William Leonard
Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. Today, I’m joined by Shep Ogden, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Offbeat Media. Through its unique 1 billion follower network across social platforms. offbeat is really focused on creating media for the digital generation. In the conversation today, we’ll cover all things social networks and media, but more specifically, we’ll dive into how Shep started monetizing his talents in college. We’ll talk about the types of clients that Offbeat serves today, and then we’ll go a layer deeper on how generative AI will reshape the future of media and content creation going forward. Additionally, you’ll really want to hear Shep share his thoughts on social media longevity, and which platform he believes to be the most durable as trends evolve. Before we begin today’s episode, I’ll like to share a couple of quick highlights from our team. So, Startup Runway, one of the largest showcases for underrepresented founders at the pre-seed stage is taking place on February 23, virtually on Zoom. If you want to participate, go to startuprunway.org or LinkedIn and type in Startup Runway Foundation to sign up and watch its next showcase of amazing founders pitch their startups. Later that evening, I’ll be at Georgia State University on a panel discussing all things venture capital, with aspiring student entrepreneurs and investors as well as the Main Street entrepreneur Seed Fund. Looking forward to seeing you there. Now back to today’s episode. This is a fun, informative, and educational episode. So let’s jump right in.
Shep Ogden
I’m super excited to be here today.
William Leonard
Excited that you are with us. I am eager to dive into all things media and influencing, but before we dive into all of that, I think it’s great for you to level set a little bit more about Offbeat and what you all do. Maybe a 30-second overview. And then, I want to dive into more about your background and your transition to entrepreneurship.
Shep Ogden
Absolutely. To say it in the most simple way possible is we create really innovative content on the internet, and we help brands do it, too. That’s our background, we create. We’ve got 12 million followers across the internet across 30 different shows and meme accounts and publishers and virtual influencers. We’ve taken all those we built playbooks, we’ve got processes, and we’ve built some technology to do that for brands. And whether that’s a show or virtual influencer, or whatever it is, it’s a new, interesting intersection of what does a new media company look like? That’s really what we’re building here.
William Leonard
Media is one of the most trend-driven spaces. I’m excited to hear some of your thoughts and how you all are innovating in that realm. But tell us more about the Shep story. I know you went to UGA. Tell us more about you know how you grew up, why you decided on UGA, and ultimately, how you came across the idea to start Offbeat.
Shep Ogden
For sure. So, someone with a similar story and in a way, like how you decided to jump in from what you’ve shared with me. I’ll start with UGA. I grew up in a really small rural town, Jesup, Georgia in southeast Georgia. 10,000 people in the city and 30,000 people in the county, I went to the County High School and most people went to Mercer or Georgia Southern. There weren’t a lot of people getting to UGA. For me, UGA was the heart of the South. It was hard to get into, it was a Northstar to get into, and out-of-state didn’t even seem like an option to me. I didn’t even consider something like that at the time. So I got into UGA and then was able to get a full ride and join the Honors Program, which was really cool. It was a pretty no-brainer to go to that school. As I went there, I didn’t know much about outside of the southeast but always knew I wanted to. My dad was an entrepreneur. I always want to start my own business at some point. As I got there, I studied finance. I really learned that there’s a large funnel at UGA about investment banking, management consulting, and some hedge funds pipelines. I definitely wanted to be a banker for the first two years. I got deep into what does that look like? What does Wall Street look like, I got to know a lot of the banks, talked to a lot of bankers, went up to Wall Street, and did a lot of that intranet bank and realized this is not at all what I want to do. Then I spent the next year trying to find myself between media technology and finance. I was exploring all three of these areas at the time. I just built a couple of Instagram accounts. One is downtown Savannah and one is St. Simons Island, and then I ended up getting a lot of bigger ones. But those are the usernames that had tens of thousands of followers pretty quickly. I was able to get a lot of clients from that. That’s like really what spurred us into starting this company. I was able to get clients pretty quickly to manage their social media while I was studying finance and whatnot. And by the time I was going into my senior year, I was making enough just from freelancing with clients that I knew I could do this full-time. I was managing all 50 Instagram accounts for different people. You’re getting paid $1-400 a piece and a couple of interns working for me. It was pretty cool. But that was really early phase of everything we were doing. And then I met my business partner, Bailey, pretty late into this, like a month before I graduated. He owned and operated an account called Humor on Instagram, with over a million followers at the time, but it wasn’t monetized as it should be. I had the time and I knew I was monetizing already smaller accounts. I said I think I can help you monetize this. Next thing you know, we just structured like a very loose partnership, where I was trying to sell deals for Humor. I sold like $5-10,000 worth within the first month or so which is pretty incredible at the time especially given it was one account. A lot of the people we’re working with started coming to us saying wow, we love Humor. Do you have other accounts like this? We have a couple of other accounts like that, but we knew all of the accounts like this, all the most culturally relevant accounts on Instagram that are run by like 18 to 25-year-olds that had millions of followers, we knew all of them because we know Humor. We became the broker for memes in 2018/2019. Fast forward a little bit, a small company just acquired a company called Musical.ly and they were coming to America. They were really trying to like become the big new hit social app. They are named Tik Tok. We became their go-to-market meme partner end of 2018, helping them tap into every large meme account across Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube, telling everyone that Tik Tok’s where you need to go to watch the funniest content. We did that for three to four years across 15 countries. We pushed over 5 billion impressions for them all in meme format and drove millions of installs. That’s really what we considered as our initial round of funding. We have paid millions of dollars in order to do that. It was really, really cool. But we knew that we weren’t just trying to build for others. We were taking that capital and we were investing in new areas of the business specifically around content. We see three areas of leverage, right? There’s capital as leverage, there’s technologies leverage, and then there are audiences-leveraged media, where you put in a certain hour, and you can get a ton of output from it. We started investing in these shows across the internet and we’ve now got 30 shows and accounts like Humor that has about 12 million followers as I mentioned and that’s what led us to this really interesting space with virtual influencers. We jumped into that in 2019/2020 and started investing into how we create virtual influencers. We put a website on virtualhumans.org as a way of documenting that space and might raise some actual capital from Mark Cuban and Atlanta Ventures and a few others in 2021 to take that to the next step. We went through a full transition of things like just really early like a meme company or like me doing social media to us becoming like a meme company to then becoming a true media company taking all that experience and culture to how do we create our own assets. And then now that has turned into both media and technology is like our main two forms of leverage, one for creating virtual influencers. We built that technology, and then two, how do we build millions of followers so that we can monetize them, grow them, etc? Now, we’re really focused, like taking a lot of this and like commercializing it to like, how do we build products around brands so that they can have their own virtual influencer, and they can get millions of followers. There’s a lot of interest in that from brands, which is really why we consider ourselves a media company more than anything. We’ve got the commercial side and we’ve got the audience that follows us.
William Leonard
So it all started for you really with an Instagram account where you were managing small accounts, helping them grow. Then you met Bailey and helped him begin to monetize his account, Humor. And then you all really just found a niche and so Offbeat now has kind of evolved into this media company today. Tell us more about how it practically works for some of the big clients that you all are working with day to day.
Shep Ogden
I’ll break it down by starting with Humor because Humor has been a really big building block for us. Humor is one of the best usernames on Instagram with 3.7 million followers now. We feature a lot of comedians and influencers on the account. A lot of people want to be featured on the account which will help them gain followers. So with Humor, we’ve been able to network with celebrities, major publishers, other accounts like Humor, and then major, big influencers. And so because of that, we’re in a really unique and interesting place where the media we sell to brands can be a post on Humor, or it could be through all the relationships we have with other accounts like this or other big influencers. When you look at how we monetize it, it really comes down to two to three ways and the way we help brands. One is you can be a part of the media that we’re creating for all of our shows in an account like Humor. Another one is like, hey, we got this huge network of influencers and publishers and we can actually bring you into that and we can run paid media on it as well. McDonald’s is a great example. We worked with them. We’ve worked with them for the last two years, we’re running influencer partnerships with dozens and hundreds of people on Tiktok getting hundreds of millions of impressions for McDonald’s on Tik Tok and running paid media from them and driving insane results in terms of like actually tracking people into a store like it’s crazy how you can track people from a Tik Tok video all the way to foot traffic and a store. That’s like a big area. And then the third is this newer innovation bucket, I’d say. We call it a virtual bucket of like, let’s say, Disney. It has all this IP, how do we bring it to life in real-time, so that it’s actually able to interact with an audience that’s something that’s super new for us in terms of commercializing it? We’ve got our own avatars and virtual influencers that have hundreds of thousands of followers but how do we bring that to brands? That’s how we think about it. We get it going and we make money for ourselves? We’ll try to commercialize a product that we roll out to brands, which is what we’re trying to do now on the virtual influencer side of things, but those are like the three ways to typically someone works with us.
William Leonard
You talk about this innovation, this new innovation bucket that you all are really focused on. And you mentioned digital influencers and virtual influencers, kind of talk to us about the difference there and how brands and enterprise clients are sort of taking advantage of those types of relationships now, as this new age of marketing and media is becoming more prevalent for them to find success.
Shep Ogden
The easiest way of describing that, I think, is there’s been a really rapidly growing industry called the creator economy over the last 10 years. This is really centered around influencers but not just influencers, but creators in general around Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The most social platforms and there are a few other platforms, even newsletters now, there are a lot of creators and influencers on podcasts, etc. But this is usually driven by real human people, real human influencers, and what we’re seeing over the last few years, this massive shift towards digital identity. We’re seeing that as a really interesting opportunity to build what we’re calling virtual influencers or avatars to be influencers, and sometimes powered by real people, sometimes powered by AI. But we are seeing this shift from the creator economy to what we call the avatar economy today, which is infinitely scalable with just massive amounts of digital goods, but it’s still so so early. When you look at our business, the creator economy is very established with tens of billions of dollar market that we’re capitalizing on because we have all these relationships with big creators and brands that have budgets today to go after it. We’re able to capitalize millions of dollars in revenue around that bucket. On the avatar economy side and on this virtual influencer side, this is new and we like to think of ourselves, we own and operate a website called virtualhumans.org fully dedicated to this space. It is the industry-leading website for this entire industry. We want to be the market makers. Right now, there’s probably less than $10 million of revenue for all the people in this space right now outside of skins on video games. However, there’s so much interest from some of the biggest brands in the world that really want to figure out how do they do this and that’s where we’re trying to help them win. So today, we’re capitalizing on an existing market, but really our goal is to build out this new beat the market makers behind like, how do we become the avatar company that’s going to be helping bring to life the best and the biggest investment like McDonald’s, Sony Pictures IP, Disney IP, like how do we bring it life and let people interact with it? How do we bring that to all the different mediums? They are new IP, they’re not real people. They’re created by a team. Like an AI, they’re created by an individual as this avatar, this personality with a first-person personality on social media as if they’re a real person. Digital influencers are just like your tried and true humans on Tik Tok. That’s where we’re striving this bucket of taking all of our learnings from these tried and true real creators and influencers to like, okay, there’s a rapidly growing bucket of people following virtual influencers and avatars and pseudonyms, how do we capitalize on that? We think that’s like an infinitely scalable market that’s just super, super interesting that is growing every single month at this point.
William Leonard
That’s an interesting point. Because you think about where a lot of attention is focused right now, AI is a huge talking point that everybody is diving into on Twitter. How do you see AI influencing and impacting media, the creator economy, and the broader marketing schemes of enterprises over the next 5-15 years or so?
Shep Ogden
It’s gonna change everything. Literally everything. For example, when ChatGPT came out, what two months ago? One of our top-performing episodes on Snapchat last month, which got millions of views was a ChatGPT-created script. It would have taken us hours to write what was written in 30 seconds with some feedback and some critique from our team. It was our top-performing video last month and that to me generates thousands of dollars and so you think okay, now you can create the scripts fully generatively. We’re seeing incredible tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, creating really incredible visuals that are becoming video very quickly, with already an incredible synthetic voice, already automated editing, I’ve already seen some examples of this today. But we’re gonna see in the next 12 months a lot of examples of fully generative media, whether that’s news stories, whether that’s just like horror stories, whether that’s like culture, whatever it is, but start to finish the visuals, the actors inside of the video, the scripts, the voice, everything is going to be able to be created with generative media, generative AI, which is absolutely insane, because it really just explodes the leverage of the media industry in terms of like, how you can have a team of ten doing what you should take a team of 100 to do it. It’s really, really interesting. I think you’ll still have those teams of 100 and they’ll just be able to do 10x more work. I think that’s what gets me really excited, it just opens up creativity. Our graphic designers right now are primarily using these generative tools to help them speed up their graphic design, that domino design, their art design, etc. We’re using it across our entire business already and it all just came out.
William Leonard
It is. You mentioned the interesting point there, right? Because some could see it as this technology becoming so robust, so advanced, it could replace teams of individuals, but you see it as more so augmenting teams of individuals and not necessarily replacing, is that right?
Shep Ogden
There’s a dystopian version of this where a lot of people will get replaced and there’s definitely a dystopian version where that happens. I think smaller, more nimble companies like ours will just be able to become much more efficient and people will be repaid better, right? I think that’s certainly the case. Maybe instead of hiring a team of seven graphic designers, we’ve got a team of two. That’s how I see it. But the big companies, there’s definitely a dystopian world where they’ve got 700 graphic designers and they’re like, we only need 100, we only need 50. That’s one of those things that’s a bit scary, but for the smaller companies, it really just allows a media company in a lot, a lot of big tech companies are shooting for $1-2 million in revenue per employee. It’s almost impossible to do that with a typical media company. I think that’s where that’s kind of changing, meaning salaries, and you get the most creative people that know how to use these tools, will be able to be really compensated well in the media industry in the very near future. I definitely think of it more as an augmentation to your workflow. If everything was created fully and generatively without any critique or great prompts, at least from humans, it’s all going to come the same. Every LinkedIn post is gonna look the same, every newsletter is gonna look the same, and at that point, it’s not really gonna be special. It’s really gonna be like, how you use these tools.
William Leonard
I agree. I mean, I don’t know about you but I can sort of tell when I see something that’s been fully generated by ChatGPT. I’m like, okay, I can kind of see how they spell the words, how their sentence structure is formed, I can kind of understand that. I think that a human in the loop there is going to be important to keep the content original and thoughtful.
Shep Ogden
This was really interesting, right? For now, I definitely agree. But there are so many cool ways already, where you can just be like, write this in this structure, and doesn’t look like it was written by chatGPT. A lot of our teams use it for LinkedIn posts, scripts, helping us write newsletters, whatever it is, we’re already using a lot of it and they’re good prompts, you can add in that don’t make it feel and look as if it was done this way. I mean, it can even be as simple as like, give me seven bullet points as to why this is important. It’ll just give you good seven bullet points. Then you build the structure around those bullet points to make it look and feel more authentic. I just think we’re moving into this world where these tools almost have to be leveraged by not just media. I think I just saw ChatGPT hit 10 million users, which is the daily active users which are insane. It’s probably the fastest growth of all time, which means that it’s not only seeing rapid growth, but people are understanding the use case for it, right? Like NFTs and Web3, that whole world but like, it hasn’t seen anywhere near the adoption that ChatGPT. There are a lot of use cases for that world but ChatGPT, as soon as you use it a couple of times, you grasp it, you’re like, this is so cool.
William Leonard
I agree. I’m excited about all the innovation. I’ve seen a lot of tools that have been built on top of chat GPT already, like email responders that kind of look at your entire history of how you’ve responded to emails and curate a response for you in 10 seconds to a new email that you have. I’ve seen tools built on top of WhatsApp and I’ve seen tools built on top of CRMs already. I’m excited for the more robust use cases to come about. But as we’ve been talking about media here, it’s also been top of mind for many Americans, and really everyone throughout the world, I want to dive into this a bit more because you look at platforms like Tik Tok, Twitter, and even Instagram and Facebook, they’ve become so controversial as platforms. My question to you, Shep, is which platform do you see having the most longevity when it comes to just global sustainability and adoption? Why do you think that is?
Shep Ogden
I think let’s just go through all of them really quickly. Like it’s a very fun, philosophical question to just dive into each of these. I think Twitter’s probably my most used platform. I enjoy it. I find value in it. But I’ve curated my feed to be that way, it can be pretty emotionally charged. And at this point, it’s pretty controversial. It is. I mean, a lot of people don’t like it since Elon Musk has taken over. It could, like a lot of brands, not last. That’s what’s crazy. It’s so controversial now that he’s trying to turn in his town square or whatever. He’s made some controversial calls. But in his process of doing that, the world doesn’t know if they like it and so that could kill it over the next year or two. We look at a platform like Instagram and Facebook. There’s a reason Meta took a really big stab at the metaverse and lost $20 billion last year on the metaverse or something like that. The reason for that is, there’s clear the numbers are going down on the platform, but the usage is there and Instagram is pivoting every single month in terms of what their priority is. Unfortunately, videos, creators, and the community is now Web3, like, what is that? It’s always changing and it’s taking on the new big features of other social apps. Instagram and Facebook, what they do have is they have one of the best ad platforms, which makes them super valuable for the user. They do have an older audience, too. They’re able to really monetize that audience. But who knows what it’s going to look like? I think Tik Tok should be one of the longest-standing but it’s so controversial, it might be before the government shuts it down. There’s a very real reality and if we really look at it objectively, as Americans, there are definitely some questionable actions that could be taking place in terms of like, how safe it could be for American security, right? It’s something that not saying one way or the other that it is, but it’s definitely something that I can see our government concerned about. One that we didn’t bring up, though, but I think is a huge contender is YouTube. YouTube is really, in my mind, the one that will last. I think YouTube will be the one that lasts and has a long-staying power. It already is the best way for a creator to monetize long term, but an entire catalog of videos that just pay you for the rest of your life. It’s an incredible platform. I think Google is going to have struggles with chatGPT. I wonder how Google, which owns Facebook and YouTube, obviously, I wonder how that’s going to affect YouTube’s growth. YouTube is a video search engine. Lastly, all these platforms are going to be likely to be able to plug in in some interesting way around this generative AI. I’ve had some really fascinating conversations. You think about how great Tik Tok’s algorithm is? What happens if they start plugging in and just like generative videos do that is perfectly prime for you, perfectly designed, perfectly built, it’s gonna suck you even more, and again, that’s a higher risk as well. It can be banned but yeah, Tik Tok and YouTube are the two biggest contenders. YouTube definitely the biggest contender because I think it has a staying power even above Google, but I don’t know. There’s a lot of change that will happen over the next 10 years in this space.
William Leonard
I’m excited to see what happens. But also I think there is a real risk there with Tik Tok as you said, being a Chinese company. I think the US governing body has really taken heat to that over the last couple of months. I think we’re gonna see some pretty big action and moves relative to Tik Tok probably later this year. Equally with the consensus on social media more so Twitter, is that Instagram is dying. I’ve seen it. I think the app is they’re trying to do everything to stay alive. Try and create shorts and reels like Tik Tok, but we’ll see how they continue to stay afloat. I think it’s the one that gets the most engagement from enterprises. I think that’s going to be an interesting kind of angle there, which enterprise attaches to which social platform the most. And also you kind of think about LinkedIn getting thrown in there as well.
Shep Ogden
LinkedIn is great for b2b. I actually think that if they can figure out how to move away from the same content structure and every major post. It’s kind of annoying, but on LinkedIn, you see the same story told in like 14 different ways from different people, like somewhat similar stories. I do agree, though, that there’s an incredible, like ecosystem being built on LinkedIn. From an enterprise perspective, I don’t think we should be attached to any of these. I really think it should be totally agnostic. Where are they getting the best results? Right now, Facebook and Instagram get you some incredible results. At scale, Facebook and Instagram are one of the best if you got $100 million, that’s one of the best platforms to spend on. Tik Tok however, you got a two-and-a-half million dollar budget, you’re probably going to get better results in Instagram and Facebook, it just might not scale to 100 million yet. That’s really interesting learning for me over the last four years. The big media agencies or the big companies, they’re looking for areas that can go above $1-3 million in media and get really great results. If they spend $3 million on it and it gets incredible results, they want to spend $30 million. And so if you can’t take that, then it’s going to be harder to have that really strong relationship with enterprises, which is where I think Facebook and Instagram have done a better job than Tik Tok so far. But Tik Tok is maturing in terms of their audience age and like, who’s on it, how many people are on it, how much data they have on them, which is gonna make their ads even better long term, right? We haven’t talked about how they moved so aggressively into creator-led and live shopping and ingrained into the feeds. Social search was pioneered affectionately by Tik Tok, where you go on Tik Tok now to say what to do in Atlanta this weekend, or what restaurants to eat in Atlanta, like 40% of Gen Z do that to find out what they’re doing this weekend versus going to Google looking at restaurants. They just go to Tik Tok. You think about the ability to monetize that, as that becomes like the new Google as well, that’s also going to just be an interesting opportunity to look at how do we capitalize on that? For us, we’re just doing it from a content perspective at this point but I think there are a lot of new trends being created.
William Leonard
As we wrap up, Shep, my next question is sort of tangential to that. How will enterprises engage in this new age of digital media and influencers? What opportunities that are untapped exists for enterprise to connect and leverage these new media platforms and creators from your viewpoint?
Shep Ogden
There are three buckets. One is just, it always needs to be a new constant form of iteration, if you’re not piling new things all the time, at least 10-20% of your budget going to new initiatives and media and like digital media, especially in influencers, you’re always gonna be a bit behind the eight ball. It’s partnering with someone like us to figure out where is that new area might yield really, really great ROI. That’s really important in digital media. And number two, though, something that a lot of brands, the stigma goes out, and I think it came from the idea of building your own virtual influencer as a brand. Just in general, the brand owns an audience versus always sponsoring influencers and creators or anything like that. The brand actually owns its own show on Tik Tok, and YouTube, like owning these platforms of getting hundreds of thousands of followers they can reach whenever they want for effectively no cost. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a new form of leverage that’s really scaling. You look at it right now, a lot of companies are buying new companies. Like HubSpot buying The Hustle, right? There are a lot of examples of that and now some are trying to create that. There’s a reason for that. I think that that’s one of the untapped opportunities that a lot of enterprises aren’t thinking about, how do they create an audience and add value to that audience outside of just saying, hey, we’re a product buy from us, but more of how do you build a community around this? I think that’s one of the biggest areas that are still untapped that a lot of brands are coming to us to talk about right now. How can we create a TikTok show that not just sponsors Tiktok influencers for thousands of dollars, but like, let’s invest $10-30,000 a month in just creating our own pilot in three months, and it doesn’t go viral? Shut it down? I think that’s a really interesting opportunity.
William Leonard
I think we’ll see a lot more of that here is just enterprises looking, like you said, to own their own shows, because now that creator owns that show, and it’s like, alright, if the creator severs ties with the brand, then what happens to that content? I think it’d be an interesting dynamic there. As we bring this conversation to an end, Shep, I want to get your thoughts on building a media company in Atlanta. What have been some of the advantages that you and your team have been able to leverage being here in the South, in Atlanta, when you think about a lot of media companies are built in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, those types of hubs, what is the Atlanta advantage that you’ve seen?
Shep Ogden
I think that the biggest thing is that everyone else is doing it in LA or New York so we’re one of the only people doing anything close to what we’re doing down here. Especially think about virtual employees. There are a few companies now that are trying to do virtual influencer-type things. But in Atlanta, we have a lot of ways to stand out, which is cool. It is the ability in our space to be one of the bigger fish in a slightly smaller pond, but still a massive, massive market in the southeast. And so for us, all of our founders are from the southeast, it’s an incredible place to build. There’s been a lot of great talent that we don’t have to be quite as competitive for down here, either. People are down to move down here because there’s the lower cost of living from these other places as we’ve really enjoyed living here. But also, if you think about building a media company in Atlanta, it’s not like it hasn’t been done. It hasn’t been done recently, but Cox was built here, Gray TV, I don’t know if it was built here but it’s headquartered here. There are some major media-style scenes downtown. There are so many major companies that have been built here that are focused on media long term, they’re more legacy. But I think the reason for that, especially today, why we think it can happen is two big reasons. One, culture starts here all the time, through music, hip hop, and now through film. We are one of the largest producers, if not the largest producer of films in America right outside of Atlanta because of the tax credits that we have for that system. So that means that with music and with film now, celebrities you hear all the time, except in LA celebrities are being like, had the door beaten down all the time saying, hey, let’s partner, come to the studio, whatever. Here, there is more accessibility to culture and there’s less competition for culture, especially with reason to tap into it, right? If you’re a celebrity, everyone wants to knock on your door. We’re one of the few companies here that can partner with big influencers and add value to them as well as add value to us. For us, we love building in Atlanta just for those reasons. It’s been incredible both from a personal standpoint and being close to family. It’s a great place to stand out with something new and innovative and different. It’s a little bit harder to raise capital here, definitely, our markets that most investors we talk to are not in Atlanta but that’s also probably changing. I know you all are investing in the creative economy and Web3 spaces like that. That’s changing as a whole. There is more appetite for this. It’s been a good place for us to go.
William Leonard
I agree with that 100%. You look at the resources that are here already and the companies that have been built here, I think it only paves the way for younger, even more, innovative companies like Offbeat to build and find success here. Relative to the funding point, man, we are excited about the South and what is happening here in this region. It’s the fastest-growing region in the country and when you take into factors like the cost of living, the great schools, and the weather that we have here, I mean, people want to move here and build here. I’m excited that you are planting roots here in Atlanta and showing that you can build a media company outside of the traditional overcrowded hubs that are seemingly almost saturated to a point now. I’m excited, Shep. I appreciate you coming on today, man, and really talking more about just enterprise, media adoption, generative AI use cases that you’re excited about, untapped opportunities for enterprises to collaborate with creators, and then just sharing more about Offbeat and how you are changing the face of how brands collaborate with creators. I’m excited that you all are here building and look forward to hopefully having you back on here soon, man.
Shep Ogden
This has been a lot of fun. Good talk.
William Leonard
Thanks. Take care, man.
Lisa Calhoun
We’re thrilled to have you as an Atlanta Startup Podcast listener to help you get the most out of the experience. Let me invite you to three insider opportunities from our host Valor Ventures. First, want to be a guest on this amazing show. Reach out to our booking team at atlantastartuppodcast.com. Click on booking, It’s a no-brainer from there. Are you raising a seed round? Valor definitely wants to hear from you. Share your startup story at valor.vc/pitch. Are you a woman or minority-led startup valor sister program? The Startup Runway Foundation gives away grants to promising startups led by underrepresented founders. The mission of the Startup Runway Foundation is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investors. Startup runway finalists have raised over $40 million. See if you qualify for one of these amazing grants at startuprunway.org. You can also sign up for our next showcase for free there. Let me let you go today with a shout-out to Startup Runway presenting sponsor Cox Enterprises and to our founding partners, American Family Institute, Truist, Georgia Power, Avanta Ventures, and Innovators Legal. These great organizations make Startup Runway possible. Thanks for listening today and see you back next week.
