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Building a Tech Business Outside of the Tech Industry with Brian Jagger of Casting Calls America

Episode #066

When Brian Jagger (@briansjagger) became a casting director, spending hours copying and pasting and editing file names, he knew there had to be a better way. Learn how Brian and his cofounders took advantage of years of learnings from past failures to build a successful business in the film industry and spread to new markets one city at a time.

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • Casting Calls America is a two-sided marketplace.

    • They started off charging $5 per user, and now charge $7.95 per user

    • They have one website per region

    • Brian started off in the Marketing industry (Marketing Development) and only did theatre on the side. He wrote a play that won an award so he decided to get into theatre a bit more.

    • His experience in Marketing Development meant that he became a natural networker, and these skills transferred into his acting career, he began acting and meeting people who would introduce him into other bigger opportunities. And within a year from starting he was working as a full time actor.

    • As his acting career and network progressed, he started referring other people for new acting roles that he found. He did this so much for a YouTube channel called “Smosh” that they hired him as their casting director.

    • Soon Brian was receiving so many applications from people who wanted one of the casting roles that he was responsible for finding people to fill, that he decided to automate the process of receiving an application, reformatting it (which took a lot of manual work per application), and then submitting it. So he reached out to a Database Engineer that he knew, and asked if they could make something.

    • Brian has always been on the entrepreneurial side. From age 8 he always did entrepreneurial things.

    • Brian started a software company back in 2006 that didn’t take off fully because they were “too early into the market”, although the idea worked and companies were interested (it was a big live chat for recruiters to choose and interview interested candidates during certain slots in the day), the required technical solutions like Amazon Web Services, and Cloud technologies, didn’t exist so his website was underpowered, it crashed a lot, and overall worked poorly. To make matters worse, they were only 2 years away from the big market crash of 2009.

    • Cold out-reach is king: For their first software company (the one above), it was a two-sided marketplace. They managed to get a lot of customers by cold out-reach to recruiters in organisations. Recruiters really liked the idea.

    • Google Radio: In order to get candidates to the platform (the one above), they used Google Radio which was a way to get your advertisement played on radio stations that had excess time. This turned out to be very cheap and highly effective for Brian. However Google shut down Google Radio in around 2007.

    • Word-of-mouth was not ideal for his Casting Calls America business because a lot of actors wouldn’t want to share a resource for getting casting roles with others, out of the fear of increasing their own competition.

    • Don’t try to grow too fast: One mistake Brian learned from his previous failed software business was that trying to grow really fast by taking on too many things. Because, by taking on lots of things, other things were breaking, but he had no time to fix them since he was already working on something else that was urgent.

    • Start small and targeted (regional rollout / market rollout): Brian and his team started their Casting Call market place by targeting one city (market) at a time. They only moved onto the next city when the current city’s marketplace was operating efficiently. They’d then duplicate it into the next city.

    • Brain was his own customer, because he knew what it was like to be on both ends of his two-sided marketplace platform “Casting Calls America”

    • After building their MVP in their first city, Brian used his network to reach out to people that he knew to get them on board. But in the cities where he didn’t know anybody, he had to do trial and error to get people on board (see next bullet point).

    • You can’t avoid the “Grind work”: 90% of the outreach in new cities was by Brian messaging people on Facebook.

    • Avoid big mass-marketing channels in the beginning. Focus on smaller more direct and personal channels

    • When starting a business: It’s far more important to have the knowledge of your user, than it is to have the knowledge of an entrepreneur business owner. If you TRULY know the pain and have ideas on how to solve it, you can just learn the business stuff as you go. So, always be talking to your users!

    • Mental time vs Physical time: Physical time is when you’re physically working; Mental time is when you’re thinking about something related to work. Although you may only work 8 hours in a day at your job or business, you still tend to think about it outside of working hours, so make sure to carve out time mental time to not think about work or business.

    • Brian kept 2 of his co-founders from his past business into his current business. They have known each other way before starting business together.

    • Brain’s advice to his past self: Think about technical scalability from the beginning, even just a little bit.

    • “Don’t quit your pain job”: Make sure that you feel the pain of your customers you and your product always stay empathetic to them.

    • Don’t compare yourself to others, every scenario is different.

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