Anthony: Hello, I’m Anthony, founder at SeedLegals, and every day I talk to and meet amazing founders. And today I’m talking to Loraa White from Music Video Marketplace. So, Loraa, tell me, what is Music Video Marketplace. 

Loraa: Well, we are a SaaS platform. We enable musicians to create a music video in minutes online. It’s fast, it’s cost effective, and it’s risk free.

Anthony: Okay, so I’m an artist, I want a music video. I know that in the past MTV, it would make or break your career. And then TikTok arrives. So how does Music Video Marketplace help with that? 

Loraa: So basically I’ve been a music video director for 15 years. Obviously, I also grew up with MTV and now there’s so much video consumption. I wanted to figure out a way that musicians could get something quick, easy, affordable, and they could start promoting their music instantaneously. So on the platform, all you have to do is upload your song. We know everything about that song. We have an AI meta tagging system that allows us to understand the genre, the mood, the lyrics. We can then take that information deep dive into our premium ready-made videos in our database and connect the two together.So you’ll have your song connecting with the right visual and within seconds you can make a piece of content and download it. 

Anthony: So that’s awesome. So you’ve got this huge body of video material and you’re going to almost sync it to my music file. So when I’m singing about the fjords or something, they’re going to be either fjords or not fjords as the case may be.

Loraa: Exactly. Obviously it is a tagging system ultimately, where, you know, if you’re a rock song and you’re singing about a love story, then we’re going to go and find a love story video from our site that matches that and try and find the right esthetic to match a rock genre.

Anthony: I’m going to try, next time I talk about agile fundraising to find the right backdrops for that and turn it into a music video. So that sounds brilliant. So how many people in the company?

Loraa: So at the minute, there’s four of us. We started off as just me, and then I have onboarded. There’s been two of us for the last six years, and now we are a team of four, which includes CTO, myself, head of marketing and head of sales.

Anthony: And what got you out of bed one day to go “I’m going to create this marketplace”? 

Loraa: Because I was tired. And to be honest, what I do, music video creation is extremely labour intensive. So I think I was trying to figure out how I can make money while I sleep, but also how can I do this faster than what I’m doing right now? Because spending three days on one project is far too long. And we just thought, well, we were playing with content one day in the office and we were like, let’s just see if anybody wants to buy it. And there is a lot of bands out there who don’t want to be in their music video and are paying me all the time just to go out and shoot content for them. So it became a whole new norm, is to make content and sell it to somebody in America or Australia. And the bands aren’t in the videos, but that’s kind of how it all started, you know?

Anthony: All right. Sounds fantastic. Now you’re based in Northern Ireland. Yeah. Northern Ireland does not have the VC capital of London and Mayfair. And so it’s often a lot harder for founders in Northern Ireland. Yes. Have you got any advice given that we’re talking here in a studio in London today?

Loraa: I mean, as much as I can complain that I haven’t had the support and the funding because of where I am, I have had to come to London and find those connections and work with Abbey Road Studios. I’ve had to come out of my comfort zone. But my biggest advice, and it’s probably has helped me a lot, is that I figured out how to bootstrap the entire thing. And that always plays in your favor when it comes to raising investment, because you’ve already done all the hard work. I haven’t just come for investment without actually having solid case studies, revenue, tech already built. So people are, it’s much easier probably to raise, and your valuation is going to be much better. If you’ve bootstrapped as far as you can. And that’s kind of what I’ve done. So yeah.

Anthony: All right. Well that’s fantastic advice. So let me dive into that because, you know, in fact raising is the failure to not have to raise. So if you can bootstrap it yourself that is amazing. Life is much easier. The problem is, you know, you can unless you’re independently wealthy, there’s a limit to the amount of money you can put into the company yourself. And so the time to raise investment is when your ability to fund it yourself is limiting the rate of growth.

Loraa: Yeah. 

Anthony: And you can now get a valuation high enough because enough has been built to raise what you want. So you’re raising right now you’re raising a half a million pounds. Is that right? 

Loraa: Yes.

Anthony: Okay. Exciting times. All right. Now, separately, you were telling me that you’ve just graduated at Abbey road. Tell me. That sounds super exciting.

Loraa: I know, do you know what? I got the opportunity to apply for this brand new program. Its the first of its kind music tech program. It’s BPI, which is the British Phonographic Industry and Abbey Road Studios and another venture capitalist company called London and Partners. They came together to build a program to help companies like me find support, mentoring, learning and of course, investment by the end of it. And yes, it’s been the last 6/7 months of my life, consumed by it. But I’ve been very privileged to be able to go to Abbey Road Studios and meet some of the most prestigious music industry professionals I couldn’t have imagined. It’s very overwhelming. 

Anthony: Lots of networking is going to lead to fantastic product because you’re going to network with the best, create the best content, and of course, hopefully they’re also going to make all the right introductions.

Loraa: Yeah, I mean I think if I hadn’t done that program, I don’t think we would be where we are. From a technical standpoint, because we had all these ideas and we just didn’t know which ones to pluck and make the perfect platform. And now, with all the mentoring and all the advice, I’ve been able to go, okay, this, this is going to work and this is going to work, and this is now the product that we’re delivering. So yeah, it’s been a phenomenal experience.

Anthony: All right. Have you got any advice, since we’re talking for founders, female founders, music founders, whichever to, you know – what should you do, what shouldn’t you do? 

Loraa: When building a tech platform? Don’t do it. No. I think I always say to people, just just dive in. You’re going to make a whole load of mistakes. I have spent money on stuff I shouldn’t have spent money on. I have risked so many things. Just do it and you’ll figure it out as you go along. I mean, I think every time you make a mistake, it’s a lesson. And it’s great because I have investors coming to me and asking, why didn’t you do it like this? And I go, we tried it and it didn’t work. So here’s the evidence, you know, and you can sort of say those sorts of things in many conversations because investors want to know everything. They want to know all your research. You know, the research piece has probably been one of the most detailed pieces, because I had to prove the market because it didn’t exist. So what we’re doing is so new and it hasn’t been done before. And we’re like okay, so product market fit, how do we prove this. So the market research that we have done has been so intense. And it’s been great because even, you know, my cohort on Abbey road have dived into this. And when these are all numbers we didn’t know before and I’m like, well, these numbers exist.

Anthony: Okay. So it’s fascinating. And of course, since you’ve bootstrapped yourself, when you tell the investor that didn’t work, you can also add and it was on my dime that I found out it didn’t work. Not anyone else’s dime.

Loraa: Exactly, so I haven’t wasted anyone else’s money but my own. So which is a good thing, because they sort of respect that you’ve done all of this without any investment. And, you know, I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot less with a lot of money. So what we have achieved, I think that’s when you bootstrap, you’ve got to figure out ways around how not to spend money and how to do things. Like I’ve been waiting on technology catching up. I’ve been waiting on the market catching up, I’ve been waiting on, AI has been since Covid has absolutely transformed my entire company, and we wouldn’t have been able to build the technology without a lot of these AI, newly developed tech. It’s phenomenal.

Well, it sounds brilliant. I mean, as I recall, music videos used to be the most expensive cost per second of video, you know, bigger than Jurassic Park.

Loraa: Yeah. 

Anthony: So to see that transformed into something that’s going to be hundreds of pounds to make a video, is fantastic. And I’m sure that the market as you grow will not just be music videos, but be anything, looking for TikTok backgrounds or whatever. It’s going to be a vast market.

Loraa: Yes. 

Anthony: So, Loraa, tell me about the tech, what powers all of this?

Loraa: Okay. So if you can understand, we are using AI to speed up all our processes. We are not AI generating content. Absolutely not. The music industry doesn’t want that. What we are doing is building lots of different processes, using AI to speed the whole thing up. So if you can imagine there is kind of a lost connection between content creators and artists. Yeah. And we’re trying to get the two of them to connect using our platform. So what we’re going to do, what we’re rolling out in the summer is actually an API tool. So our platform, you will be able to make a music video right at the point of distribution and marketing. So imagine you’re a musician and you’ve decided you’ve made this beautiful song and you want to use Distro Kid or some distribution site to release it to the world. While you’re on there uploading your song, you’ll be able to make a video right there at that point, so you don’t have to come to our site. You don’t have to, you know, go searching for content. You do nothing. We will give you the content. We will know the content you want right at the point of distribution.

 Okay. So while looking at the website, you know, it says the content is not AI generated, so it’s rare to find a site going not AI but of course using AI for matchmaking. 

Loraa: Yeah.

Anthony: And I have to say I like that because in the same way there was a no-filters moment on Insta. Yeah. I think there’s going to be the no AI moment. And you know, for me, I like the genuine Anthony, there’s no AI Anthony. It’s the genuine Anthony. So to have that marketplace where I’m assuming that content creators, people creating backgrounds can then sell their content as well. So it could be like the amazing next generation of Unsplash with huge amounts of content that photographers videographers upload that instead of you searching for it, the AI is going to now match your lyrics and video with that.

Loraa: That is exactly correct. That’s exactly what we’ve built. The idea behind building a creator economy was really, really important to me. It’s still very important to me, because I am a creator and I know how hard it is and how you can’t make money at it. So building that economy where creators are making all this content over here, we’re then the conduit in the middle that helps it sell then to the artist. But nobody’s done it for music videos. Obviously, you’ve got big sites out there like Shutterstock, Getty, and all the rest, but nobody’s actually brought into a full deliverable end to end process, which is what we’re doing. 

Anthony: Okay. And the Shutterstocks and the Gettys they’ve got such awful, you know, stock footage you can just see in a second. Any time you go to a website, whether Shutterstock or, you know, Getty Images you just know, dude get rid of that stock footage. 

Loraa: Yeah. And our content is nothing like that. So everything we do is extremely artistic. It’s got narrative, it’s gritty, it’s hard hitting storylines, which is completely different to your normal sort of stock site.

Anthony: Note to everyone. Never, ever use stock footage from Shutterstock or a couple of startups ago I learned when we are using footage and put it on Facebook ads and things like that, you could have the worst grainiest phone shot thing with poor lighting and jittering thing, and it would perform ten times as well as a high quality stock image, because nobody wants a stock image. End rant on stock images. So how can people contact you to find out more?

Loraa: They can check out our website, musicvideomarketplace.com. They can check out our social media. They can Google us. I mean, you can find us anywhere. It’s pretty easy to find us. 

Anthony: All right. Fantastic. Loraa, thank you so much for talking. This sounds great. And maybe I’m going to go off and make my own background video.

Loraa: You can. You can try it for free. It’s all try before you buy. 

Anthony: Amazing. Good talking.

Loraa: Thank you. 

Anthony: Thank you.