Adam Torres and David Baker discuss VideoXRM.
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Show Notes:
How is monetization in video changing particularly what is happening with business video? In this episode, Adam Torres and David Baker, Co Founder & CEO of VideoXRM, explore VideoXRM and its plans for further expansion.
About David Baker
David is CEO | Co-founder | Chief Product Architect of VideoXRM. VideoXRM is an AI driven business video ecosystem. The platform provides the ability to organize, index, discover, distribute, summarize, compare, predict, market and monetize video.
David is also Managing Member of Mercadyne Automated Properties, a portfolio of self storage properties. David is also Managing Member of Mercadyne Advisors LLC (fka Cascade Summit), a going public accelerator and advisor for private and micro-cap cap public companies. Advisory focused upon capital structure, offering structures, business models, investor optics and investment community visibility. He has led as investment principal, originating, structuring, financing and investing in alternative going public transactions for numerous emerging growth companies, advising them at all stages of their corporate lifecycle, from startup through subsequent public financings.
About VideoXRM
VideoXRM is a video/audio search engine (formerly known as Issuer Pixel). VideoXRM Is the World’s First Hierarchically Indexed and Cross-Indexed Issuer Video and Audio Database, Searchable by Industry, Sector, Group, Product, Service and Company.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is David Baker. He’s co founder and CEO over at Video XRM.
David, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. Thank you for having me. All right, David. So excited about today’s topic. So how indexing video opens up a world of new capabilities. We’re going to be talking about video. We’re going to be talking about monetizing. We’re talking about business video, which is a, is a big deal.
Cause I mean, we have a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs that listen to this show. So I guess just to get us kicked off here, David, I mean, how’d you come up with this idea? Like, like where did all this start for you? Well, in June of 2020. For some reason, at the time, I was trying to understand how to provide more information from an investment standpoint to people in terms of unstructured data, which tends to be video.
And I asked myself, why is there no external facing corporate video audio library? Where the companies could be found easily and so I then went to. YouTube, and I started typing in searches for companies in various industries, like photolithography, cardiac monitoring, AI, labor relations, et cetera. And what kept happening is that the results tended to be full of noise, either completely incorrect results, or a few correct results, and the balance were incorrect.
And so I realized at the time that if you don’t index your data, your video well, you can’t find it. So you basically. You need to index it to find it. And that’s what really started. The journey of video XRM. I want you to dig a little bit deeper into that world. Because when most people hear video, they just think YouTube.
So what do you mean by that catalog or that database? Like, what specifically were you looking for? That maybe didn’t exist? At the time, and it’s continued to be the case today that I started looking for companies in various industries. So, for example, if you’re a Wall Street analyst or an individual investor, you need an let’s say, about nuclear energy, and then you might say to yourself, well, I want to look at all information, including video.
Of companies in the nuclear industry So one then tends to want to say, okay, who are all these companies? Well, it’s very difficult to find in today’s world all the videos doesn’t matter if you’re using Google search, YouTube for sure. Perplexity. . So taking that, that same analogy a little bit further, say you were to like, in that exact thing, you’re looking for a nuclear company or something along those lines.
So now you go to YouTube, you put that in there and oh my gosh, like that’s, talk about a headache. Like you’re gonna get, like their algorithm and the way it ranks is gonna be based off of what those search terms are like, popular and what has a bunch of views and what’s gotten some traction in the past.
It doesn’t mean it’s gonna give you what you actually wanted, right. Exactly, exactly. You could end up getting thousands of results and most of them irrelevant disparate. And I just actually typed in that search now as we’re talking into YouTube and there was something about who profits from nuclear weapons and uranium is ready to run higher, et cetera.
But again, you’re not getting. The underlying companies, what video XRM does is we provide a platform where the discovery is very strong and the search results are precise and relevant and you can find what you’re looking for. Then once you do find those videos. One can play the video, or even just look at the thumbnail of the video on our player page and then see all sorts of video audio metadata about the video.
For example, who are the video audio participants? What’s the geography of the video? Anything special about it in particular is a private as a public. Is it a subsidiary holding company and that sort of thing? So you can really dig deep. In the videos that are on our platform. Yeah, and so, and I guess that the difference in the use case would be like the, the individuals correct me if I’m wrong in this, by the way, because I’m learning about the platform as well.
But the individuals that would maybe post on the platform, video, XRM, they want to be found and they want to be for their particular niche found. Is that my off on that? Or is there different cases? I mean, there’s different use cases, but you’re 100 percent correct. Adam, because in the end, what does everybody want, whether they’re Coca Cola, IBM, Video XRM, or any other company?
We all want visibility. We all want distribution, maybe for different purposes, like to gain investors or to gain customers or partners, et cetera. But we’re all looking for that. And because we provide this platform with very strong discovery, it makes it easier for companies to be found. Also, what I find from talking to many influencers on some of the other platforms is that.
A lot of these platforms are becoming just repositories for their video and audio, but they can’t even search through their playlist and find what they’re looking for within their own playlist. So, basically, if you don’t index it, you can’t find it. And then once you do find something, you want to be able to dig deeper easily.
And then there’s other other functions as well on the platform too. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So why would a company go a little bit further than that one? Why would they want to be able to do that? Like dig a little bit deeper? Cause I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think that because we haven’t been used to that, because if most people are using YouTube, right, then they may not even have thought of that functionality and how useful it could be.
Correct. Correct. Well, what we’ve really created at video is a video ecosystem. So the platform enables. A company to do many, many things. So, for example, the company can. Organize all their content on the platform and basically how it works is. The company uploads the content, if it’s a large volume of content, video uploads it for them.
And then we do 2 things 1, we categorize each video into the correct industry group. And two, we extract all the video, all the metadata, all the details about the video. Once that is done, the company can do a variety of things. They can communicate with prospective investors, customers, partners, and there’s a button.
Next to the on the player page next to each company’s video that says, contact the company. So that’s a direct way for visitors, viewers, subscribers, potential customers, partners, et cetera to reach out to the company and say, hey, I’m interested in this. I’m interested in that. And then the company goes to their dashboard and they can see the messages and start direct communication.
So that’s 1 way another way is there’s distribution on our platform. We’re just about to roll out campaign management and companies can actually do audience targeting using their videos on our platform and they can video cast just a viewer subscribers. And companies were completely bought from wife.
So that’s another example. Like what kind of, and I’m sure there’s many, but I guess what kind of companies typically post their, their business content on here? any company of, any size, you know, we started getting companies on the platform. We have about 21, 22, 000 videos on the platform.
I think about 1500 or more. Are showing now at the front of the platform when the process of categorizing and classifying the balance and those other, you know, 19, 000 or so videos or more will be on the front of the platform in the next couple of months. And so the company’s very, I mean, we have publicly traded micro cap companies on the platform.
We have private companies, we have international companies from Ireland from Africa, it’s really a, a mix, mix of companies, whoever funds us. First off, congratulations, over 20, I think you said over 20, 000 videos already, like congrats, that’s no, that’s no easy task, you know, that’s a big deal, what do you attribute some of that success to?
Well we opened up the platform in October of 2022 with 50 videos. What were the first ones? Was it like you in your office? Was it? No, I’m just, I was the earliest adopter. I want to give them a shout out. Do you remember? can’t remember who the earliest adopters were. They were very kind and I was making cold calls to them, asking them to join.
And they were very confused about why. Why I was asking them to do this Yeah, and then over time, you know I kept making cold calls and we got some great companies on the platform like benzinga and investing channel Got them to come on board and then it just started to increase from there And then we as a marketing strategy and i’m not a marketing person But it’s turned out to be highly effective.
We struck a couple deals With some micro influencers and if one reads statistics one can see that the return on investment for companies using micro influencers Is much much higher I think 18 times higher so the statistics can say Then with work working with the large larger ones, which is nothing against the larger ones But you know, we’re a young company We wanted to try this and those micro influencers had relationships with investor relations firms and that really got it to snowball the the content acquisition Yeah, and so now that I guess this is to me, this is a different way that that companies could even start listening to, or excuse me, can they can start considering their content and the value of their content.
Like what’s happening just in general with like monetizing videos in the business space? Cause I, I mean, We’re a media company. And so we have a lot of different content that we produce, but I’m just curious, like from your vantage point, cause you’re, you’re living on that and the, on the actual video side, like day in and day out.
What are you, what are you seeing on that? Sure. from my perspective, customer contacts and the influencer contacts on the, on the, you know, entertainment. And let’s say non business side, and I think everyone is seeing that, you know, monetization rates for monetization are decreasing there and visibility is becoming more difficult from the business side.
I see 2 things for business video. That’s archival. That’s historical. Licensors and agents of the owners of that they have a challenge. They need to figure out how to monetize that content and then current content. What I’m seeing is whether it’s a media company or some other company that’s adding value, add content.
It could be aesthetic medicine courses. By video could be continuing education, the bar courses, they want to monetize their content maximize that. And what I think is happening, what we think is happening at video is that there’s a beginning of a large movement whereby business content is going to.
Require insist that they be paid for it. So to answer. That direction where we think things are going is in the next several months, not today in the next several months, we’ll be rolling out premium content for our company content creators. And that will mean that company content creators can come to our platform and they can monetize their content on a pay per view per download per subscription.
Her collection basis, and they can set the pricing of their content and we aim to be sort of a Netflix or Amazon prime 1 stop shop for business content monetization. That’s interesting too because then what it does is and what I like about this is that even if that business is not Like let’s just say content creation isn’t their primary source of revenue, right?
But then they cost money to create content, right? So even if even if you’re you know offsetting some of the cost with you know Little amounts the beginning that just allows you know I feel like organizations to have different types of conversation about the value they want to add and the type of content they’re creating, because now it won’t just be a, you know, a, marketing expense that they, maybe they could or could not track in terms of like it being profitable or not, or like it, just one of those, like feel good education pieces right now, they might be able to think about it along the lines of, Oh, okay.
If we Up our quality. I just think about like even the early days of YouTube, like, you know, when you’re rewarded by an audience for creating higher quality content, if there’s some type of way to get paid on the back end, then, you know, reward people are going to want to like outdo themselves, right.
And their basis of content, right. Well, exactly, and that’s where our ecosystem comes into play. So a company could upload videos about their business. And then in connection with their business, they can also upload premium videos. So. The free videos can be used to educate. To gain interest, the premium videos can be utilized for monetization.
And because we’ve spent almost 4 years building this platform to host and redundancy and encoding and streaming and all the complexity of what it takes to run a. A video platform, and because we built this ecosystem, they have a 1 stop shop. They can organize their content. They can find it very, very easily.
It’s indexed for them. They can. Monetize it with our premium content capabilities. They can market on our platform with their video through video casting. And these marketing campaigns that we do, and so they can really do almost everything that 1 would want to do with video on our platform. Hmm. Yeah.
we’re all entrepreneurs here. Like I’m an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur. There’s a many entrepreneurs listening. let’s dream for a moment here. Like what’s the goal here? Like what’s the big vision down the line. our goal is to be the leading and potentially only business video ecosystem on the planet.
Can’t stop competition. We need to focus on the road ahead of us, not the car in front of us. Yeah, but for right now, we haven’t seen anybody doing all of the things. That we’re doing and it’s not as if we’re trying to boil the ocean over four years we started by building the platform itself and doing indexing an organization and And then we were able to then obviously start discovery and then from there Distribution on and off platform and then in a month from now launching the video marketing campaigns We’re promoting and then at the end of the year monetize So it’s been a a process and our hope is really to be one of the biggest You Video and potentially the only video audio ecosystem out in the world and so people understand we’re not competing with YouTube.
YouTube does something very different and they’re incredible at it and they’re an ad insertion model. We’re not an ad insertion model, and I cannot speak for YouTube and won’t, but they certainly have the amount of engineers and, you know, more capital than South America to do whatever they want to do, but they’ve chosen to keep their ad insertion model.
So, if you want to have precise and relevant media discovery. It would hurt one’s ad insertion model because the more people search, the more ads can be served. Our platform is very different, and we monetize in different ways through video marketing campaigns, through monetization of premium content, and we give away for free the ability to host, store, find, and communicate with one’s viewers.
And so it’s all free. So we’ve taken a different business model approach. Yeah, that’s great. always like to sneak in kind of one of those pay it forward questions for our entrepreneurs and our creators out there So, you know looking back at whether it’s those early days of cold calling and getting your first You know a couple videos up there or so like like what keeps you strong?
Like what keeps you going? What because you have a big dream. This is a big goal Like what keeps you going when when maybe things aren’t going the best? do you push through? You Great question, I’d say several things that help me push through you know, 1 is from a personal life standpoint. I have a great fiance and she’s definitely my.
My superpower, and that’s that’s very helpful because we’re all human and we all get. Tired and exhausted number 2 So we have a fabulous team. I’m in awe of the people that we have. It’s taken a long time to build the team, but that definitely keeps me going. Thirdly, you know, when I look back at where, how we started, you know, we’re much farther than I had ever expected.
So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve come so far and then seeing people happy about the platform. Having them say, well, I see the utility in this, or it’s really helped me or, you know, this is this is incredible. And so that’s that gratification helps helps helps to move forward. So it’s definitely been a struggle.
And plenty of rough days, but we’ve accomplished a ton and and those, those are the things that really propel me to continue and make me quite hungry. And then, of course, when you when 1 surveys the market and sees what we’re doing, it’s still unique just like it was when we started 3 years and 10 months ago that that’s also motivational.
Wonderful. Well, it was a great story, a great story of entrepreneurship. And I know we don’t have the person’s name, but shout out to whoever that early adopter was that brought on some of those first videos because and I, and I’ll say to everybody listening, like, Hey, sometimes you’re going to get.
Somebody to reach out to you and you can be that early adopter. Let’s support our other entrepreneurs out there because it’s not hard doing this thing and you know, some, and we all, we all need some support along the way. So definitely do that. So shout out to whoever that early adopter was. And David, if somebody wants to, you know, follow up, connect, learn more about video XRM, explore the platform, like give us the load on how does everybody do that?
Sure, it’s just easy. 1 can just go to video xrm. com. V. I. D. E. O. X. R. M. X. Ray. Robert mary. com and sign up. They can sign up as a viewer. They can sign up as a company and get on the platform. Check it out again. It’s free. There’s no, there’s no charge. It’s free, free to use the platform. So that’d be a great way.
Amazing. And for everybody listening, we’ll, we’ll put the link in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over and speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, then and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, please hit that subscribe button.
This is your special. We, this is a daily show or bringing you new content each and every day conversations just like this. So definitely hit that subscribe button so that you can follow up and and get the next entrepreneurs that we’re going to bring on. And also, if you’ve been in the audience for a long time and you haven’t left us a review, you already know what I’m going to say.
Leave that review. We definitely appreciate it. David, I appreciate you coming on to the show and sharing your story with myself and the audience. So again, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Adam. Thank you so much for having me. Much appreciated.
