How Popular Pays' SafeCollab Tool Protects Brands

[00:00:02] Now that we are in the middle of the holiday buying season, marketers are finding ad prices

[00:00:06] high, click-throughs low, and tactics not as effective as they used to be. That's why

[00:00:12] many in our industry are turning to influencers to capture an authentic voice without breaking

[00:00:18] the bank. But the creator economy isn't without its risks. One big one being make sure you're

[00:00:23] partnering with someone that won't embarrass your brand, either by things they do for you

[00:00:28] or things they've said in the past. One influencer marketing platform has a solution in the form

[00:00:34] of a clever new brand safety system built into their site. The platform is Popular Pays. They've

[00:00:40] been on the show before and in this paid partnership we'll chat about how to keep your brand safe

[00:00:44] without missing out on the influencer marketing trend. If you want to check out their platform

[00:00:49] while you're listening just go to popularpays.com slash podcast. Corbin Drummy is a co-founder of

[00:00:56] Popular Pays and he joins me now. Hi Corbin. Hey Todd. So before we get into the brand safety

[00:01:02] stuff, can we recap what Popular Pays is and how it works? Just kind of high level it for me.

[00:01:07] Absolutely. So Popular Pays is a platform where you can collaborate with creators and influencers.

[00:01:13] At a high level, it's where you can search and vet creators, work with them on projects and content,

[00:01:19] and then track how your work has gone with stats and analytics. The new feature we just released,

[00:01:27] one of the largest ones we released in a long time, is under that bucket of vetting influencers,

[00:01:32] since we've seen that become an increasing focus of brands. So we released this tool called Safe

[00:01:37] Collab, which lets you analyze all content, including video, audio, et cetera, of a creator's posts even

[00:01:44] years back on networks like Instagram and TikTok. I want to get there in a second, but can we just

[00:01:50] kind of go over the broad stuff for a second here? Because I want to know sort of like the workflow.

[00:01:55] I've actually used this platform before. We've used it for a campaign. And the workflow is actually

[00:02:00] kind of a nice, you've used AI in a nice way that sort of pulls out of the basics of what you're

[00:02:06] looking for in a brand briefing and sort of fills it all in. So just walk us through really briefly,

[00:02:10] like the process of from the point at which I, as an advertiser have signed on until I get the

[00:02:16] assets from my influencer. What does that workflow look like?

[00:02:20] Yeah. So I would say it often starts with either a brief or with brands searching through our

[00:02:27] network to find creators they want to partner with. But let's say that you have a campaign you're

[00:02:30] running for the holidays or for a New Year's campaign. You can put a brief out to our network

[00:02:35] of creators. And as you mentioned, it was one of the first areas we used AI where it

[00:02:40] really made a difference. You could put in a short description of the campaign you wanted to do

[00:02:44] and use AI to flesh out your brief to where we found that it increased the amount of,

[00:02:52] it decreased the time to complete for briefs from over a day to just like minutes. And it also

[00:02:58] really drastically bumped up the percent of brands launching briefs because it made it so much easier.

[00:03:03] But so I could put in something saying like, you know, I'm a fitness brand. I want to find

[00:03:07] influencers to promote, you know, healthy living in the new year, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:03:11] And fill out a short blurb. It will flush that out into a brief, ask you a few questions about

[00:03:15] like what types of creators you're looking for, things like that. And you can launch this brief

[00:03:20] out to our network. There's a community of well over, you know, 150,000 opt-in creators. And the

[00:03:27] unique thing is here, the six figures of create, you know, 100,000 plus creators we have in the network

[00:03:31] are totally opted in where we've got first party data from them from all the networks. So they're

[00:03:36] not scraped. They're people who are, we have a rating system, so they're very reliable and we

[00:03:42] have tools for the analysis and vetting part. But once you put that brief out there, creators can

[00:03:46] apply to work with you and you can select the folks you want to partner with. In the platform itself,

[00:03:52] there's also workflow for payments, contracts, content review, shipping products,

[00:03:57] there's integrations for that. There's a whole host of things for the actual collaboration part,

[00:04:01] which is the meats of the software and workflow that we provide. And then at the end, after you

[00:04:07] collaborate with creators, you can see stats ranging from if they did post how it did, or for example,

[00:04:13] you could boost the assets with paid spend and see analytics from that as well.

[00:04:16] Gotcha. And we did a much sort of deeper dive into popular pays a few weeks ago. Just go back in

[00:04:22] your podcast feed if you want to see that. All right. So this new brand safety system,

[00:04:27] you know, one of the issues, of course, is if you're hiring at scale, let's say you want to do,

[00:04:30] I don't know, 20 fashion influence or something. On the one hand, you can use popular pays to on

[00:04:36] word them. But going through all of their past previous TikToks to find have they been political?

[00:04:43] Have they been, you know, troublesome from a brand safety point of view can take a lot of time.

[00:04:49] You folks have built something fairly new, new since the last time we spoke. Tell me about this new

[00:04:53] brand safety system.

[00:04:55] Yeah, it's honestly, it's honestly amazing. And I say that both, you know, I'm, yes, I'm biased,

[00:05:00] but it's probably the first thing I've seen where I would trust AI by itself way more than humans.

[00:05:07] And normally we're used to AI making like content that's a little messy or, you know, it's

[00:05:13] hallucinating things. And here it's just so sensitive, but also smart with context that

[00:05:19] it will surface things that, you know, when I ran my own account through it, it surfaced posts I had

[00:05:24] totally forgotten about. And, but it knows the context of things. So it says like, oh, we've

[00:05:28] detected things, whether it's a swear word or alcohol in the shot or whatever, but it knows the context.

[00:05:33] So it can say, this is probably not a big brand risk because of the casual content, ton text,

[00:05:37] et cetera. But, um, it's remarkable how, um, sensitive it is for things where, um, we, we started off

[00:05:45] building this because we saw our brand spending four to six hours per creator on vetting and they

[00:05:51] were asking us for help. And we thought, Hey, with all these AI tools, they're so good at recognizing

[00:05:55] things. Maybe we can use that to scale the analysis of a creator's account. And it honestly hit home

[00:06:00] way more than I thought it would. It's, it's, it's, it's pretty fantastic.

[00:06:04] It really is impressive. You know, I, you and I were kicking the tires of it a week or two ago,

[00:06:08] and, uh, we turned it loose on my account on a, on the today in digital account. And it did flag,

[00:06:14] uh, some stuff from me. It did say that, uh, that I took that I think it flagged it in the scams

[00:06:20] category, but to your point, it was smart enough to say, and it said this in prose, like in sort of

[00:06:26] paragraph form, like a brief, like a, like an assistant would, if they came back after a few

[00:06:30] days of working on it. And it said, you know, this, the scam flag is here because he talks about

[00:06:35] and reports on scams. He's not actually running a scam. Like I was impressed that it had that level

[00:06:41] of, uh, I don't know, awareness. Yeah. Awareness. Like it knows slang. Like it caught the abbreviations

[00:06:48] AF, which I won't, I won't say how to stand it for, but like it's, you know, it said, uh, it also

[00:06:54] can catch things like audio in a real notch in video. So it's not just the captions. Um, and that's

[00:07:00] the stuff that I just don't think humans could ever like captured or crawl through that much content

[00:07:04] for all these creators and do it. So it's really the, one of the primary examples of like AI taking

[00:07:09] the lead in a human reviewing the work. Um, I think a lot of our work will shift towards that over the

[00:07:14] years, but this is the first one where if I had to pick one or the other, the best is both, but one

[00:07:18] or the other, um, this will catch things way better. Um, but like you said, one of the things we were

[00:07:24] most surprised about is how sensitive it is. And so, you know, you can filter for things that are just

[00:07:28] high severity because it will catch everything, but that's the point. Like we live in, in times of,

[00:07:32] you know, it feels like high stakes for brands and they can, uh, that's often a feedback where

[00:07:37] they're hesitant to scale their collaborations, um, as they, you know, become a bigger company or

[00:07:42] with more people. And this way it's not just like, Oh, you know, was there a cigarette in a video a year

[00:07:48] ago? But it's also like, you know, is this person, if they're going to a bunch of political protests or

[00:07:53] whatever, you, it's not, it's also a brand fit and just seeing like, maybe that's a good thing for

[00:07:58] you. Maybe that's a bad thing. Like it's, it's not as prescriptive as saying, Hey, here's the

[00:08:01] highlights. We, we analyzed like hundreds of hours of videos for you. Here's the highlights. You can

[00:08:06] make the decision. We're just highlighting anything that might be notable. And then you can kind of

[00:08:10] filter down by severity too. So you filter by severity. Can you filter by topic? What about

[00:08:14] if you are a brand that sells vodka? You don't really care if people are talking about alcohol.

[00:08:19] In fact, you kind of want that, right? Yeah. You know, it's funny. The, of course,

[00:08:23] the number one feed or number one issue on my account was the alcohol flag.

[00:08:26] Is that right? But, um, it was, it was the pandemic. It was the trying times, but, uh,

[00:08:34] you know, it was funny when I filtered by severity, only like two popped up and it was the ones where

[00:08:38] the drink was so prominent. It was saying, you know, this is taking like center stage in the

[00:08:42] shot. It wasn't just a drink in the background. And so I like, it can see visual. It can base it

[00:08:47] on the visual perspective as well. It's so cool. So like when I filtered my account by severity,

[00:08:52] the 120 something went down to two and it was because it was, it said it was the center of

[00:08:57] the shot and it had the brand name clearly. And it wasn't trying to, it was, uh, it didn't say that

[00:09:03] like, it can also detect if it's aggressive or not. Like I've seen where someone's taking a shot,

[00:09:07] it might suggest overconsumption. Um, but, uh, you make a good point. Like maybe I'm an alcohol

[00:09:14] brand and I want to see that cause I want to see who they're working with on a day-to-day basis,

[00:09:17] like on a competitive basis. So perhaps I care more about that, but maybe I'm a brand who's like

[00:09:22] pretty relaxed. I really don't need to see, I don't care about the drinking shots. I might care

[00:09:26] about things ranging from like hate speech to, um, you know, dangerous stunts or whatever.

[00:09:31] And so I want the other flags, a few things that we, so this is only out in beta recently. You got

[00:09:36] one of the earliest sneak peeks of it. Um, we have some amazing beta partners, um, some, some large

[00:09:42] brands we work with. Um, but one, uh, thing we've learned is brands also want the ability to add

[00:09:47] custom flags and features. So that's something I'm excited to say will be a part of, um,

[00:09:51] next year's like the, you know, our early roadmap for next year. So that brands can say like, Hey,

[00:09:56] these there's custom things that I care about. And so as an enterprise customer, like I want to be

[00:10:00] able to track those as well. Are these, are you just sort of scraping the content or is this coming

[00:10:06] from like a reliable connection to the API? Great question. So, um, number one is, you know,

[00:10:12] all the creators in our network, we are getting that direct access. So just via API, we're getting

[00:10:16] that first party data from, you know, Instagram or TikTok. But, um, we found that a lot of people

[00:10:22] want to scan anyone. And so we're making it possible, um, in the very near term to actually

[00:10:28] by the time it comes out, it might be out, but, um, we're making it possible for you to analyze

[00:10:33] anyone, even if they're out of network. And the, the, but the benefit is that if they're in network,

[00:10:38] we can not only see, um, like reels and TikToks, but we can see stories and disappearing content.

[00:10:44] And so it can analyze a full breadth. So you'll get a much more robust report if they're in the

[00:10:49] popular pays network, but you can still put in like, you know, uh, a random account, like a

[00:10:54] celebrity. And, uh, he's not like, we have some celebrities on platform, but someone off platform,

[00:10:58] you could still get a report on that. It just won't be quite as detailed as if they were signed up.

[00:11:02] Did you say that you can also track stories like the kind that disappear after 24 hours?

[00:11:08] So, so, um, uh, so when someone signs up to popular pays, um, we can, um, uh, we know we're

[00:11:17] constantly looking. So stories are often part of the deliverable. And so we're, we're looking at those

[00:11:22] and as a part of it, you know, we're, um, kind of indexing the more data on like what people are,

[00:11:27] are posting about, et cetera. But, um, you know, stories are ephemeral. And so if they're,

[00:11:31] if we're not set to get them to the public, we wouldn't be able to, you can put them to your

[00:11:34] close friends and we won't see it, et cetera. But, uh, if you set it to public, then we'd be

[00:11:40] able to see it and we analyze it before it goes down, you know? So we, we index it before it goes

[00:11:44] down. And so, um, and that's for, uh, we've been able to do that. So reaching back years,

[00:11:48] we can still index anyone who's been on the network. Um, so anyone on network, you could look

[00:11:52] back quite far. Um, and then anyone, um, who signs up, we can start indexing it once they sign up.

[00:11:58] It is worth noting, by the way, we're definitely very conscious about like allowing, um,

[00:12:03] as a part of our roadmap creators to get this insights, they can continue to like, you know,

[00:12:07] see how they're presenting to brands and also adjust their online portfolio. Like maybe I,

[00:12:12] as a creator want to, you know, earmark something and say, Hey, you know, actually I noticed that

[00:12:16] I don't think it drives with where I want my feed to be. I'm going to delete it and please like

[00:12:20] reanalyze it. So we'll make that possible so that people can, um, you know, make sure they're

[00:12:25] represented the way they want to be and have like transparency into how brands see them.

[00:12:29] But I honestly think as a prediction, this is built for brands, but I honestly think a lot

[00:12:33] of creators will use it and the one to know how, like where it was fun just to see my old stuff and

[00:12:40] like what popped up, like some really, like some things popped up almost from humorous occasions.

[00:12:44] Like the AI was like, Hey, I know this is, this is meant to be humorous, but still worth flagging

[00:12:49] it. And those were really like, I didn't, I didn't have tech. I texted them to some friends and

[00:12:53] family members just saying like, look what it caught. Do you remember this blah, blah, blah. So it was

[00:12:56] almost like a little, uh, fun sharing moment too. So for creators, I think it'll be interesting.

[00:13:01] Yeah, very much so. And, uh, you know, maybe political, political campaigns down the road

[00:13:04] will hire you folks to, uh, to vet candidates. I mean, if you know, it's that level of stuff.

[00:13:10] Fun fact, I can't talk about, um, I can't talk about who, but we did have a major sports team say,

[00:13:16] Hey, um, you know, the main people being drafted each year are, um, kind of vetted by the public,

[00:13:22] but the long tail or not, can we use this tool to help analyze their social feeds to see if there's

[00:13:27] anything like problematic in there. Um, but again, I think it's like, there'll be access like those,

[00:13:31] anyone could do it to themselves too. So there's kind of going to be equal access there. Um,

[00:13:36] and it's only things that are public of course.

[00:13:38] And this is just all part of the popular pays platform, right? This is not like,

[00:13:41] this isn't like a separate system with its own login, with its own pricing scheme and so on.

[00:13:46] It's all part of the popular pays platform. It is like an additional layer you can subscribe to,

[00:13:50] but you can do one off. You can purchase one off reports if you're not, if you're not subscribed

[00:13:55] to popular pays or don't have the subscription to safe collab. Um, but you make a really good

[00:13:59] point. We have talked about, should we make it a standalone, um, you know, SAS app for just for

[00:14:03] dedicated for this, because there's been a lot of interest in that. Uh, but for now, um, this is

[00:14:08] available. Anyone can sign up and, um, for a SAS fee, uh, get access to the platform or you can

[00:14:14] purchase like one off reports. It just depends on how much scale. And so it's very early. Um,

[00:14:19] we only launched this a few weeks ago. Um, and, uh, right now we've been working with these design

[00:14:24] partners and early beta brands, but we're scaling it out. And I think we're the, I'm guessing,

[00:14:29] I think we're the only people in the market that can do, um, audio video stories for people in

[00:14:34] network, you know, just multimedia in general across multiple networks like Instagram and TikTok.

[00:14:39] But we are expanding to other networks soon too, like, um, YouTube's on the roadmap, stuff like that.

[00:14:44] Um, and one more thing I should mention is it also does a cursory Google search to make sure there's

[00:14:49] no just like headlines about the person. And that's really important because, um, the initial

[00:14:54] customer feedback that launched this, the, um, uh, you could have detected it on some networks,

[00:15:01] some networks, not like maybe I posted something to Instagram, not to Twitter or whatever,

[00:15:04] but the articles you could easily spot from a mile away with a small Google search.

[00:15:08] And so, um, we made that part of the brand analysis report is that, um, you can get a

[00:15:14] summary of, you know, if there's any negative news coverage. So it ran it for like you and I,

[00:15:19] when we put our accounts in there and there wasn't anything, but I have run it for creators before

[00:15:23] where it said, Hey, you know, this creator was involved in, you know, XYZ scandal or things

[00:15:27] like that. And it summarizes it in this nice little, like, like you said, it's like an intern writing

[00:15:31] analysis. Um, and, uh, yeah, so it can do a cursory Google search, like a background check.

[00:15:37] And one of the coolest things is I think we're the only people that do this, but you can toggle

[00:15:41] people on for live tracking. So it'll also analyze new posts coming out. Yeah. It's important to capture

[00:15:45] all of that stuff. I mean, you know, we talked about stories, but I would argue that probably some

[00:15:49] of the more, um, I don't know, problematic content is put on stories because they know it'll disappear

[00:15:54] after 24 hours. But if you're, if you're indexing it from the point at which someone, uh, comes into

[00:16:00] the platform and even better still, if, if a brand is trying to hire someone who has already

[00:16:05] been on your platform, you've already got that content, uh, historical, which, you know,

[00:16:09] is, is hard to get for the ephemeral kind of content, uh, entry level, like a brand,

[00:16:14] a small business wants to get involved in this, how much we'll talk about the influencers costs

[00:16:17] in a moment, but platform fees for popular pays at kind of the early stage. What are we looking

[00:16:22] at? So popular pays, um, the platform itself, um, there's, there's a few tiers here. Um, it's,

[00:16:28] it's built so you can sign up and use it on a self-serve basis. Um, you can also use

[00:16:32] it as a scaling mid-market brand or startup. And then we have enterprise enterprise is probably

[00:16:37] the, um, it's mostly campaigns in a sense that, you know, someone might sign up and say,

[00:16:43] I want, you know, um, 50 TikTok videos for, you know, 30 grand or something. And so there's

[00:16:49] like a definite result and a, and a quote, and that's run like a campaign with a lot of

[00:16:53] support. Um, but we have a fully self-serve SaaS solution. So, you know, for a few hundred

[00:16:58] bucks a month, um, you can try it and then, uh, scale it. Um, and then we also have a tier

[00:17:04] in the middle for like scaling brands where it's about a thousand dollars a month on average,

[00:17:09] um, depending on how many campaigns you're running, things like that. Um, and it comes

[00:17:13] with a optional service layer. So we can also request our help for things like sourcing

[00:17:17] creators, running campaigns, stuff like that. Um, but in general, it's like, you know, along

[00:17:21] the normal SAS pricing, um, but we, you know, we've had some, um, we have some ways where

[00:17:27] people can like test it out and try it around for free. Uh, but there's that, I think the

[00:17:31] self-serve tier is really helpful for people on the other side, um, safe collab. It's still

[00:17:35] very early days, but you, we have some packages. We can buy like one-off, um, reports and, um,

[00:17:42] but there's also a subscription where, you know, you can have access to the ones you've,

[00:17:45] the reports that are, have already been run, uh, across the network. Um, and then, you

[00:17:50] know, you can run new ones and also do like live tracking, but we're really trying to still

[00:17:54] learn from our customers. And so we're trying to talk with people, understand their usage,

[00:17:58] give them, um, a quote there, but long-term you can definitely see this being something where,

[00:18:02] um, you know, anyone could sign up, purchase a report and it's, you know, it already is

[00:18:07] self-serve. We're just, we just want to talk with people before they use it to learn more

[00:18:10] about how they're using it, honestly, since it's so new.

[00:18:13] And so those are the platform, uh, fees. What does it cost to hire an influencer? And I know

[00:18:17] that the, the answer is it depends, but give me, give me a couple of ballparks.

[00:18:21] So what's also interesting about this is that over the years it's gone up, um, just it's,

[00:18:25] there's an inflation has hit this industry too. I would say as a really rough ballpark,

[00:18:29] um, it's a couple hundred dollars for static images and a couple thousand for videos. Um,

[00:18:34] one caveat would be, it definitely depends if the person's posting or just creating content.

[00:18:39] And then, um, if they're posting, it depends how big the account is and what network they're

[00:18:43] posting on. So one, a few examples there would be, you know, a few years ago, TikTok was really cheap

[00:18:50] to produce content on. It's gotten more and more expensive just as it grew in popularity.

[00:18:54] And, you know, with just kind of overall inflation over the years on creators prices,

[00:18:58] but, um, yeah, let's say you wanted to just to produce a bunch of static images.

[00:19:02] You could hire a creator and get them for a couple hundred bucks each, um, per image. Um,

[00:19:06] but then if you're asking them to post it, if they're just, you know, normal micro macro or

[00:19:10] micro or small creator, they might just double that price because they're charging,

[00:19:14] you know, another couple hundred dollars or more for a post depending on the networks they're on,

[00:19:19] et cetera. So yeah, it really, um, one, one cool thing is that on our platform,

[00:19:23] you can see like average rates for creators. Um, but, but the cool thing is if you're using it

[00:19:28] self-serve, whether you're on a self-serve one or the pro tier with still on a subscription,

[00:19:33] you can just put out a brief and creators will apply with their price and you can give it a thumbs up

[00:19:38] or thumbs down and you see our transaction fees on that. So, um, you can basically put out a brief

[00:19:42] creators will apply. You can say, yep, this looks good to me or not. And you can also offer suggested

[00:19:48] pricing or a fixed bid. So I could say, I'm only paying, you know, uh, $500 for this per creator,

[00:19:53] or you could suggest a price, but they could still apply with something else. So there's a lot of

[00:19:58] flexibility. You can also use it to, um, uh, negotiate. So if creators are applying,

[00:20:03] you can counter offer them, whether it's like adding more deliverables or, um, um, offering

[00:20:08] a different price. And this is all functionality that's built into the platform. So you don't have

[00:20:12] to like, you can keep it all organized in there. And since legal contract payments and all the

[00:20:16] negotiation stuff is built in, it's honestly really smooth. And it's used by a lot of brands. Like

[00:20:21] it's not something where you need to go off platform to get it done and then come back on

[00:20:24] the platform. Uh, you don't need to like revert to, you know, email and spreadsheets. The platform

[00:20:29] is really full featured for you. I have to say one of my favorite parts of the platform when we

[00:20:33] were using it for our own campaign and reviewing the, uh, the people cause we put out a brief and

[00:20:38] then other people would, you know, the influencers and creators would sort of come onto the platform

[00:20:42] and pitch and say, you know, I'd love to be part of this is that in addition to, and this is on the

[00:20:48] main screen, a very quick glance, in addition to seeing the number of followers, you also get their

[00:20:52] engagement rate of their channel. And that's so important when you're hiring an influencer, isn't it?

[00:20:58] Yeah. Well, when they apply, you'll see like a preview of their content, their stats,

[00:21:02] like engagement rate and following. And you can see things like, yeah, how many average views are

[00:21:06] they getting? Not just how many followers they have. Uh, but what's also really valued by our

[00:21:10] customers is people will apply and they'll give you a little pitch. Like they can say, you can ask them

[00:21:15] questions as qualifying questions in the brief saying, Hey, what are you going to do if you are

[00:21:20] promoting my, my products? And then they can say, they could tell your idea, like I'm going to do X,

[00:21:24] Y, and Z. Um, and you can have those qualifying questions that honestly whittles it down to people

[00:21:30] that are pretty qualified. Um, I would say also in general though, like the platform is definitely

[00:21:34] geared towards B2C products with B2B products such as yours, a strategy, you know, I mentioned to you

[00:21:40] and we've, um, uh, looked at, and I'd recommend it to other B2B companies is hire some creators to make

[00:21:45] content and then use that content as the basis for an ad unit that you're boosting because with the

[00:21:51] networks themselves, you can boost and target, um, your B2B customers or you can target it. Like

[00:21:56] you can target a much more accurately and like attach tracking links and signups, et cetera. So,

[00:22:02] um, if you're a, you know, a Shopify company advertising to everyone, influencers are great.

[00:22:08] It's kind of a shotgun blast towards your target market. But if you have like a B2B company or a

[00:22:12] niche solution, you can still work with creators for content, but then you can use that content

[00:22:16] as an ad unit and boost it to your exact target market with tracking and conversion,

[00:22:21] like better built into that ad unit. You guys are adding stuff so fast and so many new features.

[00:22:26] I feel if we were to do this in a month from now, this, we would have even like three hours worth

[00:22:30] of stuff to talk about. No, that was one of the benefits of, um, like two, over two years ago,

[00:22:35] um, popular pays was acquired by Lightrix, the makers of, um, uh, FaceTune, PhotoLeap,

[00:22:41] VideoLeap. And, um, that was a big part of it is, you know, you need a lot of resources to

[00:22:47] not only survive, but to compete effectively and, and, um, do well in a, in a crowded market.

[00:22:53] And we knew we needed to both move the core product forward with things like our AI safety

[00:22:58] tool is amazing and stuff like that, but also expanding into other areas. Like we released LTX

[00:23:04] Studio, a really breakthrough AI video platform that can work in concert with these other tools.

[00:23:08] Like you can use LTX Studio to generate a quick prototype of content that you might want a creator

[00:23:15] to shoot. And so you can, you know, as a marketer, you can use these tools, um, to brief people or to

[00:23:20] pitch ideas. So basically we combined forces with Lightrix, um, and the acquisition has given us a lot

[00:23:26] of resources to keep developing the product. So we're now shipping a lot of things across the

[00:23:30] company really quickly. And that speed is been, has been great, especially across like the AI work

[00:23:35] we've been doing. I should say, we're going to be doing a tour of LTX Studios and, um, uh, and this,

[00:23:42] this new safe collab, uh, feature on video. So, uh, stay tuned for that on our YouTube channel,

[00:23:47] which is just called today in digital corporate. Thank you so much for this.

[00:23:51] Absolutely. It was great talking with you, Todd. Um, thanks for having us on.

[00:23:54] Corbett Jamey is co-founder of popular pays. You can try popular pays right now by going to

[00:24:00] popular pays.com slash podcast. And while you're there, take advantage of their 20% discount just

[00:24:07] for listeners of this show. I'm Todd Maffin. Thank you for listening. See you on Tuesday.