. Our values, you know, roll out the red carpet, act like an owner, fight for simplicity.

Speaker 3 These are things that become embedded in the DNA. Right.
So, you know, that's one that's really important. Fourth is employee engagement.

Speaker 3 This can largely be measured by things like NPS, but most critically, it's like, are the people working for you doing the best work of their career? Right.

Speaker 3 If they're doing the best work of their career and you've got product market fit and there's leaders that they admire and, you know, they love the mission, vision, values of the company, then what are they going to do?

Speaker 3 They're not going to leave. Right.
And in fact, instead of leaving, they're going to tell the most talented people they've ever worked with to come over and work at your company. Right.

Speaker 3 So employee engagement is so critical. And

Speaker 3 probably the best leading indicator of your employee engagement is doing something like an employee NPS score, you know,

Speaker 3 once a year or twice a year, you know, do an employee voice survey, like find out anonymous, you know,

Speaker 3 one to 10, how likely are you to recommend us as, you know, as an employer, you know, ask some specific questions, get feedback. It's absolutely critical.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, the fifth one, and by the way, these are stack ranked. These are in order.
Right.

Speaker 3 And the fifth one for a long time, people probably thought was the first one, but the fifth one is keep the lights on. Right.

Speaker 3 And, and that's, you know, fundraising, it's budgeting, it's, you know, making the hard decisions when you have to, if you need to cut, reduce OpEx. But those are the five things.

Speaker 3 And, you know, if you have the money and you have product market fit and you've got great leaders and you've got internal communications and alignment and you've got employees that are highly engaged, like that is the recipe for a, you know, a truly world-class organization.

Speaker 3 And that is the type of thing that you know I strive to do every day. Like sometimes I've fallen short and not been able to execute on all that, um, but but those are the things I work on every day.

Speaker 2 I love that you most people will start with trying to keep the lights on instead of starting with product market fit. Most people go into, oh, how am I going to make money? How am I going to do this?

Speaker 2 How many do that? Instead of focusing so much on product market fit. And I love that you said, hey, if you don't have number one, nothing else matters.

Speaker 3 Yeah, look, if you, if you, there was in the zero interest rate environment, right,

Speaker 3 you know, three three guys and a, and a pitch deck could get funded.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 But at the end of the day, if you find product market fit, if you have something that people want, like you're going to be able to find capital. It's really, really rare that I see founders.

Speaker 3 I see founders all the time talking, oh, it's so hard to fundraise, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 When you have something real and your customers are raving about it and they see it and the VCs, like, I never see those people struggle to raise capital. Like, I'm sure it's happened.

Speaker 3 There might be exceptions, but you know, it's almost always the founders that don't have product market fit that are bitching about how hard it is to fund. And guess what?

Speaker 3 You have to find product market fit before, you know, you raise real capital, right? Otherwise, it's pure speculation because look, there's so many great ideas that exist.

Speaker 3 And yeah, maybe somebody has great pedigree and we've seen that. I've seen a lot of people leave Cameo and, you know, they were the reason why we won and they come and then they get funded.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I wrote a lot of those checks too for great employees. And maybe if you leave like a world-class org, then people are betting on the pedigree.

Speaker 3 But like almost always I see, you know, those, those founders ended up struggling two, three years later where they have the money and, you know, they haven't found product market fit.

Speaker 3 And they're kind of in this, you know, in this limbo where it's like, do I return the money? You know, do I keep doing what I'm doing? Do I pivot? Like product market fit needs to be number one.

Speaker 2 And most people don't even focus on that, regrettably. They focus with, hey, my grandmother had great chocolate chip cookies growing up, and therefore I'm going to give chocolate chip cookies.

Speaker 2 Everyone and everyone else is going to love it instead of going, hey, what does the market really want? And how do I meet that market need?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Some of the things, again, I think that's the big, that's the single biggest mistake that you can make as a CEO, as a founder. And

Speaker 3 anytime like I've struggled or Cambie has struggled, it's when I got away from focusing on product market fit.

Speaker 3 And, you know, in the times where we've had to like come in and save the company or really decide, like, that's when I'm like super, super deep in the weeds on the front lines trying to, you know, trying to make it happen.

Speaker 2 You mentioned some of the struggles and you wanted to give a story about, hey, these are one of those times you're messed up where you're kind of in the weeds that you were just mentioning.

Speaker 2 Can you, can you talk about one where you're like, oh, God, we were really in the weeds at this moment. We were kind of struggle bussing.
And this is how I kind of got out of it.

Speaker 2 Because everyone is looking for strategies of what works

Speaker 2 when it's wonderful and everything's happy. But most people aren't brave enough to sit there and say, hey, there was this one time in band camp that this happened or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 What is one of those times and how did you get out of it?

Speaker 3 Look, for us, it's really simple. Like as I mentioned, you know, the company got bigger.
We were working on all these different initiatives.

Speaker 3 And, you know, suddenly, like, when the world opened back up and when stimulus checks started and people could, the talent could play their games and go on tour and do that.

Speaker 3 And people started spending money differently. Instead of buying cameos, they were going to the restaurant.
They were, it was revenge spending, you know,

Speaker 3 going to Mikonos and Ibiza. And like,

Speaker 3 you know, it's like people used to go to Europe once a summer. And now now I feel like you watch Instagram and people are there four or five times.
It's crazy, right?

Speaker 3 But people started clearly spending money differently. And our core business took a big hit in that period.
Like our core business dropped by over 50%.

Speaker 3 Now, when you're, when your revenue is dropping by 50% and you're incubating a bunch of new things, but the core business, the core money maker is going down faster than the new things are growing.

Speaker 3 and your you know your opex has increased by three four x right that is not good math, right? And in fact, at that point, suddenly you go from being a profitable company.

Speaker 3 And in our case, we were burning like $6 million a month, you know, and that ended up being,

Speaker 3 and you just kind of wake up and it can happen. And in our case, it literally happened like that.
It happened so fast.

Speaker 3 So then at that point, you know, as a leadership team, we started to think about like, what do we actually, if like we had to cast everything aside and we started from a zero-based budgeting approach, like, what do we need to do to sustain and stay in the game?

Speaker 3 And, you know, over three really gut-wrenching, you know, cuts, you know, we took the company from 37, 300 and sorry, 400, you know, seven, 37 people all the way down to 35.

Speaker 3 Oh, and did that by exiting business lines and, you know, getting out of international markets. But what did we end up doing?

Speaker 3 Our best people suddenly were for the first time in like five years all working on the main thing, right?

Speaker 3 And keeping the main thing, the main thing ended up being absolutely critical to us doing something that, you know, I think Elon has had to do at Twitter, like bringing the headcount down so drastically, but it works because all of the best people were working on the biggest problem, you know, and that has been, you know, a really painful lesson for this company to learn.

Speaker 3 But as we're rebuilding, you know, it's, it's made made my executive team, you know, many of them who were the number three or number four in the old world, like the people that are still here,

Speaker 3 you know, they, they are so, when there is a new shiny object to go chase, right? Those scars are there, those lessons. It's like, this company has grit.
These are survivors.

Speaker 3 These are people that there were spreadsheet lists and they kept being on the right column versus left. And that's not to say that any of the people that aren't here anymore weren't awesome.

Speaker 3 They were.

Speaker 3 I tell people all the time: if you see Cameo on someone's resume, like, we were as good hiring as any company in the world. But, you know, this

Speaker 3 rebuild was not for everybody, right? If you were somebody that wanted to build a team, you know, suddenly like you might be a team of one, right?

Speaker 3 And you could be the best person in the world at that role, but maybe there was someone that was willing to just be that, you know, that

Speaker 3 CTO that also was willing to code, right? And that, that was for us,

Speaker 3 you you know, what ended up being, being huge.

Speaker 3 And despite, you know, my board and investors telling me that if I made these cuts, we would be a zombie company and there would be no way that we would ever be able to grow again.

Speaker 3 You know, last December, our busiest time of the year, we were 30% bigger in revenue than we were the year before with 70% less head capital.

Speaker 2 And I think it goes to what you said before, number five, keep the lights on. Do what you got to do to keep the damn lights on.
Right. So you've been through the hurdles.

Speaker 2 You've been through the extremely fast high. And then obviously the world got crazy with COVID and there was all these things and you've had these huge cutbacks.

Speaker 2 You know, you cut down to what, almost 10% of your original staff, I think if I get the numbers right, you crash down into that. What's the future for Cameo? What's next?

Speaker 2 What's a future for you as the CEO and the founder and these industries? What's next?

Speaker 3 We're really super excited about the future for the business. We were able to recap the company, which was absolutely critical,

Speaker 3 you know, four or five months ago.

Speaker 3 And effectively, what that did, it allowed us like reset the valuation. We had employees that joined at a billion dollar valuation, many of whom are here today.

Speaker 3 And you think about that, the strike price of their options is here.

Speaker 3 And when the valuation, you know, the day we became a publicly traded, or the day we became a unicorn, you know, Facebook was a trillion dollar company, right? And Snapchat was worth $120 billion.

Speaker 3 Go look at Snapchat's valuation today, right? So in the public markets, you know, the valuations contracted so heavily for these companies.

Speaker 3 So suddenly, if you're thinking about MA and any type of outcomes, the multiples changed. I mean,

Speaker 3 when we raised our unicorn valuation,

Speaker 3 the marketplace businesses like ours were getting valued 8 to 12x forward net revenue. We were 75 million net revenue, 12x multiple, 900 million free, 100 million posts.

Speaker 3 It wasn't even an expensive round. Like we had real revenue.
Our round was $400 million over subscribed, right? Like people were fighting.

Speaker 3 We had investors wiring, you know, checks that were bigger than their allocation to try to get in. Like people were literally fighting over it.

Speaker 3 And yet, you know, today, right, people are marketplaces are getting valued on an EBITDA multiple. So if you're burning money, right? Like it doesn't matter what your net revenue is.

Speaker 3 Like you're, the market's effectively telling you you're worth nothing. So we got into a point where when you looked at the public market comps of businesses like ours,

Speaker 3 if we had gone to try to sell the company, we probably wouldn't have been able to clear our prep stack.

Speaker 3 So that's why like, you know, taking the tough medicine, bringing the valuation down, you know, doing a recap, it ended up being the thing that, you know, really, I think has given us like a second life.

Speaker 3 It's been absolutely critical for me to keep my best employees. You know, they need to be incentivized.
And as we build a billion dollar company back up, right?

Speaker 3 I want the people that were here for this ride to be very richly rewarded. And I'll tell you one more thing.

Speaker 3 This group right here,

Speaker 3 the new goal is the 10x evaluation of the company before we double headcount again.

Speaker 3 In the old world, when we raised, I remember we raised, you know, 12 and a half in our series A and 50 in our series B and 100 in our series C.

Speaker 3 And every time you'd read those press releases, it's like, Cameo raised $50 million and now they're going to take headcount from 50 to 175 people, right? Like hiring people itself was like a goal.

Speaker 3 And part of that is I've always believed fundraising is just a proxy for hiring.

Speaker 3 People are giving you money so you can hire people on their behalf, basically, to go and make their money more value, you know, their investment more valuable. Right.

Speaker 3 But I love this mindset now that my team has that's like, we can do this with the people that we have here.

Speaker 3 And oh, by the way, like we have to have such a high bar that if we're going to add somebody, like they, you know, there's only going to be so many seats on this rocket ship. Right.

Speaker 3 And we need to make sure that we're incredibly thoughtful and selective of who's coming in. And it's just a different playbook.

Speaker 2 It really is. It's a completely different way of looking at it.

Speaker 2 And I think some of the things you gave throughout this entire talk are just massively different than what most people run into, and it'll change their playbooks.

Speaker 2 I always ask everybody, what are the things that you've learned, the little hacks, a little thing that you do on a routinely basis?

Speaker 2 Like, hey, there's this book, or there's this sleep thing, or this thing that most people wouldn't know that you've come across that's helped you either with your health or with your business stuff.

Speaker 2 What is one of those things you're like, oh, like for me, it's, I have something called a chill pad, which I put on my my bed and it keeps me so I sleep. I get eight hours like clockwork.

Speaker 3 I love that damn thing.

Speaker 2 What is one of those things that you're like, hey, it's a supplement or something like that that's like, ah, every single time I use this, it changes my ballgame.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the my morning routine, like I go and do Pilates every morning and then I go and follow that up with

Speaker 3 a cold plunge. Yes.

Speaker 3 And honest to God, it's like, it doesn't matter like how shitty I was feeling. And I'm not someone, like, I'm very envious.
I'm like a four-hour sleep guy.

Speaker 3 You know, I've done the eight sleep. I've done everything.
Like it's just not, my mom was like that. I'm like, I go to bed at two, I wake up at six.
Like that's how I've always been. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And, but like, and I could be so groggy, but when it's go time and I'm 7 a.m., I'm on that reformer. And then, you know, by eight o'clock, I'm, you know, in the steam.

Speaker 3 And then by 8, 10, I'm in that cold plunge. Like, it just literally, it's like, it's like super, it's like plugging the Tesla into a supercharger.

Speaker 3 And, um, for me, that's been absolutely essential, like making sure that the body's feeling well. And look,

Speaker 3 I think all of us are guilty as founders that when things are going really shitty, then

Speaker 3 you just let your habits come out the door. But

Speaker 3 as we were rebuilding the company, it was during that time that I kind of refound my health habits. And then as I was feeling better and I was healthier, I made better decisions.

Speaker 3 And that's something that

Speaker 3 I have a warning sign to myself of, of if I start, all of a sudden I'm not making the gym or I'm feeling things are good, like that's, you know, that's the danger, danger Will Robinson lights at this point.

Speaker 3 Love it.

Speaker 2 How do people track you down? How do people find you? I know people are going to have a lot more questions. What's the best way to reach out to you and to kind of connect with you?

Speaker 3 I, you know, to be honest, I'm not super active on,

Speaker 3 you know, LinkedIn as far as posting. Like I work there, so I'll post big company announcements, but I'm not like the LinkedIn guru making posts.
And I'm not particularly active on X as well.

Speaker 3 But my handle on Twitter is Mr.312, MR312, the Chicago area code.

Speaker 3 It's just my name on Instagram and

Speaker 3 on Twitter and on LinkedIn, but I'm probably most active on Instagram.

Speaker 2 Gotcha. The mayor part starts to make sense with Mr.312.
That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing the knowledge.
There's so many things that I took away from it.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for coming on and being part of this.

Speaker 3 Cool. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 Building a unicorn isn't about chasing the next shiny object or following venture hype cycles.

Speaker 1 Stephen proved that sustainable success comes from relentless focus on product market fit, then building world-class teams around that core strength.