Ben Dobyns

And was working on that and kind of realized that it made absolutely no sense that the entire process of funding independent films is based on obfuscating the fact that

that independent films, you're going to lose your money if you invest in them.

And I just had this brainstorm moment of, well, why, instead of trying to cover up that fact, why not build a new plan that actually pays investors back?

So I launched a new company with a new plan in 2010, uh,

I paid my first round investors back in a year for a product that we released for free online.

So that business was zombie Orpheus entertainment and the entire idea was

When I went to the private equity for that was we're going to make films.

We're going to release them online for free.

We're going to encourage piracy.

We're going to tell people to share them, hire them, remix them.

We're going to put it under a creative commons license.

We're just going to get it out there everywhere it can go because kind of the realization I had was.

Each of these films or each of these episodes is its own advertisement for the next product.

And we're no longer the business of selling units.

We're in the business of building a sustaining fan base, essentially using the Internet for what it does best, making perfect, infinite copies of our work at no cost to us.

So we started releasing for free online, and at the end of every single episode, we serialized our work.

At the end of every single episode, we basically had this little video that played that said, no studio, no network, no cancellation.

This show is fan-supported and creator-distributed.

On the basis of that little video, the day our first product hit YouTube and hit the web, we had people writing into us saying, tell us how to give you money now.

Because we knew our audience well enough.