is the cofounder of Complexly and one half of the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel.
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Hello! This is Hank Green, general internet guy and cofounder of Complexly. This is my last time in the Decoder guest host chair unfortunately, unless Nilay decides to have another kid someday, but we’re making the best of it. Today, I’m talking with my friend Sam Reich, who is the CEO and, I at least think, founder of Dropout TV.
You’ll hear him argue with me about being the founder, and that’s okay. He was there, he probably knows what he’s talking about. But it’s an incredible story: Sam bought the company, which used to be called CollegeHumor, for zero dollars, immediately had to lay off almost the entire staff, and then got smacked in the face with the covid-19 pandemic shutting everything down, because it was early 2020.
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You wouldn’t think that’s a likely recipe for success, but Sam has been very successful! Dropout has grown every year. You’ve probably seen some clips on a vertical video platform, if not watched them on TV, from its most popular shows — including Game Changer, which Sam hosts. Well, “host” might not always be the right word for what happens in every episode, but he’s definitely there, and you’ll hear us talk about that a little bit, too.
But what Sam and I really spent a lot of time on was the problem of running a business that’s getting big. It’s much easier to do your creative work when your company is just you, or maybe just you and a few other people. It’s a lot harder when you have a bunch of stakeholders with competing priorities and they all want something from you.
Most media companies, for example, have to deal with some combination of advertisers and shareholders, who all want to make money. Dropout doesn’t really have advertisers or shareholders; it has Sam and a few other folks, all of whom want to make good comedy. Sam described the business model to me as a comedy SaaS: subscribers pay money and get programs they want to watch. It sounds like a pretty good business model to me, honestly. But it’s pretty rare, so Sam and I really got into the weeds about why it’s harder to do than you’d think.
This was a great conversation with a great friend, and I hope you enjoy it.
Okay: Sam Reich. Here we go.
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