Yeah.

So I'm like, "Brett, hey, this is real money." He's like, "Stephen, I'd love supporting small business in Wisconsin.

I'm a Chevy guy.

I don't have a national deal.

I could do it, but it should be more money." So I'm like, "How much money do you think this should be?" He's like, "Shit, I don't know.

I'd do it for 10 grand." So I remember, like, dreading calling this car dealer back 'cause he thought he was getting something for 400.

Now I'm telling him it's 10 grand, and to my surprise, he's like, "Let's do it." I'm like, "Really?" He's like, "Yeah, I'd been trying to do a deal with him for seven years, but Buss Cook, his agent, never took me seriously." I know to do the commercial, I would've had to fly him private from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Green Bay, film with him, post-production.

Um, so is, are they, um, is that the same market you're in, or is it, like, total influencer different from celebrity?

Okay.

If you were in this sorority, if you were a Tri Delt and the Pi Pis had a party, you weren't gonna go to their event.

But because it was Zach and I, even though we were in fraternities, and we branded it Spartan Entertainment, everybody felt welcome to come, and it actually made everything more fun.

So people would come to our events because they were bigger, there was more value, and there was some killer drink special.

And then on top of that business, we ended up having a college moving business where at the end of the semester, you know, we'd send a couple football and wrestlers to come pick your luggage up, bring it to a warehouse, and then bring it back to your next dorm.

Because ninety percent of Duke students are not from the state of North Carolina, so everybody's flying in, and they don't have...

You know, it's not like U of I or DePaul, where people are packing their car up and bringing it back.

Okay.

Mm.

So I remember in the early days, there was a famous basketball player, and he was making max salary in the NBA, which was $25 million at the time.

It's a lot more now, but back then, 25 million.

And I remember him telling me he needed $10,000 to do a video, and I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Well, a couple weeks ago, I got paid 40,000 to show up at a bar mitzvah." But I'm like, "Okay, but you're 24 years old.

You're making all this money."

Yeah

...

they don't even know anybody to ask to code, or they don't have the money to pay somebody to go do it.

Will you allow your fiance one day to go on a bachelorette party? [laughs]

Yeah, I think you have to be able to trust the person that you're with.

Like, I'm not a...

I'm, like, a full trust person.

I don't, I don't have any issues with that.

But there are people, like, if they're really, really unhappy...

And in both these cases, it was like they were supposed to get married to these people.

Yeah.

How were you able to take your idea and turn it into what ultimately became a billion dollar business?

At the beginning, we were talking about the things that make you or one well-suited to go and build a business.

And you hear people talk about product market fit a lot, but in Cameo, we really had founder market fit.

So I've mentioned to you that I have this guy, Martin, who had done movie production and he was an NFL agent.

But if he was as big of an agent as Ari Emanuel, or he was as big of a producer as Jerry Bruckheimer, he's never going to think about a business like this.

It's kind of the scraps at that point, right? If you could be producing a blockbuster movie.

But because he had had the connections, he knew enough about the industry to be dangerous, but he just hadn't hit it yet.

And in a 68 period, our

How do they sign up? How do they come to you? How do they find out? How do they make money?

Yeah.

Three main ways.

The first is we have a team of people that are constantly DMing, uh, people that we think could be good.

One of the cool things about Cameo at this scale now is, is our search bar is kind of a, a window to the zeitgeist.

So all of a sudden, like we'll see these names that are popping on the trending list that we never heard of, and it may be somebody just went viral for starting a new TikTok trend or some new show on Hulu came out that we, wasn't on our radar yet.

So the second we see that, our team will go attack and go get those people onto the platform.

Interesting.

Oh my God

... ev- Like, I just, I just see that over and over and over again.

And, you know, in fact, there's a personality test we used to make everybody take in the OG days of Cameo.

It's called 16personalities.com. And, and only 3% of the human, of the population has what's called the entrepreneurial archetype.

And, you know, this is someone that's, like, forward-looking.

It's someone that's not deterred by failure.

They're resilient.

Ah.