Nwanyinma Dike
Welcome back to that Atlanta Startup Podcast. I am Nwanyinma Dike, the new Managing Director for Startup Runway. On this episode of the Atlanta Startup Podcast, I am super, super excited to welcome Shayna Stewart, founder of Shown Live. Thank you, Shayna, for joining the podcast today. Let’s just just jump right in. Please share a bit about Shown Live with our audience. Tell us what you’re building.
Shayna Stewart
Thank you for having me on. I am an avid follower of the podcast so this feels like a win for me. I’m the Founder of Shown Live and Shown Live is a sponsorship marketplace that connects audio and video creators to marketers with little to no ad waste. What does that all mean? It means that, for creators, if you’re posting podcasts, such as this one, or doing live streams, it can take up to five years for you to earn your first dollar. When you think about that, it’s absurd, because have you ever heard of a Netflix show going on for five years? That’s quite a hefty toll for creators to have spent all this time and money creating content, really, with no monetary benefit at all. We tried to aim to change that by creating what’s called sponsored gifts the marketer can come to the Shown Live platform, load in a gift, and the gift can be anything from VIP access to a private Zoom Room, it could be physical merch, or even digital merch, or discounts. From there, once they load the gift in, creators can come load in their show information, talk about what their shows are about, and then match to those sponsored gifts instantly. Creators now don’t have to go chase down sponsors and marketers don’t need to go chase down a bunch of different influencers to get their brand out there.
Nwanyinma Dike
That’s incredible as a former engineer, and probably an engineer forever at heart, I just love how you were able to find efficiencies in this process. I’m super curious about how you found your way to work on this problem and entrepreneurship in general.
Shayna Stewart
I think with any product, it’s a lifelong journey. My background started in data and analytics, then I moved into product strategy, really focusing on product-led growth of how your product and advising both corporations and startups on what the mechanics are to do that. Of course, all of the product lead growth loops are built into this product as a mandate by myself. The industries I was fortunate to work in were media, marketing, music, and even gaming via Web3 economics. Just inspired by all of the industries I’ve been in and just saw that need for these creators who have maybe 100 followers or listeners to even up to 10,000 listeners, you’re not monetizing your content. It hit me this summer that I am spending most of my time listening and watching and it’s actually with creators of that audience size. I’m building relationships. I feel like I have a relationship with the creators that I engage with. And so I was like, there’s something here that’s just unrecognized by the media industry right now. I just kind of doubled down and tried to figure out what’s the right mechanics to get both sides of the marketplace excited.
Nwanyinma Dike
That’s good. For those who may not know, the Startup Runway is the leading nonprofit in connecting underrepresented founders with capital and investors. Shayna is a recent winner of the Startup Runway showcase. She’s actually the illustrious Judges’ Prize winner. The crowd, as well as our judges, were incredibly impressed with the investment ability of Shown Live. I’m just curious, you’re still probably running on a high from that day, but what was your experience of the runway?
Shayna Stewart
First, I would just like to acknowledge all of the work that you and the others at Startup Runway are doing. Without an opportunity like this, even in this last week, I’ve gained such great momentum around the product. Again, thank you for that. It was great because we got to connect with the mentors at first. They asked really interesting questions and some of them were even more forward-thinking questions that I could think through. My answers and responses to some of those questions, I’ve been able to include that in part of my content strategy, and actually how I’m speaking to new people that are onboarding into the product itself. So that was wonderful. And then, of course, the pitch experience. It was great because the other competitors were quality startups, I would say, and had exciting pitches. I was certainly nervous to get up but I felt very comfortable in the room and everybody was willing to listen to what we had to say and just ask great questions.
Nwanyinma Dike
I’m big on feedback so I love to hear that you had a great experience. As you already know, it’s not easy to get upstate onstage and pitch. For any founders who might be listening or someone who sees themselves pursuing a competition, like the Startup Runway, do you have any advice on how to prepare or advice in general?
Shayna Stewart
Absolutely. In terms of preparation, you have to think about who your audience is. For me, I needed to put in a little bit of extra work to understand what investors would be interested in learning about my company. You only get five minutes so that’s very quick to talk about all of the things that you’re working on and thinking about. There were some things that I included, and then some things that I excluded, which may be against the norm. The things that I thought about that were important to include were, of course, getting into my product very early on in the pitch. I think it was my third slide that I went into the product and talked about what it was. I talked about my revenue goals. and how I was thinking about growing the product in the future. And then I excluded things like the competitive slide because I weave that into my storyline talking about what is the current behavior that people have, and then how this product changes it. I had some efficiencies there, cutting that slide out, and then, of course, I’m a solopreneur. I didn’t want to go too much into the team slide just because it’s just me. I leveraged my personality and my stage presence to have the investors get to know me. So that’s how I also shaved off some time.
Nwanyinma Dike
Good, and paid off. Tell me more about the difference between going all in as a solopreneur for Shown Live versus the work you’ve been doing and what your experience has been this past year making that transition.
Shayna Stewart
That’s an excellent question. It’s been a journey and learning, adding more skills to my resume, but also really moving through a lot of different emotions this year. When you’re working on a team with people, you can talk things through with them, you can get ideas. In a lot of cases, you have good co-workers who act as motivators for you. When you go off on your own, and you believe in yourself, your vision, and your product, there are certainly days that wanes, and you have nobody to go and ask and rely on and so that that sort of self-sufficiency was something that I didn’t realize I was completely missing. I was able to work through that but that was certainly challenging. The way I got around that and pulled myself out of that was by making sure that I was talking to the people who I thought would use the product. When you do product lead growth correctly, you’re always talking to who you think the end users are. That was the key motivator for me that I could help people who need it, and that keeps you going.
Nwanyinma Dike
I’m glad you brought that up. As someone who advises startups as a startup coach, I love to hear, and it always picks my ear when founders talk about talking to customers and being keen to have as many of those kinds of customer conversations as possible. That also probably plays into the reason why you one for most investable, just the investment you make in understanding the customer’s needs. So from that standpoint, through the different conversations you’ve had, did any of those conversations surprise you and maybe pivot the Shown Live we see today develop in a way that you didn’t expect?
Shayna Stewart
I’ve pivoted the product a few times. I knew I wanted to play the intersection of audio and video creators and help people grow their audience. The original idea, which took me a week to build, and that’s how I started to get feedback was like, what can I build in a week? The first idea was, I’m just gonna go out there and find all of the cool live streams and LinkedIn events that are going on that I’m interested in and create an Airtable list and put that as an embed-on like a web flow front end. And then I went out and just talked to people about it. It was interesting, because people were like, oh, I didn’t know this pool of content was happening so thank you for organizing it. But the problem was, creators didn’t really see the reason why they would load their information into this simple form, why would I go out of my way, I’m so busy. So that was a big insight for me that, okay, like what is going to be the incentive to get people to load their show content into this platform? Creators have to solve a lot of problems throughout their day one being they have to go find sponsors, which takes a lot of time from them, and then the content creation takes a lot of time, but the strongest insight I kept getting is where’s the money I need? I want to monetize my content because I’m passionate about this, and I want to do this full-time. That was my insight, then it had to be well, how do I get money into the platform to pay out the creators? So then that had to open me up to talking to broader audiences, like marketers, startups, and e-commerce platforms of like how do you want to transfer money to these creators? That’s kind of how we were able to innovate and say, okay, well, we know from like the marketer standpoint, it’s just challenging to find the right influencer and make sure they’re developing the content that’s similar to the brand. Well, wouldn’t it be great if you could just load in sort of like, hey, I want to gift this to your audience? And then the Creator can pick it up, curate that list of gifts, and then send it to their audience. It’s not so dependent on the content that the creators making, and what the brand has, it’s just more of the connection point there. That took probably a good three months of research and talking to about five to 10 people a week.
Nwanyinma Dike
That’s good. It shows where it went and also how it’s resonating. I’m glad that you’ve done that work. Just curious, what’s next for Shown Live? What’s next for you in the process of growing Shown Live?
Shayna Stewart
Shown Live is in an alpha period right now. Onboarding creators and marketers. I like to say it’s a two-and-a-half-sided marketplace but has the pace of growing a two-sided marketplace, which just means that you have to onboard two audiences at very similar periods, for the value to sort of be seen by both sides. Just putting the most effort into talking to those who would want to participate in the product itself. Once we’re done with the alpha, we will plan to launch more publicly, probably early Q1. We’ll probably do a sort of Product Hunt Launch with some extra discounts for using the product. We hope by then that we’ll have some more stats on like, what marketers can expect to get from their return on ad spend, and all of the likes of that. We are a data-driven company at the core just being my background in data and analytics, so very important for me to make sure that during this alpha period and coming out of it, we’re sharing all the hopefully wonderful stats with the marketers.
Nwanyinma Dike
We for sure will be paying attention and keeping up with you here at Startup Runway and on the podcast. I’m wondering if you have any last thoughts that you would like to leave with listeners. Our audience includes other founders, investors, and those who are curious about this space, anything you would want to leave as a last thought?
Shayna Stewart
I would say, we’ve heard a lot about the creative economy coming from news outlets and the potential impact that this very large market. I think it’s estimated right now at $250 billion and expected to double in size in the next five years. I hope that people take notice of the companies that are building in this space, because right now, as creators, there is no entrepreneurial pathway for them to earn early on, reinvest, and grow bigger and bigger. As a founder in the startup community in Atlanta, we have resources like yourselves, to help us grow, but creators don’t have that. Whether Shown Live is the execution of that, or maybe other platforms or all of the above we hope that people pay attention to this burgeoning economy.
Shayna Stewart
You’re leading in this space. We’ll be paying attention. So last, but not least, how can folks connect with you and stay connected with you?
Shayna Stewart
I’m very active on LinkedIn, that would probably be the best place to connect. It will be just Shayna Stewart. If you Google, Founder of Shown Live, I should pop up. From a social media perspective, Shown Live is at @shown_live on all the platforms.
Shayna Stewart
Perfect. Gotta make sure that people can find you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Shayna. It’s been a pleasure talking to you today. It’s been a pleasure learning more about Shown Live. I am super excited to see how it grows and continue to be a part of this story of that growth. That’s it for this episode of the Atlanta Startup Podcast, and we hope everyone had an amazing day.
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