What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? Today, I'm talking
to Brian Jagger, one of the co-founders of a company called Casting Calls America. Brian,
you and I have gotten to meet face-to-face at various conferences a few times over the
course of the last year, which is great because I've been able to see your business evolve
over time, and now I have the pleasure of having you on the podcast. So welcome to the
show, and thanks so much for joining me.
Thank you, Cortland. It's an honor to be a guest on the show.
Tell us about Casting Calls America. What is it exactly, and how does it work?
Casting Calls America is a software as a service business that connects casting directors and
producers from regional areas to local actors that are looking for acting opportunities.
So basically, if you're a casting director in Boston, and you're looking to find an actor
for your short film or your independent film or commercial, etc., then you would post what
you're looking for as far as actors go on our site, and then the actors who are registered
with our local Boston site would be able to get the notification that there is a role
that they may be a match for based upon their age demographics, etc., and they are able
to then submit through our software to that project.
Cool. So you're like a marketplace connecting people making movies and doing casting with
the actual actors looking for these roles.
Yeah, exactly. I realize now that we're a two-sided marketplace, though I didn't even
know what that term was when we got started.
Yeah, give us an idea of some of the basics behind your company. When did you get started?
How many employees do you have? How much money are you making, etc.?
Yeah, so we've been around just a little over four years. It was four years this past June,
and we started with one site. We do a little bit different than other companies in our
space and other companies in general that are SaaS. We regionalize it, so we don't actually
operate one website. We operate 30-plus websites, so each market has its own site. For example,
I was referencing Boston, so we have Casting Calls Boston that services the Boston market.
We have Sacramento Casting, which was our first site that services Sacramento, and now
we're like I said over 30 sites throughout the country.
Four years ago, we started Sacramento. After that, we realized that a couple things. One,
we would never, because we weren't charging very much, we were only charging $5 per user
at the time. We're up to $7.95 now, but we were never going to make it where it could
even pay for itself doing one market, but if we copied and pasted, if you will, the
service and the concept to other markets that were also looking for this type of service,
then we'd be able to at least sustain the company. That's what we did.
We started with Sacramento, and then shortly thereafter, we went into Portland and New
Orleans and then Denver and Phoenix, and now we're in 30-plus markets and we'll be in 44
by the end of this year. Now, we have four full-time employees in addition to myself.
I have two co-founders or partners that are working on it as well, and we have two part-time
people.
Whenever I talk to somebody who's building a tech business or a tech-enabled business
outside of the tech industry, I always want to know the story behind that. How did you
break into the film industry and become familiar with its inner workings?
Yeah, so I actually have a background in marketing development and politics and also in some
political stuff and was doing theater on the side for fun, just like a lot of people in
community theater. I wrote a play and it did very well. It was an original and got nominated
for an Best Original, and so I got a little more into it. I had some major medical issues
about eight years ago that caused me to redo my life, if you will, and one of the things
I got more into at that time was into acting. I started doing some acting projects locally
in Sacramento, and one thing led to another as far as meeting people on set.
Coming from a marketing development background, I was always a networker, and so I met people
who'd tell me about other opportunities, and I started working. I got a cast as a FBI agent
on a TV show called I Almost Got Away With It, which filmed down in San Francisco. I
was fortunate enough to meet some great people on that set. I approached it a little differently.
I came at it from a professional standpoint versus an actor standpoint and got to know
some of the people, and they had a role shortly thereafter that was a much bigger role on
a different episode of a different TV show by the same company, and they put me in that.
My second TV show filming was as the primary bad guy in an episode of a TV show called
I Faked My Own Death that aired on Discovery Channel. That went well, and then I got to
do just a few months after that, I got cast in a production where I got to do a scene
of Philip Seymour Hoffman, which was amazing, and just started building up and doing more
and more acting. Within a year, I was working full time as an actor, and also at the same
time networking a lot. My daughters, who... Gosh, this is eight years ago, so would have
been about... My oldest was about 10 years old at the time. She really was excited about
what I was doing, and she wanted to start doing some acting stuff. I learned very quickly
about what it took to be a parent of a child actor, because in California, there's a lot
of rules and regulations. My daughter got cast on a episode of a show called Smosh,
which is a web series on YouTube that has, I don't know what they're up to now, I think
like 25, 26 million subscribers, and a very, very popular web series. In fact, I think
they were the first one to break a million subscribers on YouTube.
As a parent, took her to the set and started talking with the director, and he just happened
to mention that he was looking for some people for the next episode. I happened to know somebody
that I thought would be perfect based upon my networking and meeting other people on
other sets, and I recommended them, and they ended up getting cast. The director called
me after that and said, hey, I have another need for the next week's episode. Do you know
anybody that meets this criteria? I did. After about the third time, he said, why don't we
just bring you on as our casting director? I came on to working with the Smosh team as
their casting director, and it was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. It was a great opportunity,
and I also did a little bit of set work with them as a second assistant director, helping
me when I cast a lot of people, but the challenge was, and here's where the pain came in, is
that I would get submissions. I was casting a music video, and I was getting all these
submissions from people, and they were sending me their headshots and resumes and emails,
and they would send their resume, and it would say, instead of Courtland Island resume, it
would say, my resume. Well, now I got to go in. I got to change the name on it, and I
got to change the image from image 4789 to Courtland Island resume or a headshot, because
I've got to then forward it on to the director for his final approval on the people that
I bring in. It took me hours to do all this, and it was one of those, there's got to be
a better way to do this moments. One of my best friends happens to be a database engineer,
and this is where knowing people that are already in your life that work out well, and
I reached out to him. His name is Brian Heath, an amazing engineer, and said, hey, can you
help me build something that will make my process of reviewing these submissions easier?
We started working on something, and then shortly after, about halfway through the development,
it was one of those, why don't we just make this available as a SaaS instead of just for
me? And that's what we did.
That's quite a journey, Brian, from actor to casting director to entrepreneur. Did you
know from the outset that you might want to someday start a business? When did you first
even open yourself up to the idea of becoming an entrepreneur?
When I was eight.
So way back.
I've always been, yeah, way back. I've always been on the entrepreneur side as well. I literally,
I was joking with my kids the other day when I was a kid, maybe even younger than eight.
One of one of my playsets, quote unquote, was a like, my office playset where you got
this package and it had like business cards that were like had lines that you would fill
in and you'd write in your name and your phone number on them and it had letterhead that
you would do the same thing for. That's how long ago I was interested in sitting at a
desk and running my own business.
What was the first real business that you started? Was it Casting Calls America?
No, actually, I had my own. I started my own little ad agency when I was 15 years old.
I did stickers and promotional things for local businesses in my hometown. That was
and I went and got my my business license and everything from the from the county. That
was not a long term profitable venture, but it was something that I kind of learned a
little bit right out right out the gate. And then I had a retail business actually when
I was 18 years old, I owned a small video store back when that was a thing, aging myself
a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Actually, I guess I was a little bit over. I guess I was maybe
19. But, but yeah, so that was that was quite the adventure and learned a lot from that.
It was right when things were changing from video to DVD. So it was not the best time
to be in the video store world. No, obviously, nobody was, you know, long for that world,
but had that experience. And then actually, my my two partners that I'm with now, and
I started a business back in 06. That was also a software company. And that too was
not long for this world. What happened there? And what did your company do? So that was
called e job fairs. And I still think it was a good concept. It was more of a timing and
technology issue, really. I mean, and Brian, Keith was the engineer for that as well. And
we were a way ahead of our time and be we were at the wrong time. So that the concept
for that was instead of a job fair being at a convention center or hotel or what have
you on a Wednesday from 11 to three, it would be on the website on a Wednesday from 11 to
three for an area. So it wasn't just this free for all it was very specific. So we would
have very specific businesses that would log in. And they would have virtual tables, if
you will, virtual booths at this electronic job fair, and they would have a queue. And
so they could go as a job seeker, you would log in and you could see who was there and
read the job descriptions that they had available. And if you were interested, you could click,
you know, start conversation, and it would allow you to then be put in their queue. And
the recruiter from the company could would be logged in, it would be able to see who
was in their queue, and they could go back and forth between the conversations, and be
able to interview people basically via chat, all in real time, all through the website,
all during this these specific times. And our kind of unique difference was that for
the recruiters, unlike a traditional job fair, where you have to sit behind the booth and
wait for somebody to come up to you, the recruiters were able to search through who was logged
in, and look at their resumes, and they were able to initiate the conversations. And that
was our big differentiator for what we were doing. And all that sounds great, except for
two things. One, we were way ahead of ourselves with with the technology, because there was
no AWS, there was no rampable cloud storage, and we crash. We have so many people having
so many conversations, and we had some big companies that were involved with us and working
with us. And so the companies loved the concept and loved the idea. The other so we had some
technology issues, because we couldn't keep up with our own volume.
Yeah, well, it's pretty ambitious in 2006, to try to build some sort of live chat based
system and scale that with only one developer.
Yeah, that was it. It was just it was just Brian and
he has a lot to take on. Yeah, oh, it was so much. And I don't even realize how much
it was if I thinking back, I go, my gosh, that was 12 years ago. And that was so ahead
of ahead of the times on what was happening. And so but I mean, he made it conceptually
work. It just we couldn't handle the volume. It wasn't ready for it. We didn't know what
to expect. And because it was all live login, so it wasn't as predictable as we had hoped.
The other challenge is is that it was 2006. And right when we were really getting it ready
to go is when the crash hit. And the last thing companies were spending money on was
attending job fair virtual or not, right? So alongside your video store businesses to
the second business in a row, where the market just sucked. And instead of writing a huge
wave that's forming, you're actually strapped to some plane that's crashing and burning
and plummeting to the ground. Yeah, I still think that it's a viable concept. And I wouldn't
mind going back to it in the future. But thankfully, we're doing some really great things with
casting calls America to where we're growing and finding more opportunities than than less
because, you know, in the film production world, the barrier to entry is so much less
now than it used to be. And the opportunities and the the need for production is more with
there being more places for companies and individuals to put their their productions
on with Facebook and watch the videos and YouTube and everything. There's just so much
more opportunity on on all ends that I think we're we're now on the the right wave. Yeah,
it sounds like it. That's a much better place to be. Let me ask, how did you find your customers
for this online job fair website? Because that's the part that most people struggle
with a lot of people build things and then nobody shows up. And yet you guys had so many
people that your website couldn't withstand the traffic. Where did you find all these
customers?
Yeah, so again, we were two sided marketplace without knowing what that was at the time.
And with that, it was pretty much cold outreach for the employers. It was it was calling up
companies and saying, hey, we finding out who the the recruiter was and saying we have
a job fair coming up. But here's the unique difference. You get to initiate the conversations.
And that was very appealing to people, to the recruiters, they liked that concept. And
so we had trying to think back to some of the companies. Remember, Carmax was hiring,
used us to hire for management positions, Wells Fargo used us so we had some some good
companies. And for getting the job seekers, and I wish this still existed, but Google
radio was our number one source. Google radio, what even is that? Yeah, so Google actually
had a radio platform where you could buy excess radio time like you can add words. And it
was fantastic. You would tell it what market you want to be in and what your budget was,
and you would upload your 30 second commercial. And they would basically just slide it in
to different radio stations that had the excess time. And it was extremely cost effective.
It was very easy to use. And I don't know if it was because it wasn't profitable enough
for Google. But they they shut it down. Probably 2007 2008 shortly after we kind of see star
operations that they they stopped doing Google radio, which was unfortunate, because that
was a great, great marketing platform. Sounds like the entire deck was stacked against you
with that business where everything that you depend on sort of crashing. Oh, yeah. Oh, totally.
And that's one of the things that that that scares me now is that there's, you know, we
use Facebook and we use Google to find to find people a lot of word of mouth on the
casting director side. But one was a challenge, but it's hard with actors to share other resources,
if they're concerned about it being a resource that could take away from their own opportunities.
So what I mean by that is that, you know, if an actor is having a hard time finding local
opportunities, the last thing they necessarily want to do is, and this isn't true for for all
actors, to be clear, there are some actors that are very, very open about helping other actors.
But some actors are skeptical to give out that resource and share it with others because they
they're afraid that that's going to then increase the competition that they have for getting the
jobs. And so word of mouth is not necessarily as strong as maybe in other industries. And again,
that's definitely not all actors, because there are some that are all about supporting other
actors and helping them out and going to their shows and, and being really supportive. But
we have to rely on, you know, the platforms that are out there with Facebook and Google and other
new media opportunities. And you know, if all of a sudden one of those goes away,
that's definitely a concern about well, now what do we do?
So what are some of the what you say is the biggest lesson that you've taken away from
the previous businesses that you've run? Because I know a lot of people learn by reading.
And it's also extremely impactful to learn by doing. And I think it's easy once you started a
business, and you've made some mistakes, you've seen certain things occur that kill your business
to, I guess, build up an immunity to those types of things and not make those same mistakes again.
Yeah, I think the speed at which we we tried to be all things at all times to everyone,
I think being a little bit more one at a time, like we have been now, if we'd started this
company with casting calls America with a whole bunch of funding, and in all this, you know,
amazing resources, I don't think we would be nearly as successful as we are. Because we went
basically market by market and built that market found the people that were needing our services
on both ends, built those up made the connections, built a reputation with amongst the casting
directors that we have a really good software platform. Whereas before we tried to, you know,
we created this mass schedule of Okay, let's get as many people in as possible. And let's do as
many job fairs as quickly as we possibly can, without really learning from our mistakes the
day before. So we have a problem on Tuesday, we don't have time to fix it, because we have another
event on Wednesday, another one on Thursday, and we we pushed ourselves too hard too fast.
So let's talk about casting calls America, you've talked about how you were the casting director,
and that ended up running into all these problems yourself with trying to standardize the submissions
that actors are giving you. And you realize there had to be a better way. When you called up your
old co founder, Brian, he was he immediately on board? Or is he skeptical? Because you guys had
already gone through this business that had not worked out? Well, we have another partner Kirk,
who was probably a little bit more the one who was skeptical, because he was also involved in
the job fairs and probably felt the financial pain more than not probably felt the financial pain
more than the rest of us did is he was more financially invested. I think that for this
Brian, who is such a skilled engineer, saw it as a challenge at first of Okay, how can I how can I
make this work to what me Brian needs, and solve this problem. And then once we did that, and I
said, Hey, let's let's monetize this and see if people are interested in it. And people were
interested right away. Then I think, you know, he's a very smart guy, I think he saw the writing
on the wall very quickly that okay, people people want this, and they need this. And so we have an
opportunity here. And in theory, it would be quote unquote, easy, because once we have the main
software, we could just duplicate it in the other sites. Of course, the reality is is that it's
never done. It there's constantly, you know, we're updating it by we I mean, he is updating
it constantly and creating new features and adding new features and doing new things. So though it's,
it's never done, but at least now we have it where we're not changing 44 different websites
individually, we we make one, again, he makes a change. And it goes out to all sites,
knowing that that was kind of the model of what we wanted to do, I think was more appealing because
of how scalable it was, based upon the the early success that we had.
Do you know right from the beginning that you wanted to go with this model, where you build a
different website for every city, I think most people starting online businesses would think,
Oh, you know, the advantage of being online is that I can reach everybody in every city. So let's
just do a global thing. How did you know that you should go city by city?
The initial thinking was we just did it for Sacramento, because that's where I was working.
And that's where I needed it. I was casting a project that was filming in the Sacramento area.
So I needed, I needed a tool that would connect me to Sacramento actors. And then we made it
available to everybody else. And we need to keep the price point low enough to where it made sense
for people to be a part of it. So because of that, it wasn't realistic to try to create a national
site, because we would then have to do basically the other model that that we're talking about,
that doesn't make a lot of sense, which is go too big too fast. And we wouldn't have been able to
market it right or do it right. Whereas when we stuck with one area, we were able to really
focus on getting users in that area from both sides. So I don't think that we ever planned on
it being what it is now and in a good way. But we knew that it would never be sustainable by itself
in one city, but we also knew that we had to do it in one city first to make it work. So I think
once we've realized that, then that's when we went, okay, this is, this is something that's scalable.
Let's go ahead and start thinking about how we do that. So I don't think it was initially
the plan right when we built it, because it was really going to be more of an internal tool.
But once we released it in the one market and saw the response from the one market,
then we realized that we could, that we were going to need to do a national rollout city by city.
I think starting small like that is so, there's so many advantages to it, because not only do you
get to learn as you go and not really bite off more than you can chew and end up in the same
situation you were in with your job fair website, but it's also just quicker and easier to get your
product out the door. And I think what kills a lot of early entrepreneurs businesses is they have
this grand vision of what they're going to build. And they're thinking about two or three years down
the road. And it takes them six, eight, 12 months to even get their first product out the door, you
know, by the time they've got that done, they've already invested so much that they, you know, if
they've gone in the wrong direction, it's hard to fix. Or if they've run out of money, then you know,
the company's dead on arrival. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And a lot of it was that trial and
error of kind of figuring out what didn't work before being able to figure out what did work.
And kind of went with that model of, okay, we don't have to worry about trying to market
to everybody by only having one city that we're servicing. We had, you know, one Facebook page
and one, one Twitter account and one website that was just for a regional market. So we're not
trying to get, you know, media coverage throughout the country or trying to get users from throughout
the country. Because in being a two sided marketplace, we needed those those sides to connect
and trying to do that on a national scale, I couldn't imagine doing without millions of
dollars versus bootstrapping it from, you know, from zero. So that was absolutely the best way to
go. And I think continues to be the best even if we had millions of dollars in the bank right now,
I don't think in to do it over again, I don't think I'd want to I think that this regional
rollout and by market rollout has been helpful in not only scaling the the size of the software
servicing, but also staffing, marketing tools, we can go with smaller plans to begin with and build
up as we as we got bigger, there's there's a lot of benefits to having that controlled scaling
that allows for not just the front end of the business, but the back end of the business to
grow at the same time. It's almost like you're franchising yourself, like you figured out how
to make it work in one city. And now you're opening up McDonald's, well, casting calls America
and every other city based on the learnings from your first go. That's funny, that's that's exactly
how I've referred to it to is almost like a franchise model, except for it's all run from,
you know, one office or two locations, actually, have a California office and an Idaho office. But
that's exactly the mentality is that we we do it all from that we we franchise ourselves.
Tell me about the process of building that original business in Sacramento. How did you
go about building up both sides, this two sided marketplace and how things changed and moving to
other cities since then? Yeah, I mean, with Sacramento, because I was already doing a lot
of of casting, and I was working as an actor, I was, I was personally on both sides of the
marketplace. So that allowed me the opportunity to already have a lot of connections. So I knew a
lot of the people that were casting projects. There's a casting director in the Bay Area. Her
name is Tony Stanowitz. She cast me a lot of projects and and got to know me as a professional
and as an actor. And so she had had me refer people to her before. And so when I told her
about this site, she was excited to test it out and use it. It was one of our first first users
as a casting director, and I knew others that were doing projects. And so I already had that,
that those connections with within my own personal network, and already knew a lot of the actors that
were in the community and got a lot of their feedback to about what they wanted. And so being,
being personally on both sides of that marketplace helped me a lot and having those connections and
knowing what we need to build, at least for our MVP, which again was another term that wasn't even
in my, on my radar. But that's what we ended up with. We ended up with it with an MVP that made
it work and allowed us to make those connections with the people that we already had. Then going
on to the new cities, we had to do a completely different outreach because we didn't have those
connections. And so we had to kind of figure out, well, what do we need first, the jobs or the people?
And we quickly realized that we needed the people first. So we, we kind of pre-register,
did marketing for pre-registration, saying, Hey, we're going to be offering the service.
If you're interested, you know, let us know here, you can put in your email and information here.
And then that way, once we kind of hit a threshold, we were able to then start finding the projects
that we're casting and launch the site at that time. That's really fascinating to hear about
because you've got both sides of the experience. I think a lot of people listening who want to
start businesses, look around at their current job and what the people that they know and the
skills that they have, and they don't necessarily see an opportunity to start a business. And so
they end up having to start something from scratch in an industry that they don't know
necessarily as much about. And they don't have all these connections. And they have to learn from
their customers and learn how to market to people kind of from scratch. Whereas you had
both perspectives, you had Sacramento, where you had this network built up, and you knew exactly
what to do. And you had all these new cities, where you're going in and you're starting from
scratch. What was it like in these new cities? How did you, for example, figure out that you needed
to start by getting the actors and before you started getting the roles? And how did you even
get these actors to sign up for your list in the first place? Definitely a trial and error. It was
very much a, and you said, you know, know what to do in Sacramento. I wouldn't go that far.
But I would say at least I had a baseline of I knew what I wanted as a casting director.
And so that's, you know, there's plenty of things that we've added since then that we've gotten
feedback from from additional casting directors that are at a much higher level than I ever was
doing much bigger projects that say, Oh, you don't have this feature and I need that. Oh, I,
I never thought of that because I wasn't casting that big of a project. And now we have that
feature. And same thing with the actor side, I knew what I wanted as an actor. So it was based
on that. And then we were able to get feedback once we had users in. And I also had the additional
benefit of being the parent of two child actors. And so I also had that mentality of how to protect
the kids on, because there are, you know, inappropriate, weird people out there. And so
I was able to formulate that. So at least we had the core product and what people, you know,
generalized in a medium sized market were wanting. So when we went to the new, the new cities, we
already had the MVP plus we got feedback from the users that started in Sacramento about what they
liked and what they didn't like. And we were able to use some of that feedback and kind of promoting
saying, Hey, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. And this is why it's going
to help everybody. Are you interested in pre registered? And so that was, you know, a lot of
it was probably I'd say 90% of the outreach was through Facebook. And it was, it was me sending
messages to people that that were directly that were involved in the industry in the areas that
we're moving into. We had brand ambassadors that we worked with, where we found and identified
people that were already active in that community, and saying, Hey, let me do a demo with you and
show you what this is all about. And then let you be kind of the champion of this and start
introducing it to other people that are in that community that you know. And we found a lot of
success with that too. Sounds like a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of
trial and error. What are some of the things that you tried that that didn't work out?
Oh, that's a great question. And there's definitely a lot of a lot of things we tried more
mass media stuff, and that did not work for this. I mentioned how much I love Google radio back in
Oh, 607. Well, that doesn't exist anymore. And so we tried to well, what is terrestrial radio
look like in cost. And that just, that was not a good idea. Way, way too expensive for not enough,
you know, targeting it, it just didn't work for the ROI was definitely not there. Really,
any kind of the bigger mass marketing stuff we realized didn't work. What really worked was
finding those people that were involved in the community that were already actively engaged with
it, and saying we've got this software that makes it easier. And there's still challenges with that
people would would question this, this concept is new in that there's services that have been doing
this in one form or another for decades in LA and New York, and there's breakdown services company
in Los Angeles that has been doing some form of this for for years. And there was a there used to
be a magazine down in LA called drama log that have casting calls in it, you pay for a subscription,
and they would mail it to your house once a week. And then you would mail your headshot and resume
to the address listed in the classified ad in the magazine. And that's how that's how you found
stuff. But there wasn't anything like that outside of those markets. And a lot of the markets that
were in there is that they've never seen anything like what we're doing, even though it's not new to
the industry, it's new to the market. And so we've had to also not only just provide the service and
let people know what we exist, but we also have to educate them on what we are and what we do. And
that we're not a town agency, where we don't we don't get you jobs, we're a software company,
and we just happen to be focusing on this industry. And so that was the trial and error on that
communication of explaining, educating plus explaining. And I think there's a difference
was definitely a challenge in the new markets as well.
Yeah, when you mentioned that the mass market stuff didn't work, it's interesting to hear that
because I can see how from your perspective, that's the holy grail, you don't necessarily want to have
to, you know, be super scrappy and join every Facebook group and try to find a different person
in every community in every city that you come to and talk to them and try to figure out how things
work. It's much easier if you can just blast out a message to everybody and magically your website
works. But on the other hand, when you have to go this route of talking to individual people
and figuring out how the community works and getting them subscribed to your website,
you end up having all these conversations that you wouldn't have. If you were just blasting
out a message to everybody, did you learn anything from the people that you were talking to? And if
so, how did those learnings affect the development of your business?
Oh, so much education from those conversations, because we would say, hey, here's what we're
doing. And we would find out what people didn't know and what they did know. And we would find
out from people, they'd say, Oh, this this, you know, you're not supposed to charge people to
audition for for acting jobs. And we respond, right, we know that that's not what this is.
This is a software service that allows you to be notified about casting calls. And then you can use
it to submit to those, those projects, the people who are doing the auditions don't receive any
compensation, they're just using our software. And so explaining that and realizing that we needed
to explain that was different too, because in Sacramento, people kind of knew what we were
doing. And there was, there was, it's close enough to LA and San Francisco, where there was similar
services that they got the concept a little bit easier. But these markets that had never seen
anything like us, having those conversations were extremely valuable, because we knew what we were
up against and just doing a blank. And actually, what's what's funny is I now tell people, if you
hear something on the radio, it's probably not legitimate, or at least it's not what it sounds
like. Because there's these acting schools that advertise on the radio, you know, come audition
for Disney and all this stuff. And usually they they make it sound like it's this great big
audition when really it's a presentation for a very expensive acting school. And they can afford
to pay for terrestrial radio because they charge people exorbitant amounts to be a part of those
programs. So we actually now say, you know, if you hear it on the radio, for a casting call,
it's probably not what they're saying or what they're implying that they are not that they're
illegitimate, but they're not doing what they necessarily implying per se. And having not going
that route, and instead going the route of having those one on one conversations, even if it's
through Facebook Messenger, and saying, you know, hey, here's what we do. You know, we'd love you to
take a look and then getting people to actually have that one on one dialogue and saying back to us,
oh, okay, I'll take a look at it. Hey, I looked at it. And I don't understand what this means and
having that instead of them going to the site, you know, inserting in a support ticket or
something like that. It was more those one on one conversations where knowing it inside and out,
I'm able to go Oh, yeah, this is this is how that works. And being able to read those, those messages
and say, Okay, this wasn't clear. I need to go back and make sure that it is or I need to work
with Brian and make sure that it's clear or that we change this or we work it was continues to be
valuable. I mean, it's not like it ever stops. I mean, there's still new people that message us on
a daily basis almost now that will say, you know, hey, I couldn't find where this was. And we go,
Oh, I would have never thought that that would have been a challenge. But okay, let's make sure
we make it better. I think a lot of people, especially first time entrepreneurs underestimate
the the gap between how you think about your business and how your customers think about your
business. And it's very easy to sort of have this curse of knowledge affect you where you think what
you're doing is extremely clear, or it's extremely valuable. And unless you talk to these people one
on one, and you watch them try to use your website, and you talk to them about your opinions and why
they will they won't pay you, you're never going to correct those misconceptions, you're just going
to build and build and wonder why nobody's using your product. Well, and obviously, you run a
community full of amazing entrepreneurs. And you tell me where the fine line is, because I don't
know that I found it yet. And that's, okay, I started a business because I have a specific
problem that I think needs to be solved. And I'm already in that field. And so I came up with a
way to solve it. And I know that it needs to be solved. And I know how to solve it. And then on
the other side is, but I may not know all the problems in that field or all the ways to solve
them. So that fine line between the the knowledge you already have as an entrepreneur and as a
creator, versus the knowledge of your eventual user base. Yeah. And if I had to pick only having
one of those, I would pick the latter, because I think having that, that personal experience
yourself is extremely valuable. It's kind of a shortcut to having to talk to other people,
but it won't last forever. Because as you said, you aren't everybody else. And other people's
experiences might be different for years. So no matter what, as your business grows,
if you want to build something that's not just valuable for you, but is valuable for other
people, you're going to have to develop those skills of talking to other people,
putting yourself in their shoes, and figuring out what they like. And that's something that
never ends. I mean, if you're the CEO of a big company like Stripe, you're still talking to
users and trying to figure out what they look like and what they care about, even when your
company's worth $10 billion. And every point below that and every point after that. So it's,
it's hard to draw a line. But I think, you know, it's something that never really ends.
I think you're absolutely right. And I think that if you had to pick on a side,
I think you're right, you should pick on the, the side of, you know, what are the end users
continuing to feel and they're feeling it at different levels. I mean, as I mentioned, I had
my experience as an actor and as a casting director, but there are, you know, that pales
in comparison to some of the projects and performances and roles that we've had posted
on our, on our sites since we've launched. And that's a good thing. It's a good thing that
we've outgrown well beyond my experience and have had casting directors that are, you know,
above and beyond and actors that are far above and beyond anything I've ever done or tried to do.
And be in listening to their feedback, as well as the people who are just starting out and who
don't know anything about the industry and being able to have a platform and a service that can
help that entire spectrum, we wouldn't be able to do if it weren't for listening to the feedback
that we're getting. Let's talk about some of the specific decisions that you guys have made
and running Casting Calls America. First, I want to talk about your business model,
because you guys are selling your service. I think you said you charge 7, 795 as a subscription
service. Yeah, 795 a month for, for actors. And there's no cost for the casting directors,
producers to post on the site. Okay. How did you decide on that business model? Because you could
have clearly gone a different direction. You could have potentially charged the casting directors,
you could have made the whole thing free and advertised or something. Why did you decide on
that particular business model? There's there's somewhat of a precedent already set with the other
services that are doing this in LA, New York, etc. In that the the casting directors don't
pay for it, the producers don't pay and that the the actors do. There's there's some variations
of the model. Some have it were the agencies, if you have a town agent, your agency pays a flat
rate to have all their talent on a site like ours. There's a few different models. And basically,
for the small markets, smaller basically, and I refer to the markets that we're in is everything
but LA New York type of stuff is where we're aimed at. With those markets, it made the sense
to have a really low monthly fee for the actors, compared to the LA sites, which are, you know,
more than four times ours, but because there's bigger market and there's a lot more jobs in LA
than there's ever going to be in Sacramento, California. But we still thought that that made
the most sense to stay within the industry norms, if you will, like I said, I mean, decades ago that
you paid for a magazine subscription, and then you had to pay to mail your headshot resume, which,
by the way, cost way more than what we're doing now. And that was, you know, 30 years ago. But
based upon what the market was already doing, or the industry was already doing,
and the markets that we were going into, that made the most sense.
What about the exact pricing model? How did you arrive on the price of 795?
So 795 is our second pricing. So we initially started off with $5 a month. And we added on
features throughout time that started increasing the costs. So for example, we have integrated in
video auditions. So one of the features that we have is where a casting director instead of,
this especially helps for these regional markets, instead of just saying, okay, I'm looking for,
you know, actors between this age range and males, females, and this ethnicity, etc. They can also
say, and if you match that criteria, you can do your initial audition right now by recording
these lines. And it's what they call sides or the lines that they give you for the audition.
And they can upload the sides into the into the casting call and say, okay, if you're if you're
interested, not only can you just submit your profile right now, you can actually read these
sides, record your audition and upload the video file. Well, now we have video hosting expenses.
And we also integrated in a audio audition. So if you're casting for a voiceover project, you can
put on there what you want for the voiceover. And the actors can record the voiceover on their
home microphone and upload that mp3 and submit that. And the casting director can play it directly
from their phone or desktop or what have you. And so now our we're offering more, but our expenses
became more. Right. And so once we kind of flat lined a little bit as far as new features went,
and we had that going for a while, we were able to get a better idea of what our actual costs were.
And one of our I'm gonna say challenges, but back to my viewpoint of as an actor and putting my
actor hat on when developing this, some of the these services that do similar to what we do,
you have to subscribe before you can even see what the casting calls are available. And I always
had a problem with that I, I think that it's much better model and much more service focused. If we
say, listen, if you can create your profile and register and fill out your information, and you
can see all the casting calls that are on the site that you're a match for, right up front, that way
you can make an informed decision on whether or not you want to subscribe. But part of that is is
that the image hosting and all the hosting that we do is already part of that. So we have expenses
even for our free users that are there looking at what the casting calls are. So once we were
established long enough to where we could kind of get a feel for what those costs were between
the average user and the video files and everything like that, we realized, okay, five is not going
to cover it. So we can't sustain this and keep operating. And so we wanted to find a number that
was still low enough to be reasonable, but enough to be able to cover the costs of operating the
service and bringing in enough to where we can continue our growth. And that's where we came up
with 795. Yeah, it's tough to charge a small amount of money per month, because even 795 isn't that
much. And I think if you're, you know, perhaps a struggling actor, maybe that's a lot to ask. But
at the same time as someone trying to run a business, it kind of leads you in a situation where
the only way that you can grow is by just reaching a massive number of people. Yeah, I mean, and
that's where the whole scalability factor comes in is that though we're in over 30 markets, it's
all run from two locations, essentially, and primarily, it's one company running it. So that
scalability is really critical to maintaining the lower price point. If we had to have some sort of
physical presence in every city or things like that, then it would just be absolutely unrealistic
to charge that little. But you're right, it's for a struggling actor, even that can be a bit of a
challenge. But on the flip side, actually, some of the feedback I get from the casting directors,
especially the, I don't want to say higher end, because that's not what I mean. But the casting
directors who are working on bigger projects that are paying higher rates to the actors, they like
that the actors are paying a fee because it shows a level of commitment. It lets them know that these
aren't just people who are submitting because they can, they have a paid subscription, and they're
submitting because they're serious about what they're doing, and they're interested. Let me ask you
about your personal life as a founder, especially since you're building a business that really needs
to reach a massive scale. How is your work life balance been? And how's it evolved since the
beginning of your company? Well, you're asking me and not my wife, so that's a key point. Because we
would probably have different answers. I think it's a lot better now than it used to be. Just this
year, we brought on some full time staff, and that has helped tremendously. We have some amazing
people that we have found to work with us. That has made a lot of difference in the work life
balance. Beyond that, it's definitely been a challenge. The old, we're the only people that
would give up a full time job to work twice as much at it is absolutely true. The amount of hours
spent working on the business, physically working on it, and I think there's a big difference
because there's the amount of time that I'm actually at my computer physically working on it,
and then there's all the hours where I'm sitting, watching TV, and I'm thinking about something,
or I'm lying in bed not sleeping, thinking about, oh, I got to send this email tomorrow, or shoot,
I think if we did this, it would make it better. And every time somebody asks me what I do, and I
tell them about the platform, and they ask me a question that nobody's asked me before, now I'm
thinking, oh, I didn't have an answer for that. I need to have an answer for that question, or maybe
we need to look into that. So the physical time and the mental time are definitely different,
and I think the mental time can be even the bigger challenge of always thinking about the business and
how I can improve it and make things better. So sometimes I really have to set aside mental time,
not just time with my family, but mental time with my family where I'm not in a position to
think about the business or work on the business. I hope that makes sense.
Oh, that makes perfect sense. And it's tough because it's easy to not realize that you're
spending all of this time thinking about your business, and you're sort of living and breathing
it when you're not at your computer even. And I think once you have that conscious realization,
you can start to work on it, if that's what you want to do. How has hiring helped you out,
and how have you as a self-funded bootstrap company sort of worked hiring into your process?
Because you can really only hire based on the profits that you make, and I think that limits
some of the decisions and the order that you make those decisions in.
Oh, absolutely. We definitely had to wait for quite a while before we could hire any staff in
and bring in staff knowing that we were going to have to do the price change and doing that all at
the same time was a big part of it. So we knew that, okay, we're going to have a little bit more
revenue in theory. And with that more revenue, we'll be able to afford the staff. But with the
staff, we'll be able to provide better support and more value to our users. And that's absolutely
been the case. And in more ways than I even realized, for example, before having staff,
we knew we needed a better support system than basically a contact form with, you know,
how can we help you? And I knew I wanted to find something, some program that was already out there
that would do that. But I wasn't ready to do that until I could bring somebody in that would
actually manage it. And I was extremely fortunate enough to find a individual who had a lot of
experience with Zendesk. And so when we brought him in, his name is Dale, when we brought Dale in,
and he already had this Zendesk background, which I didn't know, I'd never worked with Zendesk
really at all. And so he came in and not only were we able to get it going, but I didn't have to
learn it myself and then train him. It was quite the opposite. He basically built it and then
trained me. And that was so helpful in streamlining our support process, being able to provide more
information to users quicker, were they able to look up their own information and answer questions
without necessarily having to wait for us to respond. And it was because not just because
I hired the person that was able to take away from what I was doing, but because I hired somebody who
already had that skill set in their in their toolbox. Yeah, let's let's talk about the people
that you work with for a little bit because you have the same co founders, the same partners with
Casting Calls America, as you did back in the past with your business with the online job boards
and the job fairs. How is that minus one? So there was one other there was one other co founder that
that's moved on and lives in a different part of the country that that wasn't a part of that's not
a part of what we're doing now. Okay, so how many is three of you moved on together or three of us
now? Okay, you got three, three co founders that you've worked on multiple projects with.
How has that helped you build your business? Because I imagine, you know, not only do you
have a history of working together, but you also share the same knowledge of the lessons that you
learned from your previous business. You're not the only person who's like, Hey, we need to move
slow. Both Brian and Kirk will be like, Hey, yeah, last time we've way too fast. Let's move slow.
No, exactly. I couldn't imagine I listened to to your show and read some of the stories and
listening to some of these, the co founders that are bringing in I mean, I think it's extremely
important. I can see both sides, I think it's extremely important to bring in different views
of people with different experiences. But also having that same or similar experience, where we
knew what happened, and we can easily shut something down and go, or remember, we did that
before and it didn't work. And it's either, well, yeah, this is different. And here's why. And we
know what we're talking about. Or, oh, you're right, let's move on. And the conversation is
over very quickly. So I think that that that that shared background is very valuable. But I also see
where having a co founder coming in that has a completely different experience, past experience
that would also be beneficial. But the nice thing about our setup is that we're, we're friends and
we're co founders. And we've known each other far longer than our business relationships. And so I
think that that helps in some security too, that if we have a bad day, we don't have to worry about
one of us saying, we'll forget this. I'm not talking to you guys anymore. Exactly.
Has there ever been a time where it's been difficult for the three of you to align on a
decision? Or have there been any decisions where you guys are maybe all aligned, but it was still
a tough decision to make? Yeah, I think there's definitely been conversations about different
opportunities that we have come at it from different viewpoints. But we're very much in
this comes to film production, where I'm a big advocate for people kind of having their role in
staying in their lane. We have our specialties, I do kind of the industry relation and marketing
part of it. Brian is our engineer. And that is his world. And Kirk is more legal business financial
type type person who does all the bookkeeping and financial stuff. And we have our different areas
and we come at it very much from a here's why I think it works from my for, you know, my department,
if you will, and we have those discussions, and then we can really come together and, and go,
okay, let's this is either the way to go, or it's not the way to go. There's never been a time where
we've been like, well, it's two to one, we're going to do this. I don't think we've ever moved
forward with the decision where we weren't all three of us saying, yes, we should do this or no,
we should. It's perfect to have your responsibilities. So cleanly divided like that and just be able to
almost operate, you know, like three independent chiefs of your domains where you can go as fast
as you can without necessarily needing to powwow about everything and you can take care of your
stuff and they can take care of theirs. Yeah, I know it works out very well having those those
clearly defined roles has made things I think much, much better than some other scenarios that I've
heard. So let's say you had to go, you could go back four years in the past and tell yourself
and tell your co founder is anything what one thing would you tell your tell yourself in the past?
Oh, that's a great question. That's a really good question. I like a lot of what we've done.
But I think that I think I would probably go back and say, well, actually, I know what it is,
it would be on the technology side, and it's more of me than it is Brian. And that's that the way
that we set it up is that each site was completely separately run. And as we got bigger, we had more
requests from users. And it just made sense that there'd be some sort of connection. Because here
we are, this company that's operating these at the time, I think 20 different casting call sites,
and some of them were within hours of each other, if you think of it as cities. But there was no
connection between them whatsoever. And if you're casting a project in St. Louis, and you are willing
to accept actors from Kansas City, or better example, if you're in Houston, Texas, and you want to
bring in people from Austin or San Antonio, or vice versa, you would have to go and post it on
each one of those sites. And if you're an actor, you would have to have an account on each one of
those sites. So we created when again, we means Brian figured out a way to connect the back ends
where a casting director could post on one site, and create a posting on one site, but also have
that posting shared to other sites, and accept submissions from the actors that were registered
with those other sites, without having to go and create a new account. And the actors wouldn't have
to go to the other site. That structure was not built in when we first designed it. So Brian had
to go back and create that structure after the fact. And that took considerable amount of time
that had we maybe waited a couple of months from RMVP, would have been able to be a part of it.
But we didn't know what we didn't know. And we didn't realize how valuable that was going to be
until we realized we really needed it. And we didn't realize how difficult it was going to be
until we tried to do it. What about the future? Let's say you could talk to your future self
510 years from now. What one question would you ask? What do you want to know?
Ah, are our new brands as good as we think they are? Okay, what does that mean? So in you and I
talked a little bit about this, when we were last talking in person, but one of the things that
we've continued to do, that I think is important is, and I've the way I've I've now phrased it is,
don't quit your pain job, P A I N job. And what I mean by that is, if we stop, if I stop being
involved in production, then I won't feel the pain of our users. And so we we do production,
we have basically formed our own production company on the side, that we have a couple
projects that we've worked on. We have two web series that are yet to be released,
that we created one called driving test. It's actually one of Rance Howard's last on camera
performances before his passing, which was very sad. He was an amazing, amazing actor and man.
And we and we just wrapped on a new the first couple episodes on a new web series starring
comedian Carlos Garcia, doing those productions, and continuing to be involved in productions and
helping other people on their productions, let us know what pain our users are feeling. And instead
of just being this now SaaS company, we're still involved in the original world in which created
this concept and created the need for it and created the pain. So didn't quit our pain job.
And so by doing this, we realized that there's other places that people really need software
as a service in the entertainment industry. And the next one that we're coming out with
is crew calls America. And crew calls America is going to be the same basic concept, except for the
crew positions for productions, the makeup and hair people, the camera operators, your grips,
things along those lines that you need on set. That's another common pain point that people
have a hard time finding the people for. And so now we're going to offer that service. And we're
going to do the same mentality that we've done casting calls, or we're going to have
a crew call site for every city that we have a casting call site in.
I like that don't quit your pain job. And it's, it's so counterintuitive, because that's exactly
what everybody wants to quit. What's the most painful thing that I'm doing? How do I stop
doing that? But if you want to grow, that's what you need to keep doing. So you keep learning.
And that's where the new ideas for us come from. There's another thing that's very industry
specific called a call sheet. And it's the document that the assistant, either the first
assistant or second assistant, depending on the production size, sends out the night before,
sometimes earlier, of a production that lets everybody know, whether it be cast or crew,
who's supposed to be where and when. And that document has not, it's very, for the most part,
antiquated. And so we're developing a software that makes it very streamlined and makes it easier
for everybody. And that purely has kind of actually Brian came up with that because he
learned about the pain of a call sheet, which he'd never dealt with before getting involved
in the production side. So even though he's the engineer who never set foot on a set before,
now he's a producer helping work on these projects. And he's learning the pain that's
associated with it and getting it. And he came up with the call sheet idea, because he saw what
a pain it was. And he was hearing from the users what a pain it was. So we have that brand also
launching called call sheet maker. That's awesome. Well, how about we wrap up? And why don't you tell
listeners what you think they should take out of the story that you've had, the lessons that you've
learned and, you know, especially a focus on people who are just now getting into starting
their own business or thinking about doing so for the first time? Well, we didn't say this
specifically, but not comparing yourself to others is a huge part of it. Because you look at the
numbers and not in a negative way. I mean, you look at indie hackers, and there's so many great
resources on there. And you can see what people are doing, but not saying, Oh, I should be there
because every scenario is different. I mean, even our sites amongst themselves within our company
are different. But going slow for us worked very well this time and building up our credibility,
building up our markets, building up our user base, one city at a time, going that route worked for
us. It may not work for everybody going slow, but that works for us. And you don't have to be,
you know, the overnight success, quote unquote. The other thing would be what we were just talking
about with the don't quit your pain job. Because boy, that has helped us so much by staying involved
in the activities that we're trying to help with and coming up with a better ways to service our
existing users and be with new ideas that will help either our existing user base or our existing
world of influence. That's awesome. Well, Brian, I've loved having you on the show. Thanks so much
for coming on. Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about you and casting calls
America and all the other things that you guys are working on? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I would
say for me, find me on indie hackers, indiehackers.com forward slash user forward slash Brian Jagger.
I've got my my Twitter on there, my email on there a little bit more about me and become more
active in the indie hackers community. So happy to chat with anybody on there. And then for for
casting calls America, our main site is casting calls America calm. And then we have our sites
list on there where you can see all the all the sites that we're on right now, or that we have
live right now and the ones that are coming up. That's awesome, Brian. Thanks so much for coming
on the show. Thank you so much for having me. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation,
and you want a really easy way to support the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and
leave us a quick rating or even a review. If you're looking for an easy way to get there,
just go to nd hackers.com slash review and that should open up iTunes on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys leave over there. And it really helps
other people to discover the show. So your support is very much appreciated. In addition,
if you are running your own internet business, or if that's something you hope to do someday,
you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the nd hackers.com website. It's
a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that you might have
while running your business. If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent
of getting help from other founders rather than trying to build your business all by yourself.
So you'll see me on the forum for sure, as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that
I found in the podcast. If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory
full of hundreds of products built by other nd hackers, every one of which includes revenue
numbers and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they grew their products
from nothing. As always, thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.