← back to the archive // episode file

Why You Need to Understand Debt & Business Capital

#creators#workingcapital#financialproducts#borrowmoney#branddeals
the transcript auto-captions · entered into evidence

0:00 [Music] just imagine if you can that we're all idiots and we saw carrot and we don't know what it is how do you explain it to dumb guys like us the dumbest of guys some dumb guys we're the dumbest guys in the world sometimes so you're you're dumb guys maybe let's let's go with that premise you I know it's hard like yeah you know yeah but you guys also are very successful on content you've got that whole YouTube thing going yeah you make money from it now here's the fun thing you got your YouTube money say one day you want to get a mortgage you walk into the bank this YouTube thing's doing pretty well can you lend me something I make let's say over seven figures a year they look at you I ████ no because they don't know what

0:51 oh that that my friends is a whole another topic there is in fact discrimination and lending there are tons of laws to prevent it but laws exist to prevent something that's because you know it's happening right and it goes down to this broader point the financial eag system decides to give you money based on a set of arbitrary criteria primarily have you borrowed money before and have you paid it back and guess what for many of us immigrants who didn't necessarily come from the Mayflower we didn't know that you were supposed to borrow money first so even though you might have seven figures as a YouTuber and seven figures the number of your followers the fact you have a borrow money you have no debt yeah bank's going to look you you're be like I have no debt and you're going be you don't have any debt how do I know you're going to pay me back you don't have any debt history exactly they're not going to give it to you and a lot of us are

1:41 taught to just do everything in cash yes don't ever have debt save a lot of money do it in cash that's Ramsay's advice too right he's like do everything in cash but the thing is you know if you borrow money there is a risk but if you can do something with that money that exceeds the cost of borrowing that's leverage it can actually be really financially powerful so the issue though what I just described it's not just mortgages it's everything you want to open up a bank account Banks won't do it if they don't trust your business legitimate say I want to send you $10 people don't realize that money doesn't move over instantly say I PayPal you 10 bucks PayPal just says Eric I trust you based on my underwriting I think you're a good credit risk so while the money takes 3 Days To Move Over I'mma spot you and put that $10 in Bart's account now now but sometimes

2:32 PayPal will say no ████ you for the same reason you might not get a mortgage I don't think you're credit worthy I bet when I try and get that money 3 days later it's not going to be there so I'm not going to process your payment that's why by the way PayPal charges fees because they believe some people are going to default and the Fe is enough to make up for it that's why only fans was shut down a couple years ago because their payments processors were like I don't want to process the people who pay for only fans because I think when I try and pull the money it's not good so it's not just mortgages if a bank does not trust you and understand you you are locked out of the financial ecosystem and you can't do ████ we saw this my co-founder and I I used to work with creators at Instagram I watched so many of you guys growing up I'm like this is the future everyone's going to learn how to build their brand how to use content

3:23 but they're not going to be able to access money and my co-founder he's a smart ████ he's graduated from Stanford he raised a 10 Mill Venture fund when he was like 20 he's doing crypto hedge fund said hey I know well hopefully you'll meet him too one day one of these days we like we should do something together let's build a financial ecosystem for creators we understand you we'll provide you that capital and so a co-founder I we raised a little bit of money around 1.5 million from the co-founder of twitch and a bunch of other really smart angels and we said first product we're going to try business Capital here's $500,000 expand your Production Studio go watch your own line of merchandise and we'll take lower rates than normal bank cuz we think we understand what you're doing nobody ████ cared it failed because no

4:13 YouTuber knew who we were they didn't trust us you might remember 2020 covid PPP stimulus money from the government for Co Rel literally free no strings attached we went on to YouTubers say hey I will help you get people P I have relationships with banks I don't want anything other to build this Goodwill with you and to prove to ourselves we can build Financial products for creators not a single one took it they said ████ you scammer guy coming to me I have the email receipts I'll show it to you later guy coming to me off the street I don't know who you are and you're saying sign here and you'll give me money and I realized I wish I knew you back like I would have taken you but that's why do it on wrong man you had a bootstrap because it comes down to

5:03 financial education and trust it doesn't matter what we build for creators if no one believes in it so the second thing we tried was taxes I was like you know what they say death in taxes it's unevitable in life the issue is no one thinks about their taxes everyone's thinking about how do I make more money how do I grow faster you think about taxes maybe 1% of your life and then YouTubers they go to the people they already know so they don't think about it and then April comes and then they're like my mom's uncles's dog walker sister is going to do it for me and they don't know how to ride off for Entertainer and then they'll fight you for it they're like you can't ride off your clothes that's illegal exactly so then we come to them 99% of time they don't give a ████ because they're not thinking about it 1% they are they already found someone they liked so we're like damn the last and final product we did we were about to give up was a credit card

5:53 and it's not because we wanted to do a credit card is because we worked with a couple creators and streamers so this is one of the cars that we made right it's a heavy metal car all that ████ you know it's loud I saw on stream this Creator named Ludwick the guy makes millions and on stream he was trying to purchase subscriptions to give to his followers and his card was hitting it limit because it was really really low I was like huh that's interesting I talked to other creators who were running into similar problems most creators don't have this problem but some do where literally they're trying to spend on a card for their business little bit of working capital and they can't because Banks don't trust them enough and creators don't think of it this way but working capital is actually really really important let's take Mr Beast as an example he's talked about when he did

6:43 videos in the early days he take all the money from them and just turn it into the next video so he say he counts to a million gets I'm making this up a 10K brand deal that 10K goes to the next video where he gives away the 10K but he got a 15K brand deal so now he can do a video where he gives away 15K gets a 50k brand deal that's actually just being really smart about how quickly you can turn around working capital but creators don't know that until they're trying to literally buy ████ on a credit card and not have to pay for it right away and they can't so we made a card for few creators really really early lwig Alex botes Graham Stefan you know when Graham Stefan launched his coffee business and he sold more than six figures of coffee in a single day Shopify wouldn't release the payments to him because they're like how do we know this is real who goes from Z to 100 that fast and we're like well we can do that and then we realized

7:34 hey credit cards are good if you use them properly obviously for a lot of people it doesn't make sense if you can't control your spending don't use them but they give you flip they give you working capital and they're tangible they're physical they're understandable it's not just about hey let me provide you with better rates Mr Creator Mrs Creator it's not just about my mission is to build more for you it's also about oh but it's cool and your friends use it and it looks dope Colin and Samir Samir once told me he quoted Scott Galloway from this the most successful products appeal to the heart the mind and the ego he we can use more fic terms we could say the dick as well you got it I know your audience basically anything you sell it's got to appe to the heart the mind and the dick the ████ yeah basically and the the way a good Financial product

8:24 works yeah from a heart perspective our mission is to help creators from a mind perspective we'll underwrite you and give you better from perspective is cool as ████ so earlier you asked me hey how come I'm seeing all my friends with carrot Billboards yeah so first of all it's actually organic because these every single Creator you see on a billboard is either a client of ours or a podcast guest of ours it builds that credibility but also makes it look cool and then we said cool let's bring people onto the cards we don't even make money on these we break even we charge no fees the only money we make is the credit card processing fee that stores pay when they accept the cards because here's the secret about credit cards a lot of the money they make is by cross- selling you to other Financial products and services this data it's the data which built a better underwriting model and then the ability to sell you other targeted Financial products so I see we'll take

9:16 Chase an example you guys might have heard the Chase Sapphire Reserve card I got one it's a nice card in the first year reporter went to Jamie diam the head of Chase hey how much did you make on this Chase card it's doing so well Jamie said we lost $200 million on it this year Porter said wow that doesn't sound great wow what do you wish he had made and he said I wish we had lost $400 million on it this year because he lost a lot of money on marketing and rewards but he makes it back because those Chase card holders a lot of them become Chase bank account clients and when you're on a bank that's sticky people don't switch Banks how often you guys switch Banks it's not I just keep opening up more with Chase all right there you go and they make money right here by holding your deposits they earn interest on that maybe you need help for mortgages maybe you'll go to Chase and so our vision is

10:08 by using this card as a wedge we to your point get the data to build an underwriting model we probably understand more than anybody how much creators actually make we even launch an insights tool you can see if you this many followers this is how much your peers are going to be making you got to build a good brand name that's why we do things like the Billboards so that you can launch your other products we're launching a business bank account in a few months we're also launching instant payments if two people are on carrot you can send money to each other instantly and for free and that way one day we want to become like square but for creators you want every dollar in this Creator economy to be passing through our products and services so that's why we're doing we've been doing this for over four and a half years now my co-founder myself so does uh yeah for real does carrot does carrot run off of FICO scores or anything like that or is it completely different model in the

10:58 early days we didn't look at fos scores at all now we have an official partnership with Visa we do soft pulls soft pulls do not hurt your credit most credit cards do a hard pull which does hurt your credit the reason why we don't need to do hard pulls is we we've developed this underwriting model off of your financial history and your social stats in the early days I described to people what they were doing they're like this is some Black Mirror ████ this is the Chinese social score you are raing people off their social stats I'm like no if you're a business business would I not look at your business metrics as a future predictor of how you're going to do if you are a YouTuber the number of followers the number of views you have actually Matters from a business perspective asking someone to borrow money and then your reasoning is just trust me bro like what the ████

11:49 obviously I'm going to look at all this stuff I'm going to look your financials too and so we don't have to rely on hard ful because we why don't you just let me borrow money and trust me though is carot the first um thing that actually like when I saw that when creators are using it they're able to see where they stand as far as they have this many followers and they generate this much income from these platforms and you can compare with all of the other people w we actually just launched this where you can see percentiles hey I have a million followers and I make content about basketball right what are other creators making anonymized but you can see hey how much they make from as how much they make from Brand deals because know today the way it works you know even for the podcast that I help do I just one of my other podcasting friends I said guys like what what are your brand deal rates like when when you do an like how much

12:39 how much do you charge and I was just like why is this just like me texting my friends like this should be easier and guess what brands hold on to All That Power it's hard I go to my Creator friends I'm like hey like what's your conversion rate usually when you talk about a product and they're like I don't know the brand doesn't tell me you know why the brand doesn't tell you because if you knew how much you were actually making for them you would charge them more so they obscure it so we're hoping one day we can share that visibility as well we're not there yet by being an agency no by having the data because every time people use their financial products we learn and you help your clients charge more cuz they understand their own metrics build that yes into good data products that we're not charging for because that is lead genen for us and then when they use it they come on to financial prodcts they generate more data right cuz the more money they make the more they deposit into your it's like 10 people work in

13:30 Cub I don't know what each other's being paid and then this guy's making like half of what you're making oh gosh I'm sure probably run into things like this where you meet a Creator and you find out how much they make on their brand deals and you're like what am I just ugly like how are they doing so much better this is not fair yeah yeah yeah I mean there there are programs that they try to like automate that where there's platforms where you submit your information and then companies can bid and then but you don't really get leads like that us to all the end end person that accepts or rejects right yeah I mean but yeah it's a lot of those digital ones that are automated you don't really get good leads like that you still need to go through agencies you still need to build a relationship with Brands like that's still the best way but that's just crazy that that data is available but Brands don't want to share it actually you're you're talking about is

14:21 like AdSense for brand deals right or like you know I on a Facebook ad clorax wants to r a Facebook ad you know clorax doesn't like to like call 15 different agents CL just runs the ad and like Facebook just knows like here's the rate and here's where people convert that doesn't happen with creators because every brand read you know a lot of them are a little bit different right and like Creator conversion the ability to bring people to the product is really different and so it all ends up being Intermediate by agencies at the highest level and that's a big problem we're not necessar oh we're going to change that we work with a lot of Agents I'm just saying give the Creator a little bit more financial information on their side so they can at least know like man I ran a creat other day he had like millions of followers on short and he had no brand deals and I was like how how do you live like you're going to make nothing he just does it for fun for the passion for the love of it and abuse he he like needs to eat food so that's why

15:12 I like that like even if you guys just want to explore carrot one of the cool things you can see is the py graph of like what what portion of things uh is a Creator's income made of like you can see how much of it is brand deals how much of it is AD rev and then you can see the Tik Tok pay which is like a little line oh yeah if you're on Tik Tok yo it is hard it's a weird thing we looked at like hey say you have a million followers on a platform how much are you making on an average like 400 bucks yeah like we broke it down by how much from the platform versus not the platform Tik Tok from the platform it was like $500 now to be clear off platform it was a lot more because if you're making a full-time living with only a million on Tik Tok you're probably hustling hard on side things right you're using a leg to your own things exactly but from a platform perspective mum's nothing it's actually really weird the platform that are best for helping you get discovered as a Creator like Tik Tok or you know less so

16:03 but still true Instagram they actually monetize worse than like YouTube and twitch like if you're on YouTube and twitch you're actually earning a lot more per viewer because they're more engaged with you especially twitch they're sitting there watching your face all day yeah but it's weirdly harder to get discovered I did a CEO I did an interview with the CEO of twitch Dan clany he talked about it he said twitch is about Community they're not really about Discovery and so I was just like are you just like giving up on Discovery he's like well no but that's why they've made it easier you can now broadcast on other platforms besides twitch they're actually fine now if you go and post clips on YouTube and Tik Tok they're making it easier for you to even find those clips cuz they're realizing look people might not find me on Twitch they're going to find new other platforms but they're going to come here to like actually monetize yeah it's cool yeah but that's that's kind of what I do thanks for check out carrot guys

16:53 [Music] yeah [Music]

// end of tape