00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome back to Cortex. This time, I'm joined by Jack Coyne. Jack is the host and co-creator of Trackstar, one of the biggest shows on social media right now. If you haven't seen it, the format is simple. Jack talks to someone on the streets of New York, plays them a song, and they go double or nothing, trying to guess the next one, and the next one, and the next one. It's absolutely my favorite thing on social media right now. Jack was originally making a show about New York City trivia before they landed on music and everything changed.
00:00:28 ◼ ► Now the show features everyone from people walking home from work to Olivia Rodrigo and Ed Sheeran and more. And the team behind it is still producing documentaries alongside this viral hit. I wanted to talk to Jack because I think that what him and his team have built is a really interesting case study in how a creative format becomes a business. Like, how do you protect the thing that makes the show special while also growing it? How do you stay enthusiastic when you're filming your 1,000th episode?
00:00:57 ◼ ► What's the work of making something like Trackstar look like day to day? Well, let's get into that in my conversation with Jack Coyne.
00:01:04 ◼ ► So Jack, I want to get started by asking something that I ask all my guests. What is your favorite app that you're using right now?
00:01:21 ◼ ► I go back and forth between Apple Music and Spotify, but those are the things that I think provide the most daily value off of my phone.
00:01:29 ◼ ► See, I was wondering if you were a podcast listener, because obviously I imagine you must have to listen to so much music.
00:01:36 ◼ ► Yeah. And I also, I'm a distance runner. I mean, I like to go for a run in the morning and I like to sort of catch up on whatever the news or recently all sports related podcasts related to the Knicks.
00:01:48 ◼ ► I've just been obsessed with that. And that's all I've been thinking about. Every game, I would listen to like seven Knicks podcasts after every year. I was fully obsessed.
00:02:00 ◼ ► I heard every single podcast related to the Knicks, but I just have it on like in the background. I think when I'm showering or when I'm like getting ready for the day, I almost use podcasts like back in the day, how people would just have the radio on.
00:02:13 ◼ ► My dad was a doctor in his office. He always had the radio on all day long and we'd go there and it'd be, sometimes it'd be music and sometimes it'd be conversation. And I just like that sort of background noise. It's like comforting or something.
00:02:25 ◼ ► Yeah. I hope that's what people like about podcasts. I just want them to listen to them. I don't care what the reason is. Just keep listening to them, you know?
00:02:32 ◼ ► So Trackstar, it isn't what you've always done. I know you've been producing content online for a long time.
00:02:39 ◼ ► I know you founded a company called Public Opinion, which I believe runs Trackstar, but that was kind of more focused on New York, I think. You were doing lots of documentaries about New York.
00:02:55 ◼ ► Before I started Public Opinion, it was a pandemic and I was kind of doing some freelance work with my brother. So we started working together during the pandemic. His background is in shooting and editing, really talented cinematographer. And he didn't have a job at the time.
00:03:14 ◼ ► We both worked on this travel show where we traveled around the world. He was an editor on that show and I was the assistant director. It was called 60 Second Cities. And then that show ended. We were in Australia on the last episode and the pandemic started and everything shut down. So neither of us had a job.
00:03:31 ◼ ► We weren't stuck there, but we were like leaving at the same time that it was kicking off.
00:03:37 ◼ ► Yeah. I remember hearing the news reporters down there saying, there's a strange virus coming in from China. And when I flew back through Korea, I was like, the airports, it was strange. And I was like, is this just like an Asian thing that they're a little bit more aware of these? Because they had so much more experience with bird flu and stuff. And I was like, this is weird.
00:03:55 ◼ ► And then when I got back to the States, it was like a week later, the world shut down. But anyway, we had worked together and then that started and neither of us had a job. So we just started making videos together for fun. And I had a YouTube channel that was under my own name that I'd done some experimenting with.
00:04:11 ◼ ► Before that, I spent many years working for Casey Neistat. So I kind of got the ropes from him. We started a company together that we sold to CNN. So I worked for CNN for a year. And then since that CNN thing, I never had a full time job. I just worked for myself.
00:04:24 ◼ ► So my brother and I started working together and we were doing commercial work in the pandemic. And it was an opportunity for people like us, like a small shop that was really lean to get stuff done because you didn't have to hire this whole 10, 20 person crew, which was complicated at that time.
00:04:39 ◼ ► So we got a lot of opportunities and we made some really fun, interesting videos. And a lot of the stuff we were doing was about like New York's grit and determination to get through this pandemic.
00:04:50 ◼ ► And I had taken my background and making YouTube videos and what Casey did and kind of doing some journalism at CNN. And I was like, I just like this type of storytelling, not so much focused on me, but focused on other stuff that I'm experiencing, sort of short documentaries.
00:05:06 ◼ ► And then we decided we started working with this other guy, Henry on one of those GoFundMe projects. And we were like, had a great collaborative spirit with him. And we said, let's three of us get together, keep making commercial work. And then on the side, we'll make original shows.
00:05:19 ◼ ► And this is right around the time that YouTube shorts comes out and Instagram reels comes out. TikTok was dominating. And so I just felt like there's a great opportunity here to basically make one piece of content and you get three spins at the wheel on these three different platforms.
00:05:34 ◼ ► And they're all sort of competing for the same stuff. If we make shows that are vertical for these platforms that we can make every single day, I think we'll be able to grow an audience, which is something that we saw happen when TikTok first started.
00:05:46 ◼ ► It's something we saw happen when Snapchat launched. It's something that happened when Instagram, like anytime there's a new platform, there's a new opportunity to establish yourself. I feel like that's something that Gary V talks about all the time, like jumping on the new platform and trying to grow an audience. But I felt like that opportunity was there. And I had this idea in my head. If we created a network of shows for these platforms, there would be an opportunity akin to the podcast networks.
00:06:14 ◼ ► Yeah, building up and then selling to Spotify for a billion dollars or whatever. I was like, that's what we're going to do. One day in five years, Spotify is going to buy us for, you know, $100 million. So that was really the business model. And the first show that we made was, I was like, what's a show that we can make every single day? We want to do man on the street. We think that we can do a better version of man on the street. That's a little bit friendlier to our guests. And not so much making fun of people.
00:06:38 ◼ ► I was like, let's just do a trivia show. I looked out the window. I saw this water tower on the top of a building. I was like, I wonder if people know about that. Let's ask people about that. If they do, we'll give them prizes. And then they'll feel like they're getting something of value in exchange for coming on our show. And it won't feel so exploitative.
00:06:54 ◼ ► So I started doing that. It blew up on TikTok right away. We got a big following. But the hard part was getting people to stop and play this New York City trivia game because not everyone knows about New York City, even people in New York. But everybody knows about music.
00:07:08 ◼ ► Trivia is daunting too, right? You could consider yourself a smart person, but maybe you just don't know about the things around you.
00:07:15 ◼ ► Exactly. It can be scary. But I was like, there's something about the trivia, but how can we cast a wider net? Everybody cares about music.
00:07:23 ◼ ► And I had this idea, this visual in my head of handing someone headphones and then putting the headphones on and sort of entering this game space. And so that's what we did. We started track starts.
00:07:33 ◼ ► The first ever episode of track star is pretty similar to the most recent episode in terms of the structure and the style of the show. And then it kind of grew from there. And we shifted public opinion away from New York City trivia into this documentary style, long form YouTube storytelling, which is the thing that we really love doing. It just takes a lot of resources and time. So we can't do it as often as we like.
00:07:54 ◼ ► But it's something that we're expanding actively right now. We just hired a managing editor for public opinion. So he's getting started soon.
00:08:02 ◼ ► Track star is so easy to make every day. I mean, it's not that easy to make, but it's easy to make something that has a wide audience and wide viewership. It can help generate revenue for the rest of the business. So yeah, it's efficient, I would say.
00:08:15 ◼ ► So track star kind of got its beginnings and you still do. You just approach random people on the street of New York. How does the format work? So like if somebody says they want to be on the show, how do you choose the music?
00:08:28 ◼ ► So I have a sign and we, and it's not just for track star. I do this for pretty much anytime we do a video, a man on the street video, I have a sign that has a question and I hold that sign up and obviously I'm holding microphones and there's a camera there, but it's very hard to look, see someone holding a sign and not read it.
00:08:46 ◼ ► That is so much better than you just like jumping at people from around the corner or whatever, which is just how I imagine these things are usually done.
00:08:54 ◼ ► Yeah. Which by the way, was a huge turnoff for me. And one of the reasons that we wanted to create this show is I felt like turned off by that approaching people and putting a camera in their face.
00:09:04 ◼ ► And I wanted to make a different version of that where people were coming to me. That's also just my personality. Like I don't have the cojones to run up to someone with a camera in their face. I'm afraid I get punched.
00:09:22 ◼ ► And I actually, sometimes I have a sign that says name the artist, win money. And people say, I don't know anything about art. And I go, do you know about music?
00:09:29 ◼ ► Or I'll have someone who's like an art historian who's like, oh yes, of course. Like, let's go. I'm like, here's the headphones. And they're like, wait, I thought this was about painters. And I'm like, I don't know too much about painters. But one day we'll do that version.
00:09:42 ◼ ► Hey, you could do that. You could just show them pictures of paintings on your phone or whatever, right?
00:09:46 ◼ ► So they look at the sign that come up to us. And then I say, before we start, what do you like to like, give me just a general idea. I mean, the very first time we started, I just played songs that I thought were like the hundred greatest, like Rolling Stone, 500 greatest songs of all time list.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And I'm like, this is just a general view. But I realized that the episode was more interesting if there was a theme and like the obvious theme is a genre or a time period. So you could say like, this one's about soul music and people like, I love soul music. So then you just play a bunch of those songs. So people, you're creating more of an expectation for what's coming next as opposed to, oh, there was a country song and then a rock and roll song and then a jazz song and then a hip hop song. It's like, where are we going here? And it's easier to find, you know, narrow in.
00:10:28 ◼ ► And so I say, what do you like to listen to? I love jazz music. Okay, check this out and play something easy and then play something harder and harder as it goes on. And I'm kind of making that up on the spot. If I interview someone who's famous and I know that I'm going to interview them beforehand, I can research them. And if they're a musician, I listen to their music and I think about who do I think inspired them based on how they sound.
00:10:50 ◼ ► I have learned a lot about music. I had a pretty good baseline going into this. I'm a huge fan of music and a music appreciator, but I've learned a lot more and I spent a lot of time, my free time reading books about musicians so that I can learn more so that when I'm in these conversations, I can add interesting anecdotes besides just being a game show host.
00:11:11 ◼ ► I want to sort of try and be a little bit of an educator. And I think that's connected to what we did with public opinion with New York City trivia. I would be, how do I come up with all these trivia questions?
00:11:20 ◼ ► One of my favorite things about Trackstart is that part. It isn't just like, here's some music, here's some music, like random generate, or it does feel like you're aware of what you're doing and you talk to people about it. And especially when one of my favorite ones that you did was with a pianist and he was just playing the music and you were talking about it.
00:11:46 ◼ ► And it was just this really beautiful conversation between the two of you about just the songs that were being played and he was then playing along with them.
00:11:55 ◼ ► That was it. Yes, that's the name. That was amazing. So I think that might have been where I found you. I think that video served to me and I was like, this is awesome.
00:12:04 ◼ ► So that was pitched to us is like, hey, do you want to interview this guy? And I said, yeah, but could we do it somewhere where there's a piano? Because I just know that anytime I'd seen videos of him, it's magic, like watching him play along to something.
00:12:16 ◼ ► And they were like, yeah, let's go to the Steinway store, which I guess he's like a Steinway, the way that athletes are sponsored by Nike. Famous pianists are sponsored by Steinway. So we went there and he was set up in the room and he's a hilarious, awesome guy. And so that was a magical episode. And that's the kind of thing that we want to keep pushing the envelope on.
00:12:34 ◼ ► It's fun to do stuff on the street because you never know who you're going to run into and what's going to happen. But being able to mix those in is, I think, what we love to do. And that's what makes YouTube so special.
00:12:44 ◼ ► Has the show changed the type of music you're listening to? Do you listen to a broader selection of music than you were before?
00:12:50 ◼ ► I definitely listen to a broader selection of music. I'd say I don't listen to music so much for fun anymore. I mean, I do, but I'm always preparing for an interview or thinking about music in the context of conversations that I'm going to have.
00:13:05 ◼ ► And so, yes, it's broadened my horizons. I've discovered so much music from doing the show. But often now I'm like, oh, I want to listen to these five albums to prepare for this conversation because I know that this person loves this type of music or somebody will introduce me to something and I'll get into it. And that's how I spend a lot of my free time.
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00:15:14 ◼ ► You're very natural in the conversations that you have with guests and also just the people on the street.
00:15:24 ◼ ► Like is this from the beginning of the show or has that kind of been a skill that you've learned over time?
00:15:32 ◼ ► So obviously I've had my 10,000 hours of practice of interviewing people and have gotten pretty comfortable.
00:15:38 ◼ ► But I did this series of YouTube videos a while back in 2017 where I went on this road trip with Colin and Samir who are awesome YouTube creators.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And I was really just making these vlogs, but I was so on top of my game and excited about making this stuff and talking to all these people.
00:16:04 ◼ ► And I remember Samir, both Colin and Samir were like, you know what I think makes your videos different from other people's is your ability to sort of talk to someone and pull something out of them that is a little different.
00:16:22 ◼ ► So I thought when Man on the Street was happening, I thought I could probably do that pretty well because this is something that I'm generally good at is becoming familiar with people, making them feel good and want to open up.
00:16:36 ◼ ► And so I leaned into something that I was probably good at and now doing it over and over again, I've definitely gotten better and more comfortable.
00:16:42 ◼ ► At what point in Trackstar's history did you start booking musicians and celebrities onto the show?
00:16:49 ◼ ► I want to say the show started in like February and the first celebrity guest we got was that summer, I want to say, towards the end of the summer.
00:17:04 ◼ ► There were musicians pretty early on who are not hugely famous and I kind of learned how this whole operation works with the music labels and the PR and the managers.
00:17:56 ◼ ► The only difference is I know I have a little bit more context going into the interview, right?
00:18:26 ◼ ► And I think a lot of people would do is would be to transition the show and to become just talking to musicians and celebrities, right?
00:18:33 ◼ ► I think that would be a trajectory that would seem normal considering where the show is going.
00:18:45 ◼ ► Well, first of all, it's sexy to do that because it's like, oh, yeah, I get to talk to famous people.
00:18:50 ◼ ► But it's practically easier to produce because they're coming to my front door and it's a guarantee.
00:19:01 ◼ ► It's a lot easier to make a great episode of, hey, JLo is going to be there 11 versus you have to go find someone who is a discovery to the world.
00:19:13 ◼ ► People can apply to be on the show on our Instagram or I have to go out in the streets and hold up the sign.
00:19:19 ◼ ► And the hit rate is a lot lower of most of the time they're boring and they just want to be on the show.
00:19:26 ◼ ► But when you do, it's so much more rewarding for the audience because it feels like a discovery.
00:19:35 ◼ ► And that's the reason that we keep doing that is because it's supposed to be a show that's for and about music fans.
00:19:46 ◼ ► And often musicians are the biggest music fans, which is why we have them on there a lot.
00:19:56 ◼ ► I think that's what makes this show unique versus a more traditional interview show where it would just be focused on celebrities.
00:20:20 ◼ ► We were invited to Sesame Street and they said, you know, do you want to come and do some stuff?
00:20:34 ◼ ► It's just a production that I admire and a type of storytelling that I admire greatly because it's these people that are doing this thing that they love to do.
00:20:45 ◼ ► These are just artists that want to make a great show for kids that teaches people stuff.
00:21:35 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure right now you get lots of pitches for people to be on the show from labels, PR teams.
00:21:47 ◼ ► Like you want to take things that work and like you don't want to necessarily get entered into every movie, TV show, you know, the production cycle of all of them?
00:22:08 ◼ ► I also see these other shows on the internet that I don't think are very good and they're talking to the same people.
00:22:13 ◼ ► So we're always, even when we are in that cycle of promotion, I want to sort of break it as much as possible and have them not be talking about the cycle of promotion and be talking about something that's meaningful.
00:22:24 ◼ ► And I think that playing songs for people and having them talk about them is like a great way to sort of enable that and facilitate that.
00:22:31 ◼ ► And so even when we are in it, I think we tend to have good, interesting conversations that aren't focused on what's happening in the cycle.
00:22:38 ◼ ► But yeah, I definitely like get frustrated sometimes when I feel like I've been duped by a publicist or a movie studio that's like, this is their favorite show.
00:23:18 ◼ ► I want to make a show that's constantly mixing and catching people by surprise and doing something new and interesting and teaching someone something different about music and talking to someone who's super famous isn't always going to do that.
00:23:38 ◼ ► And so that's like what I have in my back pocket is I know if every publicist and label and everything stop calling, the show is still going to be great because we have all these people.
00:23:50 ◼ ► Yeah, because the show grew and continues to sustain itself on the people on the street, right?
00:23:59 ◼ ► But you also get so many people watching just the regular episodes because it's about the music and it's about the connection that you have with the people in that moment, right?
00:24:17 ◼ ► And we knew if we pooled our resources together and we got these jobs shooting, editing, doing photo, video, whatever, that'll pay the bills.
00:24:34 ◼ ► And then over time, we knew that there would be brand opportunities and we knew that there would be expanded commercial opportunities.
00:24:40 ◼ ► I actually thought as an advertising agency, if we could showcase our expertise in making short form video by making hit original shows, it would create opportunities to do that on the agency side of the business.
00:24:53 ◼ ► So someone like Walmart would be like, damn, you guys make these hit shows for short form.
00:25:01 ◼ ► I think that they're missing an opportunity to pay us millions of dollars to make a short form series for them.
00:25:06 ◼ ► What has ended up happening is branded content opportunities on both channels have popped up.
00:25:15 ◼ ► We continue to run our advertising agency and make content that my face is not attached to for different brands.
00:25:30 ◼ ► People don't realize that's coming out of Public Opinion Corporation, but that's one of the things that we do.
00:25:35 ◼ ► And then the most recent thing that's happened is we've started tapping into the RFP world.
00:25:40 ◼ ► And so agencies and brands go out to companies like Rolling Stone and Complex with an RFP that says we have $500,000 or a million dollars.
00:25:56 ◼ ► And we were starting to get those now because we're considered somewhere in the same realm of those types of media companies.
00:26:19 ◼ ► And so we're functioning as a creative studio and we're functioning as a media opportunity placement for that.
00:26:25 ◼ ► Well, at the same time, it's like similar to having the types of guests trying to find ways to integrate these kinds of things that feel natural and don't break the heart of the program.
00:26:36 ◼ ► For example, we did a partnership with Jack Daniels where we pitched them on, hey, you know, we have these performances in our studio.
00:26:43 ◼ ► We're going to have three artists, three different tiers, small, medium, large, have them play a show.
00:27:23 ◼ ► The one thing that held us back on YouTube was we had to age-gate the content because it's related to alcohol.
00:27:31 ◼ ► So everyone had to be logged in and prove that they were like at least 25 or something to be able to watch this stuff.
00:27:54 ◼ ► So it breaks my heart that we have these three concerts that should be seen by way more people on YouTube.
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00:29:55 ◼ ► You know, you have quite a strong relationship with the platforms that your content is on, it would seem.
00:30:11 ◼ ► I think, like I said at the beginning, we saw an opportunity where these platforms were sort of competing with each other.
00:30:18 ◼ ► They're very much dependent, and this is something that I've known for the last 15 years, is like this expansion of video.
00:30:31 ◼ ► I should probably learn how to make videos because I'll always have a job if I know how to do that.
00:30:45 ◼ ► So I'm not so much worried about them pulling the rug out or changing the algorithm in a way that hurts us because I believe in the content that we're making being the best content these platforms have to offer.
00:30:57 ◼ ► And as long as we're making the best stuff that they have to offer and we're giving it to them for free, they're going to be incentivized to show it to people because it makes them look good.
00:31:05 ◼ ► I think that there's a tendency to race to the bottom and make the most clickbait-centric thing possible and make something that's really dumb, that's hard to resist, that's almost pornographic, right?
00:31:16 ◼ ► A lot of the content, and I'm not talking literally about sex, what I'm talking is just about the idea of something that's-
00:31:34 ◼ ► And so one of our mantras in the business is we want to be the fruit and vegetables on the social platforms that are filled with sugary snacks and unhealthy food.
00:31:51 ◼ ► Not in like a cheesy way, but just that people are just enjoying music and having connections and, you know, it's like a fun thing.
00:31:59 ◼ ► And you as a listener can take something away from it or a viewer can take something away from it.
00:32:13 ◼ ► We'll have company-wide meetings and we'll do these whiteboard sessions where we'll talk about what are we about?
00:32:30 ◼ ► Earlier this year, I think, former Rolling Stones CEO Gus Wenner invested in your company, Public Opinion, and became an executive chairman.
00:32:44 ◼ ► I was looking for understanding that there's inevitable change ahead of us because we were going to have to grow.
00:32:56 ◼ ► And Gus is somebody that I went to high school with and have known for a really long time.
00:33:04 ◼ ► And I realized that the year before, we were looking at bringing someone on as a new host for a new show.
00:33:11 ◼ ► But I realized if we were going to do that, it was going to be a huge risk for us in terms of the internal foundation of the business, in terms of my time, Kieran and Henry, my partners, their time, focus, and attention.
00:33:24 ◼ ► And we didn't necessarily have the bandwidth or the resources, just in terms of time and infrastructure and team and sales and all this stuff to really make that bet while also growing the shows.
00:33:38 ◼ ► We'll bring in some money so we'll be able to build out the team, most importantly, the sales side of the business to sustain new voices and a new show.
00:33:47 ◼ ► Because if we're going to continue growing and continue to exist for a really long time, I can't host every show.
00:33:58 ◼ ► That person stayed in their job or stayed at the media company they were at instead of coming over.
00:34:03 ◼ ► And I sort of said, let's keep focusing on track star and public opinion, try and grow those.
00:34:11 ◼ ► And so during that same time, I was talking to Gus and I basically said, I don't want to just take money because you have to do that.
00:34:22 ◼ ► And what he had to offer was he was going to leave being the CEO of Rolling Stone, a company that understands the business of music media as well as anyone.
00:34:33 ◼ ► And he was going to put enough capital in to buy a stake of the business that was meaningful.
00:34:43 ◼ ► So we, over the course of the year, sort of aligned on the three key needs of the business.
00:34:52 ◼ ► All the revenue we were generating, which doubled year over year, every year, was via inbound requests for a partnership.
00:35:00 ◼ ► So we figured if we played offense, we could generate more revenue, not to get rich, but to make more shows.
00:35:05 ◼ ► Number two, editorial expansion, finding new voices, diversify against having Jack Coyne be the sole face and show and make it more about these are brands.
00:35:16 ◼ ► Kind of in the way that like, if you think about Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy is like the face that's the most recognizable.
00:35:31 ◼ ► So continuing to build a really sound and solid foundation so that we can live up to these creative benchmarks that we've set in all this new stuff that we're making.
00:35:41 ◼ ► Because otherwise, I don't have enough time and attention and hours in the day to be able to do this across lots of different shows.
00:35:46 ◼ ► But also, like we looked at the org chart of Rolling Stone and how that business is structured, which is probably 200, 300 people.
00:35:57 ◼ ► And we're like, how do we, instead of just being this flat organization, how do we start to create tiers and organizations so that we can keep growing and have the business set up so that we can expand and do it efficiently and do it well?
00:36:10 ◼ ► And when we start double and tripling our sales, be able to meet that and accomplish everything that needs to be done.
00:36:20 ◼ ► In this world where things are becoming more operationally complicated, do you plan on still being a part of the leadership there?
00:36:35 ◼ ► Now I want to continue being the CEO for the time being, maybe one day shift out of it, but I'm pretty passionate about the business.
00:36:58 ◼ ► And understanding where the money's going and what you're spending money on and where money's coming from tells a story.
00:37:09 ◼ ► And the less of a grip I have on that story, the more I sort of lose touch of what's working and what's not working.
00:37:15 ◼ ► So right now, I think I'd like to maintain that and help be the key decision maker for the other stuff that work.
00:37:31 ◼ ► And I think having a partner like Gus, who has similar experience on a different scale, like, I think there's a lot that we can do.
00:37:53 ◼ ► The benefit of a founder-led company is that if it started from nothing, usually the founders had to do things that a typical CEO would never have done.
00:38:04 ◼ ► I've experienced that myself in like growing my businesses of like, you're doing stuff that you would never do if you were the leader of the business, like sending the invoices, you know.
00:38:14 ◼ ► But you end up learning how your business runs from top to bottom because you've performed all of the roles beforehand because it just starts out two or three of you.
00:38:25 ◼ ► There's nothing that we do in any aspect of our business, except for maybe like reading legal contracts.
00:38:41 ◼ ► And when we started the business, we only had people who knew how to do every aspect of making videos.
00:38:54 ◼ ► And so you're never going to have someone who's been a C-suite executive at a traditional media company their whole life figure it out on the creator side because they don't know how to make a YouTube video or a TikTok or whatever.
00:39:16 ◼ ► So you're digging through logs, checking traces, you still have no idea what this user actually saw.
00:39:30 ◼ ► Their clicks, scrolls, what loaded, what didn't, all tied to the error in one timeline.
00:39:35 ◼ ► You can see the console output, the network calls, and even the rage clicks where a user hammered a broken button.
00:39:41 ◼ ► And because it's all built into Sentry, the replay is already linked to the error, the trace, and the logs.
00:39:47 ◼ ► This is fantastic for developers and users because for developers, they get to save time.
00:39:52 ◼ ► They understand what happened to the user, and they get to go and fix the bug, and they get to make people happy.
00:39:56 ◼ ► For the user, it makes it easy because trying to explain some of this stuff to people, what you were doing, trying to remember exactly what you did that led to this bug, that can be difficult.
00:40:23 ◼ ► Millions of developers are using Sentry, including teams at Anthropoc and Disney+, because of great tools like these.
00:40:33 ◼ ► They have a free dev plan, and listeners of this show can use the code CORTEX26, and you'll get $100 in Sentry credits if you're a new user.
00:41:25 ◼ ► If when we start playing offense, how much new work comes in and how much we're able to service
00:41:35 ◼ ► Maybe we need to grow the team a good amount to meet those, but hopefully not too much.
00:41:52 ◼ ► And that's when we started the business, myself and Kieran and Henry, the first thing we did
00:41:58 ◼ ► We had enough runway of just money that we put into the business for like three months rent.
00:42:14 ◼ ► Are you or have you become more invested in like systems and collaboration tools and stuff
00:42:43 ◼ ► Like, we use Adobe products and they haven't given us anything for free or any discounts
00:42:53 ◼ ► But having a corporate account that has access to lots of users is like $500 a person and having
00:43:11 ◼ ► They've tried to sell me so many times and I'm like, I don't understand the benefit for
00:43:33 ◼ ► So, Notion, like, has not snuck into the business yet like it does in so many tools like that?
00:43:54 ◼ ► That's an important tool for us to be able to share cuts and share notes and stuff like that.
00:44:10 ◼ ► Like, are you as a team getting together to talk through things or a few things, that kind of stuff?
00:44:24 ◼ ► There's a creative meeting every other week about someone sort of leads like, here's how
00:44:32 ◼ ► Or like, hey, let's review this video and talk about what made this special and different.
00:44:47 ◼ ► We have quarterly town halls with the whole company where we talk about what we're looking
00:45:08 ◼ ► I, like, have a notebook that I have at my desk every single day, and I write a checklist
00:45:14 ◼ ► So, meetings are a great place to, like, look at the checklist and say, where are we at on
00:45:24 ◼ ► Make sure that they're excited and feeling good and listening to what they're working on
00:45:42 ◼ ► Like, since early on when we launched the show, people in New York City were seeing it right
00:45:51 ◼ ► So, now that it's like, there's two and a half million people every day who watch Trackstar,
00:46:21 ◼ ► Anywhere that I'm traveling, people are stopping me and saying, I love your videos, which is a
00:46:46 ◼ ► So, like, because I have a baby at home, I really try and travel as little as possible.
00:46:56 ◼ ► So, someone's paying us to go make a video somewhere and when we're there, we interview
00:47:00 ◼ ► I remember we did a commercial a while back in Detroit and we had a couple hours in between
00:47:42 ◼ ► Running in the background, capturing every version of your entire Mac, including external
00:48:05 ◼ ► Just start your free 15-day trial with no credit card required by going to backblaze.com
00:48:25 ◼ ► So, you know, you've mentioned like the music concert series, Trackstar Presents, right?
00:48:39 ◼ ► How do you think about extending the Trackstar brand without kind of breaking what makes it work?
00:48:46 ◼ ► I talk about this with the creative team all the time, this idea of can we go deeper, longer, and more frequent with what we're doing?
00:48:57 ◼ ► It's basically saying like we have this core product that really resonates with a lot of people.
00:49:05 ◼ ► And that ends up taking the form of like, well, sometimes I'll do an interview with someone for 45 minutes.
00:49:10 ◼ ► There's moments of that that we can clip and put out separately that are telling us an individual story about one song and one person's connection to one thing.
00:49:24 ◼ ► And, you know, I think we stumbled into the podcast idea where I was like, wait a minute.
00:50:07 ◼ ► And then I think the more purposeful expansion is like at some point, can we do a version of Trackstar and Espanol where we have a host who speaks Spanish, who lives in Mexico, who's doing stuff there.
00:50:39 ◼ ► So basically what we're modeling it after is Wordle or any of the New York times games where it's one puzzle every day.
00:50:47 ◼ ► So the idea came from, I handed Trackstar video to someone and I was like, check our show out going back to the beginning.
00:50:55 ◼ ► And so they're watching me interview some person on the street and they're going, oh, that's Phil Collins.
00:51:11 ◼ ► But it made me realize that the show that we were making was interactive and it is interactive every day.
00:51:22 ◼ ► And now because of Cloud Code, because of these AI coding tools, it's easier than ever to make an app possible.
00:51:31 ◼ ► So we made a test flight and we're tweaking that and trying to figure out how do we get this thing in a place so that it's ready to launch and try and do so efficiently and cheaply.
00:51:40 ◼ ► Like when I used to work for a tech company, we had to have a staff of 12 engineers and a product manager.
00:51:46 ◼ ► And like you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars a month of burn just to pay for your staff.
00:51:55 ◼ ► So the timing is right and the product is basically like the thing that people have been asking for.
00:52:03 ◼ ► And then over time, the people that are rising the leaderboard of the app will say, hey, can you get on this flight and come to New York?
00:52:17 ◼ ► Like I just assumed it was like testing you about your music, but it makes so much sense to make it like a global kind of community thing where people are like, oh, I got all the way today.
00:52:32 ◼ ► I think it has the chance to be bigger than the show, because if you hate me, you can still love the game.
00:52:42 ◼ ► And I think that hopefully it's the kind of thing that people get into it and they sort of become addicted to it.
00:52:47 ◼ ► Not in a bad way, but every day they play for 10 minutes or five minutes and then they discover new music.
00:53:08 ◼ ► Aside from kind of like things like the app, the podcast, is there anything else that you kind of are excited about this on the horizon for you guys that you want to share or talk about?
00:53:16 ◼ ► There's a lot of things, but expanding the performance series and trying to take that to another level and start to bring live audiences into the studio to watch that.
00:53:24 ◼ ► So we've done a test episode of that that's coming soon, and we're going to kind of reboot that show in the new studio very shortly.
00:53:38 ◼ ► It's the type of storytelling that we love, by the way, resonates with a lot of people.
00:53:55 ◼ ► We brought on this guy, Lou Folia, who I used to work with when I was at Beam, which was this company that started with Casey that was then sold to CNN.
00:54:14 ◼ ► He made like 200 episodes where he would sit at the desk and do sort of an explainer and ask an interesting question.
00:54:19 ◼ ► We're bringing him and a version of that show to public opinion, and he's also going to oversee editorial expansion of public opinion.
00:54:35 ◼ ► We have an episode that's coming out today that I hosted about the Knicks ticker tape parade.
00:54:42 ◼ ► So, like, I'm all in on making this the best, most fun, entertaining YouTube news channel out there at the same time that we're expanding Trackstar.
00:54:59 ◼ ► I thought it was super insightful and interesting, and I really hope that you enjoyed it.
00:55:07 ◼ ► In Mortex, I want to ask him a little bit more about that and also settle the debate of what is better, the New York subway or the London tube.