Brian Dutt - Building User-Generated Content Platform BEEROLL.IO with Over 10,000 Creators

Brian Dutt (00:00.494)
I want brands to start seeing that they should be channeling people that look like their customers in ads. And I really want to change the ad ecosystem in that way. And on the creator side, it's just really fulfilling to help people get a little bit of side cash.

Anne McGinty (00:24.494)
Welcome to the 17th episode of How I Built My Small Business, the show that is dedicated to sharing the insight that entrepreneurs have about how to start and grow small businesses. Join us as we unravel the stories behind their entrepreneurial journeys. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today we have Brian Dutt in the heart of New York City talking with us about what it's like starting and growing a video creation platform and app. Brian is the founder CEO of BeeRoll.

a tech platform that empowers leading brands to weave authentic stories through user -generated content. For nearly a decade, Brian worked in the corporate world as an analyst executing strategy and business development with companies including HBO, Comedy Central, Paramount, Comcast, and more. Then in 2017, he combined his interests in storyboarding, video editing, and screenwriting and launched Beeroll.

You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description.

Anne McGinty
Brian, thanks for coming on the show.

Brian Dutt
Thanks for having me.

Anne McGinty
So what were you doing before starting Beeroll?

Brian Dutt
So before starting B -roll, I worked for a company called Freewheel. It's a video ad tech platform. So if you ever go on CNN .com or ESPN .com or Hulu and you see the ads that pop up in between,

segments of the show you're watching, our technology basically placed those ads in there based on what you're watching or who you are. And I led business development for the company. While I was there, we got acquired by Comcast. So I got to be part of a successful exit. And I also worked very closely with two of the founders of the company. So I spent a lot of time learning how a startup works.

Anne McGinty
When did you decide to branch off on your own?

Brian Dutt
I was actually working for one of our founders who led product for the company. So he was very technical hands on thinking through problems and solutions that can be solved with technology. And it's sort of infectious when you're around someone like that all day. And I had never thought about entrepreneurship, but during that time I started thinking about just random ideas to pop into my head. And one of them actually came while I was working at freewheel because I would be seeing all the ads that are run in digital. And a lot of times.

Brian Dutt (02:49.806)
you would just see the same ad over and over and over again. And you've probably experienced this whenever you're on a website or even on social media. No one wants to see the same Capital One ad 600 times with Alec Baldwin in it. So I was kind of thinking, well, this seems like a problem. Audiences are sort of saturated with the same ads over and over again. What if we could find a way to produce ads more cheaply so that there's more content rotating through and audiences can be more exposed to different creative and different ideas?

And I was kind of thinking about it with professional production, but then around this time, Snapchat was really taking off. So I was thinking, well, people are turning the camera on themselves right now and filming selfies and stuff like this. Maybe there's a way to get everyday people to make the ads that we all see. And now there'll be more variety of content. It'll be authentic. And maybe people will actually want to watch the advertising around them. So I was thinking about this concept while I was at Freewheel. And then I just, I talked to the founders of the company and I was sort of saying like, I'm thinking about doing this and.

they kind of helped me think through how to start a company and what to do. And I quit my job probably five months later and started it. Yeah.

Anne McGinty
Where did it go from there?

Brian Dutt
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of the idea requires thinking creatively. So I actually, my wife is a correspondent at CNN and she spends all day making videos that you see on the news. And she and I would actually film ads.

We were once in LA on a trip and we just sat on the beach and filmed an ad for Fiji. And just like, you had to get in the shoes of a creator and try to think through like, how would a regular person film an ad for a Fiji water bottle? So I started making ads myself, just to learn how to do it. And then I had to start learning how I would even build a technology platform because I had no idea how to actually find engineers to build the product. How do you design a product with all these things? So.

started reaching out to my network, found some engineers that I could partner with and work with, raised a little bit of money and just started getting it going. I mean, we jumped right in. When you say you raised a bit of money, what was that process like? Yeah, I've sort of taken more of the approach of keeping a lean cap table and retaining as much ownership as I can. But when I started, you start with friends and family. Go to people that you think might be interested in your idea. And what I was surprised about is people would reach out to me that I knew.

Brian Dutt (05:10.542)
passingly, I would offer to invest in the company. And when you're in the idea phase, all ideas sound really cool. So if you can pitch the idea, you'll usually find people that can get you the first 100 ,000, 200 ,000 raised, which is usually enough to validate your first hypothesis. Our first round was like 130K. And actually, my first investor was the founder of Freewheel, my last company. So he was my first money in.

Anne McGinty
Oh, wow. That's amazing that he supported you.
How did you go about finding the software engineers and choosing who was going to help you build out this platform?

Brian Dutt
That is a really hard thing to wrap your head around, especially if you're not an engineer. I worked a lot with engineers at my job at Freewheel. So I started with people on my team there who might know engineers and a lot of it was just networking, like, do you know an engineer? So people made a couple of intros and one person said, I know someone who would be a good fit.

He introduced me and we got along well and he had another friend who was an engineer who was kind of like looking around for work. So I got lucky in that sense, because I live in New York and New York has a lot of engineering talent, but obviously more of it's on the West coast. So it's not like you're walking around every day and just meeting engineers. So I got lucky.

Anne McGinty
And the capital that you had raised, I assume that that had a burn rate that didn't last you beyond a year. Yep. So how did you get it up and off the ground considering the capital expenditure that you had to push out?

Brian Dutt
Yeah, that's a good observation. I mean, I think that might have given me six months of burn. And I wasn't paying myself, but engineering locally is expensive. So in the beginning, I was just trying to prove to myself that number one, any brand would pay for this. And number two, that there was enough people out there that were willing to film ads for brands. So the first six months, we were very quickly building technology to validate those concepts. So we built an iPhone app.

for the creators and we built a very basic web interface for the brands. And in the beginning stages, you just have to do whatever you can and it's all manual. So I'm reaching out to every random person I know who works at a brand, like, hey, will you use my platform? I'll give it to you for free. The first creators in our network were my sister -in -law and like all my friends, but it does start to work because you start to get feedback from them. Then they tell someone who they know. And then all of a sudden there are people in your app.

(07:32.814)
that you've never seen before, which is like a really cool part of it. And this all happened in the span of six months. It was still very small. We had paying customers and we had creators, but we knew it was kind of working. So at that point we started trying to raise traditional venture capital money. We actually got accepted into a tech accelerator in San Francisco with Jason Calacanis, who is one of the seed investors in Uber.

Anne McGinty
Nice.

Brian Dutt
Yeah. He's like a well -known angel investor in San Francisco. He's invested in

dozens of unicorn companies as an accelerator in San Francisco where they bring in companies that are at their early stages to help them through the initial phases of building your product, marketing it, et cetera. So I was out in San Francisco every week for three months and we raised more money through Jason's Angel Syndicate. We did a little bit of VC money and then we took it to the next level.

Anne McGinty
So what might listeners not be thinking about when it comes to the fundraising experience?

Brian Dutt
So I've been doing this company for seven years now and we have in the grand scheme of things, we've raised very little money. We've raised about 1 .4 million over seven years. We've mostly bootstrapped. I think one of the things that founders should always think about is are you building a hundred billion dollar business? Are you building a hundred million dollar business or are you building a $1 million business? And all of those are great ideas. When you go out to raise VC money, the large VCs need to have.

the outsized exit to return the value of their fund. So if you went into a VC meeting and you said, look, my goal is to sell this company for a hundred million dollars in six years, they'd say, sorry, not a bit.

Anne McGinty
What?!

Brian Dutt
Now I would get a lot of flack for this, but it's pretty much true. And I think the fundraising process can be kind of demoralizing because investors will say, this is a great company, but it's not venture scale. And that might sound to a founder, like a knockier business, like, oh, you're building some.

you know, crappy business no one ever cares about. But literally you could be building a hundred million dollar business. It's not good enough for the VCs, but surely good enough for you. Right. So one of the things I would always say to founders is make sure if you're going to go running after VC money, that you're actually building a business that you believe is at least a billion. And you don't have to be, you can build a very, very successful business. It's not at venture scale. And then the avenues are a little different. You go after angel investors, smaller seed funds and.

Brian Dutt (09:59.63)
you know, institutional investors that maybe don't care as much about the big returns. But it's important to think about that when you're a founder, because most founders go out there saying, ah, yeah, I'm going to raise $10 million and then I'm going to raise $50 million and then I'm going to raise, you know, a hundred million. And that's not the only path. Basically my message is I've been doing this for a long time. You don't need to raise venture capital money to have a successful tech startup. One of my favorite examples is Calendly, you know, the calendar booker.

The founder is amazing. I think he built it with a software agency and I think they were in Europe. I don't remember the exact story, but which by the way, everyone would say, oh, you can't do that. You have to have your own in -house engineering team. And he scaled the business to billions and billions of dollars on a very simple product without VC money. You know, there's plenty of other examples like MailChimp. There's a lot of companies that reach those huge valuations without any VC money. They just build a business that has good economics. They build it lean with a small team.

and it works well.

Anne McGinty
So you don't have to answer this question because I don't know if this is controversial or not. But what is your thought on hiring engineers overseas?

Brian Dutt
Well, I have a lot of opinions on this. My engineering team is offshore. They're based in Ukraine.

Anne McGinty
Nice.

Brian Dutt
Yeah. And I've been working with them forever, including through the war. So I had engineers that were literally coding from bomb shelters.

Anne McGinty
Oh my gosh.

Brian Dutt
Especially during the beginning of the war. There's very talented engineers everywhere around the world.

Eastern Europe, South America, there's a lot of good engineers, India, there's engineers in Africa now that are very, very high quality because it's a skill set that is global. Depending on where you're working, you know, you can pay somewhere between $20 and $60 an hour for an engineer

Anne McGinty
That's a pretty big spread.

Brian Dutt
Even at the top of that range, that's half of what it is in the U S. So it's partly the cost savings, but it's also the talent is really good.

Anne McGinty
So it's just filling a need.

Brian Dutt
Yeah, I'm a firm believer in it. But we also want to get to the point where we have US based engineering. My goal is to have a balance between both.

Anne McGinty
It's an interesting predicament because you want to support local jobs, but you also need to go with whatever makes your product a viable option here.

Brian Dutt
Yep.

Anne McGinty
And get it off the ground, right?

Brian Dutt
Totally.

Anne McGinty
So how many people do you currently have on your team?

Brian Dutt
My full time employees are me and two engineers. And then we work with a lot of contractors. So we have a lot of people that are 1099 employees.

Anne McGinty (12:21.166)
And what is your day -to -day work life like?

Brian Dutt
My day -to -day work life is scattered between a lot of different things. I'm basically a bootstrap founder. I'm doing this, like we were talking about, not raising a lot of money. I'm doing everything from physically designing the product. So I use Figma, it's a design software. I'm in that every day. I'm doing customer service. So I'll answer customer service tickets in our help. We have other people that do it, but I also spend time doing it to just talk to customers and learn from them.

I'm working with the creators in our network. So I have a small group of creators that I work with regularly just to, again, understand the use of the product and what's not working. I also am working on a lot of bigger partnerships. Some of them I can't talk through right now, but we're talking to large ad agencies, a lot of the big social networks. So I'm doing a lot of business development with the larger agencies. And then in between that, I'm doing finance and accounting and budgeting.

Anne McGinty
It's everything.

Brian Dutt
Yeah. There's no part of the business that I'm not touching, except I don't know how to code. So I guess that part.

Anne McGinty
I feel like that's a story that I've heard from many entrepreneurs that they have to know how to do all aspects of their business as much as possible.

Brian Dutt
In the beginning, when I started the company, I was more focused on offloading the things that I wasn't good at or didn't know how to do. Somewhere during COVID, I took the stance that I have to throw myself outside of my comfort zone and actually get my hands dirty. So I learned how to use Webflow.

which is like a very robust website builder, but it's not like Squarespace or anything like that. You have to kind of know CSS and HTML. And I basically taught myself how to use it because why not? But you have to get up the learning curve and it's fun.

Anne McGinty
That's awesome. That's very cool. So how many creators do you have on the site now?

Brian Dutt
There's over 10 ,000. We don't do a lot of marketing, especially on the creator side. And every month we have new creators signing up. One of the incredible things is how

global it's becoming. We just have creators all over the world signing up to Beeroll. To be honest, I don't even know where a lot of them come from. I don't know how they're finding us.

Anne McGinty
That's great. Can you give us an approximate idea of how many companies you have signed up on your platform?

Brian Dutt
Yeah, we have several hundred companies in the platform. It's a pretty wide mix. We work with a lot of founder led startups where it's one person just started company, need to get their product off the ground, but we work with brands like...

(14:46.336)
Netflix, New Balance, huge brands, and everything in between. So we work with a lot of venture -backed e -commerce startups as well. So it's a wide variety.

Anne McGinty
Have you ever come across a moment, I'm sure there have been several, that was just very stressful or incredibly challenging that you had to get through?

Brian Dutt
Yeah, pretty much every month probably. But I mean, the hardest moments are running out of money. Honestly,

I don't know any founder who hasn't run out of money at some point. It's just part of the game. I've probably got to cash zero three times.

Anne McGinty
Oh man.

Brian Dutt
In like six or seven years. And what I've found is that something always happens to kind of get you out of the hole, but it's a period where you can feel the burn coming and you know you're getting down to your last dollar. Those are the most stressful times because if, if you sort of take that away,

startup is the most fun thing you could ever do. But in my experience, at least, there's always a little bit of impending doom in a startup.

Anne McGinty
So when your account balance is flush, how are you allocating those resources to further scale the business?

Brian Dutt
Yeah, that's a good question. Really, it would just be more engineers at this point. We wouldn't spend a lot on marketing because on the brand side, most of our traffic is organic. Really, for us, it's just about moving faster on the product side.

Especially because as a marketplace, we have two customer sets. We have our brands and then we have our creators and you basically have to build two pieces of software. We have an iPhone app for the creators and we have a website for the brands and each of those individually is a lot of tech. But whenever we're flush with cash, it's just you double your engineering capacity as much as you can.

Anne McGinty
Because of what specifically?

Brian Dutt
Because think about you have an idea for an app. It's a mobile game or something like that.

So you have to acquire a bunch of people to join your app and then you have to keep launching things in the Apple app store. That whole process and that whole customer base is one set of customers for me. It's like my creators. So I literally have to acquire creators. I have to keep them engaged in my app. I have to keep adding features to the app. That's like a whole business on its own. But then I have another set of essentially customers who are the brands and ad agencies that work with Beeroll. So I have to build a separate software product for them to use Beeroll.

(17:04.046)
You're basically building two tech stacks with two different customers at once. As opposed to like if I was Calendly, I'm just building a calendar app for one set of customers.

Anne McGinty
Okay. It's more complex.

Brian Dutt
Yeah.

Anne McGinty
So tell us a little bit more about the user generated content market, because I am not that familiar with this. When a creator logs in, what can they expect and how much can they make from this?

Brian Dutt
So user generated content has been around forever. You know, think about YouTube, right? The concept of people making content that's sort of rough around the edges has always been there. For ads, it's more relatively, I would say, new. I mean, brands have been making influencer content and stuff like that for, I would say it's been hot for like 10 years now. But user generated content, specifically this concept of paying someone to your first question, maybe 50, a hundred bucks to make a video for a brand. That's...

newer and it's definitely very in vogue right now. The e -commerce space, think Shopify brands that are standing up a website and selling their product online, they're selling t -shirts, so they're selling supplements. This user generated content where someone's just talking to their phone, showing the product in action, it converts really well as ads. So it's really taken off. It exploded during COVID because people were at home buying things, sitting on TikTok, purchasing things and this type of authentic advertising.

just performed really well. So hundreds and thousands of brands have been turning out this kind of user generated content. And it sort of takes like a very familiar template. It's kind of like the eighties infomercial. Do you struggle with what, you know, X, Y, Z? Well, what if there was a solution? And that's kind of the user generated content that you see a lot of now. It's sort of saturated in a way. And I think we're entering a new.

phase of it where a lot of brands are now saying, okay, you know what? It's okay to have this sort of rough around the edges content representing my brand. Not everything needs to be this beautifully produced ad made in a studio or a soundstage. We can actually just get people on their phones making the ads and they'll perform and people will still think our brand is cool. The next phase of it, I think it's going to become more creative. So it's not just going to be this sort of standard problem solution video. It's going to be.

 (19:21.398)
unique concepts like you see in the Super Bowl ads where they come up with like a really crazy idea. And now you're just going to get people on their cell phones to execute it instead of paying actors and hire production crews to do it. I think that's where we're going, especially with TikTok. People have gotten just more wild with content. And I think that's where the next iteration of this is just more creative storytelling.

Anne McGinty
And if it was more creative storytelling, it seems like that would be a bigger time investment on the creator's end, wouldn't it?

Brian Dutt
Yeah, great question. Yes and no. So I think one way to think about it is, okay, let's get a creator who comes up with these awesome ideas and knows our brand so well, and we'll just tell them to make an ad for a brand and it'll be so cool and whatever. The other way to do it is that the brand or the ad agency is generating these cool ideas and just finding a creator who can execute it. Because you kind of think of the creator and this idea is the creator is sort of the actor and the cinematographer, but the

They're not the screenwriter. They're not the director of the ad. The brand is kind of coming up with the concept and the script and the creators just executing it. And that's why the core of Beeroll software is actually the concept of a storyboard. So like if you ever watch Mad Men, the idea of these guys in the fifties making ads and they're sitting in front of this board and they're plotting out this TV commercial with different little animations to represent what's happening. That's a storyboard. We basically rebuilt that.

for user generated content. So a brand will go in and say, okay, creator, I want you to film this shot, then this shot, then this shot, then this shot. And then the creator uploads all of those. So if you make a really cool idea, you can storyboard it out. The creator will film whatever you need. And then our platform actually uses artificial intelligence to edit it together into an ad.

Anne McGinty
Oh, no way. Oh, so they don't even have to do any of the editing. It's just these short clips.

Brian Dutt
In most cases, they don't even do the content planning. They're like a one person film crew.

and acting crew in our iPhone app. They just upload the individual clips and they're done. So what does it take for a creator to be selected by one of these companies? The main thing that brands are looking for is authenticity because they can always get an actor, right? They can always go pay an actor to act. What they're looking for in user generated content is they're looking for stuff that feels almost like it's natively happening on TikTok or Instagram or Snap or wherever. So they're looking for people that can present naturally on camera.

(21:49.326)
but also have a little bit of attention to detail and quality. So their room is clean. It's well lit enough. And it doesn't have to be like a ring light and professional setting. It just needs to be good enough that if your friend posted it, you'd like, oh, that's pretty good video. So that's what they're trying to find. They're trying to find that authentic content. They're not coming to us to find hyper creative creators because you can find that elsewhere. For us, it's about getting regular people to tell these stories. And I think...

Soon these stories are going to just become increasingly wacky. It's super interesting.

Anne McGinty
I love the idea of more Super Bowl quality ads, but with regular people, you know, spread the wealth a bit.

Brian Dutt
Exactly.

Anne McGinty
So what is your ultimate goal with Beeroll?

Brian Dutt
I really believe that user generated content is the way that brands should increasingly tell stories. It's not a replacement for what exists now. I mean, my goal is to make it a real thing in the brand world. Like I want brands to start seeing that they should be channeling.

people that look like their customers in ads. And I really want to change the ad ecosystem in that way. And on the creator side, it's just really fulfilling to help people get a little bit of side cash. I have people all the time that say, this kind of helped me pay childcare. It's basically, can we sort of democratize, for lack of a better word, content creation and get some of these smaller creators money? Like we just did 1099 forums for all our creators and people make a good amount of side cash. So.

Really for me, it's about how can we change the way brands make content and how can we just get millions of people some money in their pocket?

Anne McGinty
Yeah, I like that. What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking to start either a SaaS business or a marketing platform?

Brian Dutt
I think one of the most important things early on is to validate the idea before you jump all the way in. I've spent a lot of time in that accelerator I was in and also just

in being a startup world, you hear startup pitches all the time. And honestly, 90 % of the time, they sound pretty good. Like most pitches sound good, but this is kind of cliche to say at this point, but it's all about execution. So of course you believe that your idea is awesome, but really you should start by validating it in any way possible. The Lean Startup is my Bible for this. It's a book about how you test your hypotheses first. If I was starting Beeroll right now, I wouldn't have one line of code written.

(24:15.278)
I would use out of the box, no code platforms just to see if I could get one brand to pay for user generated content. And if I get one random creator to sign up and film it, and I would just see if I could make it work once. And you can do that with spending a few hundred dollars.

Anne McGinty
What do you mean by using no code?

Brian Dutt
Tools like Webflow, there's one called Bubble, which is like a kind of web prototype builder.

They didn't really exist when I started Beeroll, but basically there are these platforms where you can build a pretty sophisticated minimum viable product to test your idea. Basically what I'm saying is you don't need to go out and pay some engineers to build your product yet, because you need to make sure that your idea is actually a thing. So if I were doing it right now, I would literally use one of these, they call them no code platforms because you don't have to know how to code. You can build a product that has a database in it for basically a couple of bucks a month.

So I would start by building a very basic version of Beeroll where you can upload a video and I would get a creator to upload a video and I would try to sell it to a brand. And if I could do that a couple of times, I'd say, you know what, this idea has legs. I'll start to put a pitch deck together and then raise some money from angel investors or my friends and family. But step one would always be to validate.

Anne McGinty
Yeah, I've never even heard about those no code platforms. So that is really fascinating to me.

Brian Dutt
They've come a long way and

For example, I saw someone that cloned Twitter on it, literally cloned it every feature in Twitter using a no -code platform. It's not generally sustainable if you're gonna build a real tech platform over time, like you're gonna need to build custom code and basically have your own code base, but it should get you pretty far. This is the advantage you have in software over building a physical product in that software, there are ways to get there pretty quickly without investing in inventory.

Anne McGinty
Very insightful.

All right, so I've got one more question for you. If you could go back and give yourself some advice when you were in your 20s, what would you say?

Brian Dutt
Well, I wish that I would have known about entrepreneurship earlier. It's something that never even occurred to me. My career vision was always work at a big company, be an executive at a big company or something like that. And I don't know why that was just the trajectory. Maybe it was just like in college. I don't know. Everyone wanted to work in finance. So I was like, oh, maybe that's what I should be doing. And

(26:36.622)
I think I thought probably a little bit too much about my paychecks and, you know, making a lot of money or something like that when I was young. But if I could, I would have encouraged myself to test entrepreneurship. I think there are ways that people can test the waters and see if they actually like it. I would have said to myself, go start a business on the side, just start a little business, making a couple hundred bucks a month and see if like it's something that's interesting to you. Because the way this all happened to me was a headhunter called me when I was working at Viacom and said,

you want to go interview with this company, Freewheel. And I had never heard of it. I didn't even know what startups really did or what happens at a startup. And if I hadn't taken that call, I probably never would have even started Beeroll. So it's like, I wish someone in my twenties had told me entrepreneurship is pretty cool. You should test it out and see if like that's inside of you.

Anne McGinty
That's awesome. I love that advice. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and share your insights with us.

Brian Dutt
So fun. Thank you.

Anne McGinty (27:37.294)
If you've made it this far, as always, thanks for being here. 

Today's key takeaways. 

If you have a great idea for a software business or an app, but don't know how to code, don't let that stop you. Tap into your network or approach existing engineers to see if they know anyone that would be a good fit. 

Jason Calacanis's accelerator in San Francisco called Launch is an option if you want to learn how to turn your startup idea into reality. So check it out.

You've heard this in other episodes, but you can get your first users or customers by offering your service for free. And if the product has legs, it will spread organically from there. 

Think about the size of a company that you want to build and know why. Don't get disheartened if you're pitching to VCs and getting turned down. You don't need venture capital money to scale a tech startup. You can keep it lean with a small team and you can go after angel investors instead. 

Throw yourself outside of your comfort zone and learn a new skill because you can and because it's fun. 

If you're looking to enter a SaaS software as a service, business, or online marketplace, the Lean Startup is worth a read. 

And you can test your idea or hypothesis using a no -code platform that only costs a few hundred dollars and allows you to create a fairly sophisticated minimum viable product to test your idea. 

Entrepreneurship is pretty cool. If you aren't sure if entrepreneurship is for you, you can always test it out on the side and see if it's in you. 

I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.