UNCHARTED: Beat Subscription Fatigue with the Right Content Solution

Starting the conversation:

Represent your business as it is, not as it will be. There are real advantages to clearly representing the unique offerings to the problems your company solves. Bob Bowdon, Founder at VidaFair shares his experiences finding and serving underrepresented markets.

Subscription models might not always be the answer for digital content, and exploring the real challenges of monetization is essential to finding a solution that aligns with the way you do your work. Through this journey, you will find the spark to refine the questions you have about the way you charge, as monetization continues to evolve.

In this episode, you will hear about the real cost of subscription fatigue, how to proactively choose the right marketing for the solutions your company offers, and the real impact of making decisions aligned to your company values. Jess Dewell talks with Bob Bowdon, Founder at VidaFair, about being BOLD to be hyperfocused on solutions for monetization of digital content.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: Bob Bowdon

What You Will Hear:

4:20 Success and longevity are rooted in the willingness to be creative.

• There is an advantage to experiencing life without technology being ever-present sparking creativity.
• The experience of learning technology as it developed offers opportunities to innovate.
• Longevity in business is credited to the flexibility and creativity developed from witnessing major technological changes firsthand.

05:25 We all make predictions and Bob Bowden was wrong in a big way.

• Bob explains he thought micropayments would become the norm for media, but the industry shifted toward subscriptions.
• A solution to “subscription fatigue” by using pay-as-you-go options for content.
• Customers shouldn’t have to manage or remember countless subscriptions.

15:35 Fair consumption of monetized content.

• Four ways digital creators get paid: ads, subscriptions, donations, and pay-per-view
• Fairly compensating creators for their time and investment is the right thing to do.

28:20 The “right” marketing for your business may look different from that of your competitors.

• Bob admits spending a lot on traditional big-company marketing (like trade show booths) was not effective for their startup.
• They learned authenticity matters more: explainer videos featuring Bob himself resonated better with customers and creators.
• The personal, transparent approach to marketing has proven more persuasive and effective than trying to appear like a large corporation.

32:50 Customer Service responsiveness is a requirement to stay competitive today.

• Fast, personal responses to customer inquiries reflect your commitment to transparency and fairness.
• Make your business rules, account controls, and decision-making practices open to your users.
• Concept of customer freedom and how it fits into your business.

52:00 The way you do your business.

• Intentionally align the customer base to core values.
• Belief in the problem you are solving and how you make decisions to stay true to solving that problem.
• Commit to staying on mission with each feature, process, development offering you make.

54:35 It is BOLD to find markets that are underserved — and excel there.

Resources

• Connect with Bob Bowdon, Founder at VidaFair

Transcript

Jess Dewell 00:00
I know you have been in business, Bob, for a very long time. Remind me, how many companies have you had? And how long has VidaFair been alive and strong?

Bob Bowdon 00:16
Don’t make me sound too old, Jess. People are going to. I’m already a dinosaur enough as it is.

Jess Dewell 00:20
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by. At the Bold Business podcast, we are normalizing important conversations. Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems. More importantly, are going to be what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using? This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it. Fuel your soul, fuel your mind. And most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out, maybe you’re ready to scale, maybe you’re going through reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages. So hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 01:12
You are listening to the Bold Business podcast, where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 01:25
Welcome to the show. I’m Jess Dewell, and today I’m joined by Bob Bowden, the founder of VidaFair. Bob’s an entrepreneur who’s built multiple companies and is now on a mission to change how creators and audiences connect without the subscription fatigue. If you’re looking for fresh ideas on business models, creative thinking, and building something bold, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in. I know you have been in business, Bob, for a very long time. And remind me, how many companies have you had? I know, right? And how long has VidaFair been alive and strong?

Bob Bowdon 02:05
Don’t make me sound too old, Jess. People are going to. I’m already a dinosaur enough as it is. I don’t the age, but how are.

Jess Dewell 02:12
Key reasons we’re asking this.

Bob Bowdon 02:16
Okay. Anyway, I really just started two, I guess technically three companies. All right, you got me there. So this would be the third company. One of them was a nonprofit, by the way, a nonprofit group called Choice Media that I ran for 10 years, that was a vertical news group about one subject matter, which was education policy. So we like to say the way ESPN just talked about sports and CNBC just talks about markets. We just talked about schools and education policy.

Jess Dewell 02:45
Yep. And.

Bob Bowdon 02:46
And before that, I had another company, Bowden Media, which was part of a documentary film production company. That I, that I had, that was pretty successful. We had a film on Netflix and distributed by Warner Brothers, et cetera. So yes, VidaFair would be the third.

Jess Dewell 03:00
Here’s an interesting thing that I was thinking about the other day. I was at an event and I was watching young business owners in many different industries, right? So some are makers, some are service providers, some are technology companies. And they were between the ages of, let’s say 30 and 50. What I recognized was there was this other group of people and I actually identified more with this other group of people. And maybe it’s because of my background. And I think you and I have this in common, which is the group of people that were around when computers were part of our world, yet not online. And then when computers and technology got us online and connected in a whole new way with opportunities and the way we work and the things that we’re doing, we got to be creative in a way that most didn’t. And now we’re in the generations of the group I just spoke of, especially on the 30ish side that they’ve always had technology and so they’ve never had the novelty of something new. And I was thinking about this specifically for our conversation because Bob, I was like, some of the reason for our success and longevity I think has to do directly. It directly correlates to our willingness to be creative because we’ve seen something since it existed.

Bob Bowdon 04:22
This is an interesting angle and I think it does apply at least to my path and journey for creating VidaFair. And I’ll tell you why. I remember when the media websites for this dinosaur term called newspapers when that, when they used to be new and people would say, wow, no one’s going to buy the Washington Post if you can get all the stories online for free. No one’s going to buy all of them. USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Denver Post. Name your local paper. Chicago Tribune. No one’s going to pay for them. If you can get the stories for free. And it became widely understood at some point they’ll have to have a business model for this thing. And I thought the world was going to go one direction and it went another. I thought the world would go was going to go to the micropayment model that would let anybody in the world pay 11 cents for this particular news story in the Chicago Tribune or the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Wasn’t that a newspaper that went out of business to use your area?

Jess Dewell 05:22
Well, you may be right. That might be for my time here.

Bob Bowdon 05:26
There you go. So I thought this story might be 20 cents, that story might be 50 cents, another story might be 5 cents, but that you would be able to buy content in a micropayment model. And I thought that makes the most sense because maybe they’ll also offer a subscription separately. But my prediction was wrong. The world went the other way. It went to subscription-only model in so many ways. And I basically what you just laid out is that some people like me saw this world come in and assumed it was gonna one, it was gonna handle monetization in one kind of way. And then when it didn’t, we had our own sort of imagination to compare against the reality. Whereas if it was just always your reality, the subscription model was the default monetization for all content everywhere. Because we all just subscribe to Netflix, or we all just subscribe to Spotify, or we all just subscribe to Patreon channels, then I, we’re just thought of that’s just the way it always has to be. So yeah, I think that makes some sense. So the platform we built, VidaFair, is not a subscription model. We’re team hashtag subscription fatigue. And we believe in being able to pay a la carte for content as a, as a consumer and not have to subscribe to yet another thing and worry about forgetting to unsubscribe to yet another thing.

Jess Dewell 06:46
Add on services for credit cards, for the tools that help you save money. Now actually you just give them. This freaks me out a little. You just give them all this access and they go find all the subscriptions you may have that you can then say yes or no and they go cancel them for you. That is a service today. And now I’m like, how can we have so much stuff we’re paying for and we don’t even understand what that is? I know everything. We keep a spreadsheet of our subscriptions and it’s always really long. We’re like, what else can we get rid of? This is too much to manage. What else can we get rid of?

Bob Bowdon 07:23
And especially with services like Adobe Photoshop, where it’s now subscription, you can’t even just buy that software. Charge me whatever you want, but just charge me once, please. That would be my reaction to that. And Adobe says, no, you got to pay the rest of your life, even if you forget about our software, or even if you, I don’t know, for whatever reason, stop using it for some other reason, you maybe your career, you have a bit of different role model in your different job demands and you stop using it you’re still paying? Yeah, to me that’s, I must think, what’s next? Restaurants charging a subscription? How much is the burger? We don’t charge. Buy the burger. You have to subscribe to our restaurant and then you get this many burgers per month and it’s, it just seems like a crazy model. It’s gone too far. But again, if you just had the option to do both, I could pay this much a la carte or I could subscribe that I’m comfortable with and that get affair our company is comfortable with. We work, we are complimentary to a Patreon model where people could, you could ask your followers and friends and fans, you could say, if you want to subscribe, you can do that over here. But if you want to pay a la carte, you could do that over there. So. So I’m not against subscription as an option, I’m just against subscription as the only option.

Jess Dewell 08:32
I like your distinction there because I’m like, I was going to argue with you and be like I am, but then you finish and I’m like, no, I’m actually like you. I can’t argue with you. I’m telling you what, Bob, that’s okay. So let’s go back to the innovation piece. You chose a path. There was this time where anything was possible and many options occurred. And by the way, I can go back in time and we can actually say there are a lot of technologies through all of this that came and went and came and went and there was something that came out of it and sometimes it was a tool and sometimes it was a way of doing things like payment. Right. What we’re talking about and what you’re focusing on through content curation and access. Now I’m going to go back to the thing when you decided to make the choice and even though subscriptions are real, how am I allowed to ask you about your market share? Because I’m very curious about the demographic and the amount of people that really do want this a la carte option.

Bob Bowdon 09:32
Sure. It’s certainly true that we consider ourselves still a startup and we are in many ways competing against big tech and so we see it that way. Patreon is considered a small player and they are a billion-dollar company. Valuation plus, I think they’re, they might be a little bit less than they used to be, but nevertheless, they’re still a really big company. Yeah, we consider ourselves still a startup, but to the larger point, I think that yes, there is a psychological shift that is needed in the space. Most people they need to, I’ll put it this way. So we, we also want to. A lot of the reason people do subscribe is they find it a form of a volume discount. So if I subscribe to HBO, maybe I binge-watch a bunch of seasons of X, Y, D series, X, Y, Z series and I feel like I’m watching a lot of content, but I’ve just paid once. So I feel like in a way I’m getting kind of a volume discount concept. And so we wanted to do that too. And so we have a grain tokens, we call them, it’s a form. But you can buy packages and if you buy larger packages, you pay less per grain, which is our token, what we call it. And so it’s a way to still offer volume discounts. It’s just that those charges never repeat. You can just buy a package once and then you can use a little bit at a time and you pay less because you bought a larger package. Or you could just pay purely a la carte. So we wanted to basically offer people this volume discount concept without still without having a subscription being involved. But yes, there are people that, that are confused by it and they’re, and they, and they’re, they make think that they think it’s like a crypto scam or something. They’re like, what? This currency, you have these grains. And we’re like, no, it’s not a currency. It’s not crypto. It’s just priced in dollars. It’s not like it trades separate from like a bitcoin versus dollar chart. You can watch, you can chart the differences in a one currency against another. It’s just a token priced in dollars. But yeah, I do think there’s a, to some degree an education that’s needed, a psychological shift.

Jess Dewell 11:34
So a psycho. Okay, so let’s talk about the psychological shift. We’ve got this thing that has become commonplace. These subscriptions we have make sense when we consume some amount from them. Right? That seems to. That is a, that is actually something that most companies that do subscriptions are actually are saying, they’re saying, let’s do it this way. And here’s what we’re doing. And they have specific measurements, right? They have recurring revenue models. They have attrition models. And that’s not what they call them. I don’t remember what they call their attrition offhand.

Bob Bowdon 12:05
And then we, the investor class and the venture capital class prefers that, by the way. They see, oh, this is your repeating revenue that we can better predict or something. But to me, just because a certain financial paradigm is better for the investor class doesn’t mean it’s better for the customers. And I would rather design a platform around what’s best for the customers.

Jess Dewell 12:28
Let’s break it down. I’m going to go all over the place here because I still want to stay on that track. We may or may not get back to it, but where you just went is. It makes me think of Clay Christensen’s jobs to be done. I’m guess… Are you familiar with his work at all?

Bob Bowdon 12:41
Remind me.

Jess Dewell 12:42
Okay, so he, the book I read of his, he’s a Harvard business professor and he would go out into companies to innovate and do research and development because he saw a whole bunch of products doing all the same thing and they were marketing different. Right. So you might have a mop that also is a duster. You might have a mop that self-squeezes versus having to put it in something else to squeeze. But they were all mops and they all did the thing. So what he did is he took people out and looked at the products that they were working with and figured out what is the job that this product is hired to do and have you. And so now I was thinking about how you were talking about we’ve got this normalization and we’ve got this concept of consumption for value. But I’m wondering if there’s actually a different job that we’re hiring a subscription to do or. And there’s a different job that subscriptions aren’t actually getting us to, but we don’t recognize there’s another option that will help us get the job we want to hire this to do.

Bob Bowdon 13:47
Yeah, I think the other option is to pay as you go or pay for a package of grain tokens as we say the parlance in our platform. And it’s just, it’s. But it does the same thing if you have the mop that still is a mop. So in this case you’re still watching video and you’re still. Whether that video is a standup comedy or an independent film or a music video or a podcast video, you still want, you’re still using money to compensate a creator for their video content. So in both cases.

Jess Dewell 14:22
One thing I was thinking about before, as you were originally describing this made me think of an old-fashioned arcade. We’d go in, we’d change our money for tokens and then we’d go play the tokens and the result of the play we’d get something to consume and it sounds like what you’re talking about with grains is similar. You go get your, you take your money, you get some grains and you go consume. And that’s also the fun part. Fun and consumption have been shortened enough. Another thing that just came to mind though is I’m thinking about these micro payments is like a street performer. For a while we lived in Boulder for six years and every summer and in Seattle they do they have this too in the big markets. There are certain areas that street performers will come in and extra vendors will come in addition to whatever else is going on. And they have their guitar case open or they have their violin case open or they have something that you can buy right there on a small stand as you’re walking by. How does what you’re doing relate to that? Because I’m trying to think. I’m trying to think what are some other things if we’re going to help the education process that we might be doing today that we don’t even understand, that helps and aligns to your business model?

Bob Bowdon 15:34
Sure. From a big-picture point of view, our premise is that monetizing content isn’t greed, it’s fairness. So making money from your video content, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s you spend time on it. Oftentimes people spend a lot of money creating their video content. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong. A lot of people feel like everything should be free if it’s digital content. Like they know they’d have to pay for a book, they know they’d have to pay for even a ticket to a concert. But if they want anything digital with ones and zeros to their computer, then that should just all be free. There’s a, that’s part of the psychological, a hurdle I’m describing. So yes, this overall umbrella concept is that monetizing your time and money spent making content and creativity is fairness. That’s fairness. But if you are going to monetize, there are four basic ways that the monetization has always happened. One is an advertiser-based monetization. We all know what that is. That’s everything from the old NBC broadcast channel with commercials to. To YouTube. If you don’t have the premium YouTube, you watch ads and that kind of thing. So there’s plenty of advertiser-based, but the payments are quite low. You get much less money than you would in the other models. So advertiser-based monetization, subscription-based monetization that we’ve already talked about, there’s a third version which is just straight up donations and you Reference that with the guy with the guitar case playing in Boulder. So. Well, there’s online versions of the donations obviously as well. Buy Me a Coffee is a. Is a platform that’s just all about that. And then this fourth model is the one that we primarily do at VidaFair, which is the TVOD is the modern term. It used to be called pay-per-view. You’re basically paying a la carte. Or again, if you buy a package of our tokens, then you pay less per rental. But. So those are the four ways. We also have part of that donation method too, meaning that we have a facility where you can pay to watch a video clip, like a podcast or a music video. Like I mentioned, you can pay to watch it and just rent it for yourself. You can also gift it to someone, which means you. You pay for someone else to see it and then you can send it to them and they don’t have to pay anything, but the creator has been paid by you. But there’s another way called a sponsor button. We have on our platform what you can pay for the next 20 people or the next 50 people or the next hundred people to watch it for free because you are. You love the content so much, you are sponsoring it. And it’s a form of a gift. Also, that’s the form that. That third version that’s a form of a someone having their guitar case open and getting donations from, you know, as a street performer. I guess those versions 3 and 4 we’ve combined in our platform, meaning the kind of pay-per-view along with the gift process. We don’t. But we do not do ads and we also do not do subscriptions. The first two methods I talked about. And I’ll tell you something else, incidentally, once you do open yourself up to ads, there’s People don’t think about the downside to that. It’s not just people’s time. And you could arguably are wasting people’s time and making them sit with your ads. But you also. Then what happens creeps in, is a kind of a. There’s a censorship aspect to. Even if you’re just saying something that’s mildly controversial, there may be advertisers that object to having their ad next to your video. And you’re a podcaster and you have a controversial view about something. And so then it creates then this chilling effect where stuff gets demonetized on YouTube often. And then people are afraid to talk about certain things or they omit certain words. And I just would point that out too as a downside of the advertiser model, in addition to the fact that. And much less money.

Jess Dewell 19:13
But yes, where I’m at in that. One of the things that I really like is the independent model and being able to connect directly to the creator without anybody in between. And one of the things that this model does is just that we can. It’s almost like it’s close to seeing somebody on the street and having that. Or buying somebody a coffee for getting their picture or watching their documentary or their video on your platform. But it’s also. I feel like I am giving all. Everything I’ve got to give or choose to pay is going to that creator. And that’s a different mentality too. And I like that. I like the bypassing of all the steps in between because in this case it’s not necessary. Makes me think of an art gallery. Right? An art gallery is kind of like that. You can go in, you can see all of the artists that are there, you’ll see a little bit of their work. And then if you buy something great, and if you don’t buy something, you now know about them and maybe you see them someplace else or maybe you get to a place you’re like, I can go get that thing now. And off you go directly to the creator.

Bob Bowdon 20:21
And to further that point, in the era of social media, there are many creators with, of course, thousands, and some have millions of followers. Whether it’s on. Whether it’s on Instagram or whatever their platform, TikTok X, et cetera, whatever their platform is. Facebook can have all of these followers. Imagine just you can go. You don’t need a middleman. You don’t need a gatekeeper. You don’t need an agent to approve it or a manager. You don’t need a studio to say it’s okay. You can make content that you want. Just again, no middleman. You just go right to your fans and. And market it to them. And if they like it, they rent it. And you get money directly from that through our platform. Now, I mentioned censorship. I will say we do have a couple of rules. We have a no porn rule, for example, on our site. No copyright infringement. You can’t just pick up a movie that you just pretend like it’s your own. And there are no doxing, no threats and no child abuse. Those are actually our entire five flags that I’ve told you. But it’s not censorship like you would find on many other platforms, including YouTube, certainly. But if you. Certainly, if you wanted to be on Netflix or Amazon Prime or HBO or any of these others. It’s much more of a you’ve got to pass committee after committee of vetting people that just not exist on VidaFair.

Jess Dewell 21:39
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business.

Announcer 21:52
Right now you are listening to the Bold Business Podcast hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary. Number two, do all the work. Schedule a complimentary consultation. To find out more at reddirection.com

Jess Dewell 22:25
You’re listening to Uncharted Beat Subscription Fatigue with the Right Content Solution with Bob Bowden. Now back to the program being not the mainstream in the way that you’re approaching. This has its challenges even being in the mainstream. If that was the case, I’d be asking you the same question because it also has challenges. I want to know your unique challenges that you have faced being providing something in the way others do, but doing it very differently in a whole different model. What’s one of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to face?

Bob Bowdon 22:55
We launched in the space, the content space of independent filmmakers. I have a background in that as a documentary filmmaker. I know that world a little better. And so we launched in that space. But I’ve always believed the more powerful market for us would be what I would just call the YouTube content space, meaning podcasts or a cooking show or a comedian or a music video like I said. Or a cool kid who rides a skateboard or some just yoga instructors or just people that have financial advice. Youtubers that basically that. And they come to our site and they will see the fact that we launched it in the film space and assume that we’re only. That is the only thing that our site is about and that they, it’s not for them. And so I found it difficult a challenge to explain to this other categories a bunch of these other categories of content creators. Oh we, we were all about you guys too. Don’t just look at what’s there right now as some sort of evidence of what the next upload has to be.

Jess Dewell 24:00
Amazon did it and I’m gonna just totally do this because when they started they just went and competed with bookstores to be online.

Bob Bowdon 24:06
Sure.

Jess Dewell 24:07
And.

Bob Bowdon 24:07
Exactly.

Jess Dewell 24:08
And. And I don’t even know how they did it. I don’t do you know you and I both grew up through Amazon selling books and then not selling books anymore and every selling everything. Right. We went through that and then when they hit groceries, I even remember that. I remember when they went to not books and everything and then when they added groceries totally blew my mind twice. I never thought a company would do that. And they’re capitalizing on their infrastructure, which I know you have some really good strengths. So now I’m curious, what are your strengths that you then brought to this problem to help shift some of that or are shifting right now?

Bob Bowdon 24:42
What are our strengths?

Jess Dewell 24:44
Your strength, like what? Yeah, like Amazon being a fulfillment center, not a bookstore.

Bob Bowdon 24:49
Well, I’ll tell you one strength is that anyone who. Yeah, first of all, yeah, no, I found that transition and that’s the example I give, by the way, all the time. And I have problems with Amazon in other ways. In terms of they, they’re. They sometimes put it this way. I have, I have come across people who are of the opinion that Amazon sometimes doesn’t stop Chinese firms from taking IP intellectual property and it’s without that they shouldn’t be taking and that Amazon offer. In this opinion that I’ve seen, Amazon is not doing a lot to oppose some of those Chinese firms from, from taking that IP without paying for it. But that said, yes, I give the example of, of Amazon all the time. Like exactly. If you’re old enough, remember it was books and then it added like the same way. We started at just independent films and now we’re trying to branch out. I think first of all, they were by then a much bigger company than we are. So there’s that. I’m sure they had probably many millions to market, but I also bet I would, I would think that they didn’t maybe go initially to oh, we’re just going to sell everything. They probably found a few particular retailers or manufacturers that they said, okay, let’s just launch with you. You’re not a bookmaker, but you do something else, consumer electronics or something. They probably started with targeted other products and then went from there.

Jess Dewell 26:12
Probably, yeah.

Bob Bowdon 26:13
How.

Jess Dewell 26:13
What, so what are your strengths that helped you overcome this challenge to be able to attract more makers and creators?

Bob Bowdon 26:19
Okay, so one of the strengths of course is that our platform works right now. So anyone in the sound of my voice could download the VidaFair iPhone app, the Android app, or the, or go to our website and you can look and see products that are right now for meaning videos that you could rent right now and you could create an account, click on a button, pay an a la carte fee of 99 cents or a dollar 99 or something. Know that you’re supporting a content creator rather than some anonymous company somewhere. That creator will make money every single time anyone listening to my voice rents any of that content. And, and in other words, the strength that we bring is even those who are not in the space of independent film could see how it works, can demo it themselves, can understand it fully before they ever do anything with their own content. And then that way they’ll better able to, better be able to explain to their fans and followers on social media, here’s how you do it. Here’s my new, here’s my new music video. And, all you do is you download the app. You can by the way put it on a flatscreen TV through what’s called Google Chromecast or Apple Airplay so they can demo it and try it and see that it works, see that everything, see that the credit card deduction happens exactly as it’s advertised, et cetera. So I think that’s a strength that, that, that we have like as we’re genre shifting it’s, there’s not a lot of imaginative jump required to say okay, if this video were a music video instead of a short film or a feature film or something like obviously there’s not a lot of you can see it would just be a different video streaming the same way.

Jess Dewell 28:03
Trying to think where I wanted to go. I actually wrote down that I wanted to go back. But we talked a little bit about the norm of thinking. We’ve talked about ways, the four ways that there are to monetize. We’ve talked about the strengths of your platform for all digital content makers of any kind. What’s your biggest lesson as the CEO of VidaFair?

Bob Bowdon 28:22
One story I like to tell is how is ways we’ve wasted money on marketing that didn’t work at all. And so one, one being that we went to a big trade show and paid a lot of money for a giant booth that had dozens of employees and we had giveaways and we had all this stuff. It was almost like we were trying to pretend we were a big company when we really were a small company and people don’t care these days. It’s almost like I think we, what we learned was it’s they would ra. They’re actually more persuaded by hearing from me. So some of our explainer videos by the way, which is another thing we’ve learned along the way too to produce videos ourselves to say here’s how you, here’s a Step by step. Way to use our platform instead of just assuming people would read through the directives and read the prompts or whatever. No, give them a video. Show them how it’s done by step with on a screen. What we’ve learned is lately, like I start some of these, some of the pod, some of the explainer videos literally on my couch saying, hi, I’m Bob Bowder and I’m the founder of IT Affair, coming to you from my couch. And here is a step, here’s this, here’s that, or here’s some advice on how to market your videos once they’re uploaded or et cetera. People prefer to. They prefer that. They prefer the authenticity. They prefer. I’m a guy named Bob and I live in Austin and I’m make. I’m on my couch right now telling you about my startup company to help creators make money. They prefer that than us trying to seem like we’re some big company with a giant budget and signs everywhere and a huge trade show. Yeah, they don’t care about the. That’s an old school way to think is what the lesson was.

Jess Dewell 30:01
You tapped into more of who you are and how you do your work.

Bob Bowdon 30:08
Yeah. Peek behind the curtain like on the Wizard of Oz or something. Let them see the real workings. And I’m just. I’m a person. I did comedy for the Onion News Network, by the way, as an on-camera reporter of fake news stories. I’ve been a television reporter for Bloomberg TV and other places. I’m a regular person with a media career. And I basically said this is the. This is what I would want if I were releasing my documentary film now, like, I have a blank sheet of paper. And how would you design a platform to help creators make money where they set their own fee? Airbnb. If you want to rent out a condo, you set your own fee for what you want to make when someone rents your condo. And some people have other problems with Airbnb and that’s fine. I’m not here to debate that. But the idea of let the person set their own fee. If they set it too high, that’s on them. But no one else knows what they spent on a particular video or what the demand is, et cetera. Let them set their. So our. I felt like we’re creating blank sheet of paper, creating a. The fair. Fairness is in our name, as we like to VidaFair. Like which is, by the way, a double entendre, I like to say. So it means both video affair, vid affair and also vida Fair. Like life. That’s fair. Vita fair. So anyway, so the idea is to let them set their own fee, make it completely transparent, have no, don’t trap people in subscriptions. Which is as I feel is a low key way to take money for services you don’t give because maybe you’re hoping they forget they’ve subscribed or something. And anyway, so I designed the platform that I would want as a creator in the fair. Any creative art creators put it this way. We own no content. Everyone has complete control of their own content that they’ve uploaded. They can disable a video anytime they want. They can close their account anytime they want. They can see exactly how many rentals have happened of their content anytime they want. And, and we have no contracts that they sign. They, we just are, we want to just present a site that’s useful to our content creators and the people that rent their work and not lock anyone into anything. I believe in persuasion, not coercion. It’s a big theme through my life. So if someone’s not happy with our service, they should be able to walk away. And why should we want to have any kind of contract with them? They get paid each time their work is rented. They keep it up exactly as long as they want. And that’s how we work.

Jess Dewell 32:38
So one of your values is fairness. You’ve talked about fairness a lot so far in our conversation. What are some of the other core values that show up in your day-to-day work that are important to you, Bob, and to VidaFair?

Bob Bowdon 32:51
We’re responsive. Someone sends us a contact request or ask a question or help notice on our contact page and where I think I like to say we always respond within 24 hours, but it’s often much faster than that. So I think we’re extremely responsive. We are, we are an open book essentially. So yes. So our terms and conditions is quite clear in terms of us that we are, we don’t own any of your work. And that to the extent is if something does get taken down, for example, because like I said, there are, you know, copyright violations alleged or again we have a no porn rule or something like that. We are also completely transparent about that. We’ll say here’s the decision, here’s why we. And that’s it. But there’s no situation where anyone then has to feel like we’re doing anything that’s not absolutely. Yeah. So transparency in other words. That’s a long-winded answer to say transparency both in terms of response time and just our rules. How we work our rules. It’s almost like. I almost want to ask you, how would you set up a monetization platform for video if it’s any different than this? I’ll tell you one other thing. When we were early on. Yeah, when we were early on in. Because we’re getting a little into the weeds here, which I love. Good. Early on, we based it on a percentage. And most people, in fact, a lot of times in interviews just like this, Jess, people would say, what percentage do you take? Yeah, I understand your content creators get most of the money each time a rental happens. What percentage do you take? Well, that is how we began the platform, at least building it. It wasn’t live. I was talking about it with some people online somewhere, in a group somewhere, and somebody said, who? I wish I had his name still. Somebody, a guy said to me, he goes, why should you? Like if there are two concrete content creators and they both have videos of the same duration and one charges more than the other, why do you deserve more for one than that? You’re doing the same service. If there are two 30-minute videos, you’re storing two 30-minute videos, you’re having to stream two 30-minute videos. But if one guy charges $5 and the other guy charges $3, why you’re not doing any more for the $5 price video than the three? Why do you as a platform deserve more money? Because someone else charges more for their work? If what you’re. The service you’re doing is the same based on the duration of the content? And I thought about that and I thought, this guy is right. I thought, yes, we actually would not deserve more money just because someone else charges more. So we should not base it as a percentage. So what we actually do is have a platform fee that is purely based on the duration of the content, and then the creator fee that they set themselves gets added to the platform fee for the sum of that is the retail price. So the retail price is not based on a percentage simply because it’s fairer to go back to that word, to not charge people more. If we’re not doing more. We should base our prices on our costs and our costs are not affected if one person charges a larger creator fee than another.

Jess Dewell 35:58
I’m your host, Jess Dewell, and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results.

Announcer 36:11
That lead to your success focused on growth. Listen to more programs like this which support the challenges and opportunities you are working with right now. Come on Search Bold Business Podcast for the key terms at reddirection.com or your preferred podcast listening app.

Jess Dewell 36:31
You’re listening to Uncharted Beat subscription fatigue with the right content solution with Bob Bowden. Now back to the program. Early in my career I was, I did the operations for an E-commerce platform back when PayPal was brand new and we were actually competitor to PayPal but on a different kind of scale. It was on specifically software. So you get into one niche, you go even further. And they were independent software developers which is why one of the reasons I got really excited about our conversation because I’m like oh yeah, these independent software creators had were an underserved market that couldn’t necessarily and this was back when SaaS it wasn’t even, it wasn’t even SaaS and then try before you buy it was actually shareware back in the day. So dating myself too. This is a long journey of this absolute evolution along the way. And when we were acquired my job was to grow the business. We were acquired right before the dot com crash. My job to get the whole earn out. Yeah. Yes. And the sale price was really big. But to get the sale price I had to hit sales goals. So there was an earn-out portion of that I had to figure out how to navigate through. And the other people that were in the day-to-day with me were helpful and then they fell off and then we still had this earnout thing. And so I was like what am I going to do about this? And our and at that time we were a percentage of sales and I think the whole time, even after I, after the acquisition I stayed and I managed a handful of companies like mine. I helped buy them and I managed them and they were all a percent of business but they started out differently. And so as you were speaking, I’m thinking because you asked me a question how would I price it? And I’m trying to think through that a little because that is my exact mostly related experience. And, I drew a graph here on my notes and one of a grid and one axis is cost up and down and the other is value. And what I found in running many of the same things that had similar price models, there was a minimum plus a percentage and all of them did that. And looking back and actually one of them did just have a, just had a flat fee. No matter what you have a flat fee. There was a lot of, there was, there were a lot of different ways that we did business. So coming back to based off of the values you have of fairness, it makes sense you would continue to understand what is fair for everybody. And I use the word winfinity. And so it seems based off VidaFair being the core, everything you’re doing for winfinity, it benefits me, it benefits my creators, it benefits my users, it benefits people who haven’t even discovered us yet and makes us attractive. As bigger buying experiences change, we become a viable option for people on a budget or people who want to try this out or. Right, all of those things. So I like the winfinity piece of what you’ve done. And I would say the only limit in that is that. So all these companies, I had some charged a flat fee, three bucks, others, the one that mine went, mine purchased. The average per sale was it was a minimum of $2 or 20%. So it didn’t matter if it was 20% of $10 or 20% of $2,000. And what we found was the, our average transaction price was 10 times the next closest person’s, the next closest business. I said person, but the next closest, closest entities transaction things. So what we were looking at was, wow, we. And we could tell what is the price point that is most attractive to each of these platforms. And that was really interesting. So I don’t know the right value, I would say so coming back, I just have questions for you. Are you on the right track? You’ve gotta be because you’re. It’s fair and it’s based in fairness. And I see nothing with nothing wrong with how that is. And then I would say so some of the questions to ask are, are you attracting content creators that go and align with that flat fee and are you missing some potential value for other people who think value-based instead of instance-based? And I don’t know the answer to that. I understand what is like purview pay per view. Right. So you’re so meaning I’m going to just have a platform fee because I’m guessing that’s per transaction. I don’t know what it is. Whatever it is per transaction, that’s our platform fee or it’s going to be this is how much you pay us every month and this and whatever that is, it sounds like because you don’t like subscriptions. It’s exactly, it’s per transaction exactly.

Bob Bowdon 41:20
Because I feel like that is the, that is what our costs are. So every business has direct costs and they also have overhead and so but.

Jess Dewell 41:30
Then they also have the amount that’s left over, which sometimes you need as profit for whatever reason and sometimes you need as profit for reinvestment and development and expansion.

Bob Bowdon 41:38
Oh sure. Oh sure. So base. There are different business businesses that have different ratios of. Of the degree to which the overhead, how, what percentage of their cost is overhead versus costs related to that transaction. But it seems to me that the best way to do things is to align your pricing as close as possible to the costs that. And there’s a different philosophy and I think this might be what you’re getting at. Some people say the customer is willing to pay for. The customer is more amenable to paying for maybe in a way that’s not as direct cost related. Like you can maybe get more money, in other words, out of the customer if you charge them for other things that are not directly related to your costs that are some sort.

Jess Dewell 42:25
Well, what’s one of the things that’s directly related to costs? Right. I know what we were facing in a. And this was of course technology is still changing really fast, but even then. So the company that I was a part of, it was called Regina, long time ago. Reginow was the first technology platform that accepted money that had an affiliate program. Isn’t that interesting? Even though it wasn’t official in the sense of we were collecting the money and paying all that that came. But we had a whole bunch of clients going. We’re doing all these special deals. And so I went to the core developer of the time, who actually happens to be my husband and he. And we were talking about it and he kept saying, no, I can’t do it for all of us, so I’m not doing it for anybody. And I kept bugging and I said, look, we’re having enough people of interest here. Can you see? And we were able to take the time to put in the work to do the research and development necessary to figure it out and did it. And we charged no extra for it. And it was actually one of the reasons we ended up having a whole bunch of new accounts. Come on. Was because we didn’t change our pricing, we didn’t charge for this new feature. We actually figured out how to bring something that a few people wanted that we could make money from if we wanted to. We didn’t make money from those few people. We figured it out how to do it across the platform, which brought it to everybody, which was more attractive to the people who had something to sell that we could help because it was our niche. And I feel like you might be doing some of those, but that’s how we were using the pricing. So I’m hearing some subjectiveness and I’m hearing some very interesting value-based approaches that are all right. And I don’t know if we would do it the same today. I actually don’t think we would specifically because back then it was hard to get a merchant account. It was. There was no square or stripe or any. Any. You had to have a merchant account. And it was so hard. We were actually a middle person to allow people that couldn’t get it on their own or it was too expensive for them to have it on their own to be able to do this. So we had other things that had to be done.

Bob Bowdon 44:28
Yeah, this is maybe. This is, I think also pertinent to this is that an example. So there’s a film streaming site that’s been around a long time called Vimeo. Right. And so they’re actually a publicly traded company. They are. And their business model has, I think changed a lot.

Jess Dewell 44:43
I used to use them and I don’t anymore. They outpriced me.

Bob Bowdon 44:47
Oh, I’d love to hear. Okay, I keep telling me.

Jess Dewell 44:50
And then we’ll come back to that. Oh, yeah, I’m very sad.

Bob Bowdon 44:53
The point is they some time ago and I’d have to re up myself on researching their current pricing, it changed somewhat and I’m a little foggy on it, I’ll admit, but I know that at one point in time, not long ago, a couple of years ago, they had what’s called a pro level account, which was I think $125 a year. And you needed to join that and subscribe to that to upload any content to be monetized at all. And they had other fees beyond that and that then. And they were separate from that. But I think that what. When I looked at that kind of, we could do that, right? We could say, oh, you’re going to upload something. All right, here’s your 125 or $200 or whatever. We pick some number. This is the annual subscription. To be able to upload anything to VidaFair, we could do that. And there’s plenty of people that were paying for it. They would think, okay, that’s just that amount, I’ll just spend that. But then what they know is there’s a large percentage of small little filmmakers that never make that money back. They basically paid that subscription. That money disappeared. It was a hopechest kind of wishing kind of thing. And what happened in many of those cases, the company didn’t have to serve very many streams and they barely. What is the cost of data storage? That gets cheaper and cheaper all the time. So Vimeo was basically making a bunch of money just on little filmmakers who were hoping their film would do well. Their films didn’t do well. And just the subscription for just. What does it cost Vimeo to actually have an open an account for this person? Not virtually nothing.

Jess Dewell 46:28
No, it does cost for storage. And I know they changed their model to serve on-demand related to storage because that’s what got me. I was under what, I don’t remember all the details. So I might get this. I’m going to be.

Bob Bowdon 46:42
Yeah, what is it? What does a terabyte hard drive cost these days? And how much of you know is one of these short films going to even be?

Jess Dewell 46:49
And you have the. Then you have the. How much can you fit on it? How much is it going to be used? You still have to have electricity to it. You have to have it on demand regardless. You have to also then have cybersecurity around it. which by the way, I think that’s probably the still so wild Westy that that’s an unknown factor of data protection and integrity. So the more stuff you have, the more assets you have that are actually creating a real liability on the balance sheet for a company. And so that’s a pretty high risk. In other words, those are just some of the things that I see.

Bob Bowdon 47:24
Let’s. Yes. So I’m not saying there are not costs to store data. I’m just saying if that really were the reason they were charging to open these accounts, then at least index it to how much data was being stored. The point is they weren’t doing that at all. You could.

Jess Dewell 47:39
So whatever. I’ll just tell you this. Whatever model I was on of theirs, like I said, I don’t remember anything about it. I paid probably $3,600 a year and with this new model that came out, I was paying $3,600 a month.

Bob Bowdon 47:52
Oh my God.

Jess Dewell 47:53
I was forced to move because my budget did not allow for that.

Bob Bowdon 47:57
Oh my gosh. So that’s insane to me. And that’s.

Jess Dewell 48:00
So we had to make a change. And it was the hardest. It was the hardest change I made because it was the company I loved the most out of all the technology stack we had. Sure wasn’t that crazy.

Bob Bowdon 48:12
Look, I have this old content of mine that’s on Vimeo that’s still there from way back in the day. And it’s great that it’s there. I don’t. I just the. I bring up the point to say you can get people to sometimes pay money in a way that’s not directly connected to your costs because you can just get them to pay it. And they are, they will. And I just don’t. I think that the fairer thing to do is to. As much as you can. We all have overhead, we all have other kinds of. We have to pay programmers, et cetera. We have. But as much as you can get your. And we should be profitable. We should basically have our prices be larger than what our costs are. Our revenue would be larger than our cost. But as much as you can get. Tie your pricing to what your actual costs are, the fairer your business model is.

Jess Dewell 49:04
I’m going to challenge a little and it might not be a direct challenge, but here’s what I would say. If I have had enough, if I have had enough experience to be able to come into an organization and fix a problem in five minutes that took me 25 years to be able to do in five minutes. You’re only paying. You think it’s the fairest thing to do, to only pay for the five minutes? Not all of the experience that allowed me to find it that way that fast.

Bob Bowdon 49:34
That’s. I don’t disagree with that example, but that’s a different kind of situation. You’re so the, in other words, the cost of hiring a. The cost of hiring a cardiologist to fix my heart or something, or the cost of hiring a, I don’t know, a lawyer if I’m arrested or something. Yeah, you would have to pay more than you would pay. Yeah, they. Those people charge more based on their experience and their expertise. That’s absolutely.

Jess Dewell 50:00
How about. How do you take into account rising labor costs? I know you’re probably taking advantage of technology and all the technology. All the technology things are there. I have had. Last year alone, I had four pieces of technology. This is not including the conversation. We were already having four pieces of technology more than. It was a 200% or more increase in pricing. And I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions, just was something like out of the blue, four pieces of my technology stack happened to do this thing. And when I look a little closer, there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some are all conjecture, it doesn’t even matter. Some I agree with, some I don’t agree with. Regardless of what the decision was, it happened. And. And there are costs that have to happen. So how many times have you raised your cost from your flat fee, Bob?

Bob Bowdon 50:49
Zero times.

Jess Dewell 50:50
Okay. You’ve been able to use technology to keep everything status quo. I’m impressed.

Bob Bowdon 50:56
Thank you. We’re not 20 years old either. Where we are about function on a functional basis. More about two years old. I would say. It’s maybe less of a brag than you think, but still, I, I, I don’t know.

Jess Dewell 51:07
I think in this day and age, the fact you made it two years without a price increase is pretty awesome.

Bob Bowdon 51:11
Thank you. But still, that said. Yeah, no, I am, I’m in the camp of set your pricing based on your costs and then you can make, you have a profit, have a margin. Profit margin is good, that’s fine. But I think that charging for other things just because you can get people to pay for it is to me a maybe it’s a more of a short-term vision for how to grow the business. You end up with more fans and devotees and evangelists. If people feel like you are, you’re, you’re not pricing in a way that you know, just because you can, so to speak.

Jess Dewell 51:45
Oh, this is interesting. I didn’t know I was going to say this. I would also say that it is complete in alignment with who your customer is and so it’s more than the profit.

Bob Bowdon 51:59
Yeah.

Jess Dewell 52:00
Is that a fair statement to make on your path about you?

Bob Bowdon 52:03
Oh no, let’s, yeah, thanks for that. Thanks for the softball. Listen, I feel this, I’m at the risk of sounding grandiose or self-congratulatory. I feel like allowing people to make money from the their work at creative work, making videos, whatever the kind of video it is, is a noble pursuit. As I pat myself on the back and our, on our team on the back. It’s actually a good thing. It’s actually, it’s there. It’s a democracy, democracy, democratic sort of small d kind of pursuit to help people monetize their work in a way that’s fair to where they set their own fee. And I like the idea of a world where people don’t have to just wait for some big company like a television network or a streaming service to anoint them as the kind of next big thing or something or I don’t know, hired for talk show or something like that. Like the idea that anyone can create their own podcast these days and then if they’re popular enough and have an audience, they can make money from it. That’s a great thing for just the idea of just the concept of open dialogue and creative ideas and free speech and all of those things that I.

Jess Dewell 53:14
Believe in creating access for people to connect with those that will benefit from their. From what they are making and putting together and producing. Seems. It always seems like there’s an underserved market there, and it feels like you are tapping into and serving that market. Am I on track?

Bob Bowdon 53:35
Yeah. And I’ll tell you something. Especially look at music. It’s so hard. There were recording artists used to make money from CDs and stuff and cassette tapes and stuff, and in vinyl a lot. How much are they doing that anymore? They basically have to tour to make any money. Why? What if they don’t come to your town? Like, why can’t it be possible that a musician makes a music video? And if they have a million followers or 10,000 followers on Instagram or on TikTok or some other platform, why can’t they allow their fans to support them through renting their music videos? I think helping people like musicians make money in a way that’s become damn near impossible is a facet of what you just described.

Jess Dewell 54:16
So lower barrier to entry for them.

Bob Bowdon 54:20
Yeah, skip the middleman. Go right to the fan base and create content that they want. And if they do want it, give them a way that they can pay for that content and let the creator benefit. That’s really our business model in a nutshell.

Jess Dewell 54:34
So what makes it bold? What makes it bold to continue to go after technologies and create technologies that reduce the barrier to entry and get more people connected?

Bob Bowdon 54:48
One thing that makes it bold is this is not a model that’s ever been done before. We don’t see anything like this. The probably the closest is Patreon, which is a subscription platform, but at least that’s a way for an artist to. A lot of YouTubers will have a podcast and they’ll say, okay, these are. This is our free show. But if you’re a super fan, you can subscribe to our Patreon. And we have a show every Saturday at noon that comes out on our Patreon. And that’s a way that they can have people subscribe and make money. And we say if you’re already making that paywall content on a subscription platform, you repurpose the same content on a pay-per-view platform like VidaFair. And that’s a way that you can let the fan and follower decide how they want to support. Usually when you give people more ways to buy something, you end up selling more of that thing because you let them decide what’s the best model for them.

Jess Dewell 55:41
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I want to share with 25 people. I know when you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share in the comments. I would like for you to engage with us. What is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important. It’s important to because yeah, there are going to be how-tos. Yes, there are going to be steps. Yes, you’re going to be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down. I wish I wasn’t doing this and I could actually take action on that right now. But guess what, you’re not. So engage right now because that one thing you want to share with others will be. The thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 56:32
Jess hosts the Bold Business Podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host Jess Dewell. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at redirection.com. Thank you for joining us and special thanks to our post-production team at the Scott Treatment.