Founder & CEO of Cameo | Steven Galanis
The new autograph.
For the first installment of Journey to PMF, I sat down with the Founder & CEO of Cameo, Steven Galanis.
Cameo is an app that enables celebrities to send personalized videos to fans for special occasions. Cameo is currently valued at over $1 Billion. In 2020, Cameo generated just about $100 million in gross revenue and netted about $25 million of that revenue. Cameo recently tapped basketball legend Magic Johnson to join its Board of Directors. All in all, Cameo is a rocketship, and they have no plans of stopping anytime soon. However, there was a point in time not so long ago that it was just a scrappy startup trying to be relevant and chasing Product-Market Fit.
I asked Steven about the origins of the idea, what started it all. He remembered the exact date, and it was October 5th, 2016. Martin Blencowe, one of the company's co-founders, asked his client Cassius Marsh to send a personalized video to a friend of his who recently had a baby. Before co-founding Cameo, Martin was an NFL agent, and Cassius was an NFL player for the Seattle Seahawks. And it was at that point, the lightbulb went off in Galanis' head, and he said that's the moment he realized that "this is going to be the new autograph."
Cameo's journey to find PMF wasn't easy. Nothing is easy in startup land. Steven left his cushy job at LinkedIn and went all-in on the idea. After going all in, three months have passed by, and not a single Cameo video was sold.
It all changed after Steven received a Twitter DM. Someone reached out to Steven, asking for a Cameo for his daughter's birthday. Steven and his team had to race to get the video but ended up having the video a few days later after the young lady’s birthday. Steven thought that because the video was late, the delivery was going to fall flat. It ended up being the opposite. Steven watched the reaction video about 2 hours after submitting it, and the guy's daughter was incredibly emotional throughout the whole video, with many tears of joy. That's the exact moment Steven realized that he indeed had something special here. He asked himself, "if we can make one person feel like this, then we could make billions feel that same way someday." At that point, Cameo didn't have a product; they did everything manually. As he put it, "we essentially had a Google Form. We reached Product Market-Fit before we even built a product." That was a significant point because founders often believe they need a finished and polished product to launch. That's not true. Get a Minimum Usable Product out as soon as possible to start gauging interest from users.
The team was potentially considering having celebrities get paid to tweet about people or brands, but that strategy did not work. Because, contrary to what many people believed in the beginning, money was not the primary motivator on the side of celebrities. Connecting with their fans and helping their fans have a special moment was the motivator. After learning this, Steven and the team went all-in on personalized shoutout videos, and it was all up from there. Steven told me that focus is the best weapon on the side of a founder. He said it's "way better to move one ball forward 100 yards than try to move 10 balls forward 10 yards each." Find a niche that works, then go all in, don't spread yourself around for no reason.
They started to get more requests than they could handle, and they did pretty much zero marketing. Steven explained that the genius thing about Cameo is that "each video is a commercial for the next video." Here's how that works: Person A requests a video for Person B. Person B posts the video from the celebrity on their social media platforms. Then every friend of Person B watches the video with the Cameo watermark, which encourages them to request videos for their own friends/family members. It's a network effect like no other, simply genius.
So, what advice does Steven have for founders on their way to PMF and beyond?
From his perspective, he believes that first and foremost, as a founder, you must live and breathe the space you are in because someone else will always try to outwork you.
Next, make sure you have an incredible founding team. Steven believes that most successful consumer founding teams need a hustler, a hacker, and a hipster.
Hustler: Someone who's able to get clout, really good at sales.
Hacker: Someone who's able to find novel ways to put anything together.
Hipster: Someone who knows what's cool and stays in sync with the latest and upcoming trends.
The most important piece of advice is one he received from his CEO coach, Bing Gordon. Bing's impressive background is too long to share it all, but he served on the Board of Directors of Amazon for 14 years, he's former CCO at gaming giant EA, and he's currently a Partner at the elite Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
The advice goes like this. As a CEO, you have five things to work on, and it is in this order:
1 - Product-Market Fit. Find it, expand it, don't ever lose it.
2 - Build a world-class executive team. At some point, the company becomes the product. There's a shift that happens between building a product and building a company. Make sure you have a world-class executive team. Rank them from 5 (best) to 1 (worse). The score should always be 4.25 or higher.
3 - Communication & alignment. Ensure every employee thoroughly understands and aligns with the company's values, purpose, goals, vision, and dreams.
4 - Employee engagement. Do your people feel like they're doing the best work of their lives? Do they feel excited every day to go to work?
5 - Keeping the lights on. Fundraising and making sure there's money in the bank for people to get paid.
It may seem counterintuitive that money is last on the list, but Steven doesn't believe so, and I agree with him. If you have PMF, a world-class executive team, clear communication, employees are engaged -- the money takes care of itself in the end.
This was Cameo's journey to PMF. I am proud of Steven and the rest of the team. I am excited to see what the future holds for them.