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Here’s the program.
Hey everyone. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. This is my second take because today I’ve got with me a guy who’s making me a little bit nervous. Alec Shankman is the CEO of GotCast. GotCast is one of the industry’s top interactive casting sites. It hosted over 6,000 castings and reached over 400,000 users. That first intro, Alec, I don’t think would have gotten me a role on GotCast. How did that second one do?
Alec Shankman: The second went much better. I see you having your own TV show very soon.
Andrew: Really? Would you vote for me on GotCast?
Alec: I would vote for you every day.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to come back to that question about voting because it seems like that’s how you get all these people all linking to your site and get them all excited about being on there. But my first question has got to be, have you ever dated anyone from GotCast?
Alec: Well, I haven’t, because I’ve had a girlfriend for the last year and a half and I’ve been CEO for about 10 months.
Andrew: Ah. I see.
Alec: So I’ve been taken.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: Unfortunately for the ladies of GotCast.
Andrew: What about your founder, Wil Schroter? Do you know if he’s ever dated anyone from GotCast?
Alec: He hasn’t because he’s had a long-term girlfriend as well.
Andrew: That’s right.
Alec: I imagine there’s a lot more trouble that two single guys in Los Angeles, running a site like GotCast, could get into, but we’ve been very well-behaved founders of this company.
Andrew: All right. Actually, I’ve known Wil for a while. I know his girlfriend. The reason that I ask though is all I see are pictures of hot girls on your website asking for votes, asking for support, thanking you for support here and there. Voting seems to be a way that you get new users into the site, right?
Alec: Correct. Yeah.
Andrew: Can you talk about how it works, how it brings new people in?
Alec: Our site is a social network of sorts and it’s an employment tool of sorts, but the social network side of it is really what helps spread the word. A lot of times, people come to us specifically because they want to find new talent for a show. Just as many times, people come to us because they want to promote their show, or they want to promote their brand, or they want to promote whatever it is that they’re working on. Sometimes it’s a small company.
Instead of going through a traditional casting channel, like a casting director or an agency, they’ll post it on our site and turn it into a vote-based casting. At which point, the contestants, they upload their address book of friends and family, and in many instances, their fans. They get them to come vote every single day. It turns the casting process into a viral experience that ends up promoting whatever it is that we’re casting for.
Andrew: All right. I want to talk about that because I think you guys do an incredible job of getting your users to recruit new users.
Alec: Thank you.
Andrew: I want to make sure that I understand the numbers first. 400,000 users, are those all paid users? Or some paid, some free?
Alec: The paid model is actually something we just implemented a few months ago. The way it used to work is that most of the site was available for free and then we had some added benefits to pro members, at which point you get better media files, you get more videos, more photos, access to more castings, et cetera.
To date, more of our users are still free users. At any given time, you’re able to use the site and upwards of half a dozen different castings for free. The power users, who are actually using it as an employment tool, for those guys we have hundreds of castings at any given time that they’re able to submit themselves for, every single day. Those are the guys that opt to sign up and pay money because they can upload more videos, upload more photos, and make it a much more serious effort to get employed.
Andrew: Actually, I’m sorry, but I’m not following. You’re saying that if I sign up for free today, I can still apply for some casting calls but not all?
Alec: Correct.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: There are various brands that come to us, or companies that come to us, and basically ask us to create events, to promote their companies, their shows, et cetera. And to these folks, it actually is worth paying us. To them, the difference is they want as many people engaged in the casting as possible.
For example, Project Runway, we did a casting for them, we had 50,000 registrations. Had we put that behind a pay wall, the number wouldn’t have been as meaningful. L’Oreal, who was the title sponsor of that casting, it was in their best interest to capture as many registrations as possible, to get as many users engaged as possible, and ultimately to make it a very viral event.
Your average guy looking for an 18- to 20-year-old female model for a fashion show, he’s not looking to promote the show as much as he actually needs the model. Those, we actually put behind the pay wall of our employment tool program.
Andrew: Okay. By the way, apparently Rob here in the chatroom is going to try to get everyone in the chatroom to make me laugh. So, if I start cracking up it’s because of what’s going on in the chatroom. A few other people don’t believe I’m reading the chatroom as I do the interview. Unlike people on Project Runway, I’ve got to also pay attention what to the audience is doing and I’ve got to look at my notes and ask you the questions.
Alec: You have conspirators.
Andrew: [laughs] Guys, not at this interview. Save it for somebody who is not used to dealing with people on camera. I want to impress on this one. Okay. So 50,000 people joined Project Runway. 50,000 people apply to Project Runway. Do all 50,000 of those people become members of your site?
Alec: Well the way it works is we have two different products that we have. We have GotCast.com, which is our mothership, so to speak. Then we also will white label our platform. So for various companies who want to do a much bigger event, that’s branded and fully customized, like Project Runway, we actually have it exist elsewhere.
In that instance, it existed on Lifetime, the network. It existed on their website and it was iFramed into Myspace. Everybody had to sign up for the program, which we hosted and we built, but it wasn’t actually part of the GotCast mothership. However, in the signup process, you click a box that says, “Click here if you’d like a free profile on GotCast.” And a certain percentage do, and they then migrate over to become GotCast members as well.
Andrew: I see. What percentage of those people become GotCast members?
Alec: It’s usually at least a third of the contestants. . .
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: . . .will do that. The voters, it depends. People who come on for just a fan or a voter experience aren’t as interested in getting cast on GotCast, so that percentage is a bit less. But your average contestant, about a third of them will actually opt in for a profile on GotCast to learn much more about what’s going on with the GotCast sites.
Andrew: I see. Does Project Runway, or anyone associated with them, pay you to do this for the white label?
Alec: They do. The white label platform, it actually varies in cost depending on the nature of what we’re doing. We’ve done quite a few of these, ranging from entertainment brands, like VH1 or Lifetime et cetera, to brand brands, like Hautelook.com or Creative Recreation or folks like that.
We’ve had, Dove is sponsoring one that we have with VH1. L’Oreal sponsored the one with Garnier Fructis. Sony has one going on with us right now for Playstation. It’s a show called The Tester. Again, it’s an experience where they wanted to get as many people going to Thetester.com as possible, so they’ll pay us a fee to build, design, manage, host, et cetera, the whole experience but they just want it to look and feel and taste like their brand or their network. They want the traffic.
Andrew: I see. Why can’t they just build this out themselves? What’s the advantage of using you?
Alec: Reality is, we’re just really good at it. The process of doing these things is relatively time-consuming and pretty expensive. You need a team of people. You need a designer. You need a moderator. You need people that are checking on the community. You need people that are really skilled at dealing with talent, et cetera, et cetera. It’s three, four, five, six people in a given project and you can either hire all of them or reallocate their time towards a project like this, which makes it pretty expensive. Or you can hire us for a pretty nominal fee.
We tend to subsidize these experiences, just because it’s what we do. We like being involved. We can do it really inexpensively. A couple of groups have done them on their own. MTV actually launched an experience a few years back where they tried a few of these internally. The team was just too big and too expensive and they ended up just unloading the full team and now they do most of theirs through us.
A couple of other groups have tried them as well. Usually what happens is I follow up and offer our services soon thereafter because if you haven’t had a lot of experience in these things, there’s just a lot of things that go wrong. For example, there’s one that I noticed with Fanta, who’s doing a casting for the fourth Fanta girl. That one is not, it has nothing to do with GotCast, and they’re promoting it all over the place. Incredible marketing budget. But last time I checked, they only had a few hundred submissions.
Andrew: Why? What are they doing wrong then?
Alec: Well, we happen to really good at viral marketing, viral promotion, getting the fans engaged, doing a lot of Internet marketing. We just make it a very interactive experience. People who are really good at other things, like making soft drinks and powering websites that sell soft drinks, it’s just not the space that they come from. Similarly, I couldn’t go market soft drinks. It’s not the world that I’m in. We just happen to be really good at casting.
Banana Republic is running a huge campaign right now with Mad Men. If anybody’s been to a shopping mall recently, you see outside all the Banana Republic stores you can get a walk-on role for Mad Men. I went on the site yesterday, same thing, 760 registrations. I followed up and offered some help. We’ll see if there’s something we can’t do to help them promote the event. For us, to get 25, 30, 50,000 people engaged in a single casting is really easy. We have zero marketing budget.
Andrew: All right. So that brings me to the big questions that I want to address here in this interview. I want to find out about how you get users. It’s not easy to get people to register using the kind of registration process that you have, which is long and it’s asking for more than just an email address and you’re getting people to do it. I want to know how you get people engaged.
I want to learn, too, about profits. A lot of companies have decided that they’re not going to charge their users, that they’re only going to make money from advertising. You guys have bucked that trend. I want to learn what you’ve learned from that.
Why don’t we start with getting users. In fact, let’s go back to before you were with the company. How did you get the original users on to GotCast?
Alec: Really, it kicked off with social marketing. The site launched. I was the agent for the site. I spent 2003 through 2009 as a reality television agent at an agency called Abrams Artists Agency. Wil Schroter, the founder of the company, is a good friend of mine. I’ve known him since 2001. We were actually business partners and friends in Ohio. In ’07, we got to talking about what would be a cool venture that I could help him with.
The idea launched in December of 2007 with a project that was associated with a website called YoungHollywood.com. The idea was let’s give away a role to cover a red carpet event for YoungHollywood.com and just see what happens. Let’s see if people care. We brought on a guy at the time that Wil had worked with and he was just an expert at nightclub promotions and social marketing and did a lot of Myspace and Facebook promotions and that was really how the site launched.
What ended up happening is, if you upload and you want to be cast for a role, which is something that for a lot of folks around the country, especially now, we’re in a culture where everybody wants to be famous, everybody wants to be on a reality show, everybody has a great idea for a reality show. They all want to be the next Snooki or whatever the case might be. If you can get somebody engaged and give them the opportunity to get their friends and family to vote for them. Again, in many instances, these folks have online presences.
If you have 20,000 friends on Twitter, or whatever the case might be, you can promote to your fanbase what you’re up to and they can vote for you. It’s a very meaningful amount of people and as they show up, they register with the site as a voter, at which point they see all these cool opportunities that they might be appropriate for.
You’re right. People don’t like giving away personal information. Especially what we’ve seen recently with the Facebook privacy laws and things going on with Twitter. In our instance, what we’re giving them is something that they really, really want. It’s a shot at fame. In the event that they are chosen for the red carpet role, or for the star of this, or the star of that, they want to be reached, at all costs. They need their cell phone number to be accurate.
Andrew: Right.
Alec: They need their address and phone number to be accurate. They’ll give you all of that information because it’s not like they’re getting a Netflix account or something that someone’s trying to upsell them on, they don’t necessarily need. It’s specifically, they want to be famous and this is a shot at being famous.
Andrew: I’m getting a lot of questions in the audience about the early days. About how you got people in there in the beginning. Can you spend a little more time on that?
So, you had this test about the red carpet event. People entered. You had a guy with you who was good at social marketing, who was good at getting people excited about a new product and a new launch. He helped drum up support. What did you do to go from there to, let’s say, your first 10,000 people?
Alec: Sure. The intial campaign was with YoungHollywood.com.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Alec: It was sponsored by True Religion, the jeans company. That campaign actually registered, ultimately, I want to say, upwards of 3,000 or 4,000 people with the site. It was a pretty awesome way to start out and just to approve the concept.
Andrew: Why did that work so well?
Alec: It was a guaranteed role. So, if you go to. . .
Andrew: Guaranteed to one person. How’d you get so many people engaged in just a chance to win?
Alec: Sure. What happens is in a casting business, traditionally, someone will post a casting opportunity and they’ll say, “Please submit to be considered.” But they’re also posting on Craigslist. They’re going out to all their friends and family. They’re calling every talent agent in the business, LA, New York. They’re doing a broad sweeping net.
So it might be that you submit through whatever way you find out about the casting call and you’re considered but that somebody who happens to have been seen on the street randomly gets the job. You’re up against a million people. It’s uncontrollable.
Andrew: But that’s not the issue with Fanta. I understand that if people think that no one has a chance to win or that they’re competing against superstars or someone on the street, then it doesn’t ring true. But Fanta’s not doing that and neither is Banana Republic. What did you guys do, or what did the company do, so right in the beginning?
Alec: Totally fair. What worked for us was one, we guaranteed the role. This was one of the first times it happened. These guys that are all doing the contests now, it’s a proven concept at this point, which is great. You weren’t guaranteeing roles. Moreso, they were doing them in auctions and goofy things where people could donate money. But this was the first time that you were guaranteed one person, in this controlled environment, was going to get the job. It was pretty meaningful.
We also built in a fashion makeover with True Religion jeans. All of a sudden, somebody was going to get flown to Hollywood. They were going to go to the True Religion brand jeans’ headquarters. They were going to get a free makeover. They were going to get to interview big celebrities on a red carpet and there was going to be footage that was distributed.
Andrew: So then are you saying that the guys who aren’t doing it well today just don’t have a big enough prize?
Alec: The outcome is definitely important.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: We’ve done events where the outcome hasn’t been that exciting.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Alec: We did an event where somebody gave away some Best Buy gift certificates, for example. It just didn’t perform. If you give away a meaningful role that’s actually going to be a meaningful resume add for somebody, they’ll take it very seriously. The first step was getting the right outcome associated with it.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: From there, it’s making sure that the social tools are there because what happens is, if people find out about it and they submit and it goes into a black box, then it is what it is. There’s no reason to come back. There’s no reason to tell your friends, family, fans. There’s no reason to post it on Facebook, Myspace, et cetera.
What we do is we give them a lot of reasons, we make the fan experience just as important as the contestant experience. As a fan, you’re coming, you’re voting, you’re seeing that your votes are being counted. The votes are registering in real time. You’re leaving comments. You’re getting all sorts of exciting feedback from the person you’re voting for because they’re getting emails when you vote for them. The contestants are given tools that they can upload badges on Facebook and Twitter and Myspace. It’s a very viral, engaging experience.
A lot of the other competitors in the business, or the other media companies, that are trying this, aren’t doing that. For example, Glee. Myspace did a big event with Glee. It did well. It pulled in 34,000 registrations, but the fan experience wasn’t there. I think with all the on-air promotion that was done with Fox and Myspace, if you had fans involved, there probably would have been 100,000 people.
Andrew: Okay. I think I see what you’re saying. Usually, and I’ve looked at a few sites before we did this interview, usually it’s submit into, what you call it, a black box, or it just looks like an empty registration form. You type in all your information, you hit send, and you hope somebody contacts you, but you’re not sure.
On GotCast, I get to see other people who are entering. I get to see my own page on GotCast. You give me a little widget to put on my website. You give me a link to encourage other people to come in. You have a wall on everyone else’s profile on GotCast, which is how these girls were messaging you and Wil to say, “Come and vote for us.”
Alec: Right.
Andrew: So you’re giving them the tools to encourage their friends to come in. I didn’t even see this, but you’re saying also, after they ask to be cast, you encourage them to upload their whole address book so they can ask all their friends to come to the site and vote.
Alec: Correct.
Andrew: And all their friends come in and they have to register in order to vote.
Alec: Correct. Each person, on average, is good for usually three to four additional signups. It just becomes a viral process like that. If you’re not encouraging people to get their friends and family and fans involved, they won’t and then all of the marketing falls on you.
In the example like Fanta, they’re doing a ton of marketing, but if they gave the participants as much motivation to solicit votes. . . Who’s doing a really good job of this, to an extent, is Oprah. Oprah has a campaign going on right now on OWN, for people to win their own show. The one issue they ran into, which is something that people, like I said, people that do it without a company like ours that haven’t had a lot of experience in it, unfortunately there are issues, that’s the nature of technology. They didn’t put restrictions on how many times each IP address could vote per day. They got dragged through the mud recently on all the major tabloids on people cheating et cetera, because you have somebody as a front runner with a million votes. Another guy signs up a week later, how’s he supposed to get to a million votes, et cetera?
There’s a lot of things you have to think through, but if you involve the fans, they spread the word for you. They do more of the marketing than you could ever imagine to do. Quite frankly, if you’re looking for an obscure role, so for example, you’re looking for a carpenter for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which isn’t as common necessarily as a model for Project Runway, it’s a skilled trade. The best way to spread the word to carpenters is to get somebody who is a carpenter to solicit all of his other friends and family who are probably, at least, ancillarily related to the business in some capacity, and the word spreads through the right communities. We wouldn’t otherwise have a great way to reach them.
Andrew: I see. I actually see how powerful it is to get people to vote. In fact, on the TechCrunch article that announced that GotCast was launching, there were a few people taking potshots at Wil saying, “This is going to disappear or be dead pooled within a few months.” Obviously it wasn’t. I think the site launched in ’07, we’re now in 2010 and the site’s still going strong.
Alec: Yep.
Andrew: So they were wrong there.
Alec: Bigger and better than ever.
Andrew: But mixed in with that were links with people saying, “Vote for me.” There was one guy saying, “Vote for my wife.” Wil apparently clicked over, voted for his wife, and came back to say, “Hey, dude, your wife’s hot.” Which just goes to show that people are willing to open themselves up that way for a vote.
What I’m wondering, though, is why? Why does it fit well with this? Everyone seems to add a voting component. We all know that voting adds virality, but it also needs to somehow fit with the product itself and I don’t see how me having a lot of friends who click that vote button and have time to fill in a registration makes me a better fit for a TV show than someone who just looks good and is spending his time acting and not adding friends on GotCast.com
Alec: It’s a good question. To an extent, well-said differently. As far as the top-10 highest voted people, in any given contest we’ve ever done is concerned, you will always have your Homecoming goofball guy that gets voted up to the top just because make a joke out of it. But more often than not, you have people that actually deserve the job.
It’s similar to YouTube, where if you’re getting a million views, you’re probably more interesting than the video that’s getting five views. In our systems, if you’re getting a ton of votes and views, chances are you’re a little bit more engaging or interesting to people who aren’t. To an extent, your friends and family help, but it’s also at the same time, your friends and family are going to the system and they’re finding other people once they’re there to vote for.
We tie in a round system. For the sake of pointing it out, not all of our castings have votes. Most of them don’t. The ones that do tend to be the promotional castings, and the branded castings, and the things that our partners in each event want to make a big experience out of. For those, we tie in multiple rounds and we make some pretty interesting things. As you eliminate different groups of people and you go through the process, the voters keep coming back because they take a vested interest in it. At which point, the voter can say, “I put that person on Project Runway.” It’s a pretty big deal.
You’re not voting for some obscure thing that will never really impact your life. It’s actually pretty cool to vote for somebody and then to see them on national television on your favorite television show a month later. It’s a pretty big deal.
We did a recent casting with the Suicide Girls. It’s a huge community of girls. There’s 5 million uniques a month on our website. They have 1.7 million friends on Myspace. I think they’re like the fifth biggest profile on Myspace. We did a funny contest with them. They sold a new television show. We did one that said, “For the five of the highest 50 voted girls will be considered for an in-person audition with the founder of Suicide Girls.” The outcome wasn’t even all that specific. It was just five of you are basically going to get an audition in person.
It was unprecedented, the number of votes. We had hundreds of thousands of votes in two weeks because this community cared so much about who the new Suicide Girl would be. I can’t even tell you the types of measures they took but there was an example of one of the girls, and for those folks who don’t know Suicide Girls, it’s basically a risque community of girls that do photoshoots, often topless.
Andrew: And heavily tattooed.
Alec: Yep. Exactly. And pierced. It’s a very alternative lifestyle. One of the girls sent a pretty dirty video to a major, major blogger and said, “This video can’t be posted on GotCast but it can be posted on your site. This is your gift for getting your followers to come vote for me.” Sends the video. The video is posted to his blog and it sent ridiculous amounts of traffic, all of his masculine viewers to our to site to come vote because they got to see her topless. It’s amazing. But she went to some pretty extreme measures and it worked.
Andrew: I see. Okay. All right. I wasn’t making a judgement call, by the way, with the question about voting. I’d love to add voting. I’d love to make it work. I just want to find out why it worked for you guys and now I understand how you tied it in. What else has worked for you with viral marketing?
Alec: The badges that we build are also very helpful because. . .
Andrew: What are the badges?
Alec: Badge is a piece of code that is reskinned, ultimately, to appear as a button or a badge on your Facebook page or your Myspace page that says, “Come vote for me.”
Andrew: Ah. I see. These aren’t badges based on my accomplishments. They’re badges that are designed to get my friends to come over to GotCast. Okay.
Alec: Correct. As long as we can create visibility on somebody’s social network, that they’re involved in one of our contests or castings, and their friends can come vote for them, it works. The more tools we give these folks, the more productive that they end up being. These people took a very vested interest.
The videos too, we sometimes will bubble up just wildly funny videos. There was a guy who’s involved in our current casting for The Tester on Playstation network, who said that one of the reasons he should be cast is because he has a beard. It was just goofy stuff, but when you watch these videos, and they end up going viral, even within small communities, it drives a lot of traffic. We had a girl that looked like Angelina Jolie. Long story short, Digg ended up sending hundreds of thousands of people to one of our castings because the girl looked like Angelina Jolie. It’s just funny.
Andrew: This was on your website?
Alec: Yep.
Andrew: Okay. The guy with the beard, if he’s getting traffic, is that going to your website or is that going to Sony’s?
Alec: That one is going casting.thetester.com.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: That’s a white label that we have existing that’s pointing over to their site. It really just depends on, we have so much original content and unique media that’s being uploaded for each of these castings, that that type of stuff draws traffic, the buttons and badges draw traffic, the pure social marketing draws traffic.
We really encourage our contestants to do most of the marketing because, like I said, they really want to be famous. Quite frankly, their friends would love for them to be famous. The friends would also love to be responsible for who the next person is on whatever their favorite show. They have a real vested interest in getting involved.
Andrew: Yeah. I could understand that, yeah, if you’re a friend of somebody who’s this passionate, or a family member, you just feel hopeless, or helpless. You feel like there’s nothing you can do, but they’re someone who you believe in.
Here, let me see. I’ve got someone, ah, right from your wall. I copied and pasted this into my notes. “Hi, Mr. Shankman. I have a daughter.” I’ll read it exactly as she wrote it. “Hi, Mr. Shankman. I have one daughter. Her name is Jade. She’s looking, needs for an agent. Currently, she resides in San Diego, California and commutes to LA on a daily basis.” This is a mother who came to you on your wall and said, “Help out my daughter,” essentially. I can understand how a mother like that, to vote is not that big a deal. To say to everyone in the family, “Go vote for my daughter,” is not that big a deal. It’s the least she could do. Frankly, she’d love to do even more.
Alec: Yeah. What happens is, so if you go to our site today, you’ll see maybe half a dozen different castings, at most, that are vote-based and probably 200 to 300 that aren’t. The people that are taking their careers very seriously, the people that are moved to LA or to New York, they have an agent, they have a manager, or they hope to have one soon, they’re really focusing moreso on the castings that aren’t vote-based because they’re submitting to 10, 15, 20 a day in some instances.
The people that are participating in the contests, sometimes you get the people that are serious talent, but a lot times you just get folks around the rest of the country that are hoping for that lottery ticket. Quite frankly, it works. Every time we’ve done one of these, people are ending up on TV.
The girl from, I think she was from North Carolina, that we put on Project Runway, it’s an awesome opportunity. She’s on one of the ten biggest shows ever because, from the convenience of her own couch in North Carolina, she created a video and got some votes. It works.
Again, the folks that are actually moving out here or driving two hours a day from San Diego to LA to get started in their career, they need a little bit more volume in their casting opportunities, so they tend to be our pro users. They sign up. They pay us a monthly registration fee, our subscription fee, and they get tons of different opportunities every single day to get noticed for different roles, acting, hosting, whatever the case might be. For a lady like that, what often happens is I’ll email her personally through the system. I don’t like to put a lot of the advice on peoples’ walls.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Alec: I’ll email her and I’ll say, “Here’s some advice. Here’s some classes she might want to jump in on and here’s some opportunities that might make sense.”
Andrew: Okay. Let’s see what else I’ve got here. Getting users engaged, we talked a little bit about that. What’s the most effective of getting people engaged? Of getting them to not just be another record in your database?
Alec: It’s to find people that really care about getting cast in roles. The folks who actually take a super vested interest in getting a role, those are the most active, the people that really want to be on the next whatever the show might be. These gamers that want to be on The Tester, they take it very, very seriously. They’re uploading tons of content and tons of solicitation for votes to become the new star of that show. That’s it. It’s providing cool outcomes.
Andrew: Do you do more than that to encourage them to say, “Hey, you’ve registered, but there’s so much more you can do on the site.” Do you ever send them an email saying, “Go and add your photo because profiles with photos are 25% more likely to get picked”? Or, “Add a video because that’s going to engage people.” Do you do that?
Alec: We do. We actually do the. . .
Andrew: Which part? Tell me.
Alec: We have a guy at our Ohio office who’s one of our moderators.
Andrew: You guys still have an Ohio office?
Alec: We sure do. Yep.
Andrew: Okay. So you got a guy in Ohio.
Alec: Rent’s cheaper out there!
Andrew: I bet.
Alec: Santa Monica rent is crazy. Yeah. We have an office in LA. We have an office in Ohio. One of our moderators, he’ll go through and he’ll find people. He might find somebody who looks very, very appropriate for some of the roles we’re casting for.
For example, you might find a beautiful girl that makes sense for a lot of the modeling roles we’re working on, but she just doesn’t have sufficient photos to get noticed by the people that are really looking. We’ll say, “Hey. It’ll be really great if you can upload more photos that truly showcase what you’re all about.”
We came across a girl recently who just happened to have a decent photo on there, but she was a contender in our Miss California pageant casting that we were doing, and we asked her to upload some more photos. The other day, they actually chose her to become the contender that they’re sponsoring through the Miss California pageant now, which is part of the Donald Trump company. She’s now a Miss GotCast. She was missing media.
Andrew: Is there any automation that goes into that? Or is just a guy in Ohio who emails out?
Alec: It’s difficult to, the automation’s a little bit tricky, because everybody has different issues. Some people, they might not have filled out their bio properly and we’ll go through and just say, “Hey. It’ll be really helpful if instead of listing what you did list, if you listed things that relate to your entertainment career.” There’s a lot of personalization to it.
Videos, too, people upload videos that are just the wrong video. It might be something where they briefly appear in the video, but if they can sometimes showcase a little bit more of themself, or their personality, they’ll get cast. To an extent, it’s just us taking the time to go through and truly take the time to help them.
Andrew: Okay. I’m looking down at my notes. I see that we only have about 25 minutes left and even though that’s a lot of time, it doesn’t feel like enough time for me with all my notes here. I don’t understand. People keep emailing me and saying, “Andrew, can you make these 10 minutes long so that I can eat my lunch and watch it?” No, I can’t. I can barely make it an hour long.
Now I want to move on and talk about profits. Why charge? Everything’s supposed to be free on the Internet.
Alec: Sure. At which point you’re actually giving people things that are valuable to them, such as opportunities to get jobs and things like that, it is something that they’re willing to pay for. We’re actually putting a lot into it. We invest a lot of our time and energy and resources. I spend every day, seven days a week, meeting with different network execs, producers, casting directors, making sure that we have the best content.
Andrew: Okay. I understand that you deserve it and I appreciate you saying that. What about, though, how does it help the product that you’re charging? Don’t you want more users on the site? Why’d you decide that this is the better solution for the product and the community overall?
Alec: Sure. The folks, at any given time, there’s a ton of people that want to be cast as talent and there’s a lot less who actually will be cast as talent. For the folks that are really just not taking it seriously, that really probably wouldn’t even, we’ve done castings where people, they try to hire them and these folks didn’t even want the job, they were just trying to win a contest for votes.
We did a gamer-oriented casting once. The network came to us and said, “We want to meet all 10 of the top-10 highest-voted people.” And only two of them bothered to show up for the meeting. They treat it as a game. They wanted to win the contest. It was kind of funny.
For the folks that aren’t taking it as seriously, for them we have a free product. We always have a few opportunities that are free that they can participate. They’re pretty cool outcomes too. They always have guaranteed outcomes associated with them. But for the hundreds of other castings that we have, it’s a valuable product. Hollywood has always charged for these types of job notices, the entire business community, the Monster.coms of the world. It’s something that people pay for. It is what it is. The people who take it seriously, they’re willing to pay and in turn, their profiles are better and they end up taking it to a level that helps them get cast.
Andrew: Do you get the people who don’t pay to fill out profiles?
Alec: Yes.
Andrew: To put up their pictures? To get engaged?
Alec: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: They just can’t. . . No, actually, they can vote?
Alec: Yeah. The only thing they can’t do is participate in the castings that are behind the pay wall.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: For example, we have a few right now, if you were to go to GotCast, including our white labels with VH1 and Playstation, et cetera, that are free. We’re launching a couple more next week and you can go and you can get involved in those. You can submit. You can get cast. It happens all the time.
We’ve had a lot of people that aren’t paying members that get cast. The reality is, if you want to be a power user and you want to be using it as an employment tool and submitting every single day, all the various opportunities that we have, in many instances, we actually get exclusive opportunities that you’re not going to find at any other job notice board, even if it’s Hollywood or not, you’re not going to find it elsewhere. The people that take it seriously and that are pro members, they get access to those things. They’re getting cool opportunities.
Andrew: Okay. Over 6,000 castings I said in the introduction. That’s over the few years you guys have been in business, right? That’s not right now on the website?
Alec: Correct. Yeah.
Andrew: In the early days, how did you get castings into the system?
Alec: In 2003, I started one of the first reality TV departments at. . .
Andrew: Abrams Artists Agency?
Alec: Correct. Yeah. That was my world. I was working, I was repping TV hosts, broadcast journalists, experts, larger-than-life personalities, and celeb-reality folks, et cetera. The people who are the buyers, the casting directors, the producers, the network execs, those were all good friends of mine and I was dealing with them on a daily basis. When they would call me at the agency looking for different talent, if it was something that I didn’t necessarily have, I’d say, “Hey. Check out my client GotCast.com. They might be able to help you.”
Wil would come out here from Ohio a week a month. I think in 2008, we took something to the tune of 95 meetings with different network execs. Again, one week a month and he would just meet with everybody and tell them about the site and everybody got engaged. There was no network that said, “This is a horrible idea.”
At this point, we’ve cast for every single network out there and they just started sending over the casting notices. As the community grew from 3,000 in December of ’07 to hundreds of thousands of what it is today, there’s actually a lot more people that are qualified candidates for each job. The Hollywood community is taking it more and more seriously every day.
Andrew: They’re sending you the casting notices? I guess they send this out to newspapers. They send it out to other sources. Right? They’re not trying to hide it, are they?
Alec: They’re not trying to hide it, but they’re also, Hollywood is particular. The way that business typically works is that a casting director doesn’t want to look through ridiculous volumes of people for any given job, because at the end of the day, they have to find the right talent. They have a job to do. They don’t need more and more work.
In the agency business, there’s about 250 agencies, a lot less than that that are actually taken super seriously. They call the select agencies that they trust, then there’s a few job boards that they trust. GotCast is conveniently now one of them. They’ll call us, they’ll say, “Here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s the date that we need the submission by.” We’ll send it on over. Sometimes they say, “Just send us everybody who submits.” Sometimes they’ll turn it into a vote-based thing and send us the top 50. Sometimes they’ll say, “Please go through yourself and make sure that these folks match the requirements and then send them over.” We provide a service for Hollywood and they trust us.
Andrew: Do you ever scrape in the beginning?
Alec: How do you mean? Email scraping?
Andrew: No, not email, definitely not. I mean scrape the job listings so that you can fill out your database with what’s already available online.
Alec: No because the problem was, conveniently because of my job at a top-10 agency, we were able to actually just get good job notices. We never wanted to be in a situation that people were calling us a scam. Fortunately, I don’t think we’ve had many people do that at all. Whereas a lot of these folks that start online talent-call-type businesses, they are scams. They get called out for being scams. They disappear pretty quickly.
That’s been, for Wil and I, the biggest thing. We wanted people to know this is legitimate. Every casting we post comes through legitimate casting directors. They’re people that we worked in the past that we trust. You’re not getting your Craigslist killer-type situations where somebody in their apartment in the bad part of town is asking for models to come over to interview for a calendar. That just doesn’t happen on our site.
We didn’t want to pull casting calls from other sources where we didn’t know if they were accurate or legit either. Ours are all posted specifically by casting directors and when you submit, it actually goes to the casting director’s email address.
Andrew: I see.
Alec: It’s all fully legit.
Andrew: The guys in the audience are checking out your website and they’re really looking deeply into it. Rob in the audience is saying, “The thumbnails on some of your profiles show a gallery view but are broken on their profile page.” I don’t know what that means, but I’ll leave for you to look at.
Alec: Oh. Well, that’s helpful. I’ll check that. Thank you.
Andrew: How can they reach you directly? Actually, you probably don’t want to leave your contact information up, right? Otherwise it will get other people who want their kids to be in movies.
Alec: Yeah. I don’t want it out publicly, but you can actually go on the site and message me through the site.
Andrew: If you get a paid $19 a month registration, you can message him.
Alec: No, that’s. . .
Andrew: I got to do that on Mixergy!
Alec: No, that’s free. Or, quite frankly, if anybody emails you directly, I’m okay with you giving them my contact information. I just don’t want it to be published out there because it just happens that we get a lot of. . .
Andrew: 100%. Guys, he’s also availabe on Twitter. Usually I get email addresses in this interview, but I don’t think it’s appropriate in this case considering how many people are trying to reach you from what I’ve seen online.
Alec: It can be pretty overwhelming. Yeah. Anybody who’s listening, I’d be more than happy to talk, whether the phone or email, and I’m happy to share my information offline.
Andrew: I’m only happy to send over information if you guys can help him out. If you’ve got issues with his website, or SEO, that you can help, stuff like that, otherwise I’ve got no interest and I’m not passing it on.
Partnerships. You said 95 meetings with network executives. You talked about Trump. You talked about Lifetime channel. How do you get all these partnerships? How do you get in the door at all these places?
Alec: It’s funny. When I started out in Hollywood, I was a 23-year-old kid. It was seven years ago and I was trying to figure out how to make a niche for myself. The reality space was where I decided to stake a claim. It was brand new. There were three reality shows on television. That was it.
I became the young, hip agent that was taking out all the network execs, and showing them a fun time on the town and because I was representing all the Deal or No Deal models, and all these funny personalities, I became the go-to guy for that. Conveniently. . .
Andrew: You represented the Deal or No Deal models?
Alec: I did. Yeah.
Andrew: The women who stood behind what’s his face with the suitcase?
Alec: Yeah. I repped quite a few of them. I also represented a lot of the Hollywood nightclubs and a lot of restaurants because we baked them into TV shows. All of the sudden, you’d see the kids from The Hills showing up at Les Deux nightclub and there’s actually backend things happening.
Andrew: How? What is a back, this is not directly related to Internet entrepreneurship, but I’m really curious about this. What happens behind the scenes that a nightclub gets featured on a TV show?
Alec: The LA community is very based on celebrity. There’s just a very tight-knit group of nightclub owners, nightclub promoters, and Hollywood relationships that come into play. You take the right ingredients, you take the right owner of a nightclub and he hires the right promoters, and you bring the right Hollywood players into the mix, all of a sudden, LC is showing up at Les Deux nightclub or at Ketchup and the place is the coolest place for the next four years. You take those recipes and you can apply it to the web as well. Everybody in Hollywood wants to be associated with the hot chicks. They want to be associated with the celebrities, et cetera.
Taking a step back, on my agency business side, because I became the guy that was just helping a lot in the reality space at a young age, I was able to build really, really strong relationships that seven years later, we applied towards GotCast. All of a sudden, we were able to take up these roles and we’d sit down with all the people that I’d been doing business with for years, the NBC folks because of Deal or No Deal, or whatever the case might be, and say, “Hey. Here’s another cool way to find talent in addition to my agency.”
Because there was a close relationship there, because these guys had trusted me professionally and socially, et cetera, we were able to introduce them to GotCast and get them engaged and it’s been amazing. We’ve done some unprecedented relationships where these networks are actually paying us sums of money to build out experiences for them. It’s based on trust. It’s based on relationships. It’s based on history. It’s based on having worked together with them for the better part of the last decade. They get it.
Andrew: What about. . . Sorry, go ahead.
Alec: I was going to say, it would be very difficult having no relationships or connectivity in Hollywood to launch a site like this and all of a sudden start posting NBC-endorsed castings.
Andrew: Okay. You were saying about some of the fun nights that you took people out. What were they like? Take me into that life for a few minutes.
Alec: [laughs] It was interesting because a lot of the Hollywood community is, again, there’s a lot of guys that are looking to meet girls, there’s a lot of people at both ends of the spectrum that are really just looking to feel cool. Hollywood’s all about status and sex appeal and celebrity. That’s the way the business spins.
My thing was, because I repped cool nightclubs, because I had interesting talent, I would get network executives to come out with us. We’d do a fun night out on the town. They’d come to Les Deux nightclub and we walk in the back door with Britney Spears and I’d show them the time of their life. They’d meet some cool people and they’d feel like a rock star. Then all of a sudden, I’d call them on Monday and say, “Hey. What do you think about this person for whatever show they might be working on?” It’s just the way Hollywood works.
Andrew: Les Deux would have a guy like you to bring them into the place just to introduce them to the place? Just to add vibe to it?
Alec: I actually was helping the nightclub side get television deals. It was all kind of self-fulfilling. The nightclubs want to meet the network execs because they want television shows on the networks. The network execs want to meet the nightclub owners because they want to be allowed to hang in VIP and meet celebrities and drink for free. The hot chicks and the celebrities that are showing up at the clubs are trying to meet both. They want to meet the network execs. The nightlife of Hollywood fuels the daylife.
What’s happening at all these events, these red carpet events you see on the various media outlets and all over the news, is very important. It really determines what happens the next day, whose calls are taken, whose lunches are actually taken, et cetera. It’s a pretty funny, but specific, business.
Since I have spent seven years in the thick of that, again, I’ve built some pretty meaningful relationships and a lot of the Hollywood folks are my best friends now. This is the business that I’m in. We’ve been able to get them to embrace us at a whole different level which is exciting. It means a lot to me that they’ve embraced us.
Andrew: Do you still get to go to all these parties even though you’re now a startup guy?
Alec: I do. What’s funny is that I have, I straddle both sides of it, so I go to a lot of the Hollywood parties still, but the LA scene has a lot of tech parties popping up too. There’s a funny disconnect where my first party I went to was for Beta South, which was last year. I had just taken over CEO. I had never been to a full-blown tech party. It was all guys. I looked at Wil and I was like, “Wow. This is crazy. I’m used to these wild, red carpet, celebrity- and female-infused parties in Hollywood.” It turns out they’re pretty cool, too. I go to both.
Microsoft Bing did a party in LA recently which was the first time where I actually went to a party that had proper representation from both Hollywood and tech, which was pretty cool.
Andrew: That is impressive. They got a lot of money and they can throw the right parties.
Alec: That’s for sure.
Andrew: A few people in the audience want to know, “Who is this guy? I thought he was just some startup guy, now it turns out. . .” Rihad [SP] says, “He’s like Mr. Johnny Hollywood Badass.” I know you as Johnny Hollywood Badass, I didn’t know you as a startup guy the way that I introduced you here. Why don’t you give people a little bit more about your background? You’ve only been with GotCast, you said, for less than a year. What’d you do before?
Alec: In 2003, I started at Abrams Artists Agency, which is a bi-coastal talent agency. It’s a top-10 sized agency in Hollywood. I started a department called “The Alternative Programming Department” which basically encompasses everything that isn’t scripted program. It was reality. It was celeb-reality. It was competition-based programming, game shows, et cetera.
I started representing a lot of folks like traditional TV show hosts, broadcast journalists, and radio DJs. As reality changed, and all of a sudden celebrities were getting engaged, and larger-than-life people, I started repping folks like the Deadliest Catch fishermen and the Deal or No Deal models and the ghost hunters on SciFi channel, and the real estate brokers on Million Dollar Listing, and folks like that. Mystery the pickup artist on VH1.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last seven years is helping these folks develop their careers. Taking celebrities whose careers perhaps were on the decline and putting them on shows like Dancing with the Stars and bringing their careers back. It’s been a really fun business.
Over the years, I’ve had almost a hundred different clients that I helped put on TV and I helped build their careers. Now what’s exciting is, I’ve transferred all of those skills and relationships into the web. We scaled it. Now we have hundreds of thousands of people that we’re helping in the same capacity.
Andrew: I like how you keep transitioning back to the web. Every time I want to find out about the good old days and some of the parties, you go, “Yeah. This is how we did it and the good news is, now I got the relationships that I can use to come back to GotCast.” Are you guys profitable at GotCast?
Alec: This year is actually a turning point for us. We were VC-backed at the beginning. There’s NCT Ventures out of Ohio backed us. Fortunately that got us through the first year and a half, two years. All of a sudden, this year’s been a really meaningful year and this year’s where we’re changing. The tides are changing, which is exciting.
Andrew: Changing how? What do you mean?
Alec: Our revenue is very meaningful this year. This should be our first year of full-scale profitability.
Andrew: Okay. Over a million in revenue yet?
Alec: Not yet, for this year. It’s safe to assume that we’re going to get pretty close.
Andrew: Okay. Where does the money go? People right from the start, right from the introductory article on TechCrunch, were saying, “Well, where’s all this cash that you committed to the company going? Why does it cost so much to run and to launch GotCast?”
Alec: We have a full staff and it’s small. It’s only six people, but it’s very talented people. We have a designer. We have a couple of engineers. We have a project manager. We have myself running the company. We have website moderators. We have hosting fees and design fees and office fees. We’re not actually spending that much money, but initially, quite frankly, it involved a lot trips from Ohio.
Andrew: [laughs]
Alec: It involves a lot of miscellaneous things where you were taking a company that was built in Columbus, Ohio and needed to have a meaningful presence in Hollywood and we did it. We never raised that much money. We didn’t even raise a million dollars.
Andrew: What size did you guys raise?
Alec: We took on $750,000.
Andrew: Total?
Alec: And then we had a couple of Angels that came in with very small pieces of money that were more just really helpful people that have been very meaningful for our company.
Andrew: Paige Craig, for example. I understand, I know Mike Jones is one of your Angels. Mike Jones has done an interview here. Everyone knows him as the guy who’s running Myspace and one of the top Angel investors.
Alec: Mike isn’t an Angel.
Andrew: He’s not?
Alec: He’s not an Angel in GotCast. He’s an Angel in Wil’s other company Affordit.
Andrew: Ah. Okay. What about Paige. . . I’ve got to stop phrasing things as facts and just put a question mark at the end. That way I could at least get you to confirm it. Is Paige Craig an Angel investor?
Alec: He is. Paige is an Angel. He actually was the first guy that came on board when Wil got to LA and was looking for some interesting technology relationships to be built out. Paige has been incredibly helpful. He’s an awesome guy.
Andrew: How? How has Paige been helpful?
Alec: He has some really strong relationships. I would argue that he’s probably the most active Angel in southern California. I think he’s done something like 26 deals in the last 18 months. He’s, in turn, met a lot of really interesting people and has some really strong relationships just across the board.
On the Hollywood side, fortunately I don’t need that much help on the introductions. But on the tech side, people that are helping us make some key introductions that are allowing us to do stuff with Hautelook.com and Intelligent Beauty.
Andrew: Paige Craig helped you with Hautelook?
Alec: Paige and or people that he has introduced me to.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: He’s been really meaningful in giving us advice, too. I’m a Hollywood guy, so there’s a lot of things that I just have questions about.
Andrew: Do you have an example of advice that he gave you?
Alec: Even structuring deals for future Angels and structuring the ways that our company works and the best way to do some A/V testing.
Andrew: Can you give me an example of how he advised you on that?
Alec: Sure. Well, our pricing model was great. Here I was, two weeks into the job as CEO of GotCast and I’m trying to understand technology as a whole, and Wil’s been incredibly helpful as well. I sat down for probably an hour on one of my first days with Paige and we just, he walked me through a whole cool way to break down different ways to test pricing. We did it. We finally settled on a pricing model that worked for us.
There’s been other introductions where people, where Mike Jones, incidentally, although Wil had a relationship with him, I didn’t. I remember Paige walked up and actually sat Mike and I down together and we’re now doing some really cool stuff with Myspace. He’s been really, really helpful throughout the whole process.
With that all being said, he’s been really cool and he’s only a small Angel in our business. In turn, we just never really raised that much money. The company’s never really cost that much to run. Here we are, three years later, and we’re going to be turning a profit soon. We just haven’t really gone through much money.
Andrew: You guys came out of nowhere into Hollywood and suddenly your whole family of companies, including Affordit, including, what’s that other one? Go Big Network.
Alec: Go Big Network, yes.
Andrew: You guys made the right impression on the right people over there and suddenly all the doors opened up to you. Let me see what else I’ve got here in my notes. I want to make sure that I cover as much as possible. The pictures behind you. I asked you before, but I know that if anyone’s watching the video, they’re going to want to know during the interview, what is that? I asked you in the pre-interview. What are the pictures?
Alec: Let’s see if I can move out of the way. I have a very loving and supporting girlfriend, and she has a lot of fun following what I’m up to and documenting it. If you were to look around my room and my office, you’d find a lot of different articles that have been published on us, and stories and press releases. She actually takes them and frames them.
Behind me now is, for example, Lifetime Entertainment, an on-star Project Runway thing for a big press release, she framed it. SoCal Tech did a cool article on me, she framed it, et cetera, et cetera. She’s been really awesome and supportive.
Andrew: Got to be really supportive. SoCal Tech is like the local, I wouldn’t call it a blog, a local news outlet and she’s framing the website post.
Alec: Yeah. She follows everything. It’s pretty cool.
Andrew: How long have you guys been together?
Alec: A year and a half.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: She actually has just booked the job. She’s the new face of Tucson morning news. She’s moving to Tucson on Wednesday.
Andrew: Get the hell out of here! You are dating the face of Tucson morning news?
Alec: For NBC. It’s a big deal. It’s exciting.
Andrew: Wow. How are you guys going to make this work?
Alec: It’s only an hour flight, so for the betterment of GotCast, I have a lot more free time now to focus on exclusively GotCast and I imagine I’m going to be racking up the miles on Southwest.
Andrew: Wow. Where is she from?
Alec: She actually grew up in Los Angeles.
Andrew: All right.
Alec: One of the few.
Andrew: Nicely done, my friend. Way to come in from Ohio and take over LA.
Alec: [laughs]
Andrew: I think I got, oh, one more note here. Small issue, but are you the founder, are you calling yourself the co-founder of GotCast?
Alec: I’m billed as the co-founder because I walked through the process with Wil as he launched it. Some people might say I’m the co-founder of it. I bill myself as the CEO.
Andrew: You guys officially sometimes call you the co-founder? What’s the deal with co-founder? I’ll tell you, in this case, it’s not a big deal. You and your founder are friends.
Alec: Sure.
Andrew: I interview people 10 years after they launch their company, 20 years afterwards, and they call themselves co-founder, then I get an email from another guy who says, “No. You think she was the co-founder, or he was the co-founder? I’m the real co-founder.”
Alec: Just to be quite frank about it, I was working at a talent agency. I was fully employed as a talent agent. Technically speaking, it would have been a conflict of interest for me to take on a super vested interest in a company like this other than being an agent as it launched. I advised Wil through the process. I helped him, but I wasn’t a co-founder, officially. I wasn’t part of the company officially. I was the agent up until recently, where I’m now officially the CEO.
Andrew: Okay.
Alec: I’ve taken on a much bigger role. I had to resign from being a talent agent before I could take on a meaningful role in helping talent in a different capacity.
Andrew: All right. Yeah. Outside the Internet space, there’s a whole lot of conflict of interest issues. Here in the Internet, do whatever you want. You want to run a blog and at the same time own a piece of the companies that you report on? More power to you.
Alec: Right. The Hollywood community is very, very careful about the different things they get engaged in because you have the TMZs of the world that are just trying to exploit scandal at any turn. You just have to be careful.
Andrew: Final question. At some point, Charlie Rose has got to give it up. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. How do I get that role? Do I have to fill out a special form? Can I start voting right now on GotCast?
Alec: Here’s what we’ll do. If you create a profile today and upload some good clips and photos. . .
Andrew: Yes.
Alec: . . .I’ll send it over to his producers and let’s see what we can do.
Andrew: You mean like do what Jay Leno did to Johnny Carson? Push him out a little bit early. Maybe we can start floating news, “Andrew Warner is [??] to get the job.”
Alec: You’re next. They’re still trying to figure out the specifics of Larry King.
Andrew: You know what? I might have a chance at that one.
Alec: Right? You got to beat out Ryan Seacrest and a couple of other ones.
Andrew: [laughs]
Alec: I think you can do it.
Andrew: Howard Stern is playing clips of all the crazy things that King has said over the years. Apparently he burped and he farted on the air. I go, “All right. If that’s accepted on CNN, I know I haven’t done that yet, I don’t think. I’ve sniffled a whole lot.”
Alec: He’s a guy who boasted about really never doing that much work going into any given interview and there’s plenty of interviews that would suggest that that’s exactly the case. End of the day, he’s become one of the most meaningful and trusted interviewers of our whole, the past 20 years.
Andrew: Let me say this. This is my only chance to speak to CNN and top Hollywood executives because I know they’re watching you. They don’t watch the average person who I interview over here. Listen. I do my research. You guys saw it that I knew that he worked at Abrams Artists Agency. I didn’t even give you a chance to say where you work. I jumped in there to show look, I did the research.
You can guys can obviously see I’m starting integrate some shtick into my interviews, so it’s not just, “How much money did you make?” There’s a little shtick. At the same time, how many times has Charlie Rose asked people, “How much money did you make last year?” If I did an interview like Charlie Rose did with Bill Gates, for example, I might say, “Bill Gates, let me see your wallet. How much money do you have in your wallet?” How much money does Bill Gates walk around with? Those are the kinds of questions that you could expect to see. Somebody please clip this and post it up on GotCast for me. I don’t have the time to do that.
Alec: You should absolutely send me, or have one of your guys send me, the material, and we’ll submit you. Why not? Let’s give it a shot.
Andrew: Done and done. All right. There you go people. On the record, my friends. Alec, I’m just really happy to do my interviews over here. Once I go public, I won’t be able to ask these tough questions.
Alec: [laughs]
Andrew: That’s the angle I’ve got to take. Public doesn’t get these kind of serious issues. They’re not ready for me. I appreciate you offering to introduce me to CNN and to PBS. I know you have it in with Thisweekin.com?
Alec: Hey. Listen. Maybe you’ll be the next Suicide Girl. You never know.
Andrew: [laughs] All right. Let’s leave it there. Alec Shankman, thank you for doing this interview. It’s great to talk to you.
Alec: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
Andrew: You guys, thank you all for watching. Bye.
Sponsors I mentioned
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