Steven Galanis

speaker

239 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Mar 2025

Steven Galanis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley · How I Built a $1B Business – Cameo CEO Steven Galanis · 6 Mar 2025 podcast

Well, of course we want good ideas coming, coming to get surfaced. Right. And you know, it's funny, I was in a product review yesterday for this product called broadcast DMS that we're rolling out. And one of the ideas that we had, so, you know, imagine an algorithmic list, social feed.

So basically if you follow anyone that follows you on cameo, Ryan, like you could send them a mass message that appears in a one-to-one DM thread and let it start having like a personal conversation with them. So we're really excited about that. One of the killer features we're thinking about is the ability for the talent to actually own, not rent their audience.

So right now, like you're following on Instagram, you're following on Facebook, you're following on Twitch or YouTube, like the platforms own your followers. You just kind of rent them.

But like, what if like we actually gave you like radical ownership and you could take anyone that followed you and export, you know, export their you know, their, their email or their phone number, their birthday to a CSV and like use that in whatever directive fan rails you, you think is best to go cultivate your network.

So we were talking about this yesterday and, you know, we were really thinking about, okay, if we were to do this, like what are the critical things of information? Like you want the name, you want the email, you want the phone number, you want the zip code, you want the, you know, you want, you want their birthday, but like, like, do you really need email and phone number?

Like, so it's just constantly, cause every time there's another field, you're going to have drop off. So, you know, we ended up getting to a really elegant solution where, you know, three of those

six things that we said were critical are like what we decided to move with in an mvp and then later you can always add add more information on or complete your profile in a deeper way have you had any that's not the right way to ask the question this idea of radical ownership of your audience

Well, number one, the business model, our business model is really different from TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat. We do not have an ad-based revenue model. So for those platforms, they monetize on DAUs, MAUs, and basically selling their user data. The talent or the creators make the content for free, and then they sell ads against it to advertisers.

So they are always going to be an advertiser-centric model, and the talent are – the deal they basically make with the talent is, hey, use our platform. You're going to get famous, but then we're going to sell – and if you get really famous, you can make money doing other shit. Like that's basically how it works is the –

The red share that comes from any, like any of that on TikTok or YouTube, it's, it's, it does not, you cannot support yourself unless you are like the biggest person in the world on the platform. So that's kind of the, so then what happens? Like you sell merch, you go on Cameo, you, you know, have a subscription on Patreon or OnlyFans. Like that's how you monetize.

For us, the talent are the four knocks, right? Like our business model has always been talent centric. Like the talent make more money than we do for everything. So for us, if we can provide the best,

tools in the world the best rails in the world for talent to directly monetize their fan base and nurture it and cultivate it and strengthen it then like i think we win in the long term but it's impossible to go from you know a tick tocker youtube business model where you know they have 100 gross margins basically on this ad product and they don't have to give anything to the talent or they give almost nothing versus our model where the town are making 75 to begin with yeah

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Let's take it all the way back. This is December 2018. We're right in the middle of Christmas season, which is our busiest time of the year. I think literally this was like Thanksgiving weekend. Brett Favre had joined Cameo earlier that year and at this point is the biggest person on the platform, you know, like an American legend and like

hall famer and you know just getting a bread on had really started to be a halo for us to get you know snoop dogg and other like you know that kind of level talent onto the platform so that we're really just hitting kind of this big tipping point at that point we had closed our series a you know maybe six months before and all of a sudden we get a actually i think we closed the series a like like weeks six weeks before this happened and all of a sudden i get a

Frantic text message from this guy named Sean Finnegan, who was extremely important to us in building this business. And Sean was working with Brad on a lot of his social stuff. And he goes, Steven, we got a problem. And I go, what happened?

Some alt-right group had tricked Brett Favre into making a dog whistle anti-Semitic video where basically the script said something like he was talking about, you know, The shout out goes to the families of the USS Liberty, which was this ship that Israel bombed of the US in like 1970s. It's like a very like esoteric reference in history.

And Brett just thought he was doing the shout out for, for, you know, basically for, he thought he was doing a shout out for veterans. And then this group took that and put it on 4chan and they'd made a bunch of little dog whistle references that I wouldn't have caught or I don't think anybody reasonably would have caught.

And suddenly, you know, they were making it look like Brett was, you know, advocating for these, you know, like these Proud Boy-like groups, like these alt-right, kind of neo-Nazi type groups. And this became like a massive, massive story. And first things first, we always want to make sure our talent's safe. As I mentioned, the talent are our Fort Knox. Without the talent, we can't do what we do.

We can't manufacture happiness. The biggest fear at that point was, holy shit, if like Brett loses his Wrangler jeans ad or, you know, and he leaves the platform and he never comes back, that will put a cap on whoever could go and join Cameo because suddenly he becomes the cautionary tale. And every single agent is going to be like, yeah, not worth it. I don't care how much you make.

You just threw everything else away. So this is really existential at the time. And so what we immediately do is we kind of let our talent base know that this happened. Like we were super transparent.

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