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Genevieve Thiers Of Entertainmint — The One-Stop-Shop For Creating And Fostering Community Around Indie Content, Plus: Linus Chee Of Netvrk, And More…

Genevieve Thiers Of Entertainmint — The One-Stop-Shop For Creating And Fostering Community Around Indie Content, Plus: Linus Chee Of Netvrk, And More…

NFT Genevieve Thiers | Entertainmint

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Co-creation is the name of the game in Web3, and Entertainmint is one of the most vigorous players out there that are revolutionizing the cocreation process in the creator economy. Entertainmint is leading the way in the world of Web3 for independent creators through collaborative storytelling. Its unique vision is to revolutionize the traditional streaming model by fostering a collaborative community around indie content. This innovative marketplace empowers creators to connect directly with fans enabling collective world building and the co-creation of new, exciting projects. In this episode of Edge of NFT, CEO Genevieve Thiers explains how Entertainmint is positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for creating and fostering community around indie content and what projects they have in store for the near future. Speaking of co-creation, we’re also joined by Linus Chee of Netvrk on our special topics section to talk about the hot projects they have coming up. Tune in for all of these exciting developments right on the outer edge of innovation!

Listen to the podcast here

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Genevieve Thiers Of Entertainmint — The One-Stop-Shop For Creating And Fostering Community Around Indie Content, Plus: Linus Chee Of Netvrk, And More…

This is Genevieve Thiers of Entertainmint, the one-stop shop for creating a fostering community in Web3 film. This is Edge of NFT, the community movement that everyone cool is a part of. Keep tuning in.

**Stay tuned for this episode and learn how Entertainmint is revolutionizing fan-creator connections in films with their Web 2.5 bridge. Plus, how this guest truly feels about the joy of baking a cake. Finally, discover how ****Netvrk **is using Unreal Engine 5 to bring customizable NFT avatars to the metaverse. All this and more on this episode. Before we get started, don’t forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. You can catch up on all the discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and registering with only your email address. You’ll then have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge watchers are welcome. See you inside.

This episode features Genevieve Thiers, the accomplished CEO of Entertainmint.com. It’s leading the way in the world of Web3 for independent creators through collaborative storytelling. With an impressive track record as a tech founder, most notably with SitterCity.com which serves millions of users and raises substantial capital before its acquisition, Thiers brings her entrepreneurial spirit to the creative realm. She has penned numerous screenplays and theatrical plays, including her renowned TV project Run the Series, available on Amazon Prime.

Moreover, she hosts the insightful crypto podcast, Byte Size Crypto, which is available on Spotify. She is an active investor in creative projects across multiple platforms. Thiers and her companies have earned recognition from numerous media outlets, including notable appearances on the Today Show, The View, Ellen, and the CBS Early Show, as well as features in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Marie Claire. This recognition extends to over 20 major awards, among them the prestigious Inc. 500 list twice, the SBA Small Business Young Entrepreneur of the Year, which was awarded in the White House in 2006, the CEC Momentum Award, and the WBDC Rising Star Award.

At the heart of Entertainmint.com is a unique vision to revolutionize the traditional streaming model by fostering a collaborative community around indie content. This innovative marketplace empowers creators to connect directly with fans, enabling collective world-building, and the co-creation of new exciting projects. Genevieve, welcome to the show.

What a bio. I forgot that I wrote all that down somewhere. It makes me seem insane.

It’s missing a couple of things. For those at home that weren’t part of the VIP part of Outer Edge, Genevieve also has a very operatic voice that she can bring out when needed to hush a crowd and get some attention.

My original training is opera. I meant to go into it and it never worked out. I didn’t want to wait tables and fell into tech. It’s been wild.

Opera is a niche market like Web3, but Web3 has a lot more flexibility with where you can go with things.

It seems to have about the same amount of drama or more, so we got that.

It’s more. I’m the least amount of diva I’ve ever met, especially in Web3. In my life, I’m really lucky. Sittercity did great. We raised $56 million and served 10 million users and thousands of companies, and then we sold to Bright Horizons in 2020. That went well. I got to sing after that. I did get to do some leading roles at Carnegie Hall and Chicago Lyric Opera and sang with Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson. I honestly thought I was going to stay there. I’m still wondering how I ended up back in tech. Web3 is fascinating, but I’m still wondering how I ended up back here, in a good way.

We’ve all had these very interesting journeys that brought us to Web3. My background is in food technology. How did I end up here? I don’t know. At the end of the day, that was about co-creating too with chefs, restaurants, and consumers. Web3 has this fascinating ability to allow people to see possibilities that they don’t otherwise see and converge technology.

You guys are building something so cool at Entertainmint. It is this Web3 one-stop shop for cultivating a thriving community around indie content. There’s this independent cowboy-esque and cowgirl component to Web3. It fits that vibe. You started to get us there. How did this happen? How did we go from Entertainmint mogul to Broadway performer to this initiative?

I ended up first building Sittercity. There’s a through line though, which is that I’m very much a disruptor. I like to blow things up. A lot of people look at Sittercity and they think I must be knitting baby hats in my spare time. I live in a hard hat. I like to detonate things and blow them up and build bridges over the carnage to the new thing. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur, but I’m probably most set in this role. I am loving the creative sides of things, and that has accentuated stuff, but I enjoy disruption.

Here is how I got into Web3. After Sittercity, we sold to Bright Horizons. It was a Fortune 500. I was like, “Yay.” I never thought I was going back to tech. I was straight shot out of tech. I ended up singing opera and performing. I’ve written some screenplays and stuff, so I ended up doing some TV work. Some of that was investing in a film Bill Macy did.

I bopped around. One of those things was a show called Run the Series, which was great. We were running around and won a million awards. We shot a beautiful pilot. It was three women producers. We had this great queer-eye style where we were helping women run for office and win. I was the tech trainer on the show. It was a really good show. We had 50,000-plus fans.

We ended up running it in 2019 through the festival circuit. I got one of the co-founders of MTV as an agent. We were doing everything right. I was like, “I can be a creator.” You see where this is going, I’m sure. We ended up in the offices of Lifetime, a television for women, right before the pandemic. We got about ten minutes into the pitch and were told, “This would be great if it were quirkier. What if it were strippers running for office?” I thought, “I don’t think so.” It became this bizarre moment in my life where I thought, “This world is a mess too.” You think you’ve cleaned up one mess.

The bizarreness of that statement ten years ago would be exponentially higher than today. Now, I’m like, “That could happen.”

Stormy Daniels should run. She has my vote. Seriously though, when you are sitting there presenting this show of fascinating women where one is an astronaut, one is this and one is that, you don’t say that. I’m sorry. Another person in the room questioned whether women should be in power at all. I was like, “You guys are idiots. We’re going to go and remake this.”

I had a Stoner Cat around that time. I was so involved in Calladita, Project Dice Man, and some of these awesome amazing projects where you could buy the NFT and then you’re in the writer’s room. You could cast your character in the animated series as your best friend, and name and dress it. I thought, “This is beautiful. I can build out the Web 2.5 bridge to translate this to the world and bring them over that bridge into Web3.” About 84% of people have no idea what we’re talking about. They don’t have a wallet. They’re on this traditional path, which is quite dark for creators.

NFT Genevieve Thiers | Entertainmint

Entertainmint: About 84% of people have no idea what we’re talking about, don’t have a wallet, and they’re on this traditional path, which is really quite dark right now for creators.

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Your describing how this all got started is reflective of the bio. All the different things that come in here and there, and the craziness of it all, which you clearly crave. I’m sure Josh, Richard, and I can identify with this falling into things. You ask yourself how you got here and you go, “I know how I got here. It’s what I’m into.” That’s cool stuff. You guys have been around this thing which we’ve seen quite a bit in Web3 around empowering creators. Can you talk about how the entertainment ecosystem operates and the impact on the creative community?

I’ll talk first about the problem and then how were the solutions. We all see the writers’ strike going on. There is wild stuff going on and has been for a while in the streaming world. In 2022, a lot of us probably remember right before Terra Luna depegged, Netflix took a stock hit. It was a pretty sizable stock hit. Up into that point all the way through the pandemic, all five of the top streamers were bashing away at each other with spending to try and rule this model. The spending was quite outsized compared to what was coming in, but they were swinging for the fences.

Traditionally, creators have had a hard time ever getting their work past Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube into anything more. It got even worse in 2022 when the stock hit happened because a lot of these streamers started cutting off their spending entirely and doing almost their own stuff. Traditionally, before 2022, only 6% of films, series, or any kind of long-form video ever got any meaningful distribution. When I say meaningful, it could be Tubi, Pluto, or something like that. Less than 1.2% ever ended up on a big five streamer, which is HBO, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+.

It’s a rough world. It got worse in 2022. You’re now seeing games like, “We’re not spending anymore. We’re doing our own stuff.” Shows are going up for a week and vanishing. They’ll go up, and then the network wants to avoid paying residuals or they want to keep tax credit and then the show vanishes forever. It’s a nightmare. Creators are tired. Even if they make it into the 0.8% that make it on a big five, they’re offered breakeven. They are sometimes paying to get their show on the air. They’re thrown off their own sets. They’re living with the acts being canceled. Fans are sick too. They don’t have any power. We’re just eyeballs. Something has got to give.

What I was seeing and what we all see is that if you take this top-down model or this siloed model where eight people, and as we can see from our experience, they’re not that smart sometimes. Eight people decide what we’re watching. If we flip that entire model and allow the creator to go direct to the fan, the fan can vote with their eyeballs and their wallets on what they want. It’s exciting. It’s a good thing. Entertainmint does that using some of the best of what we’ve seen these previous creators like Calladita and Stoner Cats do, but we’ve taken it a lot further as well and added our own innovations on top.

It’s extremely cool and awesome that you’re breaking down what the main challenge is for a lot of your end consumers. When I saw the writers had gone on strike, I have a friend who is a sound producer. He let me know, “This is probably happening soon, so I’m personally getting ready for this.” People who are watching and consuming all this content via Netflix and everything else don’t necessarily get to know how much of a struggle it is to get to the point where it’s at production, what’s being fought for, and the strength of being able to have something like Entertainmint. You spoke at our event. You started to tell us about not only these challenges but what you’re doing in this industry. We’re anticipating the launch of Entertainmint. Could you share some expected timelines and what people can expect with this? Can you dive into that a little bit more?

We’re in beta. We’ve raised about $1.5 million. We’re moving from a pre-seed to a seed. Here’s how we work. When you go to Entertainmint.com, it looks very Netflix-y. It looks very much like Netflix. There’s a streamer. You can take a look and stream many of our content. We also have distribution. We can help you get your show on. What’s different is the very beginning of our process, the project tab.

When you click into the project tab, you’ll see a whole bunch of shows that have tickets associated with them. These tickets on the backend are utility NFTs that allow you into the show in some way. We call them tickets. We use a very 2.5 language. These tickets might allow you to be an extra in a crowd scene. It can CGI you in if you’re across the country or whatever. You can be an extra in a crowd scene. You can join the writer’s room and vote on the arc of an episode or a character. You can be a co-producer.

The creator sets the parameters. That might be two cast meetings and a team photo. You set the parameters as the creator, but the exciting thing is that we take it all the way through on a co-creation aspect. Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo where you buy the ticket and you’re in the credits and you get a t-shirt, we go all the way through and attach a royalty to what you do. It’s pure co-creation. For your $75 ticket, you might be an extra in a crowd scene, and receive over the next 3 years 0.2% of residuals. Since we have all your wallets, it happens instantaneously.

Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where you basically just buy the ticket and you’re in the credits and you get a t-shirt, Entertainmint goes all the way through and attaches a royalty to what you do. It’s pure co-creation. Click to tweet

We’re breaking the wall between creator and fan. This is a wild disruption. It’s going to take a while to get this one through because that wall between creator and fan has traditionally been inviolate. You do not screw with that wall. To be honest, we need to screw with that wall because it’s way too high. If you let fans in, even for levels of light co-creation, it acts almost like a brilliant pre-sales where you can raise anywhere from 20% to 50% of your funding off the bat. You retain control and make the majority of what comes in.

The way that we work is our creators sell tickets into the making of their work with a residual on the end. The entire thing, soup to nuts, happens through Entertainmint. Once you’ve done the work, be it a pilot or a series, you can drop it on our streamer, but we’ll help you drop it on ten more, even into a metaverse. We’ve redesigned the whole process. We started deeper than anywhere that Netflix, Hulu, or any of those have started. We had gone to the source of, “Let’s make a show together.” We tried to break that wall there so that it was not such a high barrier to get in.

When you say drop it into a streamer, are you referring to like Netflix? I want to make sure I’m understanding.

There are about 120 streamers out there. If you go to a Filmhub or Quiver model and you have a piece of content you want to show, there’s the well-known big five. There’s also Tubi, Pluto, Roku, and all the other streamers that you could theoretically want to stream on. Your average creator streams on 4 to 6 streamers within 5 years of releasing their content.

In today’s world, it used to be that you would stream on one. You were a Hulu show, and then you were gone. The name of the game now is surface area. You want to stream on as many streamers as you possibly can. Since we’re on the bridge to the metaverse, you want to have as many extensions of your IP as you possibly can. You want to have your show with an NFT drop. It could be a possible game and development AR/VR extension. You want all that going on, as well as being on six streamers.

The main thing I would say is that this is a big play. When I say we, it’s me and my three co-founders. We all tend to have a formula for how we do our builds. We do two-sided marketplaces in areas that have extreme pain. They are very badly built right now. What we do is we go in and do a mass pivot. Ten years of my life before was spent at Sittercity convincing moms it was safer to go online to find a caregiver than to use the girl next door. We did that. There are 76 copies of us around the world. Moving forward, we can do it again. This time, it’s about breaking the wall or lowering the wall between creators and fans and letting fans in. If you do, more power to you and more funding to you. It’s a good situation.

It’s cool. This is a trend that we’re excited about. There is a lot of similarity in terms of the direction that you’re describing. It is like the origins of podcasting. You create a podcast and then you stream it everywhere. We’re on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other services like Stitcher. They’re all available to our content. This might be one of our first shows on Sling TV. You might not have realized that.

There you go.

Thanks to our partnership with DeFiance Media, you can see our content on Sling TV. We’re excited about that.

That’s awesome. Everybody is starting to understand the distribution game is quite a big game. There’s a reason that a16z dropped millions into Filmhub with Quiver following fast behind. That’s a piece of what we’re doing. I find that in this kind of build, you can’t just fix a little piece. You got to go all the way down the chain. I love that there are all these incredible projects out there, like being able to jump from Red Ape Family to Stoner Cats to whatever.

In the end, most of the world is going to need an aggregator. The secondary movers are going to need somewhere to go that looks a little bit like something that they understand with a twist. That’s what we’re offering. That’s what Sittercity was too. It was Match.com for parents. We’re taking this model. We’re a little bit more like an Amazon of content.

When we launched our beta, we have about twelve shows, and those are going great. The next step in our launch is we’re releasing token gating. You’ll be able to do pay-per-view. Slap the cost of watching a video. You can do full live-streaming premiers through our site and put a ticket on that too. We’re opening the doors to creators to bring them in.

We’ve got all sorts of coalition partners. We have 6 festivals and 10 studios that are all starting to come in. That’s leading to what we’re launching in the fall, which is our channel partnerships. Studios, festivals, and influencers can have channels on Entertainmint. They can follow all the way down the revenue chain as creators from their channels and go through it.

As long as everyone has a wallet, 300 transactions can happen in a minute. It’s easy. We need to hook it all in quickly and put the percentages in. By the fall of 2024, we’ll have 100 channels. They’ll all be overlaid over Entertainmint, like an aggregated Netflix model. On top of all of that, we will help you with a place to park your content and then distro.

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I was the sitter the whole time.

You were the sitter. That’s right.

Talk about an ambitious babysitter.

No, but okay. Let’s go.

Low overhead. That’s perfect. I love that.

I thought it was nice. It was 5X on each one.

I might be.

I love a Creme Egg.

I want them all.

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Agreed. That’s some good stuff.

Thanks for having me.

That’s nice. It was fate.

That’s where it all began.

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Freud?

Thanks for having me here.

I’ll see you guys. Thanks.

I met them there.

Check out Entertainmint.com. If you go to @EntertainmintCo on any of our channels, it could be TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter, you’ll be able to see lots about us. I will shout out again our Twitter spaces. They’re every Tuesday at 7:00 PM Eastern. They are 90 minutes of awesomeness. Don’t miss those if you like more collaborative social.

Thank you. We think so too.

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