TrueShort becomes the number-one true crime app with AI-generated vertical films, hits $1M annualized ARR in six months

Speaker 2: Great to meet Brandon.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on. Come

Speaker 2: back on soon.

Speaker 1: Alright. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 12: Have a

Speaker 1: good one. Up next, we have Nate Tepper from True Short. He's the founder and CEO here to talk

Speaker 4: The Tefinator.

Speaker 1: Funding from Coastal Ventures, Wonderco, a bunch of Hollywood investors for AI generated vertical films for mobile. The Teppernator. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: What's going on, dude?

Speaker 1: How are

Speaker 7: doing, Hey, guys. Good to see you. Let's go.

Speaker 2: Let's go. First

Speaker 1: time on the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the product.

Speaker 7: Nate Tepper, founder, CEO of TrueShort. We're an AI film studio and streaming platform. So on one side, we have creatives and engineers that are making movies together. On the other side, we make the streaming platform too like Netflix, distribute the music movies, monetize them. Yeah. Full stack creative company.

Speaker 1: Vertically integrated. What is the like, how how do customers experience this? Are you mobile first, web, desktop? Like, what is the watching behavior these days?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Exactly. So we were kind of inspired by the micro dramas. I don't know if any of you guys know about that. But basically saw that China was pumping these vertical soap operas that were making more money than the box office in China. Like, some of these apps are doing 50,000,000 a month in revenue, and they're all shot vertically minute long episodes. And that kind of led us to this idea that like, wait, there's something in between Netflix and TikTok. People are consuming this on their phone vertically short form. So we kind of took that exact same approach,

Speaker 2: but not Yeah. We had that realization probably a year ago too. We were looking at some of the the the iPhone kind of charts and seeing like, are all these companies I've never heard of that are in the top 25 that are, you know, printing money?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Is this and someone else had a realization like this years ago. One of your investors. I wonder

Speaker 1: who. Yeah.

Speaker 2: A good good friend of ours. Yeah. Jeffrey Katzenberg. Yeah. You got him into the round. Why what did he see in kind of your approach that would, you know, make make this a great investment?

Speaker 7: I mean, the next Hollywood is being built right now from the ground up. Right? Like, all of these new creators are coming in. I think some kid in his bedroom is gonna make the next Star Wars, leveraging AI and maybe different formats, short form, etcetera. And I think he just sees that opportunity. And the approach that we took, we have this vision of, like, the next Netflix, but we launched with a true crime app. Yeah. We just took a very strategic, like, Amazon launch with books. We took a niche wedge approach, and within six months with the number one true crime app, million in annualized revenue twice. I think he saw the vision, but that actually we know how to execute as well. Yeah. And so I I think he was bought into that.

Speaker 2: How are you working with creative talent? Are you hiring all over the world? Or is this going to be like you want to get a big studio here in LA and hire a bunch of people?

Speaker 1: The next James Cameron.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Let's go. I like that. We we actually just opened an office in LA. And so the we we call them creative pods. It's kind of the way we work. A pod is basically a showrunner who's like the visionary. The the knows the story, the characters, the brand. Then there's an AI filmmaker who brings all the shots to life with AI, kinda like the DP director of photography. And then you have the editor who strings it all together, and that pod basically produces content every week, a series a week. And so we wanna keep building more and more of these creative pods. And we're we're testing a bit right now. We have remote pods, but we just opened our first office in LA with our in person pods and just the speed that you can work collaboratively together there. So we're stoked about that.

Speaker 1: Talk about the customer acquisition flywheel. You've been at the top of the app charts. I'm sure that that has a lot of energy. There's news about the company. But how do you think about the content being shareable? One of the critiques of Quibi was that you couldn't screenshot or screen record the content. At the same time, if someone's just wiring up every time something goes out on TrueShort, just upload the full thing to YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and like let me steal the ad revenue. That's not going to work. So how are you how are you dealing with getting attention for the company, having the flywheel, leveraging the content that you're creating without giving everything away and still giving customers a reason to subscribe and pay you?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. And, like, growth is in our DNA. Jordy knows this, but our last app was number one in the app store for health and fitness. I think it had close to a billion views on TikTok. Let's go. And we I mean, look, run, like, kind of similar playbooks. We're super growth hacky. We're running many different TikTok accounts. Sure. Like, we know how to do all that stuff.

Speaker 1: Okay. You steal yourself. You steal the content yourself. That's probably the right move. Yeah. I mean, that's what we do here. We clip our own show.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I know we make content. We might as well put it out there Yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. But but I I do want to be straight up too, like, the micro drama space is run on paid acquisition

Speaker 12: Interesting.

Speaker 7: Right now. Very much so. And like, I won't deny that too. We Yeah. We definitely run paid acquisition. We just know how to do both. Yeah. So it's we have a growth advantage.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And I feel like the the the cost of paid acquisition probably falls when there's already some organic content out there. There's more familiarity with the brand. All of that helps with the CPMs.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. How quickly do you expect the the YouTubes of the world, the TikToks to actually roll out dedicated micro drama features?

Speaker 1: TikTok did. Okay.

Speaker 7: So TikTok has one called like pine dream, pine something. I don't know. I don't know why it has like 200 ratings on the App Store. So I don't know what they did with it. Netflix is creating kind of like vertical Okay. Section in the app. Yeah. But they haven't made vertical content in it yet. So it it's definitely happening. Things are are going

Speaker 3: It feels like it feels like

Speaker 2: this business to me will over time probably look more like a 24 that owns its own distribution and actually sells the product because you're gonna get like competition from all the

Speaker 1: Platforms and all the features.

Speaker 2: And so your advantage is like can you create a system that can reliably create hits and IP and deliver enough value to customers so that they subscribe Yeah. They keep coming back.

Speaker 1: Because YouTube YouTube had

Speaker 2: Is that is that is that is that right?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah. That's why we want to build the full stack here. Like, it's almost like its own flywheel where we create the content, put it in the app, funnel that data back into our own technology and creative teams, and just keep making more. So the speed that we're going and the learning the the pace pace of learning on the creative side too, I think we'll get to hits much faster. I don't honestly, just don't see these companies keeping up in terms of speed and iteration, not of creative, actually. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, YouTube got into original content that they were producing, and they pulled back from that eventually, and they just maintained just pure platform. Netflix, obviously, does productions, and there but a lot of that is done with other studios. And then they just buy or license the the actual end product. So, yeah, the vertically integrated approach

Speaker 2: I I think the key will be creating a setup where a pod can make more money, like, building on TrueShort than they can by just going and setting up their own kind of YouTube account.

Speaker 7: I'm I'm curious in general. Like, part of what I'm thinking about is like, there's about to be a million filmmakers. Like some like I said, some kid in his bedroom is gonna make the next Star Wars. Where is that gonna be distributed? Like, is it YouTube? Is it Netflix? Is it TrueShort? I think there we we're gonna see emerging films, is already happening, that are actually high quality that people wanna watch. Where are people gonna watch them? I don't I don't know yet. I think we'll see some stuff over there as well.

Speaker 1: How are you thinking about episode length and number of episodes? What have you actually tested? It feels like the the base case is, a two minute episode, maybe 10 episodes per story. Is that roughly correct? And then, like, do you think there'll be wide variation? Like, we see a ninety minute movie in a three hour epic from Nolan every once in while. Like, where do you see the dials turning?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, I actually view this micro drama space and what we're doing as like separate from theatrical, even separate from Netflix. The way people consume it is different too. It's like they open this stuff when they're bored on the subway.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: Right? And so it's actually if you still want to go watch a full two hour length movie, you're going to go watch that on Netflix or go to their theater. That will still exist until these become good enough that they're distributed there.

Speaker 1: But Mhmm.

Speaker 7: And so for now, just for now though, we're focused on these like kind of niche genre, one to two minute long episodes, mini episodes per series

Speaker 8: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: And like getting a flywheel going around that.

Speaker 2: What is what is the do you feel like you have hit IP yet? Something that you'll invest, you know, $20,000,000 into a specific like series over time yet? Or are you still just like taking taking shots, getting base hits, doubles, etcetera?

Speaker 7: So I I do intuitively. We're launching it later this month. It's not true crime, so it's not on our true crime app. It's our next genre. And just seeing what we're creating there, I would honestly say our true crime stuff is just like, that would be the lowest quality we'll ever put out stuff. Like, it's getting better and better. So intuitively, think what we're making now is real IP.

Speaker 1: Wait.

Speaker 7: Wait. People do a lot of fans.

Speaker 1: So so true crime, true short, there's obviously a linkage there, but the the name true short feels like it can hold anything. Like, it's not like

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Home box office. No one cares that they just think HBO, and it feels like you'll be there very quickly. But it sounds like you're considering multiple apps. Is that in the roadmap?

Speaker 7: I don't want to say too much yet about exactly what direction. Yeah. Because like, it's we're still discussing

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: It. But what I will say is, like, there are a lot of opportunities now around niche genres.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What about

Speaker 7: Fantastic. That's interesting.

Speaker 1: What about, like, pseudo or semi user generated content? HBO, you need an agent. It's got incredibly high bar to get your your your media product, your movie or show on HBO. Amazon Prime sort of has a self publishing like route if you're really creative. And Kindle self publishing, you can publish a book without any so like I think it needs to meet standards but it doesn't necessarily it's like an App Store review not it's maybe just one notch above YouTube to publish on the Amazon suite of products. How are you thinking about engaging like that random the next James Cameron who isn't in L. A. And didn't have a great resume but created a great product and you could monetize it for them. Have you thought about that?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, you nailed it. Like, that was the original vision. It was like, let's be the distribution for these million filmmakers that are coming, and curation and taste is gonna be really important, things like that. But we quickly learned, like, and just realized that, like, out of those million filmmakers, a lot of it will be slop, and it's still the earliest days. Yeah. And we also learned from the micro dramas that, like, there's a formula, especially for winning in the beginning. So we're like, let's own it. Let's learn it ourselves. Let's build it right now, and we can take this. It we could probably take this to a billion dollar company just as our own team moving fast. But I do think the big big vision, like I said, is like how do you find the next James Cameron? Mhmm. Where is he putting his stuff? That's that's really exciting.

Speaker 1: Favorite song to play on the guitar?

Speaker 2: Well, have thirty seconds left. Do you want to use the opportunity to do a quick solo or or your guitar

Speaker 7: Dude, I knew you were gonna ask me to do that. No. But I will plug. I will plug. Check out my band Pink Roses on Spotify. If you know Dave Fontanot, my bandmate.

Speaker 1: Oh, amazing. Yeah. We met Dave on the show.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They've had this crazy side quest of being rock Amazing. It's amazing.

Speaker 7: Well, it actually has millions of streams. You like it.

Speaker 1: Well, congratulations on the round. I don't know

Speaker 9: if we hit

Speaker 8: the gong.

Speaker 2: Hit it again. Boom.

Speaker 7: Thanks guys. Great to see you, Nate.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Make a micro drama about Tyler the intern's life at TBPN.

Speaker 1: Me Should we use his likeness?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh,