SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
774: CreativeLive's Chase Jarvis: If Linkedin Offered You $200m Do You Take It?
06 Sep 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Launched his really first application as an artist many, many years ago. Learned some big lessons going through that, but he didn't get stuck on them, moved forward. Obviously now has built CreativeLive, thousands and thousands and thousands of courses, instructors, 10 million folks that have watched either a free or paid version.
Chapter 2: What unique storytelling methods are highlighted in Chase's work?
They raised 50 million bucks from really smart people, which I think is key. He's got a vision. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top.
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed.
If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to getlatka.com. Here's the thing, though. This database... I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable.
And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of. You've probably heard of them.
They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at getlatka.com. This is episode 774. Coming up tomorrow morning, I interview Andy Swan. He's a fintech founder and he says, I will never raise capital again. Tune in to find out why.
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Chapter 3: How did Chase's experience with the Best Camera app shape his career?
Hello, everybody. My guest today is Chase Jarvis. He is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of the last 20 years. You may know him because he is also the creator and CEO of Creative Live.
He's won awards for his images on six different continents, including contributions to the Pulitzer Prize-winning story Snowfall, the acclaimed New York Times interactive story Heralded as the Future of Journalistic Storytelling, and an Emmy-nominated for his work documenting the music scene in Seattle. In 2009, he created The Best Camera Act, Take us to the top.
Let's do it. Thanks for having me on the show, by the way. I appreciate it.
You bet, man. I'm glad you're coming on. I will never forget hitting that New York Times story and being sucked in and then thinking at the end. They use things like parallel scrolling and storytelling and auto start on videos in ways that spammy marketers would never even think to use it. There were no ads.
Chapter 4: What lessons did Chase learn from shutting down his app?
It was a beautiful experience. Why can't everyone just create content like that? Why does Fortune have to pump their pages full of ads?
Yeah. Well, I think the New York Times, wherever we sit in this weird modern era of journalism and media, they put 80 people on that story. They tried to do something different. And it just shows that if you're really focused on innovating and breaking out of the mold, you can do it, even if you're in an industry that's as – at that time was as stagnant as was –
It was basically moved from a physical paper to online, and it was just a replication of that. And they broke out—the sad twist of that story is that story is about an avalanche, and one of my friends was killed in that avalanche. So it was extra special to be able to contribute to it for me personally, let alone the work.
Why hasn't—I mean, the obvious answer is cost, right? But why hasn't that—why isn't every article written like that? In other words, if you were kind of in it, how do you decrease the cost structure so that we can get more quality content like that?
I think feature storytelling will continue to see that grow and evolve in the way that that Snowfall piece did as a piece of breakout journalism. I think the news cycles now are so short.
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Chapter 5: How does CreativeLive differentiate itself from other online education platforms?
I mean, newspapers are basically—physical newspapers are dying because it's tomorrow's printout of yesterday's news, which is not interesting to anybody. So just from a production standpoint, there aren't enough hours in the day to create every news piece like that.
I do think that we'll see platforms that are embedded with those native sort of bells and whistles continue to evolve such that a CMS could drop them into society. such a thing. And we're seeing some of that with modern, modern media. I mean, there was hyper, which is, you know, 10 curated stories every day. And it was presented in a really beautiful, especially on a tablet experience.
But, um, I think journalism is moving in the same direction as tech. It's, it's a combination of what gets you the information, the fastest it's form and function. So it's not just wingdings for the
Chapter 6: What is the business model of CreativeLive?
But again, features, you're going to continue to see more and more of that. And I think as platforms become templatized, we'll get a more interactive, exciting experience with our news.
Interesting. Guys, coming up, we'll ask Chase more about CreativeLive, why he started it, what the growth looks like, how he sees it compared to other kind of online course websites. But first, look, you had a number one app for cameras. Why weren't you acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars?
Yeah.
I think timing is everything. And I learned a lot along the way for sure. You know, it was definitely, I think not a lot of people can say they've made a billion dollar mistake, but it was a handful of different problems.
Chapter 7: How has CreativeLive achieved a high conversion rate?
Like one was being so first, you know, early that creates a challenge. It's not just about being first. Uh, and then the second is, you know, I had a relationship with a developer that got into a little legal snafu and that legal snafu, it did two things. One, it slowed the development of the app down. And two, more importantly, it paralyzed me.
I had companies asking to, you know, buy it for never work again, money like private jet money. And, uh, what is that?
Like 10 million, I'm making 10 million bucks. Yeah, 10x that.
So when you have that and you have venture folks coming at you and when you'd spent the previous 10 years of your life working very hard to define yourself as an artist and you're confronted with the difference between an artist and an entrepreneur, at that point, my identity, my personality, who I was hadn't reconciled that yet.
Chapter 8: What is Chase's perspective on selling CreativeLive for a large sum?
As a person relatively of privilege, being white, born in America, middle class— Male. Yeah, male. All of those things working for me, the fact that it was still a struggle, I think, A, it outlines how folks who don't come from all of that privilege, what the additional struggle they have with identity, with opportunity, with— so many things. And, you know, A, it made me appreciate that.
B, it made me realize that if I'm able to, if I'm struggling with that, and it's a massive social pressure, and that's one of the things that CreativeLive aims to do. That's what my personal work has been around promoting content and, sorry, creating content, promoting the lifestyle of the creators and being able to live a life that you love around your passions.
To me, what if we could break through that cultural messaging that's told us that we can't, that we shouldn't, that it's risky, that all these, you know, I think it's a bunch of misinformation. So I learned that, you know, that's my billion dollar mistake. And that's one of the reasons, the flip side of that horrible, horrible outcome of basically just shutting that app down.
I was going to say, so that was the exit, right? I mean, you just, there was no money, you just shut it down.
I still could have made a lot of money. To me, the outcome was a better outcome to shut it down, learn from it, build into something new, which is now CreativeLive, than it would have been because I would have been entangled in a little legal dispute, but more importantly, I would have had to go to work for a company that acquired it. And that wasn't my passion.
My passion focus was very, you know, very clearly on creative live. So the flip side of those downsides are creative live. And I learned a hell of a lot. And now I'm, I got more juice to go help other people break through some of those problems. And if you're in that group that doesn't have all the privilege that I have, you know, how do we help them disproportionately?
That's why creative live has a free aspect to it and why I put out so much free content.
And Chase, I want to get, we'll go deep into CreativeLive here in a second, but I have to ask, I mean, other business people or artists or creatives that fear the same issue you went through on this app want to know what the issue was so they can avoid it. What was the issue? Was it who owned the IP? Was it equity? I mean, what was it?
Specifically, I owned all the intellectual property. There was no misunderstandings about that. But when you write contracts about software, you can't actually predict what releases 10 and 11 and 12 are going to look like because they're a year down the road. And I just specified that the developer needed to do a release and not the content of them. So I can't really blame myself.
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