Daniel Kang is the co-founder of Flowbo. Flowbo helps busy creators get paid faster so they can focus their time and energy on creating. Creators spend less time chasing down invoice payments and worrying about paying their bills, leaving them with more time to make great products and services.

I talk with Daniel about building and pitching the right product for your customers. Daniel shares candid insights on his journey as a founder and entrepreneur, and the mistakes he’s made along the way. We also talk about how his company, Flowbo, came to be, how it’s removing a lot of friction for his creator clients, and much more.

Daniel Kang is the Co-Founder of Flowbo, an innovative startup that helps creators get paid quicker, so they can free up headspace, and focus more time and energy on creating. Daniel earned his master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford, and has worked for companies such as Oliver Wyman, NEXT Canada, and SoftBank.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Your first step in gaining the attention of prospective clients
• The right way to make a sales pitch
• How to implement feedback loops for product innovation
• The biggest mistake Daniel made on his journey to success
  

Links & Resources

• SoftBank
• Y Combinator
• Sam Lessin
• Wrapbook
• ​​Marina Mogilko
• Book: The Mom Test
• Launch House
• Follow Pico on Twitter
• Pico
• Follow Chikodi on Twitter

Daniel Kang’s Links

• Follow Daniel on Twitter
• Daniel’s LinkedIn
• Flowbo

Episode Transcript

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00:00:00 Daniel:

I think “creator” can be a broad definition. Our general thesis is that there’s going to be more and more of these one person or two people companies that are going to form over time. There are going to be more and more freelancers creating, not just content, but creating services, creating software, creating these products that are being sold to everybody.

Anyone who does that, I would consider as creators, which in my mind makes it a very, very exciting market.

00:00:34 Chikodi:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Creative Business Show. My name is Chikodi Chima, and I am super excited to share our conversation today with Daniel Kang, co-founder of Flowbobo. Flowbobo helps creators get paid faster. Those are creators who have brand deals. They may be waiting 30, 60, 90 days to get a big check.

So, getting that check sooner frees up Headspace so that they don’t have to be chasing down invoices. They don’t have to be thinking about how they’re going to pay rent, or if they have medical expenses, or any of the things that happen in life. They can focus on creating.

Daniel worked at SoftBank, and this is his first startup. He is really excited to talk to us today about his journey figuring out how to ask the right questions to creators so that you’re not building something based on what people say they want, but what people actually do want.

It’s a great conversation, so let’s dive in.

My guest today is Daniel Kang CEO, and co-founder of Flowbobo.

Welcome, Daniel.

00:01:39 Daniel:

Great to be here. Thanks for the invite.

00:01:41 Chikodi:

We’ve had the chance to talk a couple of times now, but one of the problems that you’re solving with Flowbobo is creator liquidity: how creators get paid fast.

Do you want to give us a little bit of background about yourself personally, how you became the founder of Flowbobo, and why this is this such an important problem to solve?

00:02:00 Daniel:

Yeah, I think this is an important problem personally. I used to be a musician, and I found that liquidity was often an issue. If someone would say they’d pay me, they wouldn’t pay me. I’d have to keep track of who owes me what, and when, and where, and things like that.

I ended up taking a more traditional route, working in consulting. Then later on as a FinTech investor at SoftBank, trying to better understand finance in general; how does money Flowbo? When I left that job last year, I found that this is a problem that’s very solvable. I’ve seen a bunch of problems being solved this way from a commercial perspective.

I said, “Why can’t I apply this to a lot of the artists, the musicians and the creators that are out there?” So, that’s kind of like how Flowbobo came to be.

Trade finance, in general, is a $3 trillion market. By trade finance, I mean money that’s up in the air because people have not opted in to pay it. It’s money that’s owed, but that’s not paid.

Obviously, in the creator economy, this is a smaller than a $3 trillion market. It’s a small sub-segment. But, as we see more and more people become creators we think this market is going to be growing. Even today, a lot of brands will take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months to pay out on the work that’s been done.

00:03:18 Chikodi:

Wow. How how much of this is technical versus user experience?

00:03:30 Daniel:

I think it depends on how you want to solve the problem. The reason the problem occurs is the brands opt to not to pay early. Not because of a liquidity issue, usually because of accounting and legal issues. So, it takes a bit of time for the accounting team to process. It takes a bit of time to validate that the work has been done.

And that’s why this takes a little bit of time. The other problem that occurs is there’s often a middle. So it’s not the brands that pay the creators directly. Oftentimes there are agencies or networks that are involved, which means they receive it first, go through another set of accounting Prokofiev, and then you’ll see that leads to delays.

So you can solve it by a couple of ways. Traditional way of doing is factoring. So taking a bunch of invoices and then selling those invoices or getting money up front for them.

That’s what Flogo is able to do, but there’s a lot of different technical ways to solve this. So smart contracts are a big thing, right?

Web three. so if everyone agrees to be paid in a certain way, then we can just bypass all of this accounting and legal problem. And the entire problem of being delayed would, would disappear.

00:04:37 Chikodi:

Okay. And so for those who are familiar with pipe, you’ve described Flowbo as pipe for creators, but for people who are not familiar with. Describe what Flowboable actually does.

00:04:50 Daniel:

What Flowbo does is we do revenue backed financing. What that means is we know that there’s a certain amount of money that’ll be coming in in the future for creators, and we’re able to give them an advance based on that metric. So this revenue can come in a multiple set of flavors. One flavor can be AdSense revenue from Twitter.

Or YouTube or Patrion or any subscription-based revenue, another flavor or brand deals where the work has already been done. But the brand is taking a couple of months to pay out, which is not very hard to validate. And then the final pieces may be brand affiliate programs, which takes a bit of time to process the payments.

But it’s very easy to see how many fro links have been clicked, from a metrics perspective. So all of those revenues can be taken. and then you can get an advanced based on that.

00:05:37 Chikodi:

That’s fantastic. And so what does that actually mean to the creator then when they’re getting advanced money that they’re. But, instead of waiting 45 days, 60 days losing track, how does that actually, you know, what, what kind of material impact does that making for the creator? Are they getting paid faster?

00:05:58 Daniel:

So I think there are two large impacts. The first is liquidity and the second is Headspace. So in terms of liquidity, a lot of our customers get the money so they can work on other projects, whether it’s a physical product or a mobile app that they’re working on, they’re able to reinvest the money faster to grow their content and their audience and monetization.

The other piece related to liquidity is obviously, you know, just having money faster. And if you’re a mid-sized creator, especially liquidity matters. so this may mean making your rent, making your medical bills and things like that. Yeah, exactly. The other major pieces, like freeing up head space.

So initially when I started, I thought a lot of larger creators would not be interested in this product because I thought it was purely illiquidity issue. And if you have 10 million followers, you have more than enough money. but it turns out that a lot of creators have to keep track of who owes me, what. and it takes a bit of a head space to do this. So if you get a manager, this might be, you know, 10, 15% of the revenue that you make. If you do it yourself, that’s a lot of time that you have to invest in on a weekly basis on followup, emails, invoicing, and things like that. so by getting paid early, you know, you just get rid of that, in its entirety.

00:07:09 Chikodi:

And how easy is it for creators to use this? Because yeah, if freeing of Headspace is what you’re talking about, then yes, that’s obviously very important, but if it’s then, you know, instead of spending three hours chasing down people, you’re, you’re doing all this in , then that’s still three hours. So is this like radically simpler?

00:07:27 Daniel:

Yeah, this is much, much simpler. so initially our initial product was just uploading your contract, and then linking your bank accounts, and then we’d be able to share the revenue or give you the advanced based on that once you confirm. So it was as simple as upload the contract, link your bank accounts and sign our agreement.

We’ve recently developed a new set of product from so we can cover a little bit more basis. So now a creator is able to input the deals that they’re working on, and we are automatically sending emails out for them. If they are late, if the payment is late and then help them audit auto-generate invoices.

And obviously related to that, if they want to get paid earlier on invoices or from their YouTube revenue, then we’re able to advance that as well. So we’re going deeper into this cycle of, you know, procuring sort of the, the job to the contracting, to doing the job, to, keeping track of everything, to invoicing, to payouts.

So we’re going deeper and deeper into the cycle.

00:08:23 Chikodi:

And would you handle collections if that became necessary

00:08:27 Daniel:

Exactly. So the other piece that the creators benefit from is they don’t have to worry about collections. They’ve already gotten their money, right. So it would be who would be going after the going after the brands and the agencies.

00:08:38 Chikodi:

Hopefully that never has to happen, but you know, just knowing that it’s, on the third party is definitely, like you said, freeing up Headspace.

00:08:47 Daniel:

Exactly.

00:08:48 Chikodi:

And so you went through Y Combinator, you have background with SoftBank. What’s the, process by which this came about. You’ve talked about being a musician and not getting paid in a timely fashion, but, you know, walk us through how this became a startup.

00:09:06 Daniel:

Yeah. So my personal background, like I said, was I wanted to pursue music. Full-time. I unfortunately come from, let’s say like a humble background in terms of, in terms of finances, which is why I ended up taking a more traditional career. But even during college and throughout my career, I was very focused on providing, you know, better and fairer access to capital, to people who need it primarily to fund their lives, but also pursue things outside of the traditional sort of engineering law and, you know, dentistry.

The things that are considered more traditional, so did a lot of work on micro-financing crowdfunding saw that community was a large part in in fact, the single greatest indicator of raising capital. and I felt the creators had that. And as I had this insight, I ended up continuing working. No FinTech companies at SoftBank, both in the California and the London office, looking at trade finance and asset backed financing companies.

So all of that means is how do we move money around based on what asset you have, like, what do you own? and it turns out that creators own a lot of content. They own revenue streams, they own their audience. So based on. I said, why can’t we, why can’t we do this? so after my second year at SoftBank, I left to do a master’s degree and while I was there, COVID had hit.

And when COVID had it, it wasn’t just what we con considered like creators, but any sort of freelancers without salaries. didn’t have a lot of these. Protections from both employers and governments, because of this issue. And I said, well, they’ve, they’ve got a ton of assets, but traditional banks, aren’t able to extend them, credits traditional financial institutions.

Aren’t able to give them capital. So I said, I think I could probably underwrite risk better by looking at separate metrics.

And that’s when I met my co-founder Norman, who spent, three years across hedge funds, assessing risk and financial assets. And I said, why don’t we use. Build a company like this together.

So we incorporated in March of this year and then started to raise capital and then was lucky enough to go through YC, summer this summer. and that’s kind of how we made that decision.

00:11:17 Chikodi:

That’s amazing. And so, so fast in that, you know, in, in the development stage, but in the, the germination in the, in the ideation stage, sounds like it was something that has been with you for.

A long time. so one of the things that I was thinking about just as you mentioned, it is maybe not for the mid level creator, but for.

Kind of higher tier of creator. They’re still getting paid on a 10 99 and as a freelancer, is there anything that you’re thinking about in terms of helping them to be able to maybe purchase a house or have better financial records for, for larger, larger financing needs?

00:12:01 Daniel:

Yeah, I think helping them build credit or alternative forms of credit is something that we’re toying with. this can be. Couple of things, we could help them improve their credit score from a very traditional basis. We could again, look at their revenues of like what’s coming in, or we could look at what they already own, including their financial assets and provide them capital based on, on that.

So that is an idea that we’re toying with right now, but you know, we’ll, we’ll see what happens in the next couple of months.

00:12:28 Chikodi:

And then what got your investors excited about being part of your day?

00:12:33 Daniel:

I think there’s a couple things that we’re doing. That’s exciting. I think both as you know, the VC game, I thought about how do we invest in like a hundred million dollar company? It’s, it’s more about how do we invest in the next, you know, 10 billion, a hundred billion dollar company. And that’s why the logic makes sense where we see ourselves in the long-term.

Is a couple of ways. One way is just disrupting the entire procure to pay cycle. So procurement being, how do we find co-creators and freelancers find brand deals? How do they think about contracting? How do we think about creating and doing the work? invoicing and tracking and then, and then the payout, the entire cycle.

So obviously we’re starting with, the payment side and the invoicing side, and then moving down cycle, you’ll see a little. Public comps that are doing this for, in the commercial space. and they’re obviously very, very profitable in that sense. The other angle that we have is we want to be the center point of all creator assets being traded.

So when we look at there, when we say we advance people based on their revenue, We can structure different financial products. So right now we have income share agreement, which is one of our first products, but we can have invoice factoring, and then obviously some more esoteric assets like NFTs and so on and so forth.

So every time we take an asset and we turn that into a financial product, we want this to go through. almost like the New York stock exchange. So anything creator related, any asset that’s traded will be done through us. So I think that’s kind of what made. Excited about,

00:14:04 Chikodi:

So then you can securitize and make derivatives based on anticipated Create a revenue.

00:14:10 Daniel:

Well, that’s exactly it.

00:14:12 Chikodi:

That’s really sophisticated. So what, what does that, what does that world look like You know, you talked about the what, but then, you know, in a more full featured way, what does, what does it look like if someone is, newsletter, publisher, or, you know, say Marcus Brownley to do, does it. Product reviews on YouTube and all of a sudden, now he is in the flub on marketplace and someone says, I want to own a piece of his revenue and I want to know securitize it. So what does that look like?

00:14:39 Daniel:

So that’s a great question. It depends on what we want. The base unit,

00:14:44 Chikodi:

Say he or she, because there’s yeah.

00:14:46 Daniel:

Write.

00:14:47 Chikodi:

Yeah. I want own a person person there. Yeah.

00:14:50 Daniel:

I think it depends what the base unit of acid is going to look like. So obviously the easiest way is on a contract by contract basis, but we don’t think this is what makes it exciting. So for example, let’s say you make subscription revenue and we decided to bring that forward, give you an advance.

And then we sell this off to the financial markets as a. You know, we used securitize it and sell it off to other investors. That’s interesting on a contract basis, but it doesn’t give you exposure into this exponential growth potential that you have as a creator. What would give you that is more of like an equity, like structure or a derivative like structure.

So. Can you succeed when this creator succeed? So can we do a longer term royalty or revenue share agreements, such that if you do grow exponentially, you’re able to benefit from this. This also makes sense from a content perspective, like, are you willing to license some of your content in the case that you do become big. The investors would be able to get the upside. And then the other, other sort of asset related to that is obviously sort of this web three based NFT assets, such that it’s really based on scarcity, potentially utility when you build communities. and every time there’s the transaction, the creator continues to benefit and the investors continue to benefit and so on and so forth.

So I think the more interesting thing is, can we do it with the simple stuff first? Can we do it with the revenue? And cash backed assets first. And then after that, can we go into more of like a equity, like, or NFT like asset and then bring that onto the market.

00:16:16 Chikodi:

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So I dunno if you saw this, but last week, a SIM lesson, made a $1.7 million investment into creator marina McGill, co lingua, Maria, and she has a language learner. YouTube channel and Sam was a VP at Facebook and his company was acquired by Facebook. And I think he might’ve been a Harvard classmates with mark Zuckerberg at one point, but they’re doing an income share agreement where she’s taking $1.7 million upfront for 5% of her creator revenue for think for the next 35 years, including licensing and.

00:16:54 Daniel:

I think the hardest part is just enforcement of this stuff. I think we already see this with athletes. We see this with, you know, record labels and things. There’s a lot of legal battles that happen. I wonder, I’m curious if that would happen with creators as well.

00:17:06 Chikodi:

It’s a, it’s a really interesting thing because there’s a certain, when I think about it and actually she’s agreed to be on the show. So, hopefully people will see this episode before they see that episode. But, the idea of what is create a revenue and then on the one hand, and then the other hand.

If she’s the first person to get this kind of investment, then there’s a certain inevitability. I would imagine because she’s now saying like, Hey, not only am I creator and I’m good at this, but there’s extra interest because of the fact that she’s the first person to get a direct investment as a creator.

00:17:43 Daniel:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting incentive problems that occur as well. Right. For example, if you sell off more than, you know, 20% or 30% or 40% of your career revenue, does that mean you are disincentivized to continue generating revenue as a creator, maybe like.

So should there be a limit to how much you can sell off into the future?

Right? The other pieces, like what constitutes creator revenue. So suppose you start a business, like, does that get counted? I’m just curious how the legal contracting would work for that. That’s some of the things that we’re looking into as well. How do we think about these incentive alignment? How do we think about some of the restrictions and enforcement and things.

00:18:20 Chikodi:

So you have a product out there in the market. How many, how many creators are you getting to work with at this point?

00:18:26 Daniel:

So right now, we’re still in a closed beta. we are basically testing with, you know, a dozen or a couple dozen creators and saying, look, try using our product user products who can attract deals. and we’re examining like how they’re using the product and the stickiness of like each product. So for example, we found the invoice factoring or early payments invoice to be really, really repetitive.

So once a user starts using. They’re coming back, you know, every week or every other week, every time they have a brand deal to get paid early. we’re also looking at how often are they using this invoice feature? what’s sticky. What’s not sticky. How can we make it better? So we’re still in learn from the users stage in a very

Intimate manner before we open it to, to the public.

00:19:12 Chikodi:

Sure. And then, so you’re testing it out in a very, close feedback loop. what problems are you looking to solve on the creators behalf that are the next features that aren’t going to roll out from?

00:19:28 Daniel:

So there’s a lot of different ideas and features that are being voiced. So one of them is just a very simple way to track or helping them make better decisions. And in order to do that, they need to track things. And there’s a fine balance between too much detail and too little detail. So, for example, let’s say I’m a creator and I’m making money from affiliate deals, brand deals, my YouTube and my Patriots.

I know roughly how much time I’d be spending on each of those things, but I’m not sure how much money I’m generating from each of those things. So suppose I spend. You know, only 10% of my time on my brand deals, but 90% of my revenue comes from brand deals. then I should allocate more time to brand deals rather than say spending, you know, 50% of my time on brand affiliate

Programs. So it’s helping them make better decisions by providing them enough data, but not too much data that they’re overwhelmed. So we’re, we’re testing this feature out as well. but. Honestly, we’re continuing to just work with creators and seeing what other problems we can, we can solve for them.

00:20:33 Chikodi:

That’s great. And what discovery from this feedback loop you have with creators has been most revealing and most exciting to them.

00:20:43 Daniel:

I think just living and breathing, with creators has been fun. So I did something called LaunchHouse beta site out of Los Angeles, where they bring a lot of creator, economy, founders, and creators together. And we literally live together and build together and launched together for a month. so I did that and the feedback loop was literally an hours, right.

So when we talk about product iteration, No, I got off a call with a creator or spoke with a creator over breakfast at nine, and then build a product roadmap by two. And then we had an MVP by 11 the next day we showed them the product and the feature like, do you like it? is this what you were looking for?

So the feedback loop has been incredibly good. The other piece is just spending time with creators and understanding them and understanding that like I use the career term creator very loosely, but. I mean, if you are a beauty creator, you’re extremely different from a music creator. Who’s very, very different from a gamer.

So just being able to spend a time with, with the wide variety of creators has been helpful.

00:21:42 Chikodi:

Who is a creator in your mind? That is not the typical profile. You mentioned, you mentioned a beauty gaming. So outside of the traditional idea of a creator, who do you think falls into the creator economy today?

00:22:01 Daniel:

It is, I see it.

00:22:02 Chikodi:

Yeah.

00:22:03 Daniel:

I think creator can be a broad definition. So our general thesis is that there’s going to be more and more of these one person or two people, companies that are going to form over time. So, even they’re going to be more and more freelancers creating, not just content, but creating services, creating software, creating these products that are, that are being sold to kind of everybody.

So that’s who, anyone who does that I would consider as creators, which in my mind. Makes it a very, very exciting market.

00:22:32 Chikodi:

Yeah. So you’re saying that anybody who sends out an invoice could potentially be a Flowbo ball user.

00:22:39 Daniel:

Exactly, exactly. And who knows, maybe we can just get rid of that problem, you know, completely. No, no more delays.

00:22:46 Chikodi:

Wow. Wow. we have mentioned the word NFT has come up. So are there any web three implications of what you’re doing that you guys are thinking about integrating into your product roadmap?

00:22:57 Daniel:

Yeah, there’s a couple of things that we are thinking about and studying about a little bit more. So I mentioned this $3 trillion problem can of trade finance or delayed payments can be fixed with. Potentially fixed with web three. And one way to do this is just get rid of the entire accounting and legal process that creates the delay in the first place.

So as soon as this, if then statement is fulfilled. So, so our contract is, you know, is, is on the blockchain. There are a set of if then statements, when certain things are fulfilled, then. certain results happen in this case, if a certain metric was hit or if a certain post was made, then the payment goes directly to the creator and payments can be split across the agents of the networks and the creator or whoever, or whoever else is kind of involved without this complicated or manual accounting processes and legal processes that are involved.

So I think. Incorporating smart contracts. and trying to disrupt that space is one area that we’re thinking about. The other way that we’re looking at web three is expanding the scope of assets. So not everything has to be cashed, backed or revenue backed. In fact, the most intangible sort of asks.

Creators have is probably their community. And people try to monetize this in different ways, right? Like how engaged is your

Audience? What’s the conversion rate of your audience? What’s the demographic of your audience? Those things matter. But I think allowing creators to. get financial benefit out of that asset through NFTs or even Dows could be a potentially interesting path going forward. but we will see how, how all of that can be integrated.

00:24:39 Chikodi:

Yeah, you don’t, you’re not a, blockchain first business. So you have a lot more time to figure out exactly what, what could work.

00:24:47 Daniel:

Exactly.

00:24:48 Chikodi:

Well, that makes it really, I mean, if I’m understanding, right? The idea of creating a token around the potential revenue or creator, and then being able to let that token float based on how much interest there is in the creator and what revenue they’re bringing in actually then has intrinsic value.

Right?

00:25:05 Daniel:

Exactly, but it doesn’t even have to be tied to revenue or cash per se. It could be related to the benefits that unlocks as being a part of the community.

So this approach that, you know, if you hold a certain amount of tokens, you will have access to certain, certain benefits, to the creator or to community events.

So I think this being able to truly monetize this community would be a very interesting value prop for, for creators.

00:25:33 Chikodi:

Yeah, I was. I’m glad you brought that up actually, because, you know, recently was NFT NYC or at least recent to the, the recording of this episode. And the, board API club, which is a token based. Are they down?

00:25:48 Daniel:

I’m actually not too far.

00:25:49 Chikodi:

Yeah. Okay. So, well, what I understand of board ape yacht club is that they created 10,000 or so.

Of these profile pictures sized. And if T’s, and then people have bid the prices up to insane amounts, but part of the attraction is the art. And then unlocking certain privileges, like you said, so there’s events that you can access and you can, you can attend an event only if you own one of these NFTs.

So the same would be very interesting for a Flowbo Bo creator or their, their community. In this analogy where maybe the, the value of the token isn’t about how much cash they’re bringing in, but how engaged their community is. So if they only released a few of these tokens, then only 50 or a hundred or 500 people in the world have access to certain, certain privileges, whether it’s webinars or, you know, in-person book signings, what have you.

So, in the abstract, it sounds like that’s kind of what, what you’re thinking about.

00:26:48 Daniel:

Exactly it is, it is still not concrete yet, but I’m seeing how everything develops a little bit more. And, and, you know, quite honestly just studying, the, the technology behind all of this.

00:26:58 Chikodi:

So what, if any adjacent industries or trends are you following in addition to talking to the creators on a daily basis?

00:27:06 Daniel:

Yeah. So it relates to how I thought about or define, you know, creators. So the freelancer market in the U S alone is, you know, a $1.2 trillion market. A lot of these freelancers are actually not full-time they’re part-time right. So I think more and more people would be doing freelancing work on a part-time basis.

So how could we create a. an interesting product for them. And this goes back to this procure to pay cycle that I talked about, right? Like, how are they finding work? How are they contracting? How are they invoicing? How are they paid out? So that’s an adjacent market that I’m looking at. So one obvious thing is, you know, LinkedIn bio for creators is pretty prolific, right?

There’s a lot of players out there, from link Sri to beacons, to, you know, I think almost everyone is, you know, creating this LinkedIn, exactly.

00:27:54 Chikodi:

Because just launch one and then last a couple of weeks.

00:27:57 Daniel:

Yeah, in a way I actually have one of their water bottles.

00:28:00 Chikodi:

Oh, nice. Nice.

00:28:01 Daniel:

But yeah, so I think a similar sort of thing can happen for the freelance economy as well, or for, for these creators, to, to showcase, their, their profile, their work and things.

I’m sure there’s a lot of companies that are already doing this, but you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s an area that I’m tracking at the moment.

00:28:20 Chikodi:

So the whole freelance economy that’s a really exciting place to be at, a company that I worked with, recently. last year or so called rapid book, they help with payroll for filming entertainment, which is $161 billion payroll market by itself. but then the same technology apply across the freelance business.

Landscape is a massive addressable market and. they just last week announced a hundred million dollar financing led by tiger global and, Andreessen invested 25 million, six months prior. So they’re really on a tear. So, yeah, I mean that, that, just to me says that the freelance market that you’re looking at beyond, you know, creators are freelancers full-time, but then people who make their.

Servicing businesses and other, you know, other creative freelance pursuits have the same problems. So that’s, that’s pretty cool.

00:29:21 Daniel:

Exactly the other piece to do this. I think the government also cares about this sort of thing. Right? So from a policy perspective, there’s been the ProAct and things like that to empower freelancers and in a better way, or to help them out. Obviously the outcome of ProAct was, you know, debatable.

But there, there is a lot of like government support and backing to be protecting these, these, creators and freelancers as well.

00:29:45 Chikodi:

So then what does the, we talked about the mind space and the, just getting paid faster. So then what is the Flowbo boat creator day look like in the ideal sense?

00:29:57 Daniel:

You know, in an ideal scenario, it related to mindspace, they get like hundreds, some of these cruises get hundreds of emails, some of which are scams, some of which are not, Saying, Hey, we want a bit of your time. We want a bit of your help kind of promoting our product or promoting our services, you know, just sifting through that is pretty hard.

So in an ideal world Flowbo Bo would kind of sift that through for them. And then it would auto input all of the deals that would be interesting. The creator would then go get the deal done. and then we would automatically kind of pay them out, invoice, invoice, the invoice, the brands. and then it just to be a very seamless process.

So the creator can just focus only on the creative process, and continuing to build their, their audience and grow and, and things like that. and, and recognize that. Me and job, isn’t just doing brand deals, right? It’s just creating good content. And a lot of creators got into this to make good content and, and enjoy themselves a little bit more.

What this enables them to do, however, is just be a little bit more broader in their creative landscape. So a lot of creators are pigeonholed into one set of content if they solely rely on monetization. So if you do a certain set of videos,

Let’s say like pranks or if you do like storytelling or you do a very nice sort of thing, it’s very hard to switch over to other things and actually takes a lot of risk for you to do that.

00:31:17 Chikodi:

I personally don’t like the pranks there. So, you know, it’s like the girlfriend boyfriend pranks, especially, it’s like, I wouldn’t want to be in that relationship, you know? Cause you’re constantly getting eggs dropped on you or, you know, yeah, the pranks Springs is an interesting one because they go super viral.

But then how real are they? Is my.

00:31:36 Daniel:

No that exactly. but yeah, it allows them to have a little bit more creative freedom to do, to do what they want and then allows them to kind of build things on top of they’re just, just building content. Right. So even, even taking examples of Twitch and YouTube, so Twitch has a, if you think about a job, it’s like almost like an hourly paid job most of the time, right?

It’s mostly. How many hours you stream, although there’s some subscriptions related to that, compared to you, which is like a catalog, a social platform. So as you continue to post the value and the asset kind of continues to increase rather than Twitch, which is more of like an hourly based sort of thing.

So can you go beyond the social media platforms? So when you invest time and energy, you continue to grow and build your asset on top of all of this.

00:32:24 Chikodi:

Those are really interesting point. You made about pranks versus music versus beauty versus, you know, lots of different content types where your audience may not go with. If you want to branch out storytelling was another one you said. So then are you also thinking about building a marketplace of brands that creators can then pitch themselves to?

Or you can do a matchmaking where the creator has an audience and they want to expand. And there’s a brand that wants to, to, reach new members and new, viewers.

00:32:58 Daniel:

That is an area that’s in the back burner. We’ll see how important this is. If we were to create sort of a feature or a product like that, It would be related to it. It would have to be very creative friendly. Right. so that’s kind of how we would think about it, but what we think is as long as we can continue to bring in creators and create a community of creators on Flowbo boat, there’ll be more than enough ways to add value to creators and, and create win-win situation.

Whether it’s with brands, whether it’s other creator, economy, companies or so on and so forth.

00:33:30 Chikodi:

I, you know, I’ve been wanting to ask you this for a while, but where did the name phlebotomist?

00:33:35 Daniel:

So I’ll be really honest with you. I wish I had a really good story of, you know, some precise epiphany that came with with the idea, but. I just kind of, I had an investor call and I hadn’t really come. So I hadn’t focused on the name. I had focused on the business model. I had focused on how to run the product, how to build the product, but I had an investor call the next day and I’m like, oh, I need a name.

So I said, well, it’s some sort of Flowbo. It’s a, it’s a Flowbo of capital of some sort, but I don’t want it to sound too corporate, you know, and I want it to be two syllables. So Flowbo bow sounds. Okay. And then I said, I can change the name whenever, but it just ended up sticking.

00:34:12 Chikodi:

Nice. Nice. Well, yeah, it’s a, once you have a name, it becomes that much more real. So it sounds as though, that problem was solved fairly quickly, so that’s great. Okay. As a no marketplace necessarily could, could be a value add, but it’s more about just the, the here and the now, what kind of, what kind of partners are you working with to bring this to market?

00:34:34 Daniel:

Yeah. So we’re working with a lot of agencies and networks who already manage, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of creators. So, the reason we’re able to work with them was they were very familiar with this problem, right? So every other day they would get a call from a creator saying, Hey, like, When’s my money coming in, right.

Or, Hey, like, can I just get a little, I know money from YouTube is coming in. Can I get, can I get money a little bit earlier? And while some of these agencies and networks can cater to. They’re their top creators. It would be very challenging for them to do this, to all of their creators right there.

They’re not a bank. They don’t have a huge balance sheet.

Or even if they did the money could be spent doing what they’re very good at. Right. Which is, building audience and like brand coming, you know, bringing brands and things like that. So, When we approached them, a lot of them were very open to working with Flowbo bell because it’s a, it’s a service, it’s a problem they know creators have, and it’s a service they’d be able to provide to their talent.

00:35:32 Chikodi:

Yeah, I’m hoping, to get, Corinne from slope on for the show as well. You know, the Tik TOK creators, we haven’t really talked about Tik TOK, creators that much. You know, there’s direct monetization inside tech talk, and then there’s the brand deals. So, you know, we’ve mostly talked about Twitch and YouTube. where do you tick tock creators fit into this?

00:35:53 Daniel:

Tik TOK is an interesting platform to say the least, because sometimes there is a large mismatch between your followers and between and your views. And the reason for this is the feed on Tik TOK. Isn’t determined by who you follow per se. I think it’s mostly determined on a discovery, right. so what did you spend time on?

And we’re just going to feed you what they think. You are most interested in, and that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the creators that you follow. Right. So you’ll see that even for creators, when they post the, the views they get will often not be from their followers. It just might be from a larger audience.

So there’s like a little bit of a mismatch there. Yeah, tick talk. I think there’s a lot of different monetizations that are happening. I think they had a partnership with Shopify that happened recently. so we’ll see where all of this goes and how this plays out. But, yeah, I mean Tech-Talk creators are right now, we’re helping them with some of the brand deals. But beyond that, we’re, we’re holding off for now.

00:36:55 Chikodi:

Yeah. You know, on the subject of tick talk, I’ve been, it’s just, so addictive that I’ve had to, steer clear of it for a while. But then I went on, for some reason

I found this guy and I want to say he’s an undergrad. In ancient languages, but he can speak prodo, Indo European and Latin and Greek and a Hittite Gypson against an Egyptian. yeah. And it’s just fascinating. I mean, I just, you have to stay away from tech docs sometimes because it’s just like, it’s so, so rich and so deep, but yeah, monetization for him, you know, he’s just, either an undergraduate or in grad school, but very young. So he. have the same needs of feeding a family and maintaining a staff, but, you know, definitely has an audience.

So, so this is very The creator liquidity issue touches on many, many things.

00:37:46 Daniel:

Oh, yeah. And what you find with a lot of tock creators, not all of them will, they’ll try to bring them onto different platforms. So a lot of creators, you know, recognize that a lot of the money or stable income is earned through YouTube. So a lot of Tik TOK creators will try to divert their audience onto YouTube or even Instagram.

And then the real estate for LinkedIn bio is, is obviously very, very important in order to do that and for the fence to continue to stay engaged. Right. So I think that. A lot of creators start on Tik TOK because they can grow very, a lot faster than on other platforms. and then try to move that over to sort of, the YouTubes of the world.

00:38:26 Chikodi:

And I mean, does the audience go with them?

00:38:28 Daniel:

I think that’s kind of the hard piece that a lot of tick-tock owners have to deal with. so can I, can I bring the audience over the benefit, the one other benefit of like having short form content is that it can be recycled across multiple platforms. So YouTube shorts and even Facebook. So I think that’s like one way to try to build an audience on other platforms.

So, you already created the video, you know, Obviously go to YouTube shorts and then get the YouTube audience there. But, conversion, I, I hear is not at least with the creators that we’ve spoken with, is not to, to create. and, and obviously this is new and people will get better and better at this.

00:39:09 Chikodi:

And so.

00:39:12 Daniel:

My team is extremely small. We like to keep it slow. It’s just myself and my co-founder Norman and we intend to stay this way until we hit what we think is product market fit.

00:39:24 Chikodi:

And then w how are you gonna look to grow the team once product market fit? Is it.

00:39:29 Daniel:

I think we want to see which feature in which product hits the most. the obvious gap in our team right now is just having a creator on board with us. So a creator who can. Be a part of the team who can do outreach in individually to creators to empathize a little bit more. so that would probably be the next hire.

The other gap that we have on our team is probably related to design. So, my forte is not in design either as Norman’s. so that would be kind of what we would, we would think about there.

00:40:00 Chikodi:

Nice. Anything else you want to, share about the journey or what you’ve learned?

00:40:06 Daniel:

No, I think, I think that’s everything. oh, one thing I do want to share is, and I think this might be an unpopular opinion, but there’s this perception that entrepreneurs are extremely risk seeking. the way that I’ve approached entrepreneurship is kind of the exact opposite. so I’ve wanted to start my own thing for a fairly long time.

I told you briefly about my background, so I wanted to. Create a bit of a safety net for my family before embarking on a pretty, what I would consider it a pretty risky journey. But there’s many things that I did to hedge this risk. Right? So one is like working in traditional jobs and building networks of investors, you know, working, working in soft being and things like that.

While building my safety net for my family. then like during grad school where there’s a lot of opportunities for students, I kind of thought about the companies started building the company and started my raise while I was still in school. Right. Worst case scenario. I get a job after grad school, like everybody else.

Right. my, my, my worst case scenario was getting a degree from Oxford. Right. And then after that point, you know, we had gotten into Y Combinator, right? So how can I improve the statistical chance of me succeeding as a company, whether it’s due to the community, whether it’s due to kind of the tools or whether it’s due to the fact that.

The entrepreneurs who happen to be very successful, go through things like why C so I’ve thought about all along the ways of how do I create a minimal loss or like a no loss scenario, and while continuing to kind of build the build kind of the company like that doesn’t mean that I expect this company to fail, but that does mean.

I recognize the probability of success in my first company. I recognize that, understand the math, right? So I think trying to, de-risk as you build your company is actually not a bad thing. rather than just jumping into it as if it’s, as if it’s like a noble thing to do.

00:42:01 Chikodi:

Yeah, really respect you for saying that because there is a certain devil may care attitude that’s associated with starting up a startup, but that doesn’t mean that that’s everybody’s. So having de-risked your journey, as much as possible. What was the term you just used? create creating a no lose,

00:42:22 Daniel:

Yeah. I had no loss scenario.

Right.

00:42:24 Chikodi:

No loss scenario. There’s a certain, I mean, startup founders are entrepreneurs. Creators are entrepreneurs, but they’re not the same type of entrepreneur. So what have you learned? in this journey, in the creator economy about mistakes that traditional startups make when serving this audience?

00:42:41 Daniel:

So I think the hardest thing that a lot of creator economy companies have had, and I’ve heard this multiple times and I, and I faced this myself is just being able to speak with creators, right? So creators are inherently bombarded with messages, right? They’ve got millions of followers. Everyone wants a piece of their attention.

And even if you have the best product in the world, if you have no. Way of connecting with creators. It’s very, very hard to get feedback and get their time to speak with you. So I think building relationships with creators kind of comes first. the other mistake that I see is this and this isn’t just creator economy, startups per se.

It’s all startups is, at least people like me were pretty good. You know, hypothesizing and from an intellectual perspective, say, oh, like, here are all of the incentive structures, and this is kind of the future that I imagine for this sort of product and this sort of problem. The problem with that is you have to actually go speak with users to validate that.

And, not speaking enough and not spending enough time with users and not asking the right questions, I think is the biggest mistake that I see. So I’ll give you an example, right? So there’s a really good book called the mom test where it teaches people about how to ask good questions. So. Let’s say I have a coffee, a product that I want to sell.

If I go up to my friend and say, Hey, like I’m building a coffee product. Like, would you pay $10 for it? That’d be a pretty bad question to be asking the question you should be asking is more on the long lens of, Hey, like, do you drink coffee on a daily or a weekly basis? Like how much money do you spend on coffee on a daily or weekly basis?

If you don’t drink coffee, like entering tea, like what made you sweat? Is it because of an acid problem? Is it because there’s too much caffeine content? Was it too expensive or it turns out that you drink coffee every day, but that coffee is you only drink it because it’s free in your office. Right?

So these are the sorts of like things you should be thinking about. when speaking with users and these are the same mistakes that I made in the very beginning. and I see this mistake being repeated, you know, you know, multiple times for, at least first time.

00:44:49 Chikodi:

Yeah, I imagine when you say that, I imagine the startup pitching its product or trying to do user feedback to creators, similar to people, serving restaurants where it’s like I’m bombarded by both customers, customer service requests. And then there’s a thousand startups in San Francisco that want to be my point of sale service.

So, What, what kind of gap does that create where creators are not able to talk to the startups that are hoping to make change for them?

00:45:23 Daniel:

So, I mean, it’s unfortunate for both parties, right? It’s like a all loss scenario where some founders may be creating tools that might actually help creators, but creators are unable to see this, or it gets blended into noise that they’re unable to see or trust it or, or see it properly. Right. And then on the founder’s perspective, if they don’t get proper feedback, they might spend a bunch of time, building a product only to find out that either creators are unwilling to pay for it, or literally unable to pay for it.

In, in many times in many. Right. So if you’re going after smaller creators and charging them, maybe they’re actually unable to pay for a product like that, even if it’s valuable. So I think, you know, this communication bridging that will be really important, which was just a part of what flood was trying to do.

Right. If we can curate a community of creators, you know, continuing to be a part of this, then we can learn a little bit more about, how they interact with the product, what sort of needs that they may have, and then make the right introductions to the right, right. Sort of tools for them.

00:46:25 Chikodi:

And it sounds like you’ve, you’ve really mitigated risk in as many ways as possible on the topic of customer feedback. What’s, what’s an example of a really bad decision that you made or a wrong term that you made up to now.

00:46:43 Daniel:

Asking Write questions is probably the biggest mistake that I made. So in the beginning, I was very excited about my product, right? This revenue back financing thing. And I said, Hey guys, like, would you be interested if you could get money upfront? And guess what? It turns out money already has product marketing.

Right. So what I mean by that is when you go to a stranger and say, do you want money? Like, yeah, but they want money. what I fail to understand more is like, okay, how much time are you willing to spend on it? Or how much money are you willing to give up, to get your money? Like, you know, at Cox it’s your money upfront and, you know, basic questions like this.

And obviously like the reason I mentioned this, this mistake is I think it’s a common one. Been a part of this. And then I ended up building something that wasn’t as popular as I thought it would be. And now we’re, you know, moving towards some other, you know, other areas.

00:47:30 Chikodi:

Okay. So we’re just asking questions where you’re going to get a definite yes. And asking tougher questions to, to get at the root of what the pain is. is that fair to say?

00:47:41 Daniel:

Exactly. So I don’t, I don’t think customer calls in the beginning should be sales pitches. It should be like discovery calls, like literally floating the idea or understanding their process a little bit better.

Rather than, you know, getting feedback on an idea. I think those are two different, in terms of the purpose of the call.

00:47:59 Chikodi:

So you said the mom tests was a good place to go.

00:48:02 Daniel:

Yeah. I found that book very helpful as recommended by my co-founder, who has been a part of different startups in the past. And I, and I, you know, I learned a ton from that book.

00:48:11 Chikodi:

Yeah. I had an experience not so long ago where I was introduced to somebody and they just started blasting me with customer discovery questions and I’m not their customer, you know? I was only taking the intro because I was doing that on a friend’s behalf. So actually I had to tell my friend like, look, this person I’m introed because of you, but there’s no value for me.

And they’re asking a lot of things. So, it was on, what did you say to the creators? you know, cause they could be creating, they could be, you know, chasing down invoices or for me and at this stage in my life doing nothing and just having the time to process everything that’s going on is a really important activity of doing nothing.

So what, what was your, I guess you were in the creator house, right? So that must have. but what was your view? What was your pitch to them? Like, Hey, give me a half an hour of your time so that I can work on my startup.

00:49:03 Daniel:

Yeah. So I think the way I thought about pitching, so in the beginning, I, the same thing happened, right? So I asked my friends who were creators for intros and the way they thought about the call was I’m doing this person a favor, which is, which is not a horrible thing, right? Like, you know, you’re a startup you’re, you’re getting started, which is not bad.

What we found to be the most compelling calls, where at the end of the call, the creator asks. So when can I use the product

Or when will it be available? Right. So these are really good signs and those are the types of creators who are willing to spend the time because once they spend the time and then they get a catered product that addresses their real need.

Right. So for them. It’s worth their time. And those are probably the best initial customers to get started with. And if it takes like forever to speak with the creator and it’s clear that they’re not that interested, you know, probably not the, not the right call.

00:49:56 Chikodi:

I haven’t had any other creators that said, when is this can be ready? Become.

00:50:01 Daniel:

So like some of the newest features that we’re building is for the creators who said, look, I’m willing to pay you a hundred bucks a month for this. Like, can you like, I’d love this. Can you like build it now? so. That’s kind of like the, that, that’s how we think about getting conviction in, in spending time building a feature and testing this out.

And obviously the threshold is still pretty low, right? That’s like one or two customers or potential customers, but we are early in our journey. And then hopefully as we build more and more users, it will become easier and easier to see what, what creators want.

00:50:31 Chikodi:

Yeah. And so right now you’re taking three or 4% of a factored invoice

00:50:37 Daniel:

Yeah, that’s kind of what we’re doing. and then the remaining is kind of free service, right? So being able to track your brand deals, do automated follow-ups do generate invoices. All of those would be, would be free,

00:50:48 Chikodi:

Have you explored any vertical finance applications to this?

00:50:53 Daniel:

Yeah. We’re trying to look. There’s a bunch of products that have already been thrown out there. Stir is one. Creative Juice is another. Carrot is another. I think it’s good to learn from those first movers, and see what creators are actually excited by.

Are people are excited by analytics of their financial spending? Or, why aren’t a lot of creators using mint? Are they using an alternative, but I’m just not aware of it? So, if they’re not using it, why are they not using it? Is it an awareness problem? Is it the fact that it takes too much time to label stuff? Or maybe it’s just not useful to them at all.

So, I’m trying to understand, again, stay close to users and figure out what they want. And only build if I have some level of conviction that it is truly something.

00:51:45 Chikodi:

Nice. Nice.

Well, that’s helped by the fact that it’s just the two of you, so you don’t have investors breathing down your neck to get to an IPO just yet.

00:51:59 Daniel:

Not yet. Not yet.

00:52:01 Chikodi:

So. who is it? Who’s the ideal Flowbo user right now, and how can they get in touch with you?

00:52:05 Daniel:

The ideal Flowbo user is a creator who is consistently doing brand deals, or want to do something beyond just being on social platforms. If you have a lot of brand deals that are coming in—one of our users had literally a hundred thousand dollars up in the air because brands weren’t paying him. Some of them were net 30. Some of them were net 90. So, he was just waiting on payments.

To get access to that money early, it was actually pretty important. Just keeping a track of what’s coming in and who’s paying you, at what time are things late. So, people who need help with headspace.

The other creators that we’re looking for are creators who are going beyond platforms. So, launching their own stores, launching their own games, who need a bit of extra capital injection would be kind of the creatives we’d love to help.

00:52:53 Chikodi:

Fantastic. Anything else before we go.

00:52:56 Daniel:

No, I think this is great. I had fun.

00:52:58 Chikodi:

Yeah. I’m really grateful for you and your time.

I hope that those creators that are looking to expand are going to find this and reach out.

00:53:08 Daniel:

Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you for your time, and, we’ll definitely stay in touch.