SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 98: "Did ABC Reality Show Kill Your Startup?" w/ John Frye
30 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the podcast episode?
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. Coming up tomorrow, you're going to hear from Jay Ho with Bessemer Ventures. I specifically asked him, will Pinterest IPO in 2016? Again, Jay's with a $4 billion venture capital firm that invested in Pinterest. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. Good morning, Aaron. I love my guest today.
You know, I just got in studio here in Southwest Virginia in Roanoke, and I'm joined today by John Fry. He is the youngest at 18 on a recent reality show called Startup U with Tim Draper. We're going to talk about that. But his startup was called Study Better and then pivoted and is now called Granted. So he... What he does is he's focused now on building that post show.
He reached out to me and I said, John, come on the show. Let's talk about the show. I want to talk about also your startup. So, John, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready, sir. Let's do it. All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. So first things first, ABC reaches out to you. Why on earth do a reality TV show?
Well, I mean, it's a crazy story, man. So I actually reached out to them. I saw a article talking about Draper University. And I was at University of Santa Cruz. And I was like, you know what? This is not for me. I need to be surrounded by entrepreneurs and doing something like that. And I applied. And I didn't hear from them for a long time, maybe about a month.
And actually, my bank account hit zero. I had to go back to Florida. anymore. And literally the morning that I booked the ticket back to Florida, I got the call that night, 7.30, and they said, hey, you're on the show. So it was kind of actually like a, you know, like the last, the 12th hour moment where you were about to give up, but then things worked out.
Wait, so you sent your information to Tim Draper at Draper University or directly to the show because they were casting?
Yeah.
Yeah, so the way it worked was you had to be approved by both, right? So you kind of created your own application and sent it into both, essentially. And then, like I said, you had to be accepted by both in order to get on the show and into Draper University.
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Chapter 2: Why did John Frye decide to participate in a reality TV show?
So a much broader audience is what they're trying to reach.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they got a whole slew of new reality programming, including Next Step Realty, which is a reality show about a real estate firm in New York. So this was one of those things that they wanted to do to push up the demonstration.
So I want to ask one question first and then go back and hear the story behind it. So yes or no, did the reality show actually help your startup's valuation?
Yeah, so, you know, we weren't sure exactly, you know, how big this was going to be. I actually had my launch of our first product on the first episode that our name was announced, that the name of the company, it was then, it's now granted it was 4G. formerly PolyDelta on the show. And first of all, the launch failed.
The products, we were trying to push it to the servers and it just didn't work. And we got a little bit of press and we did see some signups and a little bump, but it
So for. OK, so that's OK. That's a good answer. So I want to I'll come back to that in a second. Let's go back to the beginning of the show. What were you guys all expecting out of the show based off what ABC was selling you?
Yeah, man, in terms of like the program or how the show specifically.
Well, I mean, like, are you thinking like, do you want to be the next Kim Kardashian? I mean, what is what was what was going through your mind? What were your expectations?
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How did the reality show impact John's startup journey?
See you. Okay, guys, yesterday you heard from Chris Sanfilippo and how he makes 100 grand per month from something called revenge porn.
Chapter 4: Did the reality show help or hurt John's startup's valuation?
Go check that out now.