Postcard 31

Peers Edition 🍐

Hi all,

This is a very special edition. Please read until the end.

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Me: " 📞 Hey mom!"
Mom: "Hey son. What are you up to these days?"

Me: "Oh you know .. just traveling the world 😇.. and some writing.... also I'm building a tech startup!"
Mom: "Oh really. Wow.."

Me: "Yeah! Remember that guy I met in Buenos Aires?"

"It's actually a really cool story.. I met him at this digital nomad event. (Total serendpity)"

"The next day I joined his company. The next week we flew to a remote town and climbed a mountain together."

"And now we're working on this cool project together.. which I'll tell you more about!

"But first, I'd like to feature 3 essays by my friends."

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3 Essays By My Friends

• Russell, 47, Louisville, Kentucky. Born with a congenital heart defect. He writes about overcoming body image issues and making the most out of what he has. Link

• Sydney, 26. Ex-Google ("Xoogler"), 8-Year Health Blogger. She writes about leaving her corporate job to become an artist / wellbeing coach. Link

• Derrick, 35, Bay Area Native, 10-Year Tech Vet. He writes about finding his true passion: Community. Link

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Mom: "So what are your days like?"
Me: "Hmm.. I wake up at 10 or 11 .. then go to a nice cafe.. maybe a little work, maybe a call.. (All this I vlog on Instagram).. Then maybe a salsa class or food tour in the evenings.. 😋"

Mom: "And what kind of work do you do?"
Me: "Haha you won't believe me but I'm actually running a company!  So it varies.. but I'll try to paint you a picture"

"sometimes it's interviewing developers..

"writing our functional specs.."

"phoning a business consultant in Melbourne or a Tesla AI Engineer.."

"My first day was spam-adding Ukranian developers on Linkedin.."

"and the list goes on.."

"figjamming with a design agency.."

"speaking with Nigerian freelancers.."

"Bulgarian development teams.."

"brainstorming features with a friend.."

“registering for Y Combinator's co-founder matching service..”

"Today I really hit it off with a college student from Gary Vee's discord!"

".. using ChatGPT to write job posts,.. meeting a guy in Colombia who works for Nvidia who's actually building a more advanced ChatGPT in Minecraft (!)"

"yadda yadda yadda .. making a logo, learning negotiation tricks, building a cool pitch deck (👇👇), reading system-design blogs, etc etc"

".. and you want to know what the best part is?  it's just me. Literally .. it's just me.. Just me and a dream (hehe)"

"Lastly .. some origin story:"

"when I first joined there was already a developement team on it.. they've been working on it for 3 months.. I came in and said "it's not going to work" — the next day they were fired. (on friendly terms 🙂). But we tossed everything out"

"And there was another guy too.. came around the same time as I. He's much more experienced than I (been doing it for 8 years).  I even told Gidon multiple times: "go with him. he can probably do a better job than I can."

Funny that didn't happen.. It's crazy man.. Gidon- he saw the talent in me before I could even see it in myself.. 🥺

".. Anyway I'm having a blast.. It took me 6 months but I finally found the right people! .. I'm so happy 😇"

PS: "Oh I should also add .. I'm getting paid $0.00 😊"

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Peers Pitch Deck

Hi! 👋

In the interest of attracting the best talent, I've decided to open-source our pitch deck. Please feel free to share liberally.

Slide 01: Title

Peers: We connect fans with creators and creators with fans.

Note: We call fans "peers". 

Slide 02: Who Are We?

Delka Talents is a Top 5 YouTube marketing agency in the US and Europe with over $10M in revenue. We manage 60-80 of the world's largest YouTube creators with over 100 million subscribers.

We've executed a variety of successful global campaigns. Our previous clients include: ByteDance (maker of TikTok), Google, Tencent, Coca Cola, Anker, Grammerly, Athletic Greens and many more.

Slide 03: Problem

After interviewing hundreds of creators, we noticed a problem...

The YouTube comments section sucks.

1. It's spam. Bots copy and post the same messages across different videos. It's inauthentic. 

2. You have no idea who your fans are. You click on a profile and you have no information about the person behind it. It's useless.

There is no engagement between creator and audience.

If that's not enough, …

Here's MrBeast, the largest creator on YouTube (134M subscribers), directly addressing our problem. Link (13:08 - 15:30)

Slide 04: Solution

The YouTube comments section is currently the only place fans can interact with creators. We want to change that.

Introducing Peers:

Peers is an exclusive content / sponsorship platform, similar to Patreon. 

• Patreon targets small creators. Fans pay $5-20/mo. What's the problem? Large creators who are making millions ($$$) won't sign up for Patreon to make another $10k. They would rather build their own platform instead.  

• OnlyFans targets pornstars. 70% of the content is NSFW. This is not the demographic we want to target at the moment.

• Patreon and OnlyFans both require creators to produce additional work. Eg. exclusive videos solely for their subscribers. This is burdensome for creators. We want to make it easy for them.

We're building a better YouTube comments section. 

YouTube is where our creators publish. So we start there. Who are the fans? The audience of YouTube. Mostly male, US-UK based. Age range 14-21.

Slide 05: Key Features

Key Features

1. Subscriptions

2. Long-Form Video

3. Paid DMs

4. Upvote / Downvote

Additional Features

• Fan Profile

• Polls

• Giveaways

• Paid Comments

Slide 06: User Story

I'm Logan Paul.

I'm a successful YouTuber. 

I just announced a new drink, called Prime.

It has 5 flavors. 

I want to know what my fans think.

I throw out a poll. 

Which flavor do you like best?

Based on the results, I can understand my audience better and make more-informed decisions.

Slide 07: Revenue Model

We chose a rate that is on par with industry leaders such as Moment House and Patreon.

Our pricing structure follows a creator-first model.

Example:

• $5 subscription

• Creator gets $5

• Fan pays $5.50

Transactions May Include:

• Subscriptions

• Paid DMs

• Paid Comments

Slide 08: Market Opportunity

Creator Economy Stats

• The entire creator economy’s estimated to be worth around $104.2 billion. (Influencer Marketing Hub)

• The next creator economy influencers might emerge straight out of high school, as 29% of high schoolers in America selected content creators as part of their preferred career choice. (Antler) 

• There are 200M content creators globally. (Linktree)

Demographics

• 30% of 18-24 year olds and 40% of 25-35 year olds call themselves content creators. (HubSpot Blog)

• Creators are most likely to be young (63% Gen Z) and female (48%). (Global Web Index)

• More American kids want to be a YouTube star (29%) than an astronaut (11%) when they grow up.

Top 3 Trends in the Creator Economy

1. Creators moving their top fans off of social networks and on to their own websites, apps, and monetization tools

2. Creators becoming founders, building out teams and assembling tools to help them start businesses while focuses on their art

3. Creators gaining power in the media ecosystem as fans seek to connect with individual personalities rather than faceless publishers

YouTube Stats

• 2 Billion YouTube Users

• 51 Million YouTube Channels

• 22 Thousand Have More Than 1 Million Subscribers

Slide 09: Strategy

Phase 1: Move Our Creators Onto the Platform

Phase 2: Target Every English-Speaking YouTube Creator

Phase 3: Reach Other Platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Etc)

Phase 4: Expand to the Spanish Market (2nd Largest)

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FAQ: Why YouTube and not TikTok?

Short Answer: Everyone buys because of story. 60 seconds is not enough. YouTube (long-form) is where the money is.

Long Answer:

YouTube is the platform everyone wants to be on and TikTok is the stepping stone as you can grow your YT channel from TikTok.

When you open TikTok, you'll see two items which are not on YouTube or Instagram. That is, you can go straight from TikTok to YouTube and Instagram. TikTok knows that. And the reason TikTok does that is because they're focused on new creators. Therefore every creator on TikTok has a certain roof that they hit. From there on they cannot grow any more.

The AdSense of TikTok is close to 0. A video with 50M views might get you $16. That same video on YouTube (long-form) will get you $60-100K from ad revenue alone.

So the plan of TikTokers is to focus on YouTube, right? So what everyone does is that they make TikTok videos at some point, in order to redirect their audience to YT. Because YouTube is where the money is. Right? It makes sense. Because first it's long form content and second TikTok is focused on new creators.

The reason why TikTok is so famous is because everyone can be a creator. You can get viral quite quickly. On YouTube it's not so simple, although YouTube Shorts has changed the industry.

The only competitor of TikTok is Instagram, not YouTube, because Instagram Reels is as good as TikTok Shorts. But YouTube Shorts is really different than TikTok. You can repurpose your TikTok videos on YouTube shorts to get a lot of views, but the long-form content is where the money is at — and that's what everyone wants.

Slide 10: Team

Introducing our team of 🌟 Superstars 🌟:

🙋‍♂️ Gidon: 26, Los Angeles. Co-Founded Delka Talents in 2019 with his best friend Tal. Previously a real estate salesman & investor, he recorded the fastest-ever sale on Day 2 on the job. He is currently learning Spanish in Buenos Aires and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 candidate.

🙋‍♂️ Tal: 26, Madrid. Co-Founder of Delka Talents. Early on in life he discovered his passions for people, business and meaningful relationships. He speaks 4 languages, plays the guitar, and aspires to be an actor one day. His acting page.

🙋‍♂️ Leo: 23, Colombia. World Traveler and Writer. Previously he worked in academia at Cornell University's Computer Architecture Lab, where he built specialized hardware to make Facebook and Netflix's recommendation engines run faster. He is currently leading Product at Delka Talents.

🙋‍♀️ Nicole: 24, London. Previously a hospice care center volunteer, offering terminally ill patients a friendly face and somebody to talk to. After leaving her career in finance, she’s now handling influencer relationships at Delka Talents.

Note: We are a global team with headquarters in Madrid.

Slide 11: Desired Outcome

Option 1: Sell our platform to YouTube, Spotify, or a related company.

Option 2: Become the next great social media platform.

Option 3: We are aware the future is unpredictable.

Note: We are optimistic but not idealistic. We don't care about changing the world. We care about solving customer problems. We have high conviction in the product we're building and the people we work with. We are fearless in our ability to adapt to changing realities in our fast-moving world.

Slide 12: CTA

We will build this platform no matter what.

Will you join us?

🧑‍💻 Designers / Developers: We have the creators on board. We just need a product that will be ready on Day 1 with hundreds of thousands of active users. We are currently hiring across all stages of development (Product, Branding, UI, UX, Frontend, Backend). We also have an opening for a Technical Co-Founder or Founding Engineer role. Fully remote.

💰 Investors: To support payroll (& future SaaS costs), we are actively searching for investors to fund the project. Friends, family, non/accredited investors— if you are (even remotely) interested, please reach out to me and we can start a conversation 😃.

👨‍🏫 Advisors: If you'd to help in a consultant or advisory role, or just offer your support, I'd also love to hear from you.

👉 Contact me at leo@delkatalents.com 👈

Note: We're an early-stage company. We're looking to build an MVP at the moment.

Slide 13: Closing

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Thanks for reading!

Leo A