How To Partner With YouTubers And Make Millions Licensing Their IP
Kids' Entertainment, Live Shows, and Licensing IPs - April 28, 2022 (almost 3 years ago) • 13:08
Transcript:
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Shaan Puri | I did talk about this the other day. I went to the Blippi show. Did I tell you about this? No? Alright, so do you know who Blippi is? Have you ever heard of Blippi?
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Sam Parr | I don't know what that is no | |
Shaan Puri | Alright, so, remember back there we had Barney or, you know, Pee-wee Herman? He's like... it's a dude. So, he kind of looks like Pee-wee Herman, but he's more like a Barney or Sesame Street-style show.
Basically, there's a guy who went on YouTube and created this brand called Blippi. He's entertaining. He'd be like, "Oh, and by the way," the funny thing that he does is there's no set. He just goes into places like, "Hey, we're at the aquarium," but they just go in after 9 PM when it's closed down. So, they have it all to themselves.
Like, "Hey, we're here in Las Vegas at this rock climbing studio." He just uses that to film his thing, but he gives it a shout-out at the beginning of the video. The video gets like 40 million views, so it's worth it to let these guys film there.
He just goes around and basically plays with toys. He'd be like, "I'm at an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese," and he'll go play with a bunch of toys, and there's music and whatever overlaid.
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Sam Parr | and it's the same guy I'm looking at him now it's the same guy every single time | |
Shaan Puri | It is, except for as he blew up and got famous, then they switched him out with just a stunt double for a bit. So, like, that guy is like a substitute teacher sometimes, and then sometimes Blippi comes back. But, like, the main guy is the main guy. He wears his outfits, like this blue outfit with his orange glasses. He always looks the same.
So, anyway, my daughter loved Blippi. We used to watch a ton of Blippi, and all of a sudden, we see this ad that says Blippi, like, the live show is coming to Oakland. So we were like, "Oh, shit!" Instantly, my wife buys tickets for all of us in the family. We go to this thing last weekend, and it's at the same place you did Hustle Con. So it's at the Paramount Theater, and it is packed. You know, Hustle Con was, like, sold out-ish; this was, like, sold out, sold out. Even the back, shady seats were sold out, and it's full of parents and their kids.
Then they just created, like, a little play, like a little mini musical for one hour because kids don't have that long of an attention span. It's just kind of like music and, you know, lights and colors. He's like, "Oh, dinosaurs! Oh, rocks! Oh, how..." | |
Sam Parr | much did it cost | |
Shaan Puri | so every ticket I wanna say was | |
Sam Parr | that venue seats | |
Shaan Puri | maybe like $60 a seat something like that | |
Sam Parr | so that venue seats between 25,03,000 I believe yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So, I think there were 2,000 there, and I believe the tickets were something like $50, $60, or $70, something like that.
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Sam Parr | so we're in like a 120,000 and so and | |
Shaan Puri | Then he played four shows in a row that weekend, and then he went to the next city. So it was like he made no... he had done eight shows, or he was doing something like that. It was some crazy thing where I was like, "Oh wow, this weekend they made whatever, $800."
Yeah, the tickets basically range from $60 to $90. And the place is lit, by the way. So, you know, he comes on stage, kids go crazy. He's like, "What does the bubble do?" and everyone's like, "Pop!" Then he's like, "When I say pop, can you say pop?" It's not a quiet show because kids are loud anyway.
Some kids are just not paying attention. My daughter, during intermission, was like, "I wanna watch Blippi on YouTube." So we had to open up YouTube on our phone and give it to her during intermission because she couldn't go five minutes without stimulation.
They have the merch and the concessions; they have all that stuff, right? So it's pretty dope, actually. I was like, "Wow, this is kind of genius." They just took YouTube IP, and this guy who was there was not Blippi. The guy on stage was just some theater kid who didn't make it, you know? So he's like, "Alright, plan B, I'll be Blippi."
They took the IP but made their own show out of it. I started looking into this, and there's a company that does this called VStar Entertainment. Awesome! So VStar, what they do is they go license these kids' brands and then they put on kids' Broadway, basically, and they tour around the country.
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Sam Parr | awesome | |
Shaan Puri | and so | |
Sam Parr | and bloodbeat's just a guy with a guitar right or were there more instruments | |
Shaan Puri | no guitar he's just just him he just walked out | |
Sam Parr | were there any instruments or was it just like a soundtrack | |
Shaan Puri | just soundtrack and like lights and like stage props so like you | |
Sam Parr | know so he he only had like backup dancers | |
Shaan Puri | Like, you know, if they came out as sharks, like a bunch of little backup dancers came out as sharks, and then they... whatever, like that's an awesome mini theater show, right?
So, Vistar Entertainment, they do another brand that you've probably heard of, called... or you may have heard of, called Paw Patrol. It's basically another kid's cartoon.
So, guess how much this is my kind of triangulation. Guess how much they sold in Paw Patrol tickets last year. Just take a guess.
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Sam Parr | 20 20 mil | |
Shaan Puri | $40,000,000 and | |
Sam Parr | $40,000,000 in event tickets | |
Shaan Puri | in event tickets for and that's just the tickets not the merch | |
Sam Parr | that was just last year in 22 | |
Shaan Puri | I don't know, it's like this is just before COVID numbers. So, like, I don't know... oh no, 2019, 2020, something like that.
Wow, so they got bought by Cirque du Soleil. So first, the backstory is some guy decides, "Oh, you know what? Like, he's watching Sesame Street, and he's like, 'Sesame Street should do a live show.'"
He goes and he basically raises $500,000 from this guy. He mortgages his house and gets an extra $25,000 out of his home equity. So he's got $525,000, and he goes and gets the license to Sesame Street. He started with the Sesame Street show, then the Muppets, and like, he... you know, did...
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Sam Parr | but that must have been years ago | |
Shaan Puri | this was in the like 1980 something like that | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | And then this other guy was doing it. They merged, and then that whole thing got bought by Cirque du Soleil last year. Is it Cirque du Soleil, by the way? Like, guess how much Cirque du Soleil's revenue was. Have you ever been to a show?
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Sam Parr | I have not seen the Cirque show, but I do know that the guy who started it is a Canadian. He's a billionaire. I read Dan Bilzerian's book, and they talk about that guy a lot. I think he's like... I mean, he started a circus, so he's like...
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Shaan Puri | a little liberty or whatever | |
Sam Parr | yeah he's really eccentric and wild and everything so it made him a billionaire how much revenue does it make | |
Shaan Puri | Ben, have you been to a Cirque du Soleil show? Cirque du Soleil generates $1,000,000,000 a year in revenue, which is insane! About 5 to 10% of all Las Vegas tourists go to a Cirque show when they're in town. | |
Sam Parr | is that what | |
Shaan Puri | you do | |
Sam Parr | what what's that at cirque is that the is that | |
Shaan Puri | Like your name, well, they have like 10 shows, right? It'll be like, they have, oh, and then they have "Zumanity." They have like, whatever.
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Sam Parr | And The Beatles, yeah, I know all about it and I'm into it. It's publicly traded, or at least it was before it was acquired by private equity, right?
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Shaan Puri | Private equity owns it now, and it's a pretty badass business. The idea was to do a circus but with no animals. It was only human performers. To achieve that, they featured crazy acrobats and great costumes.
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Sam Parr | it's basically its own genre at this. Though | |
Shaan Puri | Right, and so he built that thing into a real juggernaut. Cirque then bought Blue Man Group and VStar Entertainment.
So they got Blue Man, which is like an ad. What they had said was, "We do $10,000,000 in ticket sales a year for Cirque du Soleil." Blue Man adds another $2,000,000, and then VStar adds another $2,000,000. But they're all like different ticket prices. So, they do $14,000,000 in tickets sold per year.
This live entertainment thing really has caught my attention because I think as the world moves more and more digital, the demand for these one-off experiences—like, "Hey, let's get out of the house and go do something"—is just going to keep going up. Music festivals? That's a winner.
Then, I think plays and musicals are going to be a winner. I think they're going to be bigger than they were before, even though the world moves digital. In fact, because the world moves digital, what do you think about all this?
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Sam Parr | I 100% agree. Earlier today, I sent you a Notion document with some of my notes on peer businesses. This is basically where you pay money to be part of a club and meet up with other members.
I can't talk too much about the names of the companies, but one of them makes $100 million a year in profit. They have 2 or 3 meetups a year, and executives pay $50,000 a year to be part of it.
I think these are going to completely boom. Conferences right now are interesting, but they can be really hard to organize. This model seems way easier to pull off. All types of meetups, like Airbnbs, I'm 100% on board with. I believe that in-person interactions are the way to go. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think that... so then I started thinking, what are the other opportunities?
I think you could just go compete with these guys on either the same brands or other brands. What they did was the VStar guy took TV IP and turned it into a live show. What the Blippi guy is doing is taking YouTube IP and turning it into a live show.
I think you could even do this for more. We've talked about religion, which is the greatest free IP in the world. So, I think if somebody could do this for religion, it would make it extremely kid-friendly, in fact, kid-focused. Like a Christianity show, basically.
I think you could do this for dinosaurs or science as a generic genre. Because, like, if kids love trucks and dinosaurs or whatever, you could just basically create the show, you know, "A Day with Dinosaurs" or something like that.
Once you get a certain level of quality, moms will spread this. They will talk about it in their mommy groups and help you sell these tickets. I just feel like it's not that hard. You build one show and then you sell that one show a thousand times, right?
The show goes on tour. "Mamma Mia!" has made, like, I don't know, some stupid amount of money just being the same show on tour while replacing the low-cost actors over time.
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Sam Parr | I'm trying, while we're talking, to find the numbers. So, we used to do events, and we had this thing called **Hustle Con**, which was our big one where thousands of people would come.
Then we did this thing called **2X**. 2X was basically from 7 PM to 10 PM, and we would get 10 to 15 women, all of whom were in tech and business. Not that many of them were well-known, but they would have 10 minutes to tell a story. We would charge about $25, but then we would get tens of thousands of dollars in sponsors.
We got to the point where we could pull this off almost weekly in other cities. When we started doing this, **The Hustle** wasn't that popular, but we were making, I think, about $30 a night when we were doing it. We had one employee running it, and she would use a team of contractors.
We wouldn't supply much; I think we had free wine, but I don't even know if it was free. We wouldn't supply anything, but then when we had corporate sponsors, we crushed it. In my head, I'm like, "I can always fall back on this to make a living," because it was so much easier than people thought.
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Shaan Puri | it would | |
Sam Parr | yeah it would | |
Shaan Puri | That's pretty good for a tech bro. A tech bro business, like all of you, you were running one of the best women's entrepreneurship events. Yeah, because you got labeled wrong, dude.
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Sam Parr | I... yeah, there. I'm like an onion, man. There's layers.
So, basically, we used to do this thing called "Pizza in Forties," where we would have a meetup, and I would interview someone while they drank a 40-ounce beer. When the 40-ounce beer was done, the talk was done. But then, women were like, "This is like, there's all dudes here."
So, we created a wine version, and that had way better engagement. It was called "Cheese and Wine," I don't even remember, but that had way better engagement. We thought, "Oh, let's pursue this vein; there's clearly an opportunity here."
Then we created "2X," which comes from "2X chromosomes," which I thought was clever. I stole it from Reddit. Anyway, we did, I think, 10 or 12 in one year, and every single time, it was like $20 to $30. The cost was nothing; the cost was renting the venue, which cost like $3,000, and we would make like $20,000.
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Shaan Puri | but you and you also you had readers in every city right so that's how you | |
Sam Parr | Sold the tickets? Is that... yeah, yeah. But we weren't... basically, the speakers sold the tickets. The reason why we had 15 speakers was that I was like, "I bet each of the 15 will get 25 people to come," plus our little bit of our engine. Like, this is easy.
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Shaan Puri | you weren't making the money off the tickets you're making out sponsors really anyway | |
Sam Parr | The tickets paid for the event, and then the conference sponsors were all the profit. But there are two things going on:
1. Whenever you have an underserved community, sponsors are definitely willing to pay more.
2. It had a B2B component, so it wasn't a kids' component, which I think would alter the economics.
My point is that I think it was far easier than people thought. It was way more rudimentary and raw than people thought, and it worked. We just used Splash. If you Google "2x the hustle," you'll see that Splash is basically Eventbrite. It was nothing special, and it freaking worked.
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