DON DODGE: Hi, I'm Don Dodge and this is Google Root Access.
Today my guest is Misha Leybovich.
He's president and CEO of Meograph.
Welcome.
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Thanks!
Good to be here.
DON DODGE: So tell me about Meograph.
What is it?
What does it do?
MISHA LEYBOVICH: So we're a multimedia creation platform.
Makes it easy to combine video, audio, images, text, links,
music, other interactive.
Very simple interface and compelling output
that's kind of like multimedia stories, mixes, and mashups.
And that's what we've had live on our site for about a year.
Where people come, they create content,
then they share it via social networks
or embed it other places.
What we're moving towards now, and what
we're going to talk about here, is
we're now licensing that creation platform itself
to other companies so they can embed it in their site
as a native branded experience with all the enterprise
features around it.
And engage their customers and creating user generated content
about their brands, their products, and their services.
DON DODGE: So let's talk business models.
You started with the a B to C model.
Tell us about that.
How did that work?
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Well at first, I
was just trying to solve my own problem.
That I had done a lot of traveling after college.
I had been to about 70 countries in the seven years
after college.
And had a lot of cool media, love telling stories,
but I have no multimedia creation skills.
Don't know how to use Final Cut Pro or Photoshop
or Premiere or anything.
So I just want a way to create richer content
myself to tell cool stories online.
In a way that I felt it was native to the way
with all these different media.
So we put it out there just because, hey,
if I like doing it, other people might like doing it too,
and let's see what happens.
So it has been great.
We've grown very fast.
We have tens of thousands of regular users.
Yesterday, we had over half a million page views.
So we're doing well.
But as we really started to think about it,
like where does the business actually exists there?
We started to realize, gosh, it's difficult to actually
build a business off of storytelling,
a consumer ad-supported business.
Because for that, you need tens or hundreds
of millions users that use you weekly, if not daily.
And storytelling is something that
is valuable and important but not frequent.
Maybe a couple times of year.
So that sort of model wasn't going to work for us.
So we start to think about more B to B. Offer
this for other businesses to create content themselves
about their brands.
And there we found that our product,
while interesting and different, the end result of it
was not differentiated enough from them just going and hiring
a video crew to do something custom, exactly as they need.
Hard to build a business that way.
But as we started talking to these businesses
and we're talking the marketers, we
said look, you want your customers,
your audience, to create content.
You want them to be engaged, you would buzz around your brand.
Why don't you get them to use our product, it's totally
consumer grade and super easy, to create content
about your business.
And the feedback we kept getting was we like your product and we
like our customers taking this action,
but how is it going to work?
We're going to send them to your site,
and they're going to create an account on Meograph,
create content.
Spend all the time, by the way, and all the engagement
on your site rather than ours, grab the embed code,
if they know what that is, come back and paste it.
Ta da!
It's a lot of steps.
And so we started thinking about well
if we could provide this on your site
as a branded native experience, is that interesting?
And there we started to really get very positive feedback
from companies.
DON DODGE: So the product solves a complexity problem
and makes it easier for mere mortals to create nice content.
So you found a problem and you solved it,
but in applying a revenue model to it,
consumers weren't willing to pay,
businesses had alternatives it wasn't that differentiated.
So B2C didn't work, B2B didn't work,
and now you're doing B2B2c where the business' media
companies are your customers, and they're
the ones that are pay, and the consumers
are using it and creating content.
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Right.
That's exactly it.
It's very difficult.
It's difficult to get a consumer's time and creativity
in the first place.
To get their money as well, is nye impossible to the scale
of building a really big business.
DON DODGE: So let's talk about the pivots.
So you pivoted now three times.
Typically when you pivot, you think,
well if I only added more features,
or if I could make it easier to use,
or if I tried different marketing it would work.
So making those pivot decisions, how
did you get through that to decide, no I've got to change?
MISHA LEYBOVICH: You just got to be honest with yourself
about what your product is, what it's good at and what it's not,
and ultimately what real business value
you're providing to someone.
Because someone is going to write you a check.
If it's a consumer-based business,
its advertisers writing a check.
But someone is writing you a check.
We just had to really think about what does our product do
and what real problem does it solve for someone
that can write a check.
This sounds like a silly thing, like it should be obvious.
But before this, I was at McKinsey & Company,
a big business consulting firm for two years.
Did a lot of business problems, and you would think that that
would be self apparent, but I think a lot of the culture
around early-stage entrepreneurship right now is,
like Paul Graham says, "Build something people want. "
And that's important.
That's a baseline.
That's table stakes.
But it's not sufficient.
You have to build something that people want
and that someone will pay for.
Someone will write a check at some point.
And so we just had to be honest with ourselves
as we went along this journey as to what value are we providing
for someone, how can we help them get promoted
or not get fired, whoever it is that's writing the check,
and how do we give them the things
that they need where they can prove the value around it?
DON DODGE: Awesome!
So where these true pivots where you stopped doing something
and started doing it a different way,
or today do you still have a B2C direct-to-consumer component,
a direct-to-business component, and now this new model?
MISHA LEYBOVICH: It's really been an evolution.
If you come to our site, you can still create content there
and then embed it elsewhere.
And that's great for us, it's a great publicity.
People buzz about the product.
And we learn.
We learn from hearing user feedback about it.
Businesses still use it.
Major news orgs still just use us, embed us in their page
to tell multimedia stories and businesses do too.
And so now our new build is all these enterprise
features around to the creation product.
So when you embed it in your site now,
you have the moderation, the analytics, the customization,
the ability to embed it with one line of code
so it's not complex to do.
It's all on top of the core product.
And it all still stays true to the original mission
of just wanting to make it easy for mere mortals
to create rich content and express themselves and tell
stories about things that they care about.
And now we're allowing people to do that
but really providing value to the people who
are willing to pay and benefit when that thing happens.
DON DODGE: So you solved the customer problem
or the complexity problem fairly early on,
but the real journey was figuring out
what is the revenue model and business
model that can make this into this a business.
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Sure.
And to be honest, sometimes you just
got to wonder in the desert for a little bit
until you figure it out.
I don't think that we would have stumbled across this problem
that marketers have.
They're thinking about the rise of content marketing,
they're thinking about more user engagement
and two-way relationships with their customer base.
I didn't know all that when we started.
Nor would we have had a consumer grade end-product
that was good enough for them.
So it's OK to wander for a little bit
and figure it out, but at some point not too long after that,
you have to think about what really, really
what does the business come down to?
DON DODGE: So the lesson then for founders and viewers
is keep trying different revenue models and business models.
Sometimes you have the technical problems solved,
it's how do you make it a business.
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Right.
And if you don't have it figured out to start,
don't use it as an excuse to not get started.
Get going, try something, put it out there,
and get some validation that at least you've
built something that people want.
But don't have your business strategy
rely on a hope and a prayer that you catch lightning in a bottle
and that it becomes an overnight part of the cultural Zeitgeist.
If it is, then great.
But it's good to really think about
where can you provide business value around whatever it
is you're building.
DON DODGE: Great advice.
Well thank you, Misha.
Thank you for joining us.
MISHA LEYBOVICH: Thank you.
DON DODGE: I'd like to remind our viewers that we
have a $2000 credit for Google Cloud.
So if you're developing applications in the cloud,
try out the Google Cloud and get a $2000 credit for doing it.
The way to sign up for it will be right on your screen.
Thank you for joining us and see you next time.