How
Cameo Became a Star
The company, which connects celebrities with fans via paid videos, just reached unicorn status. Cameo is a great example of how a slow-burn strategy can catch fire and scorch unsuspecting competitors.
Chicago is all abuzz about the new unicorn in town. Cameo,
a 4-year-old startup that allows users to buy short, video shout-outs from
celebrities, just completed a new $100 million round of financing at a valuation
of more than a billion dollars. The list of new strategic and growth investors
led by e.ventures reads like a tech Who's Who
(Amazon, Google, SoftBank, etc.) and the newbies join an existing A-list VC
roster headed by Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The irony is that when the business was started a few years ago
as two young guys trying to talk B- and C-list has-beens and
never-wases (plus some new and old jocks) into making a few bucks
recording videos on their phones for complete strangers, pretty much everyone
thought it was a joke. Who would agree to do it? Who would care about the
people doing it? And, of course, who would pay for it? While maybe everyone has
their 15 minutes of fame, Cameo was chasing people who had burnt out long ago
or missed their moment completely.
What no one realized in the beginning (when the entire Cameo
team shared a modest glass-walled office at 1871, Chicago's premiere tech
incubator) is that this is a near-perfect example of how new competitors can
enter a market at the very bottom - and get ignored or ridiculed by all the
existing players -- while slowly and steadily improving their
offerings. Cameo moved continually upstream, grew its presence and share, and
is now poised to pounce.
This is exactly what China did to sectors of the
American steel industry. They started by producing and delivering cheap,
dirty and low-grade rebar (those rusty stakes you see sticking out of concrete
at every construction site with the little orange caps), which no one else in
the U. S. wanted to produce because of the low margins and associated workplace
pollution problems. And then, in just over a decade, the new entrants developed
clean mini-mills and came to be a significant player in the production of most
specialty steel in this country. Change China to Japan and you've got the same
basic story with film and copying machines. If this process sounds somewhat
familiar, it's the core concept behind Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive
innovation. Start small and moderately priced in potentially large and
under-appreciated markets, or in markets that were largely monopolized and
taken for granted. Serve your customers most basic needs, innovate and
iterate constantly, and move so quickly that the incumbents can't keep up with the
pace.
Cameo never worried about the quality of the videos on their
folks' phones -- although the quality and smarts of those phones exploded,
which didn't hurt. Smooth, polished and slick was out. In fact, the more
informal, the more ad hoc, the goofier some of the early offerings were, the
more authentic and real they seemed to the end users in an age of fake, plastic
and manufactured everything. In a way, everyone was in on the joke and the
hokier the performance, the bigger the bang.
These days, some 1,300,000 videos later, there are more than
40,000 celebs and other personalities of all sizes, shapes, ages and histories
competing every day on the Cameo site to make videos and make someone's
occasion instantly memorable, for a fee. The talent sets the price for their
own videos and Cameo takes a cut of each transaction. Last year's revenues look
to have been around $100 million.
And, as sad as it is to say, the COVID-19 pandemic couldn't have
come at a better time for Cameo since everyone who was anyone was stuck at home
along with the rest of the world looking for something to do in the way of
work. At the same time, digital gifts are safe and easy to deliver. As
the business and the transaction volumes took off, it turned out that these
celebs could actually make some real money in their spare time. The company
says that more than 150 of their best "creators" earned more than
$100,000 each last year.
All good, you say, but who's really being disrupted? That's what
the world doesn't really know yet about Cameo, even though Steven Galanis, the
CEO, talks about it all the time. He says that Cameo isn't really about the
videos -- those are mini-Trojan horses for the real score. It's about
building a two-way marketplace between celebrities and their fans where just about anything -
any task, any request - can be accommodated and bought or sold.
And who is really being disrupted and about to be blown up? Some
of the worst people in the world -- talent agents, music label heads and
managers. As Hunter Thompson used to say: "The music business is a cruel
and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run
free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
Once you (and millions of others) can use Cameo's channels to
ask Snoop Dogg to do whatever, it won't take him too long to wonder why he
needs any intermediary to take care of business. He's already killing it on
Cameo, and now non-fungible tokens, NFTs, provide another whole channel for
musicians and others to directly connect with fans. Snoop recently
observed: "There is no platform or
middleman filtering my message anymore." The fat cats in
the entertainment business may not know it yet, but their days are numbered.
Every day, it seems, the world turns upside down on someone who thought they
were sitting on top of it.
Cameo is coming for all of them. The one thing we know for sure
in the startup world is that the wolf climbing the hill is always hungrier than
the wolf on top of the hill.
