CEOs You Should Know- ImagineBC

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Episode Transcript

(00:02):
I Heart Media presents CEOs you shouldknow. Hi. I'm John Dankle,
former president and publisher of the BaltimoreBusiness Journal and now founder and CEO of
Dnkle Business Development. This is iHeartRadio'sCEOs you should know and I'm here today
with Eric Ryant, CEO of ImagineBC. Welcome Eric, and thanks for
being here and thanks for inviting meJohn. Yeah. So let's begin by

(00:23):
getting to know you and the organizationa little bit. So for those who
may not be familiar, can youtell us some more about Imagine DC.
Sure, sure, Imagine BC.It's a startup that I began, I
guess roughly about three years ago,and to be honest, we we had
an idea that people in this newworld, of this new digital age of

(00:47):
ours need to receive fair value fortheir time and data, and they need
to receive that value for numerous reasonswhich you could probably get into later through
other questions. But that's where webegan and it took We went and started
to build an app to allow peopleto if you're advertised to or if somebody

(01:07):
wants to survey you, then youreceive information, you receive payment each time
that you watch an ad, oryou respond to a survey or receive an
offer, and you can make itas much information about yourself available on app
as you want. You're always incontrol of your information. So that was
the premise that we began with,and again, to be honest, we

(01:30):
wandered around in the wilderness for abouttwo and a half years thinking this is
a great idea, but how doyou get people to buy in on it
right And the answer was in theUnited States, you can't right now.
But what we found was that whenwe start to look overseas, especially in
Africa and especially in South Africa,that if you put a little twist on

(01:52):
what our proposition was, then youcan get buy in pretty quickly. And
what I mean by that is thetwist was we partnered with a large retailer
over there who sells mobile devices.That's one of the one of the things
they sell, and they of coursereceive commissions from the telcoms for the minutes
spent on the mobile devices that theysell. So they're in competition with other

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retailers in South Africa and now withour app burned into and resident on the
phones that they sell and with peopleable to watch ads. But when they
watch an add they all not.In addition to receiving compensation cash compensation,
they also receive the value of moreairtime minutes and over in South Africa,

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it's not like here in the UnitedStates. You don't have monthly plans.
Over there, people literally pay bythe minum, especially the lower classes.
So if you don't have any cashon hand, you can't use your phone.
And if you can't use your phone, how do you participate in the
digital age. So this is justa civilization, you know problem on the

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continent of the They you have aretailer who is going to offer their customers
the ability to watch advertisements, respondto surveys, and earn more airtime without
having to spend cash. Right,that is a winning proposition. And and
and the data that we ran overthere, it filled up so fast we

(03:20):
couldn't even imagine it so interesting.That's the model that we're taking out throughout
a number of different countries in Africa. So is the goal to is that
a subscriber based model, And yourgoal is to have you know, a
you know, a large number ofloves say subscribers um that are um on

(03:43):
the platform, that have their securedinformation and then they can either you know,
and I want to talk about contenton the on the Apple and the
like. So they're viewing the content, but then they have the option to
like say, yes, I wantto be open to this particular advertisement and
that's yes. So talk about likeI guess the subscriber model if that's what

(04:05):
is or is it more of ajust content model and like talk about about
yeah, it's not as a survibermodel. Everything we do, everything we
do is free. So then where'sour revenue. Our revenue comes from when
you watch an ad? USR userwatch an ad. So let let's say
that you know, Cocacola, SouthAfrica wanted to run an ad and they

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decided that this is the part ofthe community I want to reach, so
they can set that up. Theypost the ad, they put their budget
in and they say, we wantto be sure that every user you know,
receives you know, ten US centswithout could already gets ten US cents
even time every time they watch thisad. Well, we would charge Coca

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Cola a gross up of that.You would gross that up by seventy percent
and then that would be the numberthat Coca Cola would spend for the person
to receive ten percent, and thenwe would I'm sorry, ten cents,
and we take ten percent of thatgross up number. So our user gets
seventy percent, we get ten percent, and the other twenty percent goes out

(05:10):
to the people who have helped usbuild the community. So whoever referred Coca
Cola and whoever referred the person whowatched the ad, they split the twenty
percent. Got it. If thereis no referre, then we don't.
We donate that money to charity.And ultimately the role the goal is to

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get a bunch of different members andusers, right, So building community is
the key, right. I mean, I think anybody understands that advertisers go
where the eyeballs are exactly, Soif you have the eyeballs, you'll get
the advertiser as well. If you'vegot a retailer who's selling five hundred I'm
sorry, yes, five hundred thousandphones a month, you're gonna have eyeballs

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pretty fast. Yeah. That's thatthat that's that's not hard. And you
know, and iigerry, we're talkingto a large telcom there. They've got
ninety million people using their service.So again, if now the app is
just there, it's not too difficultto go to an advertising and say here's
the community, because you've got theselarge distribution partners right, got it?

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And now from the content side,so what type of content are you're looking
for and why would content creators wantto join and imagine BC. Yeah,
the type of content we're looking foris educational, inspirational or informational content.
The reason the content provider would wantto join us versus some other platform where

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theoretically they can monetize their content isthey keep against seventy percent of whatever they
want to charge for their content.Okay, that's the direct revenue stream.
Where it gets really interesting is inour what we call our path of revenue
stream. So let's say they goout and they have a community of two

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hundred thousand people. They can getfifty thousand people to come on and pay
a subscription, then they're going tobe receiving seventy percent of that subscription direct.
But if those fifty thousand people thenstart to watch ads and fill in
surveys, then they're the refer ofthose people, so they get to the

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content gets a piece of that twentypercent. So they're making money from their
audience when their audience is doing otherthings on our app. If one of
their people goes and buys other content, they make a referral fee they make.
So it's that it's that passive revenuestream that monetizes your community, not

(07:51):
just through you having to self content, but just through the fact that you
were able to build a loyal followerbase. Got it. That's how Big
differentiated when it comes to yeah,you know us and other Patreon or other
platforms. Sure, and so thegoal is to get a bunch of content
creators. So that's going to obviouslythen draw the community, and the content
creators will have an opportunity to monetizetheir content. The you know, the

(08:16):
audience will have a way to youknow and scent themselves, right, um,
and then the advertisers of course,got you know, a capture audience.
Yeah, exactly. Now it's soso you know about it. Two
years ago we we that was ourpath, exactly what you just said.
So we went out and we've recruiteda bunch of content people who had large

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followings. But what we found wasif you're not directly paying them, it's
hard to get them to produce contenton a consistent basis, Right, so
we kind of stuttered in and said, look, this isn't going to work
right now, and you know,we don't because we don't have the money
to pay these folks to produce thecontent platform, even though they understand the

(09:01):
passive revenues there. So again we'regoing to use the you know, the
profits, We're going to reinvest theprofits we make from our models in Africa
back here in the States to goback to these folks. But now we
plan to be able to pay them, you know, a monthly stipend to
produce content and then they'll get thebenefit of those communities. Got it.

(09:22):
That's pretty cool. So are youare you currently as a startup? Are
you currently uh in kind of raisingfunding mode? Are you in between?
Like, are you looking for investorsright now? What's what's that look like.
We're not actively looking for investors.We've not actually raised any money.
It's it's an interesting situation. We'renot your traditional startup. So, first

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of all, to the audio,I'm sixty something years Oults, so not
entrepreneur. So for nearly two anda half decades I was in the hr
paerial business and I built a successfulbusiness over there. That is very that
is very profitable, and we areusing the profit from that business reinvesting it
back into Imagine PC. So wehaven't needed to raise any money today.

(10:09):
We're self funding it to grow.We will look to raise but like you
know, like anything, you haveto show the people who are putting money
in and the environment change, right, So we're pretty confident in the next
six to twelve months will easily beable to show that A we have a
large consumer base, we have alot of eyeballs, two we have a

(10:31):
real revenue source, and three that'sa profitable revenue source. So if you
can meet all three of those milestones, even in today's climate, you should
probably not have much trouble raising money, right, I gotcha. Thank you.
I appreciate you talking about that switchyears a little bit. Tell us
a little bit about your personal backgroundand how you got to this point in

(10:52):
your career. Yeah, so I'min the DC area because I went to
GW graduated for George University. Thestrangest things, even though I'm in the
I've been a technical person dealing withsoftware for my entire career, majored in
history Coca figure. So I gota job with Price Waterhouse at a college

(11:15):
in their consulting group. That groupactually was an HR and payroll group,
which is how I got into theHR payroll world. I designed a new
payroll, a new way to dopayroll many many decades ago, and had
for it as an entrepreneur in thatworld, which to one of which was
success, which we sold off toa large payroll provider too, which failed,

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and one which is still doubling,which is what wunding imagine BC.
But after all those decades of HRpayroll, the real well I got into
imagine BC was fairly interesting because Istarted to look at blockchain technology. I
was looking at it relation to payroll, and it has a reason to be
in payroll because it's securing your privateinformation. And you think about a pail

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HR system, think about you know, the private information those systems sit on.
So I thought, wow, whata way to you know, secure
the information and not worry about abeat actorhacking into our database. So we
started down that path and then aftera while said, you know what we're
really doing here is we're telling peoplethey need to take back control of their
personal but how do you convince themto do that? So if you if

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you get a good visit. Todo it, you gotta well kind to
make money from it would be niceand and so on and so forth.
And that's how we ended up pivotingand creating a new company called the mag
BC, which, through blockchain technology, focuses on people taking back control of
the data and receiving fair value fromit there, you know, from either
their data or their intellectual property inthe case of creators. That's interesting,
that's cool. Thank you for sharingthat. Um so you started this or

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like, you know, right beforethe pandemic. How has the pandemic?
I know it's kind of it's overnow basically, I know we're going to
be it's the sense we're living withit at this point. But did that
have any impact on what imagine DCis trying to do? Minimal minimal um
So certainly, you know, havingpeople have to work at home was not

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a big deal for us, sincewe we typically let our people work at
home anyway, so we let themmake the choice. And because we switched
during the pandemic from focusing on theUS to focusing overseas, we're doing everything
remotely anyway. We know, we'vegone over to Africa. Once we've got
we actually we just we got outof South Africa just before they shut South

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Africa down through the pagemic. Webeat it by like a day before they
shut the country down. But ingeneral not the pandemics had little impact on
our business because we were pretty virtualanyway. And of course we're overseas so
even dealing with our partners where we'redoing that virtually. Yeah, does the
does the app have any or theplatform have any? Um? When you

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think about this generation the gen Zand millennials and a lot obviously starting their
own gigs, gig economy and um, and you know a lot more entrepreneurship
out there. Does this platform playinto that because they you know, get
to in a sense monetize their theiryou know, their information. I guess

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you could say, if they've gotsomething, if they've got something to share,
that's a value. Yeah, right, yes, And if what they
have to share fits our is itinspirational, informational, educational, then we're
the right we potentially could be theright platform for them. Yes, got
it? Okay, Um, Soswitch here's a little bit of a guy

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I'll talk about leadership on the show. How would you describe your leadership style?
I'm a pretty hands off So I'vealways I've always managed people as if
I've wanted how I want it tobe managed. Yeah. So you know,
if I let people come to meand ask, we provide direction.

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This is you know your your youknow what you're supposed to do, but
we leave it up to you tofigure out how best to do that,
when to do that right, doesn'tI don't care if you work at night
in the morning. If you're gettingyour job done and you're getting a job
on time, then that's perfect.We're not going to micromanage you. We're
not going to come and ask howthings going. You know, We're gonna

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rely on you if you get stuckto come and ask us and be honest
to that. So I'm very handsoff manager, and I also manage my
companies with a very flat structure.I don't believe in a lot of middle
management. Yeah. God, I'venever big big enough that I've never been
big enough to have a lot anyway, But even if I get big,
I would never I would never dothat. I believe in a very flat

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manage instructure. Yeah. God,Okay, what gets you excited about the
future? Imagine BC, Well,it really goes to the back to the
reason I started Imagine DC in thefirst place, which was I'm a vociferous
reader of news and I couldn't standwhat I was reading from either side.

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Be quite honest, I don't havededicated politics. I'm neither right nor left.
I make up my mind by tryingto find information and I and more.
But more importantly, at sixty yearsold, I'm in the back end
of my life. But I'm veryconcerned about my grandchildren. And in fact,
I started to Imagine BC literally twomonths before the birth of my first
grandchild, well because I was reallythinking about what world was he going to

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inherit. Yeah, and if companieslike Imagine BC don't come along and do
something about it, then it's avery bleak future. So you know,
our message and the type of contentthat we want to provide, and how
we want to treat our consumer,and more importantly that we value our consumer's

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time and their data and want tomake sure that we help and make money
from that. These are all verypositive things, so that that's very easy
to wake up every day and getexcited about and go to work. So
conversely, what what keeps me upat night? The March of the rope,
the march of the robots. It'sinteresting because if you went back and

(17:07):
listened to somebody interviews before the pandemicfrom two years ago, two and a
half years ago, I was preachingthat. I was preaching, look,
ay I's coming, Yeah, I'scoming. And now that it's here,
the sheer displacement of jobs that couldbe caused by this worries me because the
thing that attacks the democracy the mostis idle hands. If people don't have

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something to do, they start,it's very easy to convince them whose fault
that is. So we need tomake sure that people have things to do
with their time and money to spendon the things that are important in their
life. And it's technology. It'snot like old technology. We'll all new
technology creates new jobs. The robotsdon't create new jobs, right right,

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So there have to be companies outthere thinking about how are we going to
have people real breathing. People receivereceive some compensation from from what they have,
and what they have is data.They always have data, they're always
creating new data, and they havetime. So that's what we're focused on
doing, creating that out for themthat thank you, I thank appreciate you

(18:15):
sharing that. Well, kind ofwrap things up. Is there anything else
you'd like our listeners to know aboutyou and Imagine DC? Just you know,
right now, as they said,if you're listeners of the US base,
you'd probably not going to notice ifyou're aftering a base, keep an
eye out for one of our partners. It could be pepp woor, it
could be MTN, it could beSynapsters, So keep an eye out for
us there. And just just everybodythink about what's the value of your data.

(18:40):
I can't reinforce that enough. Yeah, well, how can our listeners
find out more information about the ImagineDC. They can certainly go to www
dot imaginec dot net and take alook at our website and that's probably the
best way to get started. Awesome, Well, thank you so much.
I got a great conversation, reallyinteresting. Congratulations want Imagine BC. It
sounds really really interesting and look forwardto seeing you know when you you know,

(19:04):
kind of start to roll this outin the States and let's a segan.
So so thank you very much forbeing on the show today. Thanks
Jo, I really appreciate it.This has been iheartmedias CEOs. You should know