Building a Business Brick by Brick

When you started Cameo, there were really no established players in the space, you created this new category. How did you sell this idea? How did you convince celebrities to be featured on your platform for a company they never heard of before.

We had the classic chicken and the egg just like any marketplace. We’re trying to sell talent on this, connecting with fans when there were no fans or no traffic, and we were telling fans about this opportunity to connect with their favorite stars, and we didn’t have anyone that they knew or they liked.
So, we were very fortunate to just start with relationships that we had. None of the people we launched Cameo with would’ve been big enough to launch a business with. Anyone else would’ve said, “Don’t do it yet,” but the second we had that first customer reaction video that I talked about earlier, the second I had that video then it wasn’t about telling people to make money on something that no one was making money on, and was showing people like, “Don’t you want to make someone feel like that? Either from the customer perspective to go buy this gift for somebody, or from the town perspective of delighting one of your biggest fans.”
So, once I had that reaction video, that made the job easier, but look, it’s still a hard job today. Our talent team has built this business brick by brick, there were no shortcuts here, we never did a deal with the agencies or the networks. So, all these relationships, the 50,000 people that we’ve onboarded, we know them, these are our relationships. People on my team had DMed them on Instagram or you got to them on Twitter or got their phone number somehow. And that’s how we built the business.

Really, you DMed them on Twitter and that’s how you got some of them on the platform?

And Instagram, yeah.

That's incredible.