Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am Francis Zehrer. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And Daisy, who are we speaking with today? Today we're speaking with Sam Levy. 0:15 He's the co-founder of Rodeo, a new app for making plans with friends. And before founding Rodeo, he spent nine years at Hinge, including six years as the COO. Yeah. Excited to talk to him about it. 0:27 I wanna know if he was successful on Hinge. If he was suc- [laughs] Well, I believe he's a married man. Uh, we can, we can ask if that's- Designed to be deleted... 0:36 yes, if his relationship, uh, came, came from a deleted app. Um, I wanted to quickly recommend this book that I just finished. I think I talked about it on a previous episode. It took me way too long to read it. 0:46 It's like such a slim 180-page tome. Brian- Ooh, a slim volume... a slim little tome. Brian by Jeremy Cooper. Very Train Dreams-esque- Mm... 0:57 I would say, as shorthand to avoid myself talking about it for too long, in that it's a portrait of a lonely man, but it's more optimistic than Train Dreams and perhaps the best way to describe it is it's just about a kind, quiet, lonely man who goes to the movies for 25 years. 1:15 It's 180 pages about that. Really recommend it. It's a 25-year-long movie? Well- He sees different movies- Different movies... of course. He goes to BFI, British Film Institute. He goes eventually every night. 1:26 Every night. It's his, like, his life. I mean, I- So it's a little bit of film criticism, and also just a, a lovely portrait of, of humanity. I'm not really inclined to sympathize with a man named Brian- [laughs]... 1:37 but I guess the point of literature is to expand our horizons. Look, I know at least- So I'll give it a try... I know at least two really lovely Brians. All right. Well, you can counteract my experience then. Mm-hmm. 1:49 I also, uh, one mid thing I saw, I, uh, on a... I needed to kill a couple hours, and so the, I, I ne- so I was like, "I'll go... I'll see a movie." Saw Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein this weekend. 2:00 I had not planned to see it. [blows raspberry] Portents. It was kind of nice. It was... You know, uh, went in, kind of n- I had no expectations. What month was that? Come on. Give me a break. 2:09 [laughs] Okay, it came out in October. Look, I'm just gonna... Okay, all I'll say, Jacob Elordi's performance was nice. Oscar Isaac, hammed it up, not very good. Nine Oscar nominations? I don't know about that. 2:20 Um, would I recommend it? Not necessarily. This is a three-star movie. All right. Thank you, Letterboxd. [laughs] Okay. I, I did have trouble suspending disbelief for Elordi. I was like- Oh, you watched it... 2:33 he was, like, destroying stuff. I was like, "Why is Jacob Elordi doing all that?" Yeah, there's moments where you- I did watch it... where you see his face and it's like, "Ah, he, he just looks too handsome." 2:40 [laughs] And there's moments where you can't really tell it's him and, and that's more believable. Right. I mean, I wouldn't go that far. 2:46 Also, like, did you notice that they gave him the same exact face makeup as they're singing in, as they're wearing in the music video for Somebody That I Used to Know? 2:55 [laughs] Like, the way that they mosaic the skin on his face- Right... was giving me, like, millennial stomp clap hate trauma. Mm-hmm. You know, 3:05 I, I went through a breakup around the time that song came out, so it really, it really holds a place in my heart. I, I... 3:11 You know, this is yet another embarrassing thing I'll admit on this podcast, but, um, I like Somebody That I Used to Know. [laughs] I mean, I'm sure you can work around that. Look, it was my first breakup, okay? 3:22 It was my first breakup. First and last. Mm. You and Emma have been together for, like, 500 years. That's true. Um, yeah. Look, there was at least one other breakup in between there. 3:32 Anyways, moving on from my relationship. Um, you shared this, uh, X article with me that I... It was quite long. Really long X article. Really begging it. Yeah. Um, that I did not read. 3:45 I'm reading, actually it's about venture capital. I am reading, uh, this book right now. World Eaters. None of us can see that. Yeah. Well, okay, you can see. I'm about to read the title- Okay... for the listener. 3:56 H- World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy. Um, you know, another relatively slim tome, about 200 pages. I was looking for a... I don't know if I was looking for it. I don't know. 4:06 I, I saw it and I bought it. It's kind of a primer on how VC came to be what it is today. Mm. What's in this article? What's in this X article? You didn't wanna read Palo Alto- I did... two months ago. Two years ago. 4:16 Better, but- Okay... Palo Alto's really good. I, I blazed... I really liked Palo Alto. It's too heavy for my delicate hands. It's... Okay, it is really heavy, but as, as, as a read, it reads pretty breezy. 4:29 It's like, it's very readable, almost reads more like, like histor- like a historical fiction plot. I don't know. It, it, it's- Mm. I really li- I thought it was really well-written and really easy. Yeah. 4:40 I mean, Malcolm Harris can craft a story, that's for sure. That's for sure. Um, so this article, yeah, this- Who wrote it? Where... How are we gonna pronounce this? Will Medeis? I'm not Greek- Will Medeis... 4:51 so I don't know. We're gonna say it all one... Will Medeis. [laughs] Okay. So anyway, um, sorry to that man. He wrote an X article- What does it say about Brian? [laughs] You said it, not me. 5:01 [laughs] Patient Capital Will Eat the World. And basically talking about, like, what's going on with venture right now. Um, 5:11 from, like, dynamics with LPs, who are the people who invest in venture funds, to the fact that fewer companies are expected to IPO, which means there's fewer exit opportunities, to underscoring the fact, which I don't think a lot of people know, which is, like, if you are a venture capitalist, you are supposed to be deploying capital constantly. 5:35 Now, some of them don't. Maybe a lot of them. They kinda fly around and go to conferences. You're not supposed to do that. No. Like, the LPs are asking you, "Where's the capital going?" 5:43 So if the market's bad and you're not seeing a lot of good deals, it's kinda like tough luck. And some people, they can't handle the pressure. They just give the money back. Mm. But most of them, 5:55 you know, continue trying to find, you know, the needle in the haystack-Whatever you want to call it. Mm-hmm. 6:03 And the other thing that's, like, part of this dynamic and particularly in this moment is he's talking about also, like, if you're in venture right now, you essentially have blind faith in an almost religious outcome in two scenarios. 6:16 Geopolitically, that China will take Taiwan and that the American war effort, the Am- corresponding American war effort will create so much surplus that every American could have their own Gulf Stream. 6:26 Buy your Palantir today. Yeah. Okay, whatever. And then the second one's AGI. And so it's turned venture capital into m- even more of a, like, cultish, faith-based investment vehicle than it has been in the past. 6:44 And the counterpoint to that is, like, patient capital. 6:46 So the examples he gives are, like, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, um, something like a Berkshire Hathaway, where you don't need to be constantly investing, and you don't need to be constantly exiting. 7:00 You park your capital, and you wait. Um, and there's, like, a lot of other dynamics of this. Uh, so this is sort of like the crux of the future or the present that he's articulating. 7:13 Um, and he's describing, like, what, what capital funds will look like in the future, which will not be called venture capital funds. Mm. They will be massive, patient, product-agnostic pools of unconflicted capital. 7:26 They will have no deployment clocks forcing them to invest when opportunities are scarce or expensive. 7:31 They will have no mandates restricting them from buying debt or secondaries or whole companies or doing nothing at all. 7:37 They will have no LP politics forcing premature exits or performative activity and certainly [chuckles] not performative podcasting. Mm. That's very funny. 7:47 I mean, he's a good writer, and it's voicey, and I did not get the sense in reading this that it had been written by ChatGPT. Perhaps he used Claude to help organize it- That's fair... but it's very much like... 7:56 I thought it was very clear, clearly written, good voice, and some nice little jokes in there. Mm. 8:01 Um, the thing that's, like, in here where it's talking about buying debt or secondaries, he's talking about, like, how some of these venture capital funds have actually preemptively started to follow more of a holding company model. 8:14 They've created structures so that they're not just invested, like, a primary investor or nothing. 8:22 Like, they've really built up the infrastructure for the ability to buy secondary equity, which means that they can be trading in capital that's not their illiquid capital. 8:32 Um, and that, that just means, like, a secondary is, um, buying somebody else's equity secondhand. Mm-hmm. And it could be for less than, like, the market value if it was gonna, like, IPO at that point in time. 8:46 But it is, like, a good way to make money on mature companies where the equity would otherwise be, like, locked up. Um- And we will leave that there for now because Sam is here. 8:58 And listener, I just checked for your sake. I put that entire X article into wordcounter.net. 4,252 words on that X article. I'll leave that up to you to- I mean- Are we, are we-... that's breakfast for me. 9:13 [laughs] But we'll see if Francis- Okay... gets through this slim volume by- That's, that's your muesli? That's your muesli? [laughs] Yeah, exactly. [upbeat music] Good callback. We also- There we go... 9:27 wanted to ask, just getting it out of the way, did you meet your wife on Hinge? [laughs] Uh, we... Oh, man. We did not. Um, we- [laughs] That's all right. Ooh, I know. [laughs] Should I lie? 9:38 Um- [laughs] No, we, we- If Rodeo had existed, you could have met her on Rodeo. Well- I know... we'll get to that. Well, we, we go on dates via Rodeo. But, um- Mm... we met at our friend's wedding, 9:51 and actually, our friends met on Tinder. How's that? [laughs] Wow. That's, that's big. Uh, I know. I mean, it doesn't really matter as, as long as you get to the same destination, right? Exactly. Multiple pathways. 10:04 Um- Mm-hmm... well, we didn't, we didn't give a definition of Rodeo in the intro, so I'm just going to take a step back and, and explain a little bit of how it works now. I have it on my phone. It's beautiful. 10:15 Um, it works by allowing the user to submit a social media post or screenshot directly to the app. 10:23 So you send it to the app, processes those submissions, it extracts the relevant context and information, um, and, and basically stores and organizes it for you. So you could use it to organize date night. 10:37 If you got a, a Partyful or Luma invitation and you don't wanna deal with those guys, you could screenshot the relevant info and track it in Rodeo instead. 10:48 And, um, I think you c- you can connect it to your calendar, you know, if you're already really embedded in the Google Calendar ecosystem, as I am. So it's, it's a deceptively simple idea filling 11:04 a clear vacuum, which is part of why we are excited to talk to you today. Very, ve-very simple. [laughs] I mean, I, I'll, I'll tell you, [laughs] uh, was there a question there? Or do you want me to explain? 11:16 No, it was a comment. You did a- It was a comment. [laughs] You did a... Y-you did a g- you did a great job explaining it. Uh- [laughs]... 11:21 it's alway- it's always interesting to hear people explain your stuff, and, uh, it helps you realize how far off you might be in making something really simple. Um- Yeah... 11:34 and, uh, there, there's a phrase we use a lot which is, like, "Simple always wins." Um, and so if you're making a consumer app, people don't really have the attention span to figure out anything complex. Mm-hmm. 11:49 Um, and so the fact that you said it's simple is... like, makes me overjoyed [laughs] because, uh, the goal is simple, and that's right. For the listener, like, when IFirst heard of it, I had no, you know, no context. 12:05 I'm like, "Okay, it's events." Like, so is this like sort of a, a party full Luma competitor? Is this like a Airbnb Experiences thing? Is this like a Resy thing? Like, that was my first impression when I hear- Yeah... 12:18 app, like app and events in the same sentence, right? But it's, uh, it's more of like a layer... 12:23 But maybe there's some similarities with Airbnb Experiences, like in a, you know, very different way, but like that you can find experiences on there, that it can be like a compendium of them for you. 12:34 But it's more of like a organizational layer that can process those other things and, you know, it-- then it's just kind of your, um... What's the word I'm looking for? Like- Staging area is how- Yeah... 12:46 my friend Liz, who works at Sam- Yeah. [clears throat]... describes it. Like- Yeah. Staging ground... stuff that doesn't make it out of the group chat. Mm-hmm. 12:51 There's no staging area between your group chat and your iPhone Notes app and your calendar, and it's like there's-- we're missing a step. Yeah. 13:00 I, I-- like at a high level, it's, it's infrastructure for your social life. Um, so it's, it's one place to put all of these things that you come across in your daily life. 13:13 A lot of those are things from online, uh, social posts, or things in your group chats, or the Luma someone sent you. Uh, you could just zip those all into Rodeo, kind of like 13:28 people used to do with Pinterest back in the day. Um, the technical term is this, uh, it's called an iOS share extension. Mm. Um, [lip smack] and yeah, it works with all sorts of links. It works with screenshots, photos. 13:42 Like, you could take pictures of things IRL. You could take a picture of a, a storefront, uh, and it'll save it for you so that you can remember it later. 13:51 Um, and so what I, what I say a lot in TikTok videos is, "Save it so that you actually do it with your friends"- Mm... is kind of the simple one sentence of what Rodeo is all about. 14:05 Um, and so yeah, the goal is to help people remember the things that they come across in their chaotic daily life, and then help you actually do them with your friends. 14:15 How do you avoid then like that becoming, like, I've, I've saved so many things in that. Like, like my Google Maps, um, you know, restaurant list, I've got like 500 on there, right? 14:26 Which is useful if I'm in a certain neighborhood. I'm like, "Oh," like, "I forget. Is there anything good around here?" Like, anything I've been wanting to try, then I can look, and maybe then it's useful. 14:33 But like it, [sighs] it becomes this like massive pile that's then hard to navigate. Is there like... Like, how are you helping people then navigate a hundred, 200, 300 locations? Yeah. 14:45 Are you building for outlier restaurant sickos like Francis? Are you building for- No. 14:48 But restaurant- [laughs] Like, very, you know, very quickly, if you become a power user, you, you, you, you quickly save like, oh, like, there's, here's 100 versions of a weekend I could have with my friends, right? 14:58 Sure. Sure. So, um, people are using it a lot of different ways, but some people are sickos, and, uh- [chuckles] Or what, what's the phrase? Uh, restaurant sickos. Yeah. 15:09 Um, [lip smack] and, uh, and we kinda have to accommodate a lot of, uh, different use cases. Um, and so I, I-- there's a couple different layers of it or vectors, but one is, one is context. 15:22 Uh, can we help you have the context by which you saved it in the first place? Um, because if you look at Google Maps, many people have saved stuff to Google Maps and don't remember why in the first place, right? 15:37 Um, whereas- I always forget to write the little note of like, "This place is supposed to have really good s- this specific type of ramen," right? I'm just like, saved restaurant, no context. Yeah, exactly. 15:46 And so then you look at it even like maybe a week later and have no idea. So on Rodeo, we have the source by which you saved it. 15:54 We're gonna have things like notes or like other social features that are gonna help you kind of like triangulate why you cared about this place in the first place. 16:03 Or if you don't remember, go watch that video again, because it triggered something in you in the first place. Um, so that's kind of one element. The other element is, is like how do we organize things in Rodeo? 16:17 Um, and so we use these lists as kind of like a core UX pattern. And I like to think of lists similar to like playlists on Spotify. Mm. Um, and so 16:31 it's very easy to, uh, drop your songs into playlists on Spotify. You can make them-- They're like default private. You can make them public. You can share them. You can collaborate on them. 16:44 You can make them blended, so on and so forth. 16:46 Um, we are not all the way down that path with Rodeo at this point, but if you think about it in similar ways, if we help you make these lists really easily and share them with your friends for certain situations, like a trip to Italy, or 17:02 options for Thursday night, or options for this weekend when you're visiting. Um, or in my case, like I have a date nights list with my wife and a list of our kids' stuff. 17:12 A-all of those provide a nice container to actually, like, keep you organized, remember why you had them in the first place, uh, and ideally help you do the things that you're saving. Mm. 17:26 I won't, I won't say it's like a totally solved problem. I think what you're bringing up is, is totally true. Like that's, that's like we don't wanna stop people from saving a lot of things if they want to do that. 17:38 But, um, you know, h-how do we, how do we save you from yourself [chuckles] to some degree? 17:44 Well, I mean, where my mind then goes on how you solve that is, so Rodeo is very much functionally an AI app, but that's not something you advertise. 17:53 That's not something you brand it as, which I think is, is the smart move. 17:57 But, uh, like what it do- you know, inputting a screenshot or a post that then gets like, you know, the component context gets split into this, this page in, in the app, like that's an AI function, right? 18:10 Uh-Where my mind goes, though, is if you then have so many, the next step is to have some sort of, like, you know- [chuckles]... the infatuations list- AI summary. [chuckles]... where it's like-- Yeah. 18:20 Well, no, AI, AI listing feature was like the infatuations lists where it's, uh, you know, the highly specific thing of, like, places to go for happy hour when your mother is in town or, like, where to go- Mm-hmm. 18:30 Mm-hmm... for your 30th birthday when you have 20 friends. It, it's always like there's, like, three-- This-- So it's so contextualized. So I don't know. 18:37 That seems to me the ne- the logical next step of taking all these contexts and it combining, like, oh, like, suggestion, here's- Mm... 18:45 a Friday night to do with your seven friends who've also-- I, I, I'm, like, imagining functionality that I don't think is there yet. 18:51 [chuckles] But, like, seven friends who have-- They seem to be available on Friday night, three weeks from now. Here's, like, the night you could have with them, right? 18:59 Like, that's-- I'm maybe walking too far down the path, but- Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a cool walk. 19:04 Uh, I think we-- We're, we're, we will probably do summarizations for you of, like, different, different lists you could make, and then just hit, like, Okay, and there's a list. 19:15 Uh, we might make you-- We might allow you to make, like, an AI-generated list of, like, yeah, stuff we could do Thursday. Um, 19:25 yeah, there's, there's a bunch of things that we're, we're already kind of poking around with. But I, I think your, your head's in the right place. 19:33 Will it, will it triangulate everyone's schedule and then put a list together and then book it for you? I'm not sure, but maybe. We'll see. Yeah. 19:44 I mean, I just went to a demo for this, um, inspiration platform called Cosmos, which has sort of been compared- Mm-hmm... to, like, Tumblr and Pinterest and Arena, and the, the real, like, 19:58 if-- competitive advantage there seems to be better search functionality, better tagging to query yourself and to query the platform. Mm-hmm. 20:06 So to me, when you were talking about context, I was thinking, like, all right, the next step would be to basically have an LLM that lets you query your own bookmarks in, like, a really intelligent way and has, like, more context about mood and who you might wanna do those things with. 20:25 And you used the word context, which reminded me of this article that Forerunner Ventures put out, which is from cognitive effects-- From Network Effects to Cognitive Effects: The New Rules for Platform Dominance. 20:37 Mm-hmm. Where it basically talks about, like, users are going to expect apps to be a memory layer for them, and they're going to expect that memory layer to be consistent across different iOS experiences. 20:48 And so, you know, the apps that can use AI to offer that, like, just be a better repository for knowledge about you and your habits, are gonna be the ones that are gonna win, versus, like, the last sort of cycle of social apps or, um, you know, networked apps, where it was really about, like, locking in all of your friends in a tiny box. 21:12 [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah. No, it, it, it, it resonates. I mean, at, at the core, there's an element of Rodeo that's kinda like second brain, which is- Mm-hmm... you know, a bit of a buzzword. Mm-hmm. 21:27 But aga-again, like, we-- we're kind of, like, funny with the AI stuff. Like, we, we never established this company as an AI company. We don't call it an AI company. We don't call it an AI product. 21:41 We s- just sort of view this as, you know, if, if AI helps solve problems that we wanna solve, like, we'll use AI. And if- Mm-hmm... 21:51 if programmatic stuff helps solve the problem, we're gonna use programmatic first, 'cause programmatic's dependable and, uh, and less expensive and faster. And so 22:04 we are, we are only using AI to the extent it solves a problem that we can't solve any other way. 22:10 Um, and so we are using AI to, like, extract s- some different parts of these images and links and to go get the tickets and set reminders and all of these things that, um, you know, if we can't do it programmatically, we'll do that. 22:25 But I do-- I'll admit, like, some of my beliefs in this moment, that may change, is, uh, this world that I feel like, 22:37 um, people thinking really deep about AI or, like, the current capabilities think about is, is, like, "Oh, I wanna be able to, like, like, do these, like, really elaborate searches across my, um, my bookmarks." And 22:53 what I think actually happens with consumers is, uh, people are like, "I don't wanna do that work. I don't want, I don't wanna think about how to construct this prompt," or, "I, I don't even know how. 23:08 I've never done it before." Right? And so, so my brain goes more towards, like, how do you make it, again, simpler? Seems like a, already a theme. And, uh, and Francis was kinda hitting on this too. 23:22 Like, you know, do you, like, pre-tag things? Do you pre-prompt things? Like, um, like, that's a lot simpler than, than more of a, um... I mean, r-right now we do have some search. 23:35 It's not, like, s-super powered, but- Mm... um, that's just, that's just philosophically where my head goes with some of these things. 23:44 Like, I, I think, I think if, if we're building an app for today, an experience for today, and we want it to work today, then sometimes you don't wanna go, like, too many steps forward. 23:56 This-- So, um, Daisy mentioned Cosmos. We had Dina from Cosmos on recently, and in that conversation, we were talking about, like, the organization nerds, you could say. 24:09 Whether it's on Cosmos or Arena or Pinterest, whatever. 24:12 People who are-- People who for whom-Going on an app and finding things and categorizing them and, and adding metadata manually, how that's like such a passionate hobby. And- Mm-hmm... 24:24 I'm thinking of it 'cause what you were just saying, it's like there are two kinds of potential users here. 24:28 Many kinds, but in this case, there's, there's the user who is really interested in spending time in Rodeo and, and organizing and planning their-- the bachelor party, et cetera. 24:39 And then there's the person who doesn't really wanna do all that work, who just wants to be able to go in and be suggested this, "Here's the event you should do based on events you've gone to in the past," and maybe were connected to your social accounts and, you know, whatever data being input. 24:54 Um, so there's those two types of person. I imagine that right now, 'cause you've been in beta for what, two months, three months? Yeah. Almost-- Actually, almost four I think. Yeah. Almost four. It's been. Okay. Yeah. 25:05 Yeah. So right, right now it's probably more of the organization nerd who's, who's the user in beta, right? Y- you'd be surprised, actually. 25:14 Um, [clicks tongue] yeah, you see it in the comments, uh, especially on TikTok, uh- Hmm... you see a lot of people saying, uh, "I've a t- I'm a Type A person. This is for me." 25:26 [chuckles] I literally saw it- And, and the-... in the comments of your TikTok. I was, uh, "This seems for me. I'm the el- I'm an eldest daughter with ADHD," [chuckles] and it's like this is- I-- Oh, we could-... 25:35 gonna work [laughs]... we could, yeah, we could talk about there's a whole, the whole, uh, there's a lot of people with ADHD going crazy for this product, and we could explain that in a minute. 25:43 Um, but yeah, you see, uh, "I'm a Type A person. This is for me." And then you see, um, equal if maybe not more people saying, "Actually, I'm, I'm a Type B person, and this is for me." 25:57 Um, [chuckles] and then you see a lot of different other things like, "I'm a parent, this is for me. I'm a college kid, this is for me," which is very cool to see. 26:06 Um, makes, uh, makes marketing personas very challenging, but, um- [laughs]... I, I, I actually think it's kind of a split. 26:17 Um, there are people that are more the Type A, like quote, unquote "planner friends" who are the ones that suggest plans to their friends, uh, and they're looking for a way to stay organized, and they want to make all of their lists and, uh, add emojis to the front of all their lists so they're super organized. 26:38 And they want more ways to tag the things that they're saving, um, and, and just like, you know, color code and whatever, all of these things, right? 26:47 Uh, and then there's like equal if not more people, and I, I myself on my s-social life are more like a Type B person, um- Mm-hmm... who love it 'cause they can just throw stuff into Rodeo, and it's basically, 27:02 you know, remembers it for them, organizes it for them to some degree. 27:07 And, uh, and that, that really doesn't exist other places 'cause the Type A person might use, they might use Google Maps and tag everything and write notes and all the things. 27:19 They might use their notes app and spend a lot of time managing their notes app. Uh, whereas a Type B person, like if you looked at my notes app, you'd be like, "This is absolute chaos." 27:31 [chuckles] Like you can't do anything. [chuckles] So, so I, I actually think it kinda goes both ways and even maybe skews Type B. For, for both group chat drivers and group chat passengers. Yeah, exactly. 27:44 Um, so yeah, it's been a fun learning. You guys have had some videos in the, like, hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, and I'm curious like 27:54 is there a bit of a flywheel effect where you can actually use TikTok to figure out what these personas are? 28:00 Like, and, you know, like when you're seeing somebody in the comments saying that they're using it in a certain way or they belong to a certain demographic, like, "I'm a parent, and this helps me," like is there an opportunity to, yeah, like make TikToks directed at a certain persona user, but also like use them- Mm... 28:15 to test the waters with the type of person you might want to onboard? Totally. I mean, the, the, when I-- So I didn't have TikTok until the end of October. [chuckles] Bless you. 28:27 That was when I downloaded it for the first time. Uh, and, uh, that was, um, [clicks tongue] that was definitely Liz's idea of like, you know, let's, [chuckles] 28:38 let's get you out there, and let's start talking about Rodeo in the wild and see who shows up, you know, who shows up to our door. Um, and, 28:49 and so we, we actually-- We hired some people before I got on there to make more like generically themed-- Like it was more like mission-driven content to like- Mm... 28:59 enter the conversation about, um, yeah, about like IRL culture and, and, and more like mission-based, uh, you know, friendship and IRL and, and those sorts of themes. 29:12 Um, and meanwhile, we're, we're-- we have like these huge product decisions to make, and I felt like I wasn't learning what to-- how to, how to tackle those decisions. So then- Mm... 29:24 I got on there, and I started to make product demos because I wanted product feedback. Uh, I didn't necessarily want feedback about our, our mission and brand and stuff like that. 29:36 And so that-- Those are the videos that went viral very quickly. Um, and we could unpack maybe why they did. But [chuckles] originally it was just for product feedback. 29:48 Like I started to show, uh, using Rodeo for events, and then I started to show it using Rodeo for places, uh, for restaurants, for-- I showed our like reservation search feature. 30:01 You know, I, I showed all these different features, and a lot of them went viral. 30:04 So I didn't-- [chuckles] I don't know if-- I, I think I learned that people wanted like the collective suite, not necessarily one or the other. 30:10 And when we started to l- You know, the TikTok gives you a fair amount of data, like the audience was sort of centered 25 to 35, uh, skewed heavilyWell, not half. It, it was probably like 60 to 70% women. 30:26 But then if, if I started to make other videos featuring, I don't know, that I saved the Patriots game, it skewed men. So it kind of went both ways. 30:35 But then there, there are just these kind of themes across, like we talked about, like the type A, type B. We talked about parents. Um, A- ADHD was a huge theme in the comments. 30:48 Uh, I think what- what's happening there is it... Like, I don't have ADHD, my wife does. If you have ADHD, your, your short-term memory is compromised, and, uh, Rodeo is, is helping you fill that gap. You know? Mm-hmm. 31:03 It's... You are able to save things to Rodeo without having to context switch, and, uh, and then Rodeo will help you, you know, resurface it later. 31:13 And, and so even if you don't have ADHD, the way you use your phone or social media, it's, it's hard to remember anything. 31:21 And so I think the recepti- why, why people went sort of crazy on TikTok is because everyone's sitting there being like, "Wow," like, "my memory is shot here the way I use my phone." Uh, and you guys... 31:37 Like, I d- [laughs] you know, I need this. I don't, I don't want this. Um, so it... 31:41 That was just a really interesting learning through, like, just marketing on TikTok or just, s- just standing up on TikTok and saying, "Hey, this is what, what this is." In that way too- Were you able- Okay. 31:54 Go ahead, Francis. I was just- I was just- I was gonna ask, like, were you able to... [laughs] Were you able to attribute new sign-ups to your wait list to TikTok? 32:01 And like, what is the biggest source of new sign-ups for the wait list, and how big is it, if you're comfortable saying? I mean, I think... H- honestly, I don't even know the number. Yeah. Because, uh, uh, there are, 32:15 there are more people in my TikTok DMs, like message requests, than... I, I don't even know the, the bottom of it, to be honest. [laughs] Can't place the login. [laughs] 99 plus. [laughs] No, but I... 32:28 And I, I like messaging people. At every, every night I go in and I invite people from the DMs. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's over 30,000 for sure. Um, and, and most of that, most of that is TikTok. 32:43 I, I put a lot of the TikTok videos on Instagram. It's harder to go viral on Instagram. They went viral on Instagram. Mm. It's gone viral on LinkedIn more... That's maybe more like thought leadership stuff. 32:56 But yeah, I don't... I actually, [laughs] I don't know the extent of our videos. Francis would love to go viral on LinkedIn. [laughs] Uh, you know, we have- [laughs] You and I have a video from this podcast as. Uh, no. 33:06 I w- I was gonna say, what we were just saying about like, you know, mu- using apps to remember. When I, I use Letterboxd, right? And I track what I watch. 33:14 And the, the, the real, the ideal purpose is tracking what I watch so if I'm talking to somebody I'm like, "Oh, what movies did I watch recently?" And I can look and be like, "Oh yeah, this one was good. 33:22 This one was good. Oh yeah, I remember this now." And, you know, if I'm hanging out with a friend it's like, "Oh, let's... 33:27 Maybe we should watch a movie," pull up the watch list and here's what I've saved of things I could do. And that... When you... 33:34 What you were just describing made that click of with Rodeo it's, you know, hanging out with a friend it's like, "Oh, we should..." Like, like I, I can think of one friend right now, my friend Andre. 33:42 We've been texting recently like, "Oh, we should hang out soon. It's been months," and we keep not doing anything. And then it's like, "Oh, well like, actually like, let me scroll through my Rodeo. Um, oh, the... 33:52 He likes this. We should do this thing," and then like sending that to him. 33:55 It's like that same function of like I don't remember the things I wanted to do, but at one point I did, and I put them in here, and now, friend, we can make, we can make plans. Um, but I wanted to ask. Yeah. 34:05 Is there, is there a specific type of event that's, that you're seeing processed the most in the app? Let's see. Uh, mu- museums are really popular. 34:15 Um, it's a really good use case because, uh, you know, like a museum exhibit has a, has like a date range- Mm... that you want to keep track of. Um, and you don't wanna miss it, and you wanna be reminded maybe of the... 34:31 you know, when it starts and when it ends, um, so that you ac- can actually go see it. Um, so museums are really great. Concerts, um, like vintage show pop-ups are really popular. 34:46 That was actually one of my first viral videos. I showed like a, a v-... My friend sent me... I think it was a, a Stacy London estate sale. And he was just like, he was like, "Do, do the Rodeo thing on this." 35:00 [laughs] You know, it was probably one week after we had lau- He was like, he was like, "Can it do this?" And then so I just recorded the like, you know, putting it into Rodeo and the output and sending it back to him. 35:10 Um, and so that, that's kind of a popular one. People send a lot of restaurants, um, a lot of locations, uh, as, as you might expect. Um, uh, which is, you know, great and useful. 35:25 Um, but a, a lot of the things that have like a time associated with them, uh, are, are really popular too. Mm-hmm. Th- one question about the name. So the slogan on the website, uh, there's... 35:36 I've seen two versions of this. There's "Your non-work life wrangled," and then there's also, "Your social life wrangled." Is... 35:41 Does the name Rodeo come because you guys were talking about wr- wrangling people together- [laughs]... and then from wrangle you get Rodeo? You know, we... So we came up with the r- name Rodeo a while ago. 35:52 Uh, and it just kinda... I think it came to me just, you know, probably in the shower. [laughs] Um, and, and, uh, I think it, it, it just evoked kind of like fun without- Mm-hmm... being too on the nose. Um, and then, 36:09 you know, we've worked on a couple different versions of, of this app, like some kinda like lowercase P pivots. Um, but it's always kinda had this, this like wrangling sense to it. 36:24 Like we were, we were pretty focused on like-How do you, how do you help people find the time for something is a common, like, kind of holy grail problem, um, that we were, we were digging into. 36:39 Um, and that, that's kind of like a-- you're like wrangling all your friends to like figure that out. But so the name's kinda always worked, uh, and, 36:49 a-and, and the wrangling part I think has, has always like stuck regardless of w-what the UX was. 36:56 Um, but yeah, now we-we've kind of, we're kinda wrangling more of like the-- we say like the what's versus the, the who's and the, and the when's. 37:06 But I think, I think you'll see more aspects of like what, who, and when, like in the app over time. Um- I saw a, a pitch deck that you shared on LinkedIn about a year ago, earlier pitch deck. 37:17 There was some screenshots where it looked like the functionality there was more like, uh, people like browsing events and then like tagging your friends as if like, "Do you want to go to these?" 37:27 Maybe, maybe I'm misremembering that, but I-I'm curious about some of these lowercase P pivots. Yeah. So I, I could describe some of them. So we, we started off, 37:37 we started off kind of obsessed with, with calendars actually. Um, this idea that... A-and just to back up a bit, like our, our mission all along has been to help you spend more time with the people you love. 37:50 That's what got myself and Tim, uh, who is the CPO of Hinge, excited about this. And so when you think about how- Kind of the opposite of Hinge, which is like spending more time with the people you don't like yet. 38:03 [laughs] You might li- y-the people you might like, uh- And might - The people you don't like. You might love and/or might even hate. Might, might hate. [laughs] Yeah. Somebody that you used to know, as you said. Yeah. 38:13 Yeah, exactly. Um, no, yeah, [laughs] that's a good take. 38:17 Uh, yeah, so if you think about like helping people spend time, you think about like w- I don't know, we keep going back to like these, these pieces of infrastructure or, or what, what I like to call social utilities of like what, what is going to sit on my phone or my computer or wherever that's gonna, you know, be on my home screen that's gonna help me like m-manage my time and my life and hopefully make it more fulfilling. 38:45 And when you think about calendars, uh, they haven't really changed in 30 years, and they're basically, uh, devices that are engineered or designed for, for work, uh- Mm-hmm... at this point. 38:56 And then if you compare that to, say, like a map, the-- another kind of like core utility in our worlds, uh, maps have changed dramatically in 30 years. 39:07 Like i-if you go from, from an atlas to MapQuest to like all of these versions that end us-- 39:14 e-end up with us having Google and Apple Maps on our phones, like those are, those are like unbelievably sophisticated things that connect us to the world around us and do like a million things for us. And so, 39:28 uh, the early innings of, of Rodeo was thinking about, um, how do you tackle, you know, a, a social cal- Like how do you, how do you design a calendar if it was meant to help you live a more fulfilling life with your friends? 39:44 Um, and so in that was this idea of, all right, a calendar obviously has time, but let's bring people into it, and let's bring the things that you wanna do into it. 39:57 And so the things you wanna do, you could see the early innings of what Rodeo is today, like that, that was starting to be incorporated into the product and into the vision. Mm. As, as we, we made a, a lowercase pivot 40:12 more into, all right, now LLMs are really good at reading calendar data. What if instead of looking at these like messy intersections of people's time, what if, what if we let AI do it? 40:28 Um, and so we spent about six months looking, looking at that problem and building what was essentially like a collaborative AI tool that let you say anything you wanted to do, and we would figure out when and where, and you could share that with your friends, and they could comment on it, and it would start to like resolve this problem. 40:52 The problem is, and we, we kinda touched about on it, uh, earlier, is people don't wanna do any of that work. [laughs] Like they don't- Mm-hmm... 41:00 they don't wanna do all of this writing, and they don't wanna do all this reading. And I think we were testing this out kind of in peak, 41:09 uh, I don't know, GPT fatigue, um, where people were like, "You know, I do all this GPT work for school or for work, and like for my social life, I don't know if I really want this in there. 41:24 I don't want this assistant feel. I don't wanna do all this typing and reading and writing and whatever." So we, we learned pretty quickly like that UX pattern was not really what people wanted. Mm. 41:36 Um, but what we did have in that, [laughs] in that version is you could send things from social into Rodeo, and we would remember it. And that's what, again, had people kinda like light up and say, "Oh, I love that. 41:52 Like my, my TikTok collections is where everything goes to die. My Instagram collection's where everything goes to die. All this stuff lives in DMs, it's all going to die." 42:02 And so we forced ourselves to make more of a standalone product for just that because, again, simple wins. And th- and that's, that's what has taken off. What's the business plan at this point? 42:16 When I-- That same pitch deck I referenced a second ago, what I saw there, you listed three things. There was affiliate fees for, for bookings, which I assume is might be a hotel, might be a restaurant, et cetera. 42:27 Um, sponsored places, so maybe like how if you're on Google Maps and you're looking for a restaurant, there's the sponsored ones that pop up. I'm assuming it's like that. 42:35 And then there was a Rodeo Plus subscription in that deck as well. Are these three- A vague, a vague Rodeo Plus. Yeah, whatever that may be. [laughs] Yeah. 42:43 [laughs] Um, so I-- The way-Here's, here's, here's the way I think about it. We-- The short answer is we don't know. Um- Mm-hmm... and the, the longer answer is 42:57 Tim and I, from our Hinge experience, we, we like subscription business models. Uh, they tend to align the company and its members, uh, on a common goal. 43:11 And so that would be my, my priority is, is like how do we, how do we make it so, um... I don't know, like may- maybe it's like you said, uh, restaurant sickos who- [chuckles]... 43:27 are saving five hundred places, and they're not gonna remember them. 43:32 Like, maybe that's a moment to say, "Hey, maybe this is paywalled beyond this point," uh, because it, it maintains the integrity of the product and, um, and, and also we're, we're storing a lot of things for free. 43:50 Um, so I think, I think, [chuckles] I think from, like, the business side and the membership side, you could look at that and be like, "Okay, that's reasonable." 43:59 [chuckles] That's-- So that's, that's kind of the way I think about business models. 44:04 You could apply that to different things on Hinge, was also, like, trying to figure out, you know, where, where to draw a line to maintain the integrity of something like a like. 44:18 You know, if, if you could, if you could like everyone like you can on Tinder- [chuckles]... then what is, what does a like really mean? Mm-hmm. 44:25 Um, so you know, and, and maybe that, that, like, you know, jumped the shark with, like, roses and all of these things. But, um, but at the core, that- that's 44:37 what that's about, is like can a business model actually help you, like, maintain the integrity of, of the product, um, to some degree? 44:46 And if you could do that, then, like, you know, that's, that's, like, the perfect place to say, you know, "Here's, here's the subscription." Mm-hmm. I-- On, on that same theme of integrity, 44:58 I, I don't think you're gonna see, like, sponsored places on Rodeo hopefully ever, definitely not anytime soon. Um, I think if you do that wrong, you lose the integrity of your product. 45:13 I think, I think no one's, like, loving Yelp these days. Uh, so- [chuckles] I accidentally opened Yelp. I s- for some reason still have it on my phone. I accidentally opened it this morning. Closed it as fast as I could. 45:25 I was like, uh- [chuckles] Yeah... I shouldn't, I shouldn't say this, but I was, like, shocked at myself for even having it on my phone still. What? Anyways. Yeah. Sorry, sorry, Yelp crew. 45:33 But that, I mean, that's the- It had its moment. It had its moment. I used to love Yelp. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah. Like, that's what it looks like when you give up all of this real estate to sponsored places. 45:44 And if you make it confusing, then you're asking users to-- members, users, people to, like, just think too much using your product. Mm. 45:53 You know, you start to be like, "Oh," like, "Is this actually the right place for me, or is it just 'cause they-- this place paid?" Um, and so, so yeah. 46:02 We don't, we don't-- I don't think we really wanna go down that path. Um, I think there's, there's probably ways to make a couple bucks on affiliate fees without, like, compromising integrity. 46:15 Um, but my-- our main focus eventually will be on the subscription side. 46:21 I was gonna ask whether there was a threshold that you wanna hit before you leave the closed beta, and I was curious, like, okay, what, what needs to happen for the public beta, and, like, is the plan to launch with a subscription rather than adding it later? 46:37 No, we're not, we're not gonna launch with a subscription. Um, and I think something, something Liz has taught me is, is sort of this, like, always be going to market, um- Mm... mentality. Uh- ABGTM. [chuckles] Exactly. 46:53 It's, [chuckles] it's, it's, it's on our wall. Um- Alex Bald- Alex Baldwin could never. [chuckles] Yeah. Uh, that's, that's kinda what we believe. 47:01 And so I, I think for a launch, you're gonna kinda see it more of, like, a, like, a rollout of every, like- Mm... couple weeks. There's, there's-- It's kind of broadening and broadening. 47:12 I'll, I'll be the one to make the bad, bad joke, but it, it's not-- This one's not our first rodeo. And so- Oh. I feel like, I feel like this, uh, this moment where you, you catch, like, the lightning in a bottle a bit. 47:27 Like, instead of just, like, opening the doors and just, just going for it, to take a moment and, uh, I don't know, make sure you're ready for scale. 47:39 Uh, I, I think we'd like to make the app more social than it is right now. Mm. It, it feels a little bit more like a, like a, a personal tool, um, with some social features. 47:51 And I-- Again, we're, we're not g- this is not social media. We're not gonna have, like, a feed. It's not gonna be like that. But just, just answering these questions of, like, how do I use this with my friends- Mm... 48:02 um, is something that we wanna get right before a hard launch. Yeah. Well, what I was talking about earlier about, you know, this, the generated infatuation style, hyper-specific lists. 48:13 Like, something like that needs some-- enough soc- enough, like, profile social feature for the user to build this habit-based data that then the app can learn from and suggest things, right? So I don't know. 48:27 What are, what are the-- If you don't wanna be social media, what are the limits of this? Is it, like, pr- maybe like Venmo, right? 48:34 Where, like, people aren't necessarily discoverable in a social way, but, like, you can look for your friends because you need to contact them for this thing, right? 48:40 And I mean, Venmo, they should have the, uh, the feed off by default. Mine's been off for years. I see people on there. They're s- they're still using it. Um- [chuckles]... 48:47 I don't think that you necessarily need to expose to other users, like, Daisy went to this, went on this hike in this city-Uh, yesterday, right? Like maybe you don't need to expose that [chuckles]. 49:00 But you do want to have like- That's Strava. That's, that is Strava. That's true, that's Strava. 49:04 [chuckles] But you wanna have, my friend is on here and oh, like, wow, this is my friend from high school that I'm, I'm in town. I haven't seen them forever. 49:11 Like, I wonder if they wanna go [chuckles] on this hike with me. I don't know. [chuckles] Yeah. I mean, y- yeah, you're touching on a, a lot of it, some of the tensions. 49:23 Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't think we wanna expose people's plans. Um, you know, you may have invited one friend and not another, and that's- Mm... not gonna feel, feel good. 49:35 Um, at the same time, there are people asking for, you know, if, if I, if I saved a place or a museum exhibit, it would be really cool to know if my friend did as well. Um- Mm. Yeah... 49:50 but then-- And, and that's kind of-- I call it like the bumping of molecules. 49:54 That's like the-- That's like getting things going [chuckles] so that you, you start to realize, oh, it's, it's actually kind of a low lift to just reach out and be like, "Hey, let's, let's, let's do this thing." 50:06 You've-- We- Mm. You know, this restaurant just opened. I could tell you watched the same TikTok video I watched. Let's, let's go do it. 50:15 Um, and so- This is like wanting to, to, to call back to Hinge and like the, you know, designed to be deleted. 50:20 It's like the point here is like how do you get users spending the least, the, the least amount of time from like using the app to like coming together in person for a thing, right? 50:29 Like that's the, that's the goal is like least amount of time from app use to meeting up. Totally. Yeah. Our, our kinda north star is, is that you're actually doing the things you save with other people. 50:41 Um, you know, it-- That's, that's an absolute number. You don't need to do a high percentage of the things you save. It's just like you're actually using it to do the things. Um, and, and yeah, we don't, we don't, 50:55 we don't optimize towards keeping you on the app at all. In fact, like the whole way you use the app is, is not [chuckles] like-- Most of the way people use the app is just sharing things into it. 51:05 You don't even have to open it. Um, so, so that's, that's like spot on. Um, I will say on the social side, peop- people are making like shared or collaborative, collaborative lists with other people. Mm. 51:19 And so that's a fun way to like-- You know, I have a list with, um, some of my friends from Boston, and they are like Boston sports events to get together around. Um, and so if I 51:36 see a Celtics game that looks fun, I just shoot it in, and everyone gets pinged about it who's on that list. And then it starts a little bit of like a catalyzing event to actually get together and- Mm... 51:48 you know, watch the Patriots in the Super Bowl. So, um, that's, that's kind of another social dimension that has like nothing to do with feed, nothing to do with any of like the social media dynamics that we know of. 52:05 Sam, thank you so much for coming on. I feel like that's a good place to stop. Yeah, for sure. Get offline. Uh, thanks for having me. [chuckles] Get off- Yeah... get offline. Get offline. Get offline. Get into Tasteland. 52:18 We'll see you next week. [outro music]
