Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. So I'm the co founder and CEO of Suna, but I have always been a creative person at heart. So today, while I sit in sort of a business role, I actually have a background in being a creator. So I went to college to become Barbara Walters. That was my aspiration. I thought Barbara Walters was the most powerful woman on planet Earth because as a little kid, you get to see her on the news. She's interviewing the president, she's interviewing Prime Minister. She seems very important, but very quickly realized that I didn't want to be on camera, that I far preferred the more technical and creative jobs. And so I had about a seven year career as a television editor that I'm really proud of and was really exciting. I worked on a lot of different programming, from Big Ten Network to CNN to BBC, and then eventually landed at PBS, doing a lot of different work for them. And in 2013, I became pretty obsessed with creating video for the Internet. And it's easy to look at that time now and not be very precious about it. But it's keep in mind, in 2013, the only two places you could upload a video natively to the Internet were really YouTube and Vimeo. And so I started a production company that focused on creating ad content, video ad content for YouTube and very quickly became an agency and production company that focused on everything that had video moving forward. Facebook, Instagram, every mobile app that you would open up would have video ads in them. And so we were creating video ads for a lot of different platforms. And in 2019, I decided to sell the company ultimately because I wanted to go after this opportunity with Suna, and because my co founder and Suna, Haley, and I, we really honestly just felt that Ecommerce was going to be the next area of opportunity. So sold my first company in 2019 and then started chasing after Suna shortly after that. And the idea behind Suna is really quite simple. There's not a single thing that we buy on the internet that doesn't have a photo. The photo is the most important part of the purchase making decision. It's the thing that makes you emotionally go, yes, I want that, or no, I don't want that. And it also is frankly one of the hardest and most expensive parts for brands without platforms like Trend or Suna or others. And so we wanted to solve that problem and we wanted to do it at scale. And so since then, Suna has shot 5 million Ecommerce assets in the last four years, which has been really kind of an incredible thing to think about now in retrospect. And we've just continued to be really proud of what we're doing as a business. We have 15,000 merchants on the Suna platform creating content for whatever they sell and wherever they want to promote and sell it.

Yeah, it's really incredible. Also thinking about your background and how time, like how everything changes so fast, like 2013 video ads, even you just saying Vimeo and YouTube and those being the only platforms for video ads. I remember that was around the time I was starting my first company. And at that time you needed a video ad to launch your product. But to get it something like that produced, I remember we were going to have to come up with ten k to get a video done just because there was no one doing that kind of stuff. So it's just so interesting to see the evolution in ten years. Now. Video is like pretty native sort of content all over. For creatives, it's shorter form, there's all different sorts of asset types. So it's just anyway, you took me down memory lane with that one.

Well, you just think about how funny it is now. We take for granted how many things are video first, how much of our shopping decision making is video first. So I feel really lucky that I actually went to school for Broadcast because I think it ended up being fortuitous and continues to be an area that I always get excited about.

So on the fact that you went to school for broadcasting, where did the entrepreneurial knack come from? Because you could have just gotten a job. You got your degree, but you went down the lane of starting an agency and a company as the first one. Where did that come from?

It came from my grandfather. My grandfather was a businessman. He was an entrepreneur. When I was a little kid, I was what I called a shop kid. My grandfather had a canoe outfitter in northern Minnesota, where we took people on canoe outfitting expeditions in the Boundary Waters Canoe area, which is the largest set of chained lakes in North America. And they're untouched by man. So you can't live on these lakes. You can't use a motorized boat or ski do or something like that on these lakes. So they're really majestic, very pure water. You can literally drink the water right out of the lake. And we had a tourism company. People would go on trips with our family. And as a little kid, I hung out in the shop. I spent every night after school, I spent every weekend there. I was very familiar with that, and I think the thing I observed, and honestly, the thing I was longing for after six years of sort of doing a normal job, if you will, is starting a business and being part of a business, it gives a lot of purpose and meaning to life. It's like a reason for waking up in the morning. I didn't want to keep waking up and working on things I didn't care about. I didn't want to spend my days going like, oh, I just spent 40 hours on something and I'm not that proud of it. And I felt so called to entrepreneurship, I think, because my grandfather just showed me the value of hard work and also just the importance of having purpose and meaning in your life. It's going to be ten years this upcoming October that I've been an entrepreneur just kind of unbelievable. And I have to be honest, I have not longed for meaning in ten years. I haven't felt like I wake up in the morning hating what I do. I feel really lucky that entrepreneurship really gives you that sense of purpose.

Yeah. I think for the right people who gravitate towards it, it's like you have to be a little bit crazy, but it doesn't feel like work because you're just like solving problems and putting out fires all day, but your brain just can't stop. You just keep going. And like you were saying, it feels like there's purpose. It doesn't feel like you're just throwing your time away, which I think is the most important part.

And there's the legacy component. I feel like I've met so many people who've worked for my grandfather, who went on a trip with my grandfather's company, and they remember him, they remember everything that he did for them. There's so many people who will write to me and say, I got married to the person that I worked with at your grandfather's shop. And you just think, through how many kind of amazing things you also get to witness. And a company is really just a way that you build a community around something, whether that's the community of your customers or the community of your employees or in the case of a business like Trend or we're a pro services directory at Suna, a community of people who want to model and share themselves and share their experiences with the world. And so I also think we're very communal creatures. We humans. And entrepreneurs have a really unique ability to sort of foster community through business a lot of times when they're very successful.

I mean, I can relate. My biggest driver was seeing the payouts to creators, and same it is for you to say, 4 million photos provided to Ecommerce Brands. And so most important thing is that it all starts backwards from the mission. You don't just pick a business idea with the intent to make money. All great businesses work backwards from that mission. And it's clear that that's what happened to you because your previous business was an agency. But then this vision for Suna was a tech business, something you hadn't done before, and clearly that didn't stop you in the tracks from figuring it out. So what was that like, diving deep into starting a tech company?

It's such a keen question because I had no idea what I was doing, so I had no idea. I knew intrinsically that I wanted Haley. So Haley and I, when we started talking about this idea, the thing that we both knew we wanted to do is we wanted to make the photos really affordable. And one of the things that we talked about and the video clips, one of the things we talked about was that, like a stock photo on Istock, for example, the average price was about $40. And so we would say, okay, how do we make a great custom photo about the same or less than a crappy stock photo, so that it feels like you're just getting this fantastic deal? And we realized very quickly through talking about that that the only path to solving that was going to be technology, that we were going to have to use technology to cut out a lot of the waste. Cut out. A lot of the time that goes into planning photo shoots and to create sort of a consistent workflow that made it possible for us to do this at scale. And so knowing that as a North Star, I think it was just a process of gathering product requirements, right? But we didn't know that at the time. We had no idea we were doing that. And so what I always recommend to people is try to find a thought partner who can sort of help you shape your idea into kind of the, what are the requirements? What does success look like? What is it going to be if you do it well, in your mind, and that helped us then reach out to different people in our network. And I remember reaching out to a person that I worked with who I knew was really good at live streaming and knew a lot about compression because it was like, okay, how are we going to make video instantly viewable, and lots of them, all the time. And I put this document in front of them and just asked a bunch of questions. And it's funny how I think one of the most important qualities to have an entrepreneur is just curiosity and not getting overly attached to how something happens, but being ruthlessly stubborn about what's going to happen at the end. Right. I will go on any journey, like, whatever journey you want me to go on, I'm down for the ride. But I am stubborn as hell about I want to deliver great value to the customer, and great value means $39 photos. Right. And that, I think, balanced with a really good technical mindset. You will find a way to get there together.

So you mentioned a keyword, which is consistency, and always looking from the outside into soon. I thought that's one of the things you guys do best is that consistency and then the timeline and speed of delivery of the content while keeping that consistency. It's almost like the value proposition of Starbucks. People know because they know what they're going to people go because they know what they're going to get every single time. So when you were building it out, did you have, like, three major things that you were like, all right, we have to get these three things right, or five or whatever it is in order for this to work. If we get this right, we'll figure out the rest?

Yeah. It was quality, affordability, and it had to feel fun. So quality was we have this saying that's kind of a joke now, but it still feels true. A $39 photo is only exciting if you like the $39 photo. A $39 photo is not exciting if you think it's ugly. So the quality had to be first, the affordability, it had to feel like it was in your budget. And then the fun is, to me, kind of giving people that experience. We're in a B, two B space, and Haley and I have this joke amongst us that B two B secretly stands for boring. To boring. Like, every single B, two B business is like, we have a perfectly stark blue, white and black website, and we build technology for other businesses to solve their dynamic problems. And it's like, no, that's so boring. I'm a person. You're a person. There's definitely a person at this company making the purchase decision. Let's talk to each other like human beings. Let's have some fun with it. And we thought if we could bring those three things together, we would really have something special. And it's strange because I think a lot of people change those values over time or change those ideas over time, but they've stuck. Like, we still believe in quality, affordability, and fun, and that's kind of guided us well, I think, the entire way.

Yeah, I think that also, like, what you said before, that about having a destination that you want to get to and then figuring out how we're going to get there and pairing that with values, that just seems like the perfect recipe for being able to achieve progress. I see it all the time in our projects, too, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a startup, anything you're growing, you have an idea of where you want to go, and sometimes it's pretty unclear where the solutions and the unlocks are going to come. But if you know they're going to come and you're curious about where they may come from, they start to reveal themselves. And then you pair that with the values that are important to you as entrepreneurs and the value that you're trying to bring, that's kind of how you're able to unlock it. So, Liz, the next question that I have is building a business like Suna or Ramon the trend. Like, I know how Ramon built trends, so we don't have to go there. But these sort of marketplace businesses, they're not the easiest businesses to build. Right. You are dealing with a supply of, in your case, creators. On one side, they're delivering a product, and you have customers on the other side. So the three of us here, we all know about building marketplaces, so why don't you walk us through the beginnings of Suna, right? Like, how did you start building out your network of creators, your first customers? Just take us back to the early days, and how did it start coming together?

We had a really long approach to the first customer, so we actually got into Tech SARS in January 2019, and at that time, we were still developing the product. We didn't even have an MVP or a beta. We were still in development. And honestly, the only thing I had to show techstars as part of our application process was this very novel technology that we had developed that essentially allowed us to take a photo anywhere in the world and then have it show up in this browser based experience. And one of the things that Haley and I both knew really intimately from having been on set, because Haley is a professional animator by trade, so that's another sort of, like, nuance to this is she's also a professional creator. And we've spent a lot of time together on Sat, and so we knew that one of the things that really gets customers excited in trusting you with their vision and their brand is actually being able to see what you're doing. The kind of black box nature of most marketplaces, I think, is oftentimes a detriment to the experience because brands get excited about creating content, then they order the content, but they aren't part of the process. They don't get to experience the process. And so we just really believed in that as the primary kind of reason why we were innovating in the space and why Techstars should let us in. And it was funny because basically Haley and I were like, okay, we have no idea how we're going to get to a product by the end of this, but let's just start building an email list. So we had started a YouTube channel and we were just sharing every single week of Techstars, week by week. And we knew that there are a lot of people who are just interested in techstars. And so we were like, cool, maybe people will just subscribe and watch us go to Techstars every single week. And I also think people just really, I don't know what it is. People are just fascinated by founders. They're fascinated by how ridiculous we are. And so we would do a Techstars video every single week. And then that led up to at the end of the 13 weeks, we could announce like, okay, we have a beta coming in September, so sign up to be part of our beta. And we got 2000 brands to sign up to be part of our beta, which we thought was really exciting. And then we said, okay, cool. September rolls around, we get the beta off the ground. And we said, we're going to accept 200 into the beta and we're just going to make content for them for $100. It was like, whatever, content just to ask them questions, get price points, whatever. And I remember the very first day that we opened up the beta, it took three orders for a customer to sign up to where I didn't know anybody associated with the product. And I think that was when I knew, like, wow, we are really hitting a big problem when normally you'd expect your 1st 50 orders to be your friends, your family, like a bunch of people you already know, but three people, and I already don't know this person. And so those early days were really super unscalable stupid things. But honestly, they're things that I still do today. Like I have 2 hours of my calendar every single week that's just dedicated to content creation. And I see my job as the founder of this company to be like being out there in the world, talking about ecommerce, talking about the business. You all have this podcast. I literally have three LinkedIn posts, an email newsletter, several TikTok accounts that I'm responsible for a YouTube show. I have so much stuff that I'm making all the time. But honestly, it's never been about quantity of viewers. I'm clearly not Mr. Beasts. That's obvious. But I think the quality of what people get from the content that we create is real and is very meaningful to me. And so that's been a strategy we deployed since day one. And then after our beta, we literally just asked every single one of these customers, okay, what do you want? What would make it better? What would make it awesome? What would make it more exciting for you? And we got some guidance on pricing. We got some guidance on how it should come together. And then by December of 2019, we launched sort of what Suna is today, which is a virtual photo shoot platform where you can plan the photo shoot and have the photo shoot in one layer of software. And honestly, I think we just got really lucky after that. I mean, the Pandemic accelerated our business in a way that I could never have predicted in a million years. And the fact that people could participate in the photo shoot virtually when they were already participating in remote work gave us a competitive advantage during most of 2020 and 21. That was magic in a bottle. I hope we can capture it again. I'm sure we will. But it was a pretty special time in terms of building up to that.

One I remember hearing about soona. Well, we were introduced after the tech stars through Techstars in Adam Burrows range. But I remember first seeing Suna during the Pandemic with sort of I think it's a growth hack strategy that you guys did of the free headshots, right?

Yes, we did free headshots. Still to this day, that must have.

Been a boom, because what was the perfect sort of trifecta there was it Pandemic new company, starting them beefing up their LinkedIn. People are tweeting more, needing professional headshots. And so this was remote headshots, right?

Yeah, we did remote headshots for a while, but then as the world started opening back up, the other thing that was weird is people were just desperate to leave their house, and so they got a reason to do it. So the summer of 2020, I think we did like, 500 headshots that summer alone. And then now we've done probably about 5000 since then, and we just do them on Friday afternoons. But that was a growth hacking strategy because think about this, in B two B, everybody needs a headshot. There are so few delightful experiences that happen in your B two B life. So to have kind of this like, oh, I had this great experience. I got to pick a ridiculous color backdrop. I got to interact with the photographer, whatever people would post about it on LinkedIn a lot. And so that was a huge growth hacking strategy. The Pandemic definitely gave us some wind at our backs. And then I think the other thing that really just worked for us was brands would share their virtual photo shoot on Instagram. So they would be like, oh, look at my virtual like, which images do you like here's? I'm on a live shoot right now. What do you want me to tell the photographer? And so people were saying like, oh, you should tell them to add flowers, or you should tell them to add a vase, and they would do it and someone would post it on Instagram. And so that was a really huge there was just something very fun for people about sharing their photo shoots. And it's interesting to think about that. If you were a creator, you shared your onset photos. People are so excited to share their onset photos, and so that was kind of the equivalent of the onset photo dynamic. But the only thing we did there's some really boring practical stuff that I always recommend too. We've always been really diligent about email trends, really good at email, too, but making sure that you've got really strong email and you're really thinking about cultivating your list and respecting your list and not just making ass all the time, but actually being helpful in providing guidance. We also integrate it with Ecommerce. So we have a Shopify app and we have an Amazon app, and pretty soon here we're going to have a Canva app. We also have a big commerce app. So we made it really easy to discover Suna and some of the other places that people were looking. And then, I don't know, we just invested psychotic amounts of energy in that dang Instagram account. I mean, it has over 130,000 followers, I think, today, and that just has paid dividends in a pretty big way.

It's fun to talk about all the things that worked, but I'm sure that between all those there was 20 things grubhacks you tried that didn't work. And it comes from leadership of optimism, because during COVID you guys have physical studios as well. So I'm sure it was a moment of turning a hardship into an opportunity.

There were so many of those. Speaking of things that let me tell you a couple of things that absolutely didn't work, but they might work for someone else, right? At one point, we had this idea of essentially creating kind of demo stores where people could test an entirely new idea in the photo shoot. Absolutely nobody wanted to do it. They were just like, Absolutely not. In my head, I was convinced that you would want to demo content with the photography and nobody was interested in it. I'm remembering also, we tried SMS marketing. Nobody wants a B, two B, business texting them. I don't think anybody really wants any business texting them. So we tried SMS. It absolutely fell flat on its face. Nothing about that worked. And there's been so many times where I've seriously questioned, is it the right thing to have a network of dog models and cat model? Because it's like a lot of work. There's a ton of weird, bizarre risks associated with our pro services platform. I remember we had a dog on a set and I just happened to be in the studio that day. That was really aggressive and really mean, and we had to fire our first dog from the platform. Just the stuff that you kind of laugh about now, but in the moment just feels like the worst thing because you put so much time and effort into it. And so I don't know, that's kind of why I say my philosophy has always been about this sort of like, be stubborn about the destination, but be flexible about how you get there because you don't know what's going to work always. You don't know when you're going to fail. You don't do something knowing you're going to fail. You do it going, okay, I'm going to try it, and hopefully I don't fail, but I probably will, and let's see what happens, right? And I also think it just helps you keep your mental health in a good position during the journey when you're not overly controlled or convinced of outcomes ahead of time, because otherwise you can start to really beat yourself up for mistakes. And I try not to think of things as mistakes. I try to think of them as tests that either went right or went wrong and lean into the ones that went right and let the ones that.

Went wrong go in the rear view mirror 100%. And I think so much of it kind of like you were saying, sometimes they go right, sometimes they go wrong. Sometimes if there are different conditions in a market, they would have gone really right or vice versa. So it's just about doing things, putting them out there, seeing what works and doubling down on what works, so long as they're carrying you in the right direction. One question that I'd have for you, Liz, is now it seems like we have a general kind of idea of how the business was built, how you guys approach everything. But talk to me a little bit from the perspective of a brand, right? Like, let's say I'm starting my own new brand, and now I'm looking to get some creative. How does my experience, how does that happen through Suna? What am I able to get? I know you talked about being able to kind of have some direction in the photo shoot. Tell me about what's happening on your end and how that whole process works for me as a brand who's looking to get some product photography or any sort of content done.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's just say you need some content to launch a new product. You probably need some product photos. You need some campaign photos. You're probably going to need some ad video, perhaps. You're going to want some unboxing video or some how to video. And so our platform allows you to plan a photo shoot for that product launch. And we really kind of design our photo shoot planning around either. Do you want to build around the platform? Meaning, are you building a new Amazon listing page? Are you building a. New shopify page? Are you building an Instagram ad or allow you to build it kind of based on every single thing you think you need for a given product campaign? So brands are able to sort of plan those two ways and they're able to add every single thing that they need in order to fulfill that creative vision. So that's everything from what kind of background are you envisioning? Is it a lifestyle background or is it more of a polished studio background? Is it product on white because it's going on Amazon? The things that I would just consider to be sort of checking the boxes of making sure you're meeting all those requirements, then we're going to let you do things like add your personal style as a brand. So you can shop our directory of over 3000 props and pick what kind of plants do you want, what kind of pillows do you want, what kind of napkin do you want? And all those get bundled into your photo shoot. And then finally you can decide if there's going to be people or pets in your photo shoot or any providers who are going to make that look great. So we have a pro services directory, about 1700 members. And these are hand models, foot models, full body models, dog models, cat models, turtle models, rabbit models. But then also these trades people who are really professionals in really key areas of production. So fashion stylists, food stylists, food styling is incredibly specific and challenging. So being able to style food appropriately so that it looks good on camera is a key skill. And then once the brand has sort of built that photo shoot and keep in mind that process. So before suna, if you want to plan a photo shoot like this, it would have been a ton of spreadsheets, a ton of pinterest boards. Probably looking for these studio locations across airbnbs and different websites and calling different places, touring different places. We've taken this process that was taking brands two to three weeks and lots of money and turned it into seven clicks. And I think that's what that time savings like. Five minutes to build a photo shoot of your dreams has been just a huge piece of this for brands. And then once their photo shoot is built, they order it and we match it intelligently to one of our production facilities across the country. So we have facilities in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Denver and Austin, Texas. And those are kind of the hubs where we bring together sets, props, environments. That's where our providers come in and have their photo shoots for the day. And once that photo shoot happens, you get invited to join a virtual shoot. So not a little bit different than joining a video meeting, but instead of looking at each other, you're actually looking at a live view of what's coming out of the camera in real time. So you see every single photo and video clip as it's created in real time. You can give feedback, you can message with your creative. You can actually rate the images, make your favorites, create folders. And then one of the things that I think is so special is those assets become shoppable. So we have an ecommerce platform ourselves. You pay $39 per photo, $93 per video clip. You only pay for the ones you truly want and love, and we deliver them the next day. So all in brands will spend about two weeks on average, from planning a photo shoot to having final assets, and they get them for an incredibly affordable price that I think is just really allowing them to professionalize their business no matter where they're trying to sell their product.

Yeah. And you guys are doing something that's really hard, like you said for brands before, in order to plan the logistics and execute. But the first thing that comes to mind when you're telling me about this is like, I get all these videos and reels on Instagram where it's like the hack to make your crazy product photography. And you see all these people, I don't know, dropping a ball into a bowl of powder and capturing them. And I'm like, oh, man, that's cool that you just showed me how you got that picture, but imagine having to set up that whole rig and do everything right. It's not easy work. So it seems like you guys have yeah, go for everyone.

Well, no, I think it's important that you mentioned that you asked about your scenario here was, what if I'm starting a brand? And now you're talking about me setting that myself up. But I think it's important to talk as well about what if I'm already a big brand and I go into Suna, right? Like, I'm looking to scale. I have hundreds of SKUs. What's that scenario like, what is the alternative for those companies? And what does that experience look like in Suna for, like, 5100 million dollar brands or so?

Sure. And we work with a lot of those big brands, right? Because scaling creativity is almost just as hard as doing initial creativity. And it's for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, right? You've got 50 SKUs. Each one of them need different images. And this is where our integration layer really comes into play, because being able to integrate our technology with your brand's infrastructure allows us to do really novel things. So one of the things in our product that we don't talk about that much publicly, but is an awesome feature for large brands is something called the product catalog. And what it does is it allows us to suck in all your inventory and see what do you need images for? And then you can order images according to every single item in your product inventory that's missing content or that you want to change content. So that's a perfect example of when you're scaling content, being able to become integrated then with the virtual Photoshoot experience allows to make ordering easier. It allows teams to work together so as soon as a multi seat system where large teams of people can collaborate on photo shoots and also attend them together. And then the other thing that I think is just really novel about when you're scaling your content is scaling your professional services. You're going to need models that are coming in a staggered way and you don't want the same model for every single image. And so being able to add up to 20 models to a photo shoot and then know that it's going to be intelligently, organized. So that we're doing 2 hours with Melissa, then 2 hours with James, then 2 hours with Dominique, and it goes through the flow. Building software to make that possible, to schedule that seamlessly has been a huge part of the lift of this business, but it's what makes creativity both accessible at the low end and then scalable at the high end.

The next thing I want to talk to you guys about is now like Trend and Sooner. Right. Automatically I start to see the synergies because it seems like Sooner built a network that was really predicated on being more high touch. You've got the studio component, you've got all these processes built to generate that type of content. Whereas Trend and Ramon, I've worked with Trend to get content done myself. It seems like it's more distributed. So it seems like just talk me through the acquisition. How did you guys think about it? I'm initially already starting to see a whole bunch of synergies in blending. Now what you have with Suna and the distributed nature of Trend. Yeah. So how did it all come together and how do you guys think about it from a business?

I don't know if Ramon has even heard me explain this thinking.

So it's week one.

Yeah. See what we think.

Yeah.

Let me start with this. So one of our core philosophies at Santa is that we are ecommerce platform agnostic, meaning we do not align ourselves with any one platform or any one tool. We don't say we're a shopify app or an Amazon seller central tool. We see ourselves as completely agnostic. So wherever a brand wants to sell and however they want to market their product, we want to be the right fit for producing content for them in those places. And one of the trends that we've been keeping our eye on is we really started to believe firmly that shopping is going to become a feature of everything we do on the Internet. I can even see shopping being a feature of this podcast where somebody just clicks add to cart about something we talked about. Right. And when you think about shopping becoming a feature of the Internet, that actually means that the kinds of content that you're going to need in order to successfully execute on that is even broader. You're going to need not just the great product and white images and the great campaign images and the awesome Instagram ad video and the cool TikTok video. You're also going to need user reviews. You're also going to need user generated content that features environments. You're going to need the travel Vlog. You're going to need so many types of content to successfully respond to where Ecommerce is going. So we had been really bullish on adding UGC to our platform in 2023, and we were actually doing the work to build the product ourselves. And then I had gotten to know Ramon a little bit, but once we spent some serious time together, I spent time with Ramon and Zach and realized, why on earth would I try to build this? They've already done it. They've already done an exceptional job. They've already thought through the problems. They've already seen the problems firsthand, and they've already seen what success looks like. And I can't say enough about, like, as a founder, I really want to be honest with myself about what I don't know. And what I don't know is how to build a UGC platform. And so we decided that once this opportunity came across our table, we would be silly not to look at it as a way for us to go faster, to partner with leaders in this space. And one of my personal philosophies as a human is it's just as important to me who I do things with as what I'm doing. And my relationship with my co founder has always been about, I love working with Haley. I would literally work on a tube sock company with Haley if she wanted to. I don't care what we're doing. I just want to hang out with Haley. And I kind of felt like Zack and Ramon also had that relationship, and we could relate on that level. And if the success that Haley and I have experienced together, if we could replicate that with Ramon and Zach, the four of us working on this product, I just felt like there would be tremendous opportunity to just explode what they have been able to do so far. And so I really think that the time will tell, but I'm very optimistic.

Yeah. Blaine has heard my pitch and thesis, and it's along the same lines of in order for brands to win from 2023 onwards, they need to be omnichannel, and the channels that they need to be present on are only increasing. And so the output of content that brands need to produce is growing at such a pace that brands can just not keep up. And so all of these are different sort of systems for generating content. Like you said, the brand that needs the Ecom photography is the same brand that needs the TikTok video. Completely different system. And you also don't want all of your content to be the same across all channels because that's boring. And so for us, what Blaine mentioned earlier of, okay, I don't want to have to do that whole Rig set up Myself. Well, okay, a Creator Can do it for you, but what about when you Want to Get serious about it as a brand? You also don't want to manage 300 Creators doing this. And if you do, it better be a really good system for how you're doing it. So you can scale that and it's Not A Time suck for Brands. And So we felt like we did that first Layer well. However, UGC in the creator content space needs a lot more professionalism and understanding of the creative industry. And that's something that Liz and the Suna team had. And so for that reason, it made a lot of sense for us. And I feel really excited about just seeing this be taken to a new level because I think that this continues to build the moats for the one company that is going to win the creative space, which is the one destination for any kind of creative and that is going to be very hard for any incumbent to try to start from scratch.

Yeah, I think they're really interesting here. And this is something that Liz, that Even Ramon Had pointed out to me, that a lot of people don't pick up on, is Just Like the Nuance within Creative. And clearly I can see that with Suna. So when you hear the term creative, you're like, oh, product photography. It's the same thing as influencer. It's the same thing as UGC. But what people Don't Understand is the systems to Make that stuff happen and the type of Creative that sits under the broader Umbrella of Creative, they're all different Processes and they're all Different Things, right? Like even Ramon, when you say UGC, UGC is different than an influencer platform. And Then all these people are just like, oh, isn't it the same thing as an influencer? It's like no, it's different. Right. So I think if you guys have the thesis that brands need to be omnichannel, content is everywhere. Content is like The Lifeblood Of Brands and being able to meet their audience on the Internet, well, Then you need to have all those systems and processes and people know how to run those processes in Place or even Expose them to New audiences.

Well in what you can't not to sort of fast forward too far, but I think what we have seen. Let's take another creative company that is publicly traded and very successful. Adobe. What has Adobe done really well, Adobe has taken a professional category and created software and tools for anyone to be able to create content in the post production components of the content business. And Then you've got A company like Canva that enters the market and Says, Cool, we love all that, but we're going to make it browser Based and we're going to hit the easy button for you so you don't have to think so hard. I kind of think about the creative space of the actual content generation very similarly. There were a lot of companies out there, big agencies, big billion dollar agencies that were sort of letting you do this in a very custom way, very slow, but you can get it done, but you had to have sort of a professional environment. I think there needs to be a canva for the actual content generation and that is hitting the easy button on the content creation piece. And I think we are really well positioned to do that now, especially with the opposition of trend. And I know there will be even more opportunities for us to expand that vision even further.

I love that. I love the whole easy button analogy because like you were saying, if you're doing things one off or you're working directly with a singular UGC creator or trying to direct your own photo shoot where you have to do all those different components, it's not easy. You can do it and you can get as granular as you want, but that's not an easy process to manage by any means. Right? So I think that's a really good analogy. What were you going to say, Roman?

No, I think what most people listening might be thinking is, well, isn't that what AI generated content is supposed to do? So listening back on this conversation, there's a lot of elements that hit the mark here that people overlook, that don't understand creative. Like Suna turns the brand owner or the person creating the content and puts them in the director's seat. Because brands ultimately want control, right? And so they are involved in the experience, they have a say, they have a voice and they have control. And so I think that's some of the key elements that AI might be missing. But I'm curious on your take on can I just generate a content? Isn't that the new easy button?

For sure. If you want like a really crappy picture that is going to compete with stock content, for sure. I don't think that AI in any way, shape or form isn't an easy button. It is, but I think I sort of approach it this way. Brands don't want to all look the same, brands don't all want to sound the same. And there's going to be a lot of places where AI is just going to create a lot of the same. One way to think about this is they are data sets. And data sets represent what the most common themes are and what the most common information is in a data set. And it can be a whole new type of blending where we just see brands all doing AI generated stuff, AI generated copy, AI generated emails, AI generated images, AI videos. But we all remember, I think, as direct to consumer people a period between 2016 and 2020 where every brand kind of looked the same, everybody was copying sort of the same aesthetics. And then we had sort of a renaissance of everybody's going to kind of determine their own identity, their own vision, their own storytelling in the world. And I truly believe, actually, in that creative spirit, the diversification of what we're doing, the individual details that make a brand special. And I think that AI can actually be a companion to ensuring that creativity can scale even more. One of the things that I really think is in trouble is stock content. But I don't think highly specific, storytelling oriented, brand oriented, campaign oriented content is in trouble because I candidly think that human beings want to be part of that process. They want to make sure they're controlling the tiny details. They want to be involved in being in the director's seat. As you mentioned, Anne doesn't put us in the director's seat. It just sort of says, well, here's what everybody mostly thinks this idea is. Is that what you think it is? And that's not fun, that's not interesting, and honestly, it's not that creative. And so I try to think about, where can we use AI in our business to make people feel more creative, to expand the potential of their creative and have it almost function as, like, another person on the crew that is supporting that creative direction, instead of thinking about it as a replacement of the entire process. And you know what? If I'm wrong, one of the things that I think you have to decide as a founder is, like, I'm okay with being wrong, and I don't want to run a company that looks differently. And I think we have to be brave as founders in acknowledging that and saying, like, listen, if all of society has decided that creativity is dead, and we all want to look at hyper imaginative images of the world generated by AI for the rest of time, then that's a world that other people can go participate in. I think I'll go, like, grow yams or something, because I don't want to do that. That's just not what I want to do with my life. So I hope I'm right. I believe I am. But time will tell.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And because I've actually sat in the director chair trying to get AI to do what I needed to do, obviously, technology improves quickly. But I think another thing for brands, kind of like you said, they want easy button and they want direction and they want quality. And with AI, especially now, it's like you really have to get in there and you really have to work it hard. And at the end of the day, you're still not getting quite what you want. And a lot of times, even at the agency level, the reason agencies tend to work so well for brands is because they don't want to do it they want to be able to have a little bit of direction, but kind of get it off their plate so you guys are able to handle it. And I think what Suna and Trend and you guys coming together, what you're able to deliver is exactly that, is being able to deliver the asset that they want, have the creative direction involved. And then, like you said, even in a worst case scenario, as AI gets commoditized in the space, you're already the company that people trust for generating creative. You can work that into your workflows to help augment not only your creators, but the end output. And so I think that's what was that, Ramon?

We tested a little bit of AI stuff with brands, and it was because I was having conversations with brands, but I couldn't get the answer of, have you tried to do it? Have you tried to do it yourself? And so we kind of give them the power to try and doing it themselves because brands, they don't know before they start the journey of creating the content that they want to be in the director's seat, that they want that much control and they don't know. Ultimately, you generate content to generate sales, which content performs on context. And so there's not going to be any model LLM model that understands the Kayaking industry and can generate that authentic content that could expose you to a new audience or make that content that is going to resonate and perform. Today, I was listening to a podcast of my first million this morning with Rob Derdick, this supplement brand that they spent a few million dollars, like six years trying to make the business grow. And it only took off when Huberman promoted it on the podcast. And it went from nothing to like 20 million plus. And it's because the authenticity there. And so it's not always volume of output, it's how well it can resonate. And so if you can unlock both of those, I think we're onto something big. And hopefully that's what we can do.

And ultimately, AI is artificial. It's artificial. And what I think Trend as a business model proved is people actually want authentic. It is not authentic intelligence. It is artificial intelligence. I also want to point out that at the end of the day, the three of us, when we unwind and we maybe hop on TikTok or hop on YouTube or go on Netflix, we feel there's something deeply human about the connection that we feel with content, with storytelling, with performance. And you can create a song that kind of sounds like Drake or you can create a movie that kind of looks like a Norafron movie, but it isn't their movie. And I think one of the things that a lot of people are really not taking into consideration is what goes into these models is really important contributions by human beings to our creative and human experience. And I find it really disingenuous and honestly kind of sad that we are all so willing to just hand over the idea that human beings have anything to contribute to culture at all and just go, well, I guess the computers will create our culture now. I don't get that. I'm not interested in a universe that functions like that. I want to know about Ramon's life. I want to talk to the two of you. I don't want to talk to a computer. At least I don't right now. I want to really, as a person and as a leader, just constantly remind people that, yes, it's cool, yes, it's interesting, but when you really think about what matters to you as a person, I'm going to guess it's the human parts of your life, not necessarily the artificial parts of your life.

And your soul is aware. You know that deep down. So I couldn't imagine watching Netflix. That was all AI generated. Okay, so as we get towards the end here, what is the future of Soona? What does that look like?

We want to be the single place for creating content online, and we continue to look forward to providing that for brands in new and interesting ways. With this acquisition of Trend, I really think it's just that simple.

Amazing. And Liz, for our listeners that are maybe interested in checking out a little bit more about Suna connecting with you, where can we find you online? And then yourself? Are you on LinkedIn? Are you on Twitter? You're on everything. I know you said you're on YouTube and TikTok, literally on everything.

So, yeah, absolutely. Please just go to Suna co to learn more about Suna. If you want to learn about Suna and Trend working together, go to Suna co trend. And if you want to follow us, we are at Soona Studios on literally every single thing. And I am at Liz georgie G-I-O-R-G-I on all the things I hope you will come have conversations with me and maybe send me your offensive Vincent van Gogh's created by AI. At which point I will remind you that the AI only created that horrible image because Vincent Vancouver was alive and well and created amazing art at one point in time.

So.

How Matt? Leave what I have.

Love it.