SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Vid.Camera Sells $20m in Tokens, Converting 100% to Fiat for New Facebook Where Creators Own Upside
08 Dec 2020
Chapter 1: What is Vid.Camera and how does it operate?
So the way that our token sale works is we sold 1% of the token supply, so we own 99%. So I think that proves enough that we believe in the value of the token. Our token sale actually goes on for five years more once the app launches.
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He's the CEO and founder of a company called VidCamera. All right, Jag, you ready to take us to the top? I am. So what does this company do? What's the product?
Vid is a memory media platform. So if I said to you, what can you remember from this day last year, you probably can't tell me much. What Bid sort of stumbled onto is all of your memories already exist out there in the form of consumer data.
So every time you take an Uber, stay at an Airbnb, spend on your credit card, that data that those companies are collecting on you, we can turn into memories. So we basically pull in that simple text metadata and auto-generate three-second video memories from that data and put it all into a calendar user interface.
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Chapter 2: How does Vid.Camera utilize consumer data to create memories?
um it's now just finished and it ran for about three months okay so you just did that i mean literally right now yes okay um how are you look a lot of this you know i've had a lot of people on that have been token sales some of them are amazing some of them it just feels extremely scammy right so how did you what's the storyline you're putting out there to get people to give instant utility value to your token
Sure. Well, the only way an advertiser can buy any advertising within the bid ecosystem is by buying this token. So when Uber, for example, wants to add a swipe up to an influencer's auto generated memory, they have to buy the token to then buy the swipe up. So it's essentially like saying to people, Facebook earned $55 billion last year in advertising revenue.
It's your chance to buy into that ecosystem. And the only way then an advertiser can buy ads is through you. So that's the utility of the token.
But no offense, right? So why does anybody care? You don't have millions of users.
Sure. I think the people that care and the people that have bought the token see the upside of the platform and then the influences that are signed on. And just the obvious... numbers involved, even if 1% of their followers convert 370, that's 3.75 mil users. That's more users than even Ethereum has had max transactions.
So then the sentiment around the token, I guess people are kind of factoring that in as well. If a token does have that many users, it's more users than a chain even. And the sentiment around the token will be great.
How much of the 20 million that you just raised, do you plan to convert to fiat to pay things like developer salaries, company expenses, things like that?
All of it.
Okay. So this to me is a massive red flag. Anytime I hear a founder that does a token sale, who's saying, look how valuable our token is, that they then raise all the money, then convert all of it to fiat. To me, that just screams red fricking flag. If you believe in your token value, you'd keep all of it in the token.
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Chapter 3: What strategies are being employed to build a waitlist for the app?
Uh, 19, nine, zero 19, one nine, one nine. Okay. And how many are engineers? Um, six. Okay. Six. And so how do you, I mean, look, um, you know, obviously you, you build this thing out, right? You have 30,000 people on the wait list. When, when, I mean, when is go time? When is official launch?
Um, within a month now we'll have the badger out and out to those. When we, we start the influence of big, big push in the next few weeks, tap that out at a hundred thousand and get the badger out to those a hundred thousand people, get out some bugs and then worldwide launch on main iOS.
And so what incentive does let's, let's just, let's say Kim Kardashian is right. Someone you've signed this contract with, right. We're hypothesis hypothesizing here, right? Let's say she was, what incentive does she has to drive people out of her Instagram where she already has a massive following into this new tool that like nobody's on that she has to build a following from scratch on.
Sure. I think the main reason people will use it first is just because it solves a problem. The ability to remember every moment of every day. It's kind of like Snapchat. They came about, it was just disappearing communication between one and two people. Then eventually you realize all your friends are here and you start to post there. Initially it's a tool and then network effects kick in.
And what if network effects don't kick in?
Then it'll still always be a tool.
But isn't the critic, I mean, no one, even if people are posting every day automatically because you help them, because you pull metadata from their phone on their last Uber ride or the last place they were, if no one's viewing it, they're not going to keep doing it.
Not necessarily because you can export and post anywhere else. That's the point. The point is that it's a unique form of content. And you can post it on Instagram, Facebook, wherever you like.
I can share an Instagram post to Facebook right now.
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Chapter 4: How are influencers incentivized to join the Vid.Camera platform?
What I see is a guy that's had a successful exit, you've been an angel investor in other companies, so you understand both sides, you're well-connected, you understand marketing and sales, and you've built a tool that does have real tech. There's a tech stack there that brings real value to different form of content. And the challenge you now have is how do you take all of that
and seed this thing so you do get virality kicking in. That's the big next step. But I also would say that's the biggest risk in a company like this.
Of course it is. And pre-launch, we're not willing to lay out our whole strategy in a podcast, but I can assure you we understand that risk and it's something that we're very, very focused on.
Yeah, so when... when will we know if it's working or not? So in six months, I'm going to go, I wonder how that Jag guy's doing.
In the first three months, we'll definitely know. Okay. And we're definitely trying to get to the number one on the app store within the first few months.
Okay. Got it. So you'll, you define success short term as in the next kind of three to six months. If you, when you launch, you hit number one in the app.
We'll see. Do people like it? Um, is it working? Uh, pretty, pretty rapidly. We already know because we did a test launch. I think this is something that I should clarify. I test launch when just 10% of the app was launched. We got 30,000 users straight onto the app store chart within a few weeks before we took it down.
We were just testing the AI, making sure things were working, making sure, again, the viral loop was working when people were posting out, when people were downloading the app because of the quality of content they were seeing. Yes, they were. So we were able to plot out that K-factor pretty accurately.
What is it right now? Obviously it's above one. It sounds like, what was it in that small test period?
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