What Worked Episode 24: The business of content creator merch with Saurabh Shah
In this episode of What Worked, Mike and Tyler interview Saurabh Shah, CEO of Warren James. Saurabh brings his unique perspective on the business behind merchandising in the world of content creation and moving it beyond print-on-demand shirts.
Saurabh shares his insights about:
- Managing stakeholders and their sometimes conflicting goals
- The analytics (and gut feelings) that predict successful launches
- The future of content for creators and businesses
We'd love for you to connect with us:
Transcript edited for clarity:
Mike Wu
All right, welcome back to another episode of What Worked. After this short intro, you will get to meet our next guest, Saurabh Shah. He's the CEO of Warren James. Warren James is a company that builds businesses around creators. In this creator economy, they're spearheading many different merch lines, product lines, and that sort of thing for some of the biggest creators in the world.
Warren James is a really unique company, at least from our perspective, right Tyler? They have to cater to many different stakeholders. The content creators, the creators' teams, like their managers and that sort of thing; the creators' audience, and then their own team, which is a global team that lives all around the world. And so we brought Saurabh on as the CEO of that company to help us think through how to manage a global remote team, how to build culture, and just the thing that we all deal with at work, which is managing different stakeholders.
Did you have a moment or part of that conversation with Saurabh that you think the audience should tune into and pay special attention to?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I'll toss out a few key words that I like. First of all, Saurabh is my neighbor, technically. We both live in the same part of LA, so I refer to him as Sawtelle's finest. If you know Los Angeles, you'll know what I'm talking about. Great neighborhood. And the other thing I'm gonna toss out is the word or two words, same word together, Moomoo. So we talk about one of his partners, content creator partners, who ended up creating a very successful line of Moomoos. If you don't know what those are, hit the old Google machine or Perplexity or Chat GPT or whatever your search engine of choice is.
But yeah to Mike's point, I found that conversation, obviously I enjoy all of them, this is our show, but I found it so stimulating because I myself, these days, I don't really watch any TV, I don't watch movies, I don't watch anything. I watch YouTube. So I am myself a consumer in this content creator space. And I, as a person that owns their own business, I love the business side of content creation because it's quite interesting. These people build incredible distribution and incredible following, but they are very, very, very dependent on the platforms on which they're on, in terms of they can get deplatformed, they can get demonetized, right? It's very, you know, kind of flimsy at best. And that's where Saurabh’s company comes in. Warren James is really cool in helping these creators basically diversify their income streams. But yes, this conversation, if you follow content creators or are even remotely interested in it and are someone that likes to dig into the business side, you're going to really enjoy it.
Mike Wu
Check out the episode and let us know what you think.
Welcome back to another episode of What Worked. Tyler and I are stoked to have an awesome guest here today. We have Saurabh Shah, the CEO of a company called Warren James that is working in this nebulous creator economy, at least nebulous to me and Tyler who are still trying to figure out what's trending.
We're super excited to have you Saurabh, we were talking earlier and we want to learn more about you, Warren James, and a little bit about how you kind of manage multiple stakeholders, at Warren James. It's something that Tyler and I are always talking about at Hireframe. How do we manage our different stakeholders that we're always trying to work for and serve? It's a challenge, it's a kind of work in progress always for us. And so we're eager to hear your tips and tricks about what works at Warren James. So, without further ado, Saurabh, can I turn it over to you? Could you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us more about Warren James and what you guys do there?
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, for sure. I'll do the quick version of the background. So I've always been delving into stuff that kind of touches on both sides of my brain. So blending a lot of creative aspects and analytics into my career. And it feels like most careers end up being on one side or the other. And I feel like I've gotten a lot of happiness when blending both. I was a creative early in life, a magician at a young age. I was a member of the Magic Castle when I was 13, made a movie when I was in high school. But then pivoted to professional services post undergrad. Cornerstone Research, the litigation consulting firm, and then went to UCLA for business school. Post business school, I was a partner at BCG. And that's where actually Mike, you and I ended up meeting, which was rad. I got to hire and work with you on a bunch of different projects too.
On the BCG side, I got lucky because I think being in LA, being able to work on media and technology projects and a lot of stuff that's kind of hit on the consumer front too. With the digital ventures arm of BCG, we were building startups for Fortune 500 companies. So that ended up making it a lot of fun on thinking about how do you actually think more like a startup but also have the backing of these larger companies to make that happen. Love the startup side. So that's when I left BCG, joined Next 10 Ventures. So that was a fund to build creator businesses. We were basically backing anybody who is a creator, anybody that has largely long form content on either YouTube, Twitch, we would help fund anything that they wanted to bring to market. So with Chad and Vy Qwaint, we actually helped build a toy subscription box, supported game ventures, supported actual technology items too.
And I ended up meeting the co-founders of Warren James at that gig. So Ben Warren Widener and Kevin James Ramsey, they ended up coming to Next 10. We were using them for some merch aspects and I became an advisor to them. So it was strictly in an advisor capacity for about two or three years before I joined full time. I still wanted to get more operational experience. So I joined Jaanuu, which is a medical scrubs company. So FIGS is the big name brand. And then Jaanuu was kind of the David in the David and Goliath story there.
And then Warren James got to such a size where like my background, so mixing both the creative and the analytical sides could help really scale the business. And we've done just that. So over the last two, two and a half years, we've grown over 50%. We support really the biggest and coolest creators in the business. And it's just been an awesome ride. So that's kind of the background. Hope that sheds a little bit of light and the Magic Castle is always a fun topic. if that ends up getting sprinkled into a couple of things, we'll do that too.
Tyler Rachal
You've got a kid, how often do you make it to the Magic Castle these days? And I know you're in Hampton with me. Do you ever get to go, late nights?
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, so funnily enough, dude, we did a Hampton event there at the Magic Castle.
Tyler Rachal
Now I know who is probably behind it.
Saurabh Shah
You got it. You got it. We're gonna hopefully do one in March too. So you got to come to that one at this point.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I will in a heartbeat. That's awesome.
Saurabh Shah
I'm getting there every now and then, I actually just went Tuesday for a little early birthday celebration. It was great. And then I try to get there every six or so months. I haven't performed there since I was like 20, 21 years old. So now I got to make it a goal to try to get back there and hopefully do a week there too.
Tyler Rachal
Without that one more personal question before Mike shifts gears, because I know Mike's chomping at the bit to jump into the business stuff. But I got to ask any person who has a background in being a magician, I got to ask, did that play any role in the sort of courtship of your wife, your partner?
Saurabh Shah
Of course, of course, man.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, you got to, right?
Saurabh Shah
For our one year dating anniversary. I had done this thing, because we didn't have money then and lit a string on fire and out came a necklace. And so for the proposal, I did the same thing, lit a piece of paper on fire and out came the ring. So it's always a little special to kind of blend that in too.
Tyler Rachal
Now she just thinks anytime you light something on a fire, she's like, what's to come and you're like, no, actually I'm just starting a fire.
Saurabh Shah
What's going be coming up? Yeah, it's good to blend some of that creative aspect into the romantic life, right?
Tyler Rachal
You got to. What a skill. I have no skill of any sort. So I’ll just be like, let me make this beer disappear. That was like my magic trick.
Saurabh Shah
Oh come on. Mike, I feel like you're creative, though. I feel like you've got some of that in you.
Tyler Rachal
He does, he does.
Mike Wu
I wish, I wish, no. But I will say that Saurabh, you actually, I think, organized a trip, maybe it was through BCG, my first time at Magic Castle. And it really changed me like I and I'm not just saying that
Tyler Rachal
Wow.
Saurabh Shah
Really?
Mike Wu
I like to think of myself as a rational, logical person. So magic is like, I'm the guy that's always looking to try to find the slip up and the tricks so I can call it out. We went there, I don't know if you were in the room, I think you were, but there was a mentalist there that was reading people's minds and telling. What happened was, they did that to one of our colleagues, so I knew it was legit. And I was just like, Whoa, like that is insane. I never thought that would happen. I always thought it was like fake on TV and stage or plants in an audience, so that was really cool.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, it's not.
Mike Wu
I still don't know what to think. My brain is like, no, it's fake. It's fake.But yeah, I've never been the same since that night.
Saurabh Shah
Sounds like a trip to the Magic Castles in order with this gang here. We're gonna make that happen.
Tyler Rachal
Let's do it. Absolutely.
Mike Wu
Yeah.
Saurabh Shah
Going back to the Warren James side, right? So I think we just started a touch on this. So our business is developing brands and premium merchandise for the world's biggest content creators. So Good Mythical Morning is a brand that we've worked with. Hassan Piker, who's more of a political commentator on Twitch. Brittany Broski has a bit of podcast and video stuff going on. PaymoneyWubby is a Twitch streamer that does a variety of content. KallMeKris, she's really big on TikTok, probably 50 million or so on TikTok.
So we basically create really cool products, stuff like what I'm wearing right now. And we wanna help them diversify their revenue outside of just content. So extend their IP onto physical products and we do apparel, toys, we've done comics, food and beverage. If you can move it, we'll figure out a way to make it and make sure it gets over here to fans. And our differentiator has really been around going beyond print on demand. So we don't want to do basic screen printing. We really go above and beyond to do more custom cut and sew apparel, plush toys like we talked about, to create something that feels truly unique to the audience and feels really unique for that creator as well.
Mike Wu
Yeah, we've heard about some of the things. Could you share one example, maybe something you've done recently that you're really proud of, that exemplifies like that premium kind of creative concept that you guys brought to life.
Saurabh Shah
One that I've talked about and one that I've talked about, and I really enjoyed the process. So Brittany Broski, who I mentioned earlier, right? Really cool content around a little bit around podcasts. She has specific guests that come on. And she had actually come to us with the idea of developing a moomoo. And this is kind of a big nightgown. It's probably worn in the like 30s to 50s. Her grandma wore it. And she was like, hey, can we figure out a way to make this happen? And this is one where we were actually hesitant because of this stakeholder dynamic. We were like, who is going to buy a moomoo from, from a creator, right? Who wears nightgowns on top of that, who would end up buying one.
And this is one where one, we went on a little bit on gut because Brittany was really thrilled about this idea and we knew that she'd actually promote it well, which is a majority of how we get success. And then two, we kind of started doing a little bit of focus group stuff around like, hey, if this is the product, would you think about it in placement of a robe? And we ended up launching it. So we took the one that she brought to us that was like 50 years old. We figured out a way to kind of make that happen in a few different color ways. So it had the same level of texture, feel, zipper, all of that. It actually had the same resemblance as the one she had before. And we brought it to market in three or four different colorways and it sold like crazy. And I would not expect a product like this to take off as well as it did. And it just sold so well and it's continued to do well. We've brought it back in different colorways. We brought it back around holidays. We're thinking about different patterns that are associated with it. So that one was one where it was just like more around gut feel with a little bit of focus group because she was so passionate about the product itself.
Mike Wu
And Saurabh, so it sounds like going back to the idea of the different stakeholders for Warren James, to me it sounds like it's obviously the creators, one of your main stakeholders, if not the main stakeholder for you, there's their audiences. There's your team, which I imagine is a creative, like team of like, do anything type people, like a fantasy factory of folks. Is that the right breakdown of who's in this picture and putting that formula together?
Saurabh Shah
I would probably even put more into the mix, right? So you also have the manager or the agent who is the one who has brought the deal to us, right? And they're obviously going to be incentivized by making sure that their client is going to get paid and end up getting the biggest check, biggest check possible. So we have them kind of in the mix and usually that person might be different. You might have an agent and you might also have a manager. The creators that we work with tend to be pretty large and we're humbled to be doing that. But that also brings then they might have a creative director and that creative director is usually in the picture for thinking about the creative aspect too. So there ends up being just like a litany of folks that we're making sure that we help shepherd along. And the other people, of course, the audience is gonna be most important that we're developing for them. And our team because they are dreamers. They do want to make cool stuff and we've got to kind of figure out how to rein it in and make sure that they're developing towards the creator and towards the audience too.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I know you've, you've made reference to this, but you've talked about almost a proprietary formula to make sense of these different metrics. What's always interested me about creators is, we've actually done this recently with the What Worked podcast audience, but it's always interesting to look at your audience demographics because what you think, where they're coming from and where they actually are coming from and all that, their age, it might not match with what's inside your brain. So I'm just kind of curious, how do you approach that conversation with the creator? When they come to the table with some type of idea and then you're marrying that with a bunch of other business research information.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, it's an interesting problem because if you think about most platforms, they're technically only supposed to be for people who are over 13 or 18 years old. And so when you have data that comes back from a platform, including third party software that will do some of this, it's totally skewed, especially if the creator is appealing to an under 18 audience, which frankly, most creators have a pretty large part of it.
Whenever we talk to creators, they're like, this is what my audience looks like. And we kind of look at that. We look at their content. We're like, this probably doesn't really match up. So we'll do our own surveying. we'll be like, hey, just put this up for a poll and we'll get back demographics. And that will be our guiding light on what this looks like. And in general, we see that it is usually younger, usually more international than what some of the data might say. And even some things like the male-female breakdown, which is going to be critical for parts of this, will be very different than what third-party data will have.
Tyler Rachal
Interesting.
Saurabh Shah
It's been a game changer on how we approach it. So even out of the gate before we're going to even sign a creator, we'll use this as a mechanism to say, let us understand what your audience looks like. And by the way, it kind of gives us a gauge of how many people have filled out the survey. And that helps us figure out how big the audience might be engaged as well. So that serves as another metric too.
And that's really to your point on the stakeholder side, right? Like the creator usually thinks the audience looks more like them than anything else. I'm speaking in broad strokes and we're like, hey, actually, no, they're much younger. They might be more female leaning or things like that. So that's been, it's a hard conversation to honestly have because you're like, no, well, hey, who I meet at the convention kind of looks like this. And like, that could be one that's a smaller sample size, but you know, here's data from 5,000 people that say otherwise too.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, you reminded me of a very funny personal anecdote. I think Taylor Swift was in my top five of Spotify. You couldn't pay me to go to a Taylor Swift concert. I know it's a crazy ticket and you're probably like, you're lying, if I gave you, you know, front row tickets, you'd go. Honestly, I have no desire to see her live, but apparently I love listening to her music. So I'm probably not showing up correctly on her demographics in terms of the fans that she meets versus apparently one of their true fans.
Saurabh Shah
I thought you were going in very different direction. I thought you were like, hey, your kids are listening to your Spotify account.
Mike Wu
Yeah, someone hacked you.
Tyler Rachal
It's me. Nope. Nope. Didn't get hacked. Believe me, I got my Spotify wrapped and I was like, come again, top five?
Saurabh Shah
Wasn't there that one guy, that Democratic senator who published all Bruce Springsteen songs and it wasn't, he had faked the Spotify Wrap.
Tyler Rachal
No, no, I could totally see that. That's very funny.
Mike Wu
I did not know about that. Sounds about right though. Yeah, not surprised by something like that.
Saurabh Shah
And he blamed it because his kids were listening to Spotify or something like that. He was like, it doesn’t seem right.
Tyler Rachal
He's like NBA YoungBoy?
Saurabh Shah
Yeah. How do you, I mean, you guys obviously aren't more consumer facing, but as you guys try to learn more about whether it's your customers or then who you're kind of hiring to, how are you learning about that? Because you're just probably talking to leadership, I would assume for the most part, but then you got to make sure culture jives with the rest of the company and all that as well, right?
Tyler Rachal
It's a wonderful question
Mike Wu
Yeah. One thing that came to mind when you're describing how you guys bring value to table by doing analysis, surveying, analytics and that sort of thing to help bring insights to your creators. Maybe a parallel at Hireframe is a lot of our customers, say they're a head of sales of a software company or maybe they're the CFO of a software company. They always want to know, like a common question that we receive is, Hey, like what are other companies that look like us doing? How are they building their 2025 finance organization? What does a modern sales organization look like for a series A FinTech? And then what does the go-to-market motion look like? For example, or how are you like building like a hybrid US / Philippines-based accounting team? Those are the types of questions that we see. And they want examples.
And I think it's very similar at BCG. A lot of the clients at BCG, they got a lot of value because BCG has experience working across industries and even within industries. So there's a lot of examples. There's a lot of institutional knowledge around like how to, and like what's best practice today. That is one thing our customers are coming to us a lot for right now.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, I get the analog.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. And what I would add to that that's been really interesting. We're a professional service provider. And so we have the benefit of being able to have set goals. We're going to have conversations with the people that signed the contracts, made the decision to quote unquote, hire Hireframe and gotten to know them.
And to kind of bring it back full circle to Warren James, there's the people that, whatever you want to call them in sales would be the decision maker person who decides to engage with Hireframe as a partner. But then there's, there's also this other subsect of our customers, which is the day-to-day stakeholders, the people that are responsible for managing the talent that we're staffing for them. And I would say that those two profiles are very different. Typically we will have a conversation with the decision maker, it might even just be one conversation, 30 minutes. I would describe them as they're either entrepreneurs or they're soon to be entrepreneurs. They think like executives, they're at a stage in their career as well as a role within the business where they treat it like it's their own business. And so they really do take that sort of thought leadership role, which is like, what should I be thinking about? And they value that expertise and they want to know what other smart companies are doing and all that sort of stuff.
And then if you switch to the day-to-day stakeholders for Hireframe, it's very different. Oftentimes it's a manager who's getting their first opportunity at doing a business initiative like this. So they can kind of attach their name to cost savings for the business growth for the business, whatever it might be. And for that person, it's a much more hand holding approach where they really want to know how can we work together? I'm trying to figure this out. You know, I really want this to be successful too. So it's interesting, but those demographics, when you actually sit down and look at them quote unquote on paper, I always find that you always come away with some incredible insights.
Saurabh Shah
It's a good point because what we have in ours, right? So I wouldn't call what you guys are saying is there's a conflict between call it the day-to-day manager and the decision maker, right? Usually they're going to be somewhat aligned, especially against some of these cost quality outcome pieces. Where we sometimes end up facing an issue is for a creator, they do obviously want the revenue that comes from the merchandise side, but usually call it somewhere around like 10 to 15 percent of their total take-home pay, especially the bigger ones that we work with. And so they want to make sure that the merchandise is pristine and perfect before they decide to put it out into the market. Whereas we try to do somewhere around three to four drops per year for any given creator. But sometimes what ends up happening, they're like, well, I don't love the way that this puff print is exactly raised. So if we tried it a different way, what does that look like? So that'll delay launches. And then we have somebody like the agent manager who's like, Hey, how come we haven't gotten to a launch because we want to end up getting the revenue. So that's where we actually see things that, they're aligned with us in that sense, because we want to try to get more launches out and we have to help kind of guide.
I think where we're similar on this is we're guiding each stakeholder towards an outcome that kind of makes sense. Because for the creator, they need to be extremely happy with the outcome for them to promote it with gusto, right? They need to be just ecstatic about this t-shirt is like the best freaking t-shirt you're gonna buy. And it's just the best quality. And here's like a really cool walkthrough of it. And that's where we see success is like the creator who've got the rack behind them. They do a walkthrough of the website. They feel super pumped about every step of the way. So that's where we've seen the most success. So it's trying to marry that with, OK, well, what does potentially the agent or management want? What do we want? And trying to guide them towards that outcome, too.
Tyler Rachal
I'm chuckling to myself and this is no knock on them because obviously they're wildly successful business. But, when you say the gusto, I'm thinking of just how just about every creator I feel like is working with AG1. I've seen probably a very wide range of AG1 ads, everything from like, Hey guys, what's up? Every day I like to take my AG1 supplements. It's really great to someone being like, I'm feeling strong. I'm feeling fit. I needed greens in my life.
You're absolutely right. When they, can always tell when I have a creator that I follow when they're behind something, you can feel it. And you're like, and I've been sold on stuff before. I have one question, I know Mike wants to jump in, but I'm just really curious about one particular aspect of the process, about you in particular, Saurabh. Because I see this with Mike and my wife, I don't know if you knew this, my wife is a consultant at Deloitte, and I call it the consultant superpower, which is it's that ability to understand either an entire call industry, type of business, model, whatever it is. it's that ability to seek out the right information, digest it, and then very quickly understand it. I try to think about how do you feel like you apply that to your day to day because I'm thinking about someone, I know you have that great example of that guy, that ripped dude, William Tennyson I think is his name or the creator, right? And you guys did the baked goods. So how do you become an expert on baked goods overnight?
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, it's great. have great people around us. That's kind of the first piece of this, right? So we hired two awesome women who led our food and beverage side of things. So they are amazing at figuring out how to think about what products to go after. So I think that's obviously going to be step one. The biggest thing that I think I've learned here is not to go overly analytical, which has been some unlearning that I'm hoping that, Mike, you and I can probably share notes on. You don't need to go to the nth degree on some of the analytics side and that's where we felt like we had to potentially get. I think the better part about this, especially with our traditional merch versus the food and beverage side has been for the most part, as long as it's an e-commerce good, it generally follows the same kind of analytics and what kind of margins and whatnot you're looking for. So that part's the easy part.
But honestly speaking, the food and beverage side, super hard. We did this cereal with Good Mythical Morning and to do that development took a very long time. It's a very different process than coming out with a shirt where we were making a custom shape or making a custom flavor. And so that just took substantial time. And it is very much about diving into the deep end, making sure that you're having conversations with the co-manufacturer, doing it frequently, understanding pros and cons about different ingredients, understanding how things are molded shaped. So it is very much just like diving into the deep end for at least a week and just being like alright, how am I gonna really figure this out? And then you can kind of come up for air and then trust the people that are around us to to make that happen And that's been that's been a really great learning
I luckily had the advantage of being an advisor for like two plus years for the business. So I could really hit the ground running and we're able to make a bunch of improvements on process and margins and all that kind of stuff. So that was great. What you mentioned earlier that kind of struck me around the products that you're going to developing for the audience or even like something like the AG one side, right? That is very much a metric that we use around how are they promoting their brand deals? And that will give us an indication on how they're gonna promote merch deals.
Tyler Rachal
Interesting.
Saurabh Shah
Because if they're doing AG1 in that first tone that you were talking about, that's probably not gonna fly. That's probably how they’re gonna pitch their t-shirt. So it'll usually be a subjective factor that we put into our model for even if we wanna work with that creator too.
Tyler Rachal
Super, super interesting. And that diving deep thing that resonates, Mike and I love to do that, you know, about just everything. So we can appreciate that, the value and just immersing yourself in all the information and just trying to come up to air, kind of say like, what did I learn?
Saurabh Shah
Absolutely ends up being the case. And that's where it's good, even for me to look specifically at the survey responses, let me get familiar with it and understand what this is about so that I can kind of get my head around that. Especially as entrepreneurs, you guys are like the founder/manager mode, right? Is that what it is?
Tyler Rachal
Yep. I think manager mode, that was the gist of it, right? was like middle managers basically are kind of the death of startups basically.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, so that's always a good model to think about because I think you end up going into founder mode and really diving deep versus at some points hopefully letting people actually do their work with the right leadership team that you've hired. So that always ends up being a struggle on a day-to-day basis. Even though I'm not one of the founders, I still have that mentality around it being a hired gun too.
Mike Wu
I'm just curious now, Saurabh, one, you work with a bunch of creators and I guess as a consumer of content, I don't often think about the business of a creator. And you kind of alluded to like what some of your creators, their teams look like, their business looks like in terms of they have a business manager, they might have a creative director or something like that. What does that team or staff look like now? We're always interested in what teams look like for different types of organizations here at Hireframe. So, today, this is like a nice transition to where the creator economy is going and some things you're saying, but, maybe we can start off by just talking about what does the team of a creator look like today? Who's on that team? And maybe even for anyone who's interested in kind of joining the industry, what are some talent gaps that creators might need to fill, there might be a shortage of that kind of talent. We're always interested in that kind of stuff.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, for sure. I'll make a pitch for a friend's business within this too. So I think there's all the ways that it's extremely professionalized, right? So something like Mythical, which puts out content every day and has been in the business for probably 15 plus years at this point. They're OG YouTube creators and they have a full studio. They have a team of hundreds of people. They really have a professional organization that would rival, if not beat even some levels of studios or people who are doing professional TV shows. So there's that end of it down to what I would say is most of the creators that we have are at some level of manager or agent. So that is usually the folks that are doing brand deals, helping to execute the brand deals. That's a majority of that side, but they're also helping with stuff like merchandising or their other business ties, other partnerships to be having too.
Then depending on the kind of content the person has, it'll be a litany of folks within the content side. So it might be like video editors, producers, things like that. So, and much more around the creative front, down to also like moderators. If you're doing a Twitch stream, making sure that you have moderators that are within your Twitch stream, they have folks around too. And then for stuff like if they have creative ventures, if they're an animated channel, that might be opening up a different team of folks. And what I was mentioning about my friend's business, so Sherry Wong, she has a business called Roster and that is basically one where if you are a creator and you're looking for somebody, it'll be kind of the LinkedIn place to go and do that.
Tyler Rachal
That's cool.
Mike Wu
Very cool.
Saurabh Shah
It's super cool. And you, as a creator, can see like PewDiePie, who was his video editor, who is his thumbnail artist. And based on that, be like, I want to try to hire that same person because I feel like that could be really advantageous for my type of content too. So it really provides that level of transparency around like big creators or not and the types of people that they work with. And it's great. I mean, the business continues to do really well. So check it out. And it's very much geared towards the creator business because it's always that question, Hey, who's your editor? Like, this looks really good. How did you find that person? And provides a much more streamlined way of finding that person too.
Mike Wu
Yeah, we hear, we hear video editors are high in demand these days.
Tyler Rachal
It's quickly become, I would say it's probably accounts for about 40 % of our reqs at Hireframe. Which honestly, Mike and I had no idea this would be a thing. But it is, it's in such high demand and us being a remote staffing company.
Saurabh Shah
Very cool. Video editor specifically?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. Specifically short form.
Saurabh Shah
Incredible.
Tyler Rachal
So we work with a number of different media companies. This need, what's really interesting is we're talking to a lot of these media companies and they've just been telling us how quickly things are changing. And it's really hard to one, find the talent, which I'm sure this is probably something creators struggle with too, right? And then two, it's expensive. A lot of people are still figuring out streaming or they're figuring out YouTube and all that stuff. So putting together the production people that they need can be hard in the US. So they're looking elsewhere. I have one last question on my end. You've been, let's call it in the room, I like to use that expression, you've been in the room with, imagine a wide range of business people, everyone from probably fortune 100 companies, from your time at BCG to obviously creators. And you even mentioned working at a litigation research company, right? So litigators, what would you say has been the most surprising thing and working with creators just in terms of the way they do business? What did you expect and what have you learned?
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, it's a great question. I think that also speaks to, Mike, what you were asking earlier is like what the future of the creator economy is going to go towards as well. I think the most surprising part about this has been the wide range of business know-how that I'm seeing where I will be talking to 18 year old creators and their level of business intelligence will be extremely high on on just like, hey, would you think about this analytics? And because they're so steeped on the YouTube side, on thinking about deep analytics about how do I really maximize my audience? They'll be able to translate that into the business front. And that I honestly found surprising. I thought we would have to help and wear that hat and I'm able to learn from them as much as we're able to impart wisdom upon them too. To the very much on the creative front, so the pendulum also swing and they’ll be like, I'm here to make great content. I don't want to see a number unless it's a check, right? So that's where we have to figure out, speaking on the first topic we were talking about on the stakeholder management side, how do you cater what you are displaying? It can't be a one size fits all. We can't be doing QBR style reports for all creators. So we got to see how we manage that. And that's where I think.
Mike Wu
Taking notes here. That's something I would try. That's something I would have tried though.
Saurabh Shah
I still am. I just got an email on give me some year end reports on our creators. I was like, got you. Got that.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, you're saying to some 14 year old like, we circle back on this? They're like, circle back. Like, what are you? What is that?
Saurabh Shah
But that's where the future is going, right? The most popular career for people under 16 is that they want to be a content creator and you're going to continue to see the democratization of that content and you're going to see everybody wanting to be one. And that's where I think it's actually kind of cool. You guys are tapped in. Yeah, you've got big companies, but people who are just starting up on YouTube are thinking about how they get great edits going and if you don't really have a content strategy, you're going to be DOA for most companies. If you don't have a creator or an influencer strategy, you're probably going to be DOA. So that's why probably AG1 has every single person pushing their product, because it works.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, props by the way, AG1, I'd love to work with you. Listen, whatever you need, AG1, I will call up these creators and I will yell at them if they do not give the most impassioned plug possible. But, that makes sense. And I think, the interesting one for us is that we've worked with a lot of actually more legacy media that's trying to get more, you know, prolific on the different platforms and they're trying to catch up with these 14 year olds.So yeah, it's quite interesting.
Saurabh Shah
Totally. Those guys run circles. And they end up usually, I mean, this is again broad strokes, they end up having such a traditional media way of thinking about it. And you've got to actually think about this from the lens of a creator or an influencer who knows how to put out content. And they usually are just like, oh well, can't I just make a 10 second video and hope that it does well. So I'm glad you guys are helping kind of point them in the right direction too.
Tyler Rachal
That might be a perfect place to end it. I was gonna just ask, I'd love to plug Warren James here. I know you guys have grown a ton. And maybe we could even put it out into the universe. Are there any creators that you'd love to work with that you haven't had a chance to? Just toss out your dream five, if you want.
Saurabh Shah
Yeah, we, I won't say it because I think we've got enough out there right now. We've got enough tentacles that are in motion, but we've got a bunch.
Tyler Rachal
Cool, They're coming to you now.
Saurabh Shah
I hope so. I hope that's where, that's where it's going to rebound back to at this point, but we've, we're blessed to be working with the ones that we currently are. We're expanding into really cool types of content. We work with now Dropout, which has an awesome SVOD platform. It used to be known as College Humor, we run their merch program. Hell of a Boss, which is an animated channel. So our definition of creator is also starting to expand here too. It's not just the strict YouTube vlogger or the Twitch streamer. And so we're seeing cool expansion around that too. We're tapping a little bit into the music space. So don't think of the very narrow definition, but there are ones that we should be working with. Please be emailing me at saurabh at warrenjames.org or add me on LinkedIn. Would love to stay connected with the audience here too.
Mike Wu
There you have it. Reach out.
Tyler Rachal
Very cool. Reach out to Saurabh, work with Warren James. Thank you so much for coming on to What Worked. I'll say this, you're probably the coolest person to come on What Worked. Coolest by proxy. We're all dads here. So we're kind of lame,
Saurabh Shah
Aw, my shucks. Yeah, the bar kind of gets automatically lowered there.
Tyler Rachal
Exactly. I saw Mike earlier today. I was definitely rocking my, what are those Nikes? My Air Monarchs, my dad shoes. So I'm not that cool, but, yeah, we appreciate Saurabh and, definitely we'll look, we'll look out for the next moomoo creation.
Mike Wu
Thanks for doing this.
Saurabh Shah
Thank you guys, thanks for having me. you got it.
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