Jared Kleinstein on building Gondola, the IMDb for social media
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Jared Kleinstein is the Founder and CEO of Gondola, a platform that allows marketing and creative professionals to showcase their work on social media. Gondola has grown quickly in the sports community because creatives get access to performance metrics and are credited across any channel that posts their work. Jared was inspired to start Gondola through his work leading sports partnerships at Vine/Twitter and running his own successful production company, Fresh Tape Media. Brian Bosche and Jared chat about how creatives are building their own brands, why credit is so important in the marketing and creative industry, and how they have grown Gondola as a startup.
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Full Transcript:
Brian Bosche: (00:00)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the creative BTS podcast. I am your host, Brian Boche and today we have a very special guest, Jared Kleinstein, founder, and CEO of gondola. What is up, Jared?
Jared Kleinstein: (00:15)
Uh, I'd say not much, but I've already like done an hour of work, hung out with the baby cooked breakfast, set up a new espresso machine. So lots,
Brian Bosche: (00:23)
Lots of you're a founder. You're a dad. You're an entrepreneur. You get a lot done in the day.
Jared Kleinstein: (00:28)
Yeah. And, and still, I don't get anything done at the same time. I think that's just how, if you're, if you're, uh, you know, a parent and an employee or working anywhere, I think you always have this perpetual state of, I am constantly working and don't get anything done. So today is gonna be the day that I'm gonna get it all done.
Brian Bosche: (00:45)
It's always, you're always trying to shoot for that. Uh, and this is a fun day for me too, because I obviously love intersection of sports, creative tech. You're all of those things. And you're also a mutual Denver sports fan. I was, we talked about this a little bit is what was your, your theory wherever you live in fourth grade is where fourth theory is like, where you want give it to us. I love this theory.
Jared Kleinstein: (01:06)
Yeah. Fourth grade theory is that, uh, sports fandom is determined based on where you were and what you cared about in fourth grade. So if, and, and the reason is, you know, fourth grade, you just came out of learning the basics of math, but, uh, to the point where like stats actually mean something to you. So batting average RBIS, uh, goals against average and hockey, um, points for game in basketball. That that all makes sense, but you're still young enough that these are your heroes. So whatever your family tells you to love or whatever is the like local team to love, you're still passionate about. So I think that, I mean, that's probably why I'm still in abs nuggets, Broncos, Rocky fan.
Brian Bosche: (01:46)
I'm saying that
Jared Kleinstein: (01:46)
Was
Brian Bosche: (01:46)
Everything. Both. I moved around a ton, but I was in Denver for about six or seven years in that fourth grade time span, moved to London from Seattle. So I like some Seattle teams, but there's nothing like thinking back to like old school nuggets scheme, even in the late nineties where I think they were the worst team of all time. I still have a special place in my heart for Nick van axle and that crew,
Jared Kleinstein: (02:06)
Um, oh my God. It's, it's like, it's also, like, we probably look back nostalgically on those teams that were not the best, uh, as if like there's still some of our heroes like that. Lafon Nick Vanel. Oh yeah. LA friends back then.
Brian Bosche: (02:22)
Yeah. You love to see it was, and you're also, you're just, this is all nostalgia for me too. Cuz you have a vine logo in your background. You've worked at vine. I just saw this tweet was like, what do you miss the most vine? I definitely miss the most, but we're gonna get into all this. I want to send out the podcast right now cuz I am super interested in this new venture you're launching gondola and you get to practice your elevator pitch. What is gondola?
Jared Kleinstein: (02:46)
That is the sound dramatic pause. Uh, that was the sound of, uh, furniture being moved above
Brian Bosche: (02:52)
Jared Kleinstein: (02:53)
It's
Brian Bosche: (02:54)
The sound of the elevator it's it's going.
Jared Kleinstein: (02:56)
Yeah,
Brian Bosche: (02:56)
It sounds like it's going up the shaft where you're like, okay, press the button. Now I have to give the pitch. But what's the, what's the short overview of go give our listeners a little insight.
Jared Kleinstein: (03:04)
Sure. Uh, so gondola is the first system for creators to get credit for their work on social media and in doing so they get to build portfolios, gather analytics, uh, and uh, create opportunities for themselves, both, uh, you know, finding opportunities, connecting with other creatives. So
Brian Bosche: (03:20)
Do, do you have any fun this or that? I, I usually hate this or that, but every VC, every everyone loves here. It, do you have a, this, this for that?
Jared Kleinstein: (03:28)
Yeah, I think so. I, I it's,
Brian Bosche: (03:31)
It always changes too when
Jared Kleinstein: (03:32)
I it's it's a it's if you know the internets, then it makes sense. But if not, then, you know, like I think that I thought IMDB, everybody knew it. It turns out I was just like really into movies growing up. So IMDB was like a big part of my life, but the way we see it is IMDB for social content. Uh, and that's how we initially envisioned it. But it turns out it's becoming more linked in for the creative community, uh, where we thought that the most where we thought the most important thing was giving credit creators credit for their work. What we're realizing now is when they do that, they build a portfolio that's essentially their creative resume. That's a more accurate and uh, visual display of their work than any of the other portfolio sites. Mm-hmm so we're, we're cool with that evolution. As long as people still, you know, are excited to find the credits on social content that they've seen.
Brian Bosche: (04:19)
Yeah. I think when we were trying to put one together for slope over five years, it changed about a hundred times. So it constantly evolves. New companies get hot, you wanna associate yourself with them. Um, but you have a really interesting path to creating gondola, which I love as a former founder of myself, of you actually experience the problem yourself and you're trying to solve it. You have a deep history here. So you wanna go a little bit into your professional background on kind of what kind of spurred you to start gondola?
Jared Kleinstein: (04:45)
Sure. Um, it's funny. I, I was talking about this the other day, uh, the concept of giving, uh, X industry professionals credit for their work. Um, I'd like to say started with gondola, but actually I've been doing it since 2007. Mm-hmm . So 2007, I worked for a company called street, easy in New York was there for seven years until we got acquired or six years until we got acquired by Zillow and then stayed within the Zillow org for a bit. Uh, and one of the things that we cared about doing was giving real estate agents credit for their transactions that nobody, uh, knew was them before or historically cuz it wasn't part of, uh, city records. So I guess I've been doing that for a while. So I was on the business development side at street easy. Then I went over after the Zillow acquisition to Twitter to run sports partnerships at vine. So, you know, pour one out all yeah, fantastic time. It was also like, like the, uh, the most fun two and a half years, uh, human being can have in a career. I got to work, you know, across the world. I was the, I was the sports person. There was nobody else
Brian Bosche: (05:44)
On yeah. Dream job,
Jared Kleinstein: (05:46)
Like for real. And it was a, like a total accident that I got it. If it had been a head of sports job to apply for, I never would've got it. I worked in New York real estate. There was no reason I should have been hired. Uh, but in the partnerships manager interview, they said, if you could focus on one thing, what would you wanna focus on? And I was like, so scared to say it. I was like sports, sports
Brian Bosche: (06:07)
I
Jared Kleinstein: (06:07)
Like sports. You're like, oh great, ginger doesn't wanna do sports. You're good. And I was like, oh my God, like ginger, not wanting to do it was the reason that I got ahead of sports job at vine. So it took some convincing to the Twitter team at one point that like I was credible and worthy of the role. Uh, but soon we became like really close, very integrated. And you know, I was a part of the Twitter sports team for many years and it was a blast and I'm still close with those people. I was like some of my best friends today. Mm-hmm
Brian Bosche: (06:32)
and it's funny the credit I see gen Z now, like on like there's a bunch of TikTok photographers and they get aggressive with credit where a lot of their bios say like credit or die and they just like flat out like, cause this is a big problem in the industry of not getting credit to, uh, you know, stealing content, stealing photos, stealing videos, ripping them off, putting 'em on your own sites, not giving any credit. But I feel like it's a much more aggressive thing now with, with the upcoming generations of creator.
Jared Kleinstein: (06:58)
Sure. And, and this indu, the, the reason that it's becoming a thing right now is because, uh, the way in which content is distributed to major brands, meme accounts, everywhere else ranges from, uh, ripping it for free as in like how's highlights bleach or anybody who has been historically taking content and giving credit as the only means of compensation to, uh, I'll do free or affordable labor for you for exposure, where I wanna be credited, which a lot of influencers have used as a tactic and creatives of these as tactic to get growth, to activity at growth to I'm just being paid to make the content to the far side, which is not only am I being paid to make the content, but you want to associate my brand with yours. Mm-hmm so if you're an influencer, uh, who does stop motion, the MBA may want to credit pay you and credit you because for them it shows them most.
Brian Bosche: (07:48)
Yeah.
Jared Kleinstein: (07:48)
Yeah. So that's like the fact that there's the reason that the credit thing is so important right now is because there's such a range of people from, you know, getting stuff taken for free to giving it to free, to getting paid that like, uh, nobody really knows who's making what and who deserves to be getting credit. So the default is, yeah, you should for sure. Give credit to the people behind the work. Um, also as we've said, like we mentioned IMDB, like if you watch a movie and you wanna know who the director is, wait till the credits and watch them or go to IMDB. Yeah. That's existed forever. And we just don't have the mechanisms for that on Instagram and Twitter and YouTube.
Brian Bosche: (08:24)
I do really like the IMDB, uh, comparison because it is, it's like here, if I want to go see, oh, what else were they in? Uh, what else have they done? It's hard on existing portfolio sites. It's hard on LinkedIn to see kind of what they've done specifically. You can, it's easy to kind of give generalities, but I wanna see who's who's post went viral, uh, like J square, the photographer for the, the warriors or Jordan pool when he had some of those like iconic Steph Curry, like look away three pointer shots. You're like, who, who took that? Like how do I go back and see how, how many impressions did he get? It's a really interesting thing to start to explore,
Jared Kleinstein: (08:58)
For sure. Imagine like on your IMDB profile, if you're like Kevin Hart and, uh, who probably just like sends people his, his IMDB because you know, he has the time to do that. Uh, not really. So, so imagine if Kevin Hart on his profile, when you hovered over Jumanji, it showed the clip from Jumanji that he was funniest in. Right. And imagine if it said, except it went viral. Exactly. Imagine if it said, when he, you hovered over his Jumanji, uh, in his portfolio, it said, um, how many, how much money it made in the box office right away? It's like, that's the kind of stuff that we're able to do for social creators, with gondola that even the traditional industry hasn't had historically it that easy at the fingertips. So we're
Brian Bosche: (09:39)
Still, and you, and you just didn't pull this outta nowhere. And this wasn't even, maybe from vine, this is you in the trenches, fresh tape media. Do you want to talk about kind of years of doing some of the best creative work I've seen in the sports world?
Jared Kleinstein: (09:50)
For sure. So, I mean, at, at the vine, in the vine days, um, I think it was the NBA or NHL first came up to us, said we want analytics cuz it's the one thing they didn't have exposure to. So I started providing that. I knew about how important analytics was early on. This was
Brian Bosche: (10:04)
Fresh tape or did you do fresh tape
Jared Kleinstein: (10:05)
First? This was at vine. This
Brian Bosche: (10:06)
Is, oh, this at vine. When I was
Jared Kleinstein: (10:07)
At vine, I was doing analytics for the NBA on their vine account. Um, and it was really valuable to that. So I start fresh tape in 2017 and I still have that mentality that if I don't give you the numbers of how something performed, then how can I tell you that it's really worth your money? So fresh and fresh tape, by the way, for context, uh, is a creative production company that we launched 2017, uh, that focuses mainly on working with sports leagues teams, uh, media companies and broadcasters, uh, to create sort of primarily social content though. Now we've expanded to a lot of fabrication and uh, commercial work as well. Mm-hmm um, so essentially I had this mentality is like, if we don't give numbers, then we can't tell people that we're worth it. Uh, so I tried to figure out those numbers and it turns out when you are at a league or you're at a team, you have access to your analytics, you have sprout social, you have crowd tank, you have all these different things, but if you're an agency or a brushing company or a freelancer, you don't know anything, all you know is what you see.
Jared Kleinstein: (11:03)
If you like cop, if you look at a, like a YouTube post or a Instagram post, you can see the views mm-hmm and the likes and the comments. But to gather that stuff together, to put together a report for a client is so manual. And we were like literally making Google sheets with lists of links and then analytics next to them that the next day were inaccurate. So we're like, wait, do we wait until two days after? Do we wait a week? When do we give an analytics report? It was ridiculous. So we just built an internal tracking tool. We called it fresh tape admin. And we said, all we want is to be able to take a link, paste it into some database and then see the stats later. If we wanna look it up. And, uh, an old vine engineer, uh, that I had worked with helped me build it.
Jared Kleinstein: (11:43)
And then we said, oh, can you add who the creators were on our team? So if they leave the company or if in five years somebody said, you know, I want context on that project who did it? We could say, oh, that was max. Or that was Lana. That was Gabby, et cetera. So, um, that was it. It wasn't intended to become anything bigger. And then all of a sudden we had this realization after like one product change, which was to be able to reverse search. So instead of pasting a link and then adding the data, just to be able to paste the link and then see the data that's already in the database, we were like, wait, if you can paste a link and see who created it, then sure. That'll work for agencies and production companies like us. But if everybody uses it that way, then you can find out who made the content you're seeing on social and we've created this IMDB of social and we're like, oh shoot, we probably shouldn't call it fresh tape admin anymore. So that was like, well,
Brian Bosche: (12:32)
That's, that's a pretty good name.
Jared Kleinstein: (12:34)
Yeah. Fresh tape admin. I think, uh, I don't know how much marketability that would've had. Yeah. Uh, but we're so stoked cuz now it's been a few years and uh, we've been developing it and knowing that every single tool we build is something that we are gonna use. Um, because it's a part of our daily life. And we know that other agencies, freelancers creatives will have value from it because if the only people using it are Jared clients team and Brian Boche, then we're gonna get value from it. And it's like built, uh, that way. So having a huge community using it is extraordinary. And if it never grows past the two of us, which it has, but not here nor there, it definitely has. Uh, it would still give us value. So that's why we're really excited about the product.
Brian Bosche: (13:16)
If you had to give an example of your favorite use or favorite creators on there who have done something really cool, just to kind of illustrate the product itself, what would you give an example of?
Jared Kleinstein: (13:27)
Um, I can think of two. Uh, one is, um, trying to give, so there's a, you know, there's been a big trend in the last kind of few years in terms of how to adapt, highlights to something great of using rotoscoping and doing, um, you know, illustration and animation of, uh, rotoscope highlights. It's huge because like in some sports you can't use broadcast footage, like, um, European football, like there's so
Brian Bosche: (13:53)
Many to work around,
Jared Kleinstein: (13:54)
Stuff like that. So it's kind of a way to, uh, sorry, my dog wants to come say hi man. You wanna
Brian Bosche: (13:59)
Come in? Dogs are always welcome on the podcast.
Jared Kleinstein: (14:02)
Come here, Manny, come on, join the podcast. Come here. We'll tell the story one more time in a second.
Brian Bosche: (14:07)
and if you're watching this on YouTube or on TikTok, okay. You get the extra benefit of that's why you don't subscribe to the YouTube. You get to see dogs instead of just listening. Oh, big, big hug.
Jared Kleinstein: (14:20)
This is manchego. He goes by Manny or the cheese monster. you doing cheese? Go down honey.
Brian Bosche: (14:28)
Oh, now he's gone. Just wanted check in. Just wanted to see what's going on in the creative BT
Jared Kleinstein: (14:31)
I load of this podcast is the dog like flying on top of me. Oh, he's back. So, um, anyway, an example, um, a cool example of sort of the use of it is, uh, this trend with rotoscoping where people are adapting highlights into, you know, illustrations and animations. Um, and we've done it a few times at fresh day media and it's awesome. And the cool thing about it is, uh, like it both gets numbers. People like the content and it shows, you know, creative drive as a company. Uh, so, um, we, when somebody says to us a few weeks ago, um, Hey, have you ever seen anybody do this? Or do you have anybody that does this? Not only can we just do one filter, that's just, you know, rotoscope within fresh shapes, gondola portfolio, but it'll give the analytics and it'll show people, oh, when the NHL did this, it got this many million views when the Washington capitals did to day got this many views, you know?
Jared Kleinstein: (15:24)
So, um, that kind of stuff is really helpful. And then the other example, I think is like, um, we were talking about LA and events and all the tent pole events that happened there. Um, and we said, did we, did we do something that was kind of Hollywood themed a few years ago? And it was too quick. So I was like, I think it was all star. And we looked and it was like, oh, NBA, all star 2018. Here's the content we had made from it that used like a old Hollywood style. And that is so helpful for new employees at our company. Who've never seen that we did this work and they're like, oh shoot, you did that four years ago. That was cool. So, um, that's, those are two pretty fun use cases.
Brian Bosche: (16:03)
So if I'm understanding this, this from the kind of creative social media professional point of view, um, it really helps them kind of showcase their individual work. It helps them build their portfolio, share it with others. Um, kind of like how other portfolio, LinkedIn ask sites do it. And then it also helps give some analytics if you're trying to showcase to your clients how it's helping them, but we're on the same page there does this kind of go along. I see this trend of kind of creator empowerment. You know, every individual creative working on things seems to be getting more and more notoriety you typically, I guess in the past, didn't know specific photographers or videographers, but now they're almost becoming famous themselves and pairing with the athletes and their kind of athlete duos. Do you see this kind of riding along that trend as well and other trends you're seeing in the creative space? I I'm interested to hear your thoughts on kind of what trends are happening that is kind of making gondola, like catch fire a little bit more
Jared Kleinstein: (16:55)
For sure. So in the athlete space, you have, uh, you know, a few different mechanisms by which they get content for their channels. One is they have a friend who takes their photos, their videos, right? There's like their right hand person. Uh, and that's just a casual relationship. They probably pay them a little bit. Uh it's a lot of, they may tag them in their content and for exposure and that's great. So hopefully they get other opportunities and can say, I work with Von Miller, et cetera. Uh, the next level up, uh, is creating small production companies, um, so that they can sort of manage their own creative on their channels. And when a brand wants to work with them, they can have that. So that trend is being seen through things like shadow line with Brady, uh, Russell Wilson's west to east, uh Peyton's Omaha, um, and like Brennan Scarlet who plays for the dolphins has a company called, uh, B scar creative.
Jared Kleinstein: (17:43)
So like it's becoming something that's um, like I think people athletes are, if I'm gonna, you know, work with Bose or Nike, uh, on an ad, why don't I help create on production content get from the upside rather than them just offloading it all to some agency. Yeah. Um, so then there's, and then there's also the people like the Coolmax of the world and folks that are really like tied to it. And as you said, they are building brands where actually the athlete likes that they get to associate and say like, oh, this was shot by this person because, um, these people have some awesome credibility. They
Brian Bosche: (18:15)
Get their own shoe lines. Cool. Macko his own shoe
Jared Kleinstein: (18:18)
Basketball shoes. Unbelievable. Just killing it. Um, so that's like, and that's like a perfect example of it. So, so, uh, where gondola fits into this is a few different realms. If the athlete wants to go find a creative and we have a partnership with influencer, so that, uh, college athletes, if they do get an ni L deal, they can go find a local creative using gondola. They can staff their projects and the creatives get to get, uh, sort of like that second level of exposure because they can build this content up. The best thing about gondola, not, I'm not gonna be the best thing cause everybody has their
Brian Bosche: (18:51)
Own best. You're a founder. You think everything's the
Jared Kleinstein: (18:53)
Best thing? One, one of the best thing to me is that like, okay, I'm a people pleaser by nature. Like I've always been one. Uh, and I really don't like pissing people off. So, uh, where most of the portfolio sites out there let you upload content, you know, through years of work at fresh tape, I know how complicated contracts are for content creation. And I know that I don't own almost anything, right. Yeah. Like my use of content has to requires written permission, uh, etcetera. So, um, and they can revoke at, at any point, if the NBA just decides, like, I don't like you anymore, remove that from your system. Um, the good news about gondola is it's all in beds. So we're actually saying to people, if you post this video here from Instagram of your client, they get the views, which I think is really helpful for them being able to sell it back to their clients, for them to be able to sell it to anywhere else. Uh, and it's sort of to the athlete empowerment side of things, like you can build this portfolio in gondola and then long term, like if, uh, if you expand and work with other athletes, work with other, uh, teams league, et cetera, um, your portfolio stays there and it's not like you're gonna be required to remove a bunch of things
Brian Bosche: (20:00)
Because it's already public and you're just tagging yourself as the creator or athlete or whatever. What I like too is you can, you can tag your role. So even if you weren't the photographer, but you were a producer or you were doing the creative direction, or maybe you were just, the studio was shot in, you get some credit there and you can see kind of an aggregation of that instead of the long, you know, Instagram comment list where you can't see anything after it's posted
Jared Kleinstein: (20:22)
Per, and the perfect example is, um, so there's this, uh, creator in London, Brian, Boche talented basketball creator. Uh, so if somebody's looking for a photographer in London, they can find you, but it's not because you set, I am Brian, I am a photographer. It's because there's content that you are associated as a, as a photographer on. So what that means is that like people can show up in search results for rules. They have, even if it's not their entire role. So if you get, uh, if you tagged yourself as a videographer on a few posts, you may show up in videographer searches and people can see what you were a videographer on. Yeah. So they're not gonna be like misled and you don't get, um, limited in your opportunities to one category of content creation.
Brian Bosche: (21:04)
Yeah. And for my side too, it's a lot easier lift because I don't have to build my portfolio, choose the photos I just post what's already posted, you know? And so it takes a lot of the decision making out of it, which is nice. And I just put what's already out there. Um, so it's a little bit lower lift for me, which I always appreciate
Jared Kleinstein: (21:20)
For sure.
Brian Bosche: (21:21)
So really helpful on the creator side, totally understand that side. How do brands get involved? How do agencies, how, because I, what we, what I've always found is businesses are usually the ones that pay for this, or it's advertising, you know, the way that you're making money. So how do you make money? Are you bringing brands into kind of generate revenue, job listings, whatever, how are you thinking about monetizing this? When, you know, a lot of us are, you know, on the creative side, don't have big budgets to spend on software,
Jared Kleinstein: (21:47)
Right? So the pro account that we have right now is $10 a month. I like to think of it as, uh, one less Chipotle. Um, although I think Chipotle's probably like 12 in the wrong city these days. Yeah.
Brian Bosche: (21:57)
You're gonna discount Chipotle.
Jared Kleinstein: (21:58)
Yeah. Um, so, uh, it's $10 a month for the maximum, like current like creator account. And that pro account right now is both B2B and B2C. If you're an agency, you can use that $10 account. If you're a creative, you can use it as well. And the idea is it's kind of a, you know, additional convenience tools and exposure tools. So you show up in more places, you have, uh, you get, uh, access to download things via like a export for XLS, which is big for brands. Uh, you can, uh, bulk import things. So there's different tools that come with that, um, premium account. Uh, so there's that model. And then for B2B, like the long term obvious play is, uh, two things. One is like sort of an enterprisey account where you have access to different tools to compare your different creatives and find access, uh, connect with creatives in different ways, and then the job world.
Jared Kleinstein: (22:49)
Um, and there's, uh, the hiring world, um, is really funky because right now there seems to be two mechanisms to work for the NHL. You can either find a job post that says we are hiring a senior graphic designer, or you can, uh, reach out like cold message somebody on LinkedIn or via connection say, hi, I want to be a graphic designer for you. Uh, but the NHL doesn't necessarily have a pipeline of people that are like talented creatives that have worked in hockey that wanna work for them. Uh, and we're gonna build out tools to help, uh, brands create pipelines, um, by letting people say, it's my dream job to work for the NHL as a freelance photographer. And then the NHL will see that list and be able to, you know, reach out to those people and say, Hey, we saw you on there. You know, we don't have a full-time role, but we're doing a shoot in Finland. Um, do you wanna come over
Brian Bosche: (23:39)
Available?
Jared Kleinstein: (23:40)
Yeah. Meanwhile, I really want to go to the global games this year, but that's near there. Anybody from the NHL is watching Sean, Rebecca, you guys want, uh, you
Brian Bosche: (23:49)
Want, you want some talent global
Jared Kleinstein: (23:51)
Games? We'll go it's on my birthday. So um, yeah, so that's a, that's one value for the brands I think is, uh, you know, the job side and also just using the, the creator database to find talent right now is already avail amazing. So yesterday we were with a, um, a league and they said, well, what if we just wanna help, uh, a team find a videographer in, you know, X city in Texas? And we just did it as a sample, not knowing if it was gonna work. And there were 26 videographers in that city in Texas that you could break down to see which of them had worked with basketball teams. And it was like, it was so quick and so efficient. So I think that it'll become the best like recruiting tool for sports and then far beyond it right now it's pretty niche to sports. I think that entertainment, media, music, um, it'll all get a lot bigger there.
Brian Bosche: (24:40)
Yeah. So you're starting with sports and it has spread like wildfire through the sports community, from what I've seen so far, always smart to, to focus in on a specific vertical, how have you grown the community on gondola?
Jared Kleinstein: (24:53)
Um, so it's a combination of things. Uh, most of it's organic. We haven't the most Mon the money we've spent on marketing is we made these like really soft gray t-shirts, um, for ourselves. And then, uh, Amy keen, we hired to be our first head of community started just doing giveaways. Uh, if people shared their go to the profile, then they'd get a chance to win a t-shirt turns out the t-shirts are just fantastic. And it's not like they're anything special. We've been like, I've been giving out gray t-shirts to clients for 15 years. Um, it's just, they're really soft. Uh, so I think that, uh, that's, that's
Brian Bosche: (25:25)
Entrepreneurial advice right there, marketing advice, the softest t-shirts possible
Jared Kleinstein: (25:29)
Soft gray t-shirts, everybody will wear them. And I know that, like not everybody's a grout fit and B blowout fit person. Like I only wear grays and blues practically. I'm not like a Steve jobs. It's just like, I have blue
Brian Bosche: (25:38)
Eyes. It's, we're both. If you're watching, you're wearing blue, I'm wearing gray. Uh, we're, we're matching that aesthetic.
Jared Kleinstein: (25:43)
If you have, if you have blue eyes, it's kind of what you do. So, um, I, and if you're not creative with like fashion, uh, so the, uh, the marketing budget is pretty much shirts and swag. Uh, and the coolest thing about it is we have not told anybody, like when I first, when we first launched, I was like, we're gonna have to tell people to share their gondola profiles in their Twitter, by us. And they just did it. We didn't have to tell them, um, and people, when they hit milestones, they start sharing. Like I hit a million views on go, and we don't even have like a badge analytics.
Brian Bosche: (26:16)
That's what I was gonna say. You have built in like these viral loops, these positive feedback loops, where the more you use your product, the higher the numbers get the more they want to share it and on and on and on. So it's kind of built into the product itself where you get to, you get to brag. You're not only show like, Hey, there's this cool new technology and the sports creative, you know, social world. Oh. And I also have 5 million views if you, if you didn't see the number down
Jared Kleinstein: (26:39)
There. Yep. And it's public. So like the only way right now, if the brand or whatnot hits a number that there's really exposure for it is they can type it themselves in a tweet. Or it shows up in like a S SPJ article or something that says like, they reach this many impressions or something, because it's been gathered by internal analytics teams. Now you can say, Hey, I just hit 5 million. Or like somebody that runs TikTok for TLC has over a billion views as an individual. Yeah. Like that's crazy. And people now can, you know, they're so it's also like this, I don't know if it's like, uh, impoverishment or what the, like, people have been, the individuals have never had access to anything to quantify their individual value. Right. Yeah. And this is the first job.
Brian Bosche: (27:20)
It's a thankless job for the most part publicly. Yeah. You're so public. And this is also a debate online is like a lot of social media professionals don't have very built out personal profiles because they're so focused on their brands. They're so, and they're exhausted from being on social all day. So they're like, yeah, I know I don't have a big following personally, but I've built enormous brands, but there's no way for them to really get credit for that.
Jared Kleinstein: (27:42)
For sure. And then you also have, you have this weird dynamic in sports where, um, people will, and I talked about this with friends that worked at, at like a league a few years ago and left the league. They said, I felt like I wasn't happy in my work, but when I posted a picture next to LeBron and put it on my IG, people would be like, oh, shoot, coolest job ever. And I'd be like, well, I guess, and now you're, you're just like with gondola, you're saying like, here's my worth. You can tell it, not just to the community in case you are looking for a new opportunity, but also to your own team, like, Hey, this is what I do. This is why I want a promotion. This is why I wanna raise, um, and show that like relative to the team, I'm the I'm overperforming, et cetera.
Brian Bosche: (28:24)
So, well it's yeah, you're, it's, it's the key is people can feel valued through your technology and it's, it is the, the combination of the creative and the analytics. I do. I always think it's the analytics is so important, cause it's really hard to aggregate all of that. Um, and to figure that out. Um, but if you find that you have a product where it makes people feel valued, it's gonna have those positive feedback loops. And I will say like, I've tried, I'm, I'm a very early adopter for most technology, especially in this space. And it just worked the first time I used it, which is a very special experience where most of the time they break or you're like trying to upload a video, it doesn't really, you know, it all breaks, but it worked, it was super easy. Got my, you know, my, one of my shoots up there and now I feel comfortable adding to it. And so that like first experience is really hard to master and you guys caught it. So shout out you guys for that, for that first product
Jared Kleinstein: (29:14)
Experience, it never breaks. It's
Brian Bosche: (29:16)
It's, it's perfect.
Jared Kleinstein: (29:17)
It's, hasn't broken, it's
Brian Bosche: (29:19)
Startup technology. It never breaks it didn't break for me. So I've been on so many live demos where it breaks or the first time you show someone it breaks. So Hey, data point of one, it didn't break for me.
Jared Kleinstein: (29:28)
I'm, I'm so grateful that, uh, I can't tell you how many times I've been on a demo. And I was like, you know, today it'll be a win. If it just,
Brian Bosche: (29:35)
Just works,
Jared Kleinstein: (29:36)
Everything just works. I think that's, and that's the norm that hap once I did a demo for like street easy for real estate, New York, front, a brokerage, and there was no internet and you can't show a website to a group of people without internet. So I just talked about what it kind of looked like for 30 minutes. And I was like, this is the worst. Um, I'm gonna get fired for how bad this is. Um, but somehow I kept my job.
Brian Bosche: (29:58)
This is a more higher level question, cuz it, obviously you have so much data on your side about what people are posting. Are you able to see trends in social media based on what people are posting, any insights there?
Jared Kleinstein: (30:10)
Uh, I, we don't have any yet because, uh, we have a data scientist that if she's watching this, I really hope she starts, uh, soon she's just busy and I really want her to work with us. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, trends on social media are really funky.
Brian Bosche: (30:24)
Not, not even the content itself, just like what channels are people posting to? What's the breakdown, just like popularity of different channels. How often people are posting, you have like a great database of what people are actually using.
Jared Kleinstein: (30:37)
See that's the real, so, okay. We also launch a new feature. That's a great point. And we have a new feature called matching. And what matching is, is it allows a creator to see the cumulative engagement on one post across chance. Right. So I can see, yeah. I saw that amazing this picture of like, you know, uh, Steph Curry, taking a three and turning around. I can see that picture cumulative engagement on, uh, all of our own and operated channels in the NBA, as well as if Bleacher ripped it. If, how the highlights ripped it, all those et cetera. Um, and the cool thing about that is now you make a great point that I haven't even told anybody to do. We can actually see among that cumulative engagement engagement, what percentage is coming from Instagram? What percentage is coming from? Yeah, totally Twitter. What percentage is coming? How much more exposure are you getting from owned and operated than you are from, uh, earned media. So we can pull that data. We just haven't yet that we should probably do that. That's a great idea. Yeah. See, this is why you go on podcast.
Brian Bosche: (31:31)
It's like a brainstorm. Yeah. You's just a good little good brainstorm.
Jared Kleinstein: (31:34)
It's like when you, when like that trashy tactic where somebody will interview a client, like somebody for a job and they're like, uh, what ideas do you have for this social media campaign? When they give ideas? You're like, well, you're not qualifi for the job, but thank you for so much for those amazing ideas. This is great.
Brian Bosche: (31:48)
And if there's, if there's one thing I found in SAS, its even if there are competitors doing it, even if there's other services that do it, as long as you have your like core audience core user base and you're expanding value for them, even if it's like pulling analytics where there's a lot of social monitoring tools that pull analytics. But if it's in the same place where people already are, cause it's so hard to get that first bit of attention it's valuable and you can expand into it.
Jared Kleinstein: (32:12)
For sure. I think that there's a lot like what, we're not what we're doing as in like giving creators analytics is not the, we're not the first it's been happening for years. There's a company called niche that essentially was doing this for that got bought by Twitter in 2014 or whatever I was working there. Yeah. Um, the difference is I think so many SaaS companies are more concerned with your initial point about the money coming from brands and having it be behind a pay wall where it's locked and it's locked data. You by logging into this amazing service, have access to this and you'll have access to a creator database. And we're just like, not let everybody see it, you know, public. Um, that's and that's kind of the, one of the things that we're, that we've sort of committed to is we will never charge somebody to take credit for their work. It's to your point about like, why have credits have been such a hot topic? Mm-hmm um, as a product of that, we never want to be the company that said, um, you know, we really needed to make money. So we told you, you could not add that you were the photographer on this post, unless you gave us 10 bucks. It's not gonna work. Um, and it's not in our hearts. So I think we'll be okay.
Brian Bosche: (33:16)
Yeah. Well, I I've taken enough enough of your time right now. I'm gonna do a, we have our final segment, which you'll appreciate as someone in sports, the parting shot, your last little bit of wisdom you can give to entrepreneurs, sports, creative professionals. What is your parting shot for the podcast?
Jared Kleinstein: (33:33)
That's a good one. Um, if you're a create, even if you're a creative or let me think about let
Brian Bosche: (33:41)
Yeah, you can brainstorm. This is, it is a tough question. Mm.
Jared Kleinstein: (33:48)
I was gonna say my initial one was so boring. I was gonna say set up operations and systems before you do everything else. So, uh, if you are a creative and you're like, oh, I want to go start a production company. Um, I'm a freelancer right now, uh, going and telling people that you've started a production company and starting to get business, uh, is definitely a part of it. But if you set up your accounting, your contract system, your, uh, tr task management, all that stuff, uh, off the bat, you're setting yourself up for a future where, uh, you're running a business, not just making content. And then if you can get it going smoothly, then it just becomes more fun than ever. Uh that's but that's the least,
Brian Bosche: (34:31)
I love that. Jared, that is bright. That is my, like, if, if that my personal brand and diagram like overlap with that piece of advice is like a circle marketing operations, creative operations, like get your back office, set up, get your operations set up so you can be successful. That's great advice. But if you wanna, you know, do a, a sexier one, you can. Mm
Jared Kleinstein: (34:51)
Oh yeah. Um, have money for when things are good. Not when things are bad. Uh, so like that, it's a weird way to look at it. But especially in a world where payments from your clients may come late. Um, what we learned that nobody told me before I started this is that, um, when we haven't had a lot of business, we had the most money in the bank and when things were hot, we had none. So, uh, it's kind of like if somebody says, why should I have savings? Or how much should I have saved? I say, plan for when things are great and plan for when you need to go spend a lot on a bunch of things. That's when you need money in the bank. And when your, you know, clients are laid on payments, um, there's that also people like the that's a, another piece of terrible advice is like trust people. I don't know, like, uh, but
Brian Bosche: (35:40)
Don't take net a hundred twenties, net, nineties.
Jared Kleinstein: (35:43)
Well, I mean, like we, we have some net, 180 S oh, and I, and to be real with you, these
Brian Bosche: (35:48)
Are, those are business killers.
Jared Kleinstein: (35:50)
I love those clients. And I love, I
Brian Bosche: (35:52)
Guess they are the bigger clients, the work.
Jared Kleinstein: (35:54)
Sometimes we do the work before we have signed contracts with 'em and it's such a bad thing to do, and nobody will tell you to do that. But like, if I passed up on every opportunity because we hadn't signed our contracts yet, and I didn't trust that we would get to the right space in negotiation, then I'd miss out on so much. So, um, yeah.
Brian Bosche: (36:13)
So your feedback there is to, is to work for free just to clarify Jared
Jared Kleinstein: (36:17)
. That is the opposite of my feedback. Um, although, uh, if it feels like if it feels like you'd be doing it anyway and you're getting paid, then that's like, awesome. Like that's the coolest thing, like real talk, your podcast, what you do for a living, what are the people that are gonna watch this do for a living is so cool. Uh, and if we can set, as I mentioned in the beginning, set up operations, uh, so that you're not stressed by it all later, uh, so that you can focus on doing what you love. And like, I bet there's a lot of people watching this that make money doing what they love. And that was not a thing in our parents' generation and generations before. So, you know, keep killing it out there, team. Yeah.
Brian Bosche: (36:58)
Well, thanks jar. Anything to plug before we go sign up,
Jared Kleinstein: (37:02)
Um, go to gondola.cc, uh, sign up for an account. Uh, tell your friends, if you have a gone to the profile, tell 'em all how great it is. And uh, if you're looking for content production fresh day, media's got you. And if you're in Denver, oh, that's the other thing. If you're in Denver, um, we do like lunches on Tuesdays and you wanna come have lunch with us. Um, we like pick a new restaurant and treat everybody. So if you wanna come hang out with our teams, the gondola and fresh tape media teams come on by. It's a good time.
Brian Bosche: (37:30)
Love it. Thanks Jared. Thanks for coming on.
Jared Kleinstein: (37:32)
Thanks Brian.
