Hogan Shrum 0:17

For sure. So, the short version of the story, I suppose, is, you know, when I was when I was young and coming out of high school, I'd always wanted to be in film. So, I went to film school, did that, and pretty quickly realized I couldn't stomach the idea of waiting 10 years or longer to potentially make money. So, I pivoted pretty quickly, got an MBA, and combined those two into an advertising career, which I've been doing for 20 years. And as you mentioned on the experiential marketing side, as well as the content side.

And through that, you know, about last year, met my co-founder. And I'd always been thinking, especially over the last three years, like how do I integrate AI into my business? And you know, I'd had a few different ideas and when I met my co-founder, he's always been at the forefront of all things AI. Spent a lot of time at Apple and global product development. And he had created something for himself where he was telling bedtime stories to his kids. I also have two young boys and he'd like to make them up instead of reading books and his kids would start contributing and he would record them on his phone for memories, right?

And his wife had been hearing these stories. She's like, "You know, they make those AI books. You should make these stories into a book." And he's like, "Well, that's boring. That's already been done." and he nerded out, if you will, on all things content creation, stitching tools together and figured out a way to build his own tool where he could upload these audio recordings of his stories and turn them into fully produced animated cartoons. He showed me that and I was blown away and I instantly realized I'm like, "This is it." you know, especially having been in content and been on the agency side for so long.

I'd certainly been using AI for the last two or three years, whether that's, you know, renderings, creative support, etc. But the biggest problem I think me and most people have is, you know, AI is still very AI, in that, you know, I can put in an idea, I can give it some prompts, but in the end, if I'm looking for an image or a video, I'm pretty limited on what I can do as far as directing and creative control. It's solely based on how good I am at prompting. And even then, it's like cross your fingers, hope it gets it right, and if it doesn't, you just retry and until you do, right?

And so when I saw what he'd built, I was like, do you think we could build this where anyone could use this? You don't have to have AI prompting expertise. You don't have to, you know, even be a full-blown storyteller, right? If someone just has an idea, something in their imagination, can we build a platform that helps them bring it to life in terms of animation while retaining creative control? Because that's the biggest miss right now is, you know, I don't have any way to like iterate on an idea like being in the agency being a creative, right?

The idea starts somewhere, but you know, as you build it, as you see it come to life, you change it. It gives you more ideas. It's a process, right? And it can be a lot of fun, but AI kind of took that out of it. And so that's what we set out to build in December of last year and spent four months doing that and now we have it and that's what it's built for. And the other piece of it was, you know, my co-founder has two sisters that are artists.

One of them is an animator. I've spent 20 years in the agency space working with designers, artists, creatives. So I understand why they hate AI. It takes a lot of work away from them because it's not being used ethically in the creative space. So we decided well let's tackle that problem too and we launched with PIPPA our artist platform with the goal being that all of the styles you use in PIPPA to create your animations are artist created and they get paid every time you use it. So our goal is not to deal, so to speak, in AI slop and not to deal in AI art theft, but to actually flip the switch and empower artists to use a platform that can create another stream of income, another way to promote their work and benefit from the world that AI has brought to us.

Hogan Shrum 5:36

Sure. So we've recently basically partnered with ByteDance to have exclusive access to things like Seedance 2.5 and basically utilizing on our platform only the leading technology that has gotten quite good at character consistency for example. We've also built it into the platform. So in our platform you have the ability like many right to create your custom characters but it helps you create a library as well. So, let's say you're a creator that wants to create a series and you've created your characters, you can save them and then utilize them across series so they appear consistently throughout.

And the big challenge with consistency is now is again going back to one of those big barriers to entry even in the past two years has been yes, these tools exist, but they really only exist in two ways. And the way that you get the best produced cartoon is you have to be a real expert prompter. You know what I mean? Like going into Midjourney or using Higgsfield, you yes, you have access to Seedance, but you have to write three paragraphs for a 10 second clip. And if you're not an expert hitting on every detail, make sure you avoid any ambiguity for the AI.

The AI is always going to fill in ambiguity, right, with its own like whatever pieces are missing, it will fill them in without your permission. And so the thing we spent the longest time doing was how do we create a system that interprets a person's own voice, instructions, what have you, into an optimized prompt for the models that we're using, in particular Seedance. So tons and tons of testing have gotten this to a place where you can utilize your own words to describe what you want to happen and it will create an optimized prompt for Seedance to ensure consistency across characters, voices, action, etc.

That's what's so cool about it and that's part of that creative control which is, you know, you create it gets you to your storyboard, you can open a specific, say 10-second scene, it will show you the prompt that it's developed. If you think anything's missing, you can give it instructions in your own words. Or if you're an AI person, you can go in there and try and edit the prompt and then you can run it to see how it works. If it doesn't work, you can tell the system what went wrong again in your own words and it will fix the prompt to fix the problem.

So the idea is to reduce that barrier of you don't have to be an AI prompting expert. We've got that covered. Just tell the system what you want to happen as a director or just from your imagination and it will do it.

Hogan Shrum 8:28

For sure. Yeah. So that's the other problem, right? Is you think you see some of these super professional videos that have been made, you know, they've actually spent quite a bit of money, hundreds of different reanimations and iterations to get every single detail right because they're starting from scratch. They're digging in and having to do all this prompting work. So, the tokens add up. And with our, you know, I think on average right now, our data shows that we're getting an average of two to three regenerations, which comparatively speaking is very low.

So, how does that translate into tokens in terms of the cost to the user? You know, our $15 a month plan, for example, is easily going to get you five to seven minutes of fully produced animation that's that includes reanimations, re-renders, and getting it right.

Hogan Shrum 9:25

Yeah. You know, obviously being an agency person, it's been one of those things where that's been a pretty popular, this has been a pretty popular tool in the agency space, right? Because again, even the barriers to entry for content creation studios or agencies has still been very high. But now that you can create these both when you're testing pretty cheaply and then when you're ready to switch over to the pro model for example we see a lot of agencies and brands frankly taking this up as potential content creation engines, advertising creation engines etc.

And then a huge push which we had a hypothesis about this but and it's so cool to see it happening but education so like teachers especially for you know preschool elementary we're seeing a lot of education users both online and IRL schools using it to enhance their lessons create different animations around lesson plans and things like that. But we're also already starting to see it being used as something that can be handed off to the kids. So instead of writing a little one-page paragraph on what you learned about the American Revolution, for example, it's, hey, let's make a 30 second animation on something you learn from this.

And it creates this more interactive, fun way of learning for kids. And that side of the business seems to be taking off even faster than we anticipated.

Hogan Shrum 12:13

Exactly. Exactly. And I've already I can tell you having young kids and being able to do this is really cool. Like I've made a couple videos that I've started a series that tries to teach kids about like their bodies and how it works. And so basically just creating think of Inside Out, but you can turn any cell or any part of your body into a character. Made one that explains how viruses work when they get a cold. And after one viewing of this video, all they can talk about is white blood cells and they fight viruses.

And it's like, just try to explain that to a kid in a teaching setting and like that'll take forever but my four-year-old knows about viruses and how white blood cells fight viruses like that is crazy.

Hogan Shrum 13:09

Yeah. So, we have a PIPPA channel on the site that functions very similar to a YouTube and that's also a big component of where we see this going long term is you brought up YouTube is a great example. YouTube in many ways created a paradigm shift in both music and content creation from a video perspective, right? Like that democratized in some ways movie and television making because the vast majority of people now consume their content in shorter form on YouTube, not always from well-funded producers and creators. And so what it did was it created this sort of larger pool of imagination, content ideas, etc.

The cream still rises to the top, right? But think of all the people. Think of Justin Bieber came out of YouTube. Was not around singing. Would he have been discovered without a YouTube, without a SoundCloud, without all of these ways to distribute his music? No. So we see PIPPA as the same thing for animation. If we can unlock and create an opportunity for anybody to bring their ideas to life in the form of animation is even more limitless than YouTube. YouTube, you're still limited to video, so you're limited to reality and what you can capture in reality.

With animation, there is no limit to that. And so imagine a world where all these people can now create these ideas from an animation and storytelling perspective, what that could open up as far as opportunities for creators in the future.

Hogan Shrum 15:30

Sure. So there's a lot to that, right? And there's also only so much you can do. Look, our idea here is rooted in we want to make this accessible to everyone. Now, will the majority of people over time that use this probably not create the best content? Sure. You know, one other angle to this is that's also the reason it was so important that we enabled as much creative control throughout the process as possible. Because the more time, for example, that I spend on these videos, the less it feels like AI.

Why? Because the human is involved in the creative process. The more the human being is taken out of that process, the more AI it's going to be. And you alluded to it, the human brain and eyes, we're going to pick up on something that's AI, right? It's not going to feel human. It's going to feel like a machine created it. And so the more creative control we can enable prevents that. It's also why we're sticking to animation. We don't offer like photorealistic rendering and animation capabilities because we also don't want to be associated with creating something that could be passed off as real when it's not or used to spread information, misinformation, etc.

Right? Like an animation is clearly not real, right? We've crossed the barrier there. And then obviously we have a lot of protections in place in terms of IP protection, content protection on what can and cannot be created in the platform. In order to again prevent things like trying to rip off other animated characters or pass something off as Disney, for example. All of these things are built in. And so you know we've put so many of these guardrails in. Now, is that going to stop someone from being lazy and created create bad AI animated content and put it out there? Sure, it's not. But again, the cream still rises to the top.

Hogan Shrum 18:07

Yeah. And it's not even limited to filmmakers. I think that's the most exciting part, right? Because we're creating styles that are basically based off of any kind of visual art. So you could be a painter and a graphic designer, a sketch artist. You could be you know another group that's been really interested in PIPPA and started using are children's book authors, right? A lot of them write their stories and illustrate themselves. They can literally take their books with the story and turn those images in that book into a cartoon version of it.

And they're not animators and they're like this is incredible. Like this is a new way for people to consume my work. On the film making side, you know, we're in talks right now raising money and the most interested parties are those from Hollywood because they have not been able to find a tool that will empower creators in that space to develop their ideas while having creative control. And so, it's actually been received very positively from all of these spaces because finally there's a an opportunity for me to utilize this in a way that benefits me, helps me maintain my creative voice.

And now I can just do all of this stuff faster. I can do it more efficiently. And I don't have to go off and train myself for two years on being an expert in AI. I can still use my process, my creative process in my own way to make this work. And then the monetization piece is if an artist decides to put their art on the platform, one, they go through a pretty extensive vetting process. We make sure a it wasn't AI created imagery, that they own it, that they have the ability to license it, and when they pass all those tests, if they choose to make it public, anytime a user on PIPPA uses that style for image rendering and animation, including revisions, they get a big chunk of the profit that from those tokens. So, it's a constant earning stream for them.

Hogan Shrum 20:40

So, there's a few ways. One, regardless of whether it's used or not, like someone could create a bunch of content and then abandon the project and never export it, but the artist still gets paid because we our model is a monthly subscription model. You know, we have 15, 50 bucks, etc. That covers all of the costs associated with this and then some. So any of the profits that we make on the tokens that are used from artist styles go to the artists themselves. And so that is an ongoing stream and as that PIPPA channel grows, right?

Right now we're still early stage. It's not like we have an audience that could be selling a lot of advertising or monetizing content on this specific channel, but as it grows and does that any monetized content used by artists will receive their they'll receive their licensing fees. So it creates an actual ecosystem in marketplace where any artist or creative who's developed something a visual style can earn continual perpetual licensing revenue from it.

Hogan Shrum 22:09

I mean, honestly, the vast majority of how we use AI to promote the business is creating great content with it. And you know, we have a robust content team that's, you know, working on different categories of content, right? One of the things we're having a lot of success with is looking at, say, old memes or vines from forever ago that went viral and then recreating them in fun animation styles that make it new and interesting and fun. That's been hugely popular. And what we're seeing is the more variety of quality content that we put out there that definitely feels different than any other AI animation you've seen where it really does feel like, oh, this is a creative idea.

This was definitely created by a person that people tend to follow it. They see what can be created and then want to try it out for themselves. Obviously on the back end there's other things we're using AI for. So truth be told, this company was built with AI. We hit this perfect timing where Codex, Claude Code and all of these things have taken over the market over the last six to eight months, right? And in order for those companies to do it, they basically opened it up for everyone. That is now changing.

But we literally built this from scratch. My co-founder built this himself 16 to 17 hours a day using AI to build this from the ground up from scratch utilizing key learnings from all of the platforms audio video you name it. So the platform itself was built using AI and is still optimized along with an engineering team at this point to constantly check and monitor and improve optimize etc. And then of course utilizing AI for all the data that we have on our back end in terms of how people are using how can we make this experience better all of it.

Hogan Shrum 24:25

We are there As people continue to use PIPPA I can tell you this right now you could likely produce call it a 90-minute animated film within PIPPA for under $1,000.

Hogan Shrum 24:43

Well, distribution will always be sort of the big push. So, I go back to what we were talking about earlier, like you think about, you know, go back 10 or 20 years, you know, how many animated movies came out a year? Three. Right. Because their average cost is $250 million plus marketing. And so, again, going back to that analogy with the music industry and what happened when Napster came out, for example, and then the streaming world changed everything. There are still Taylor Swifts of the world. There are still the Justin Biebers of the world.

But they came from different places. So, combine what it used to be like and look at it now. If there are all these people that can now be producing say 1 hour, 90 minute, 2-hour animated films, but they don't have the distribution, but the idea is right, people are starting to consume it. Just like in those cases, what's to stop a Disney, a DreamWorks from saying, "Hey, Mr. Creator, we want to buy this and distribute it and we want to give you a deal to create more of these." I it is exactly the same.

So just like on YouTube, people could create this sort of low-budget content, but then the idea itself and the popularity and how it resonated with their network virality, if you will, turned it into a pop culture phenomenon.

Hogan Shrum 27:13

Yeah. And I my co-founder I've been telling him and we agree one of the dreams is that just like you have a YouTube app or a Twitch app on your TV that there's a PIPPA app and that's where people go for all animation and eventually it is a subscriber-based streaming service that pays the artists associated with the work that's been created on PIPPA based on streams based on everything. So think of it as a Spotify model. The more popular the content is, the more it gets promoted, the more the revenue goes to the artists that helped these creators create it.

Hogan Shrum 28:04

Yeah. So the idea behind this is twofold. One you know the cold start problem that any business has at the beginning is you know we have this artist platform we're onboarding artists but in order for people to try and use it we have to use AI based designs and art and so we didn't want to have that go against our mission. So the initial idea was well let's create a foundation that takes the profits from those and reinvests it in the development of the arts. And then also a portion of that foundation a pool is created for artists that are on the platform so that even if their art isn't being used and someone uses in the early stages of our company these AI styles that money is divided up amongst the artists on the platform.

So even if AI is being used, artists still get a chunk of that money. But really the idea was we want this to be to a for this AI to then fuel interest and pursuit of visual arts which could theoretically lead to more users creating their ideas on PIPPA, right? Which not for monetization purposes, but again to start creating that pool of creative ideas, content, etc. To give all of these people more opportunity to have their work recognized and elevated. And so the idea was first, oh, do we partner with a nonprofit, specific nonprofit, but the more we talked to advisers, it was it's really hard to find nonprofits where you know for sure where your money's going.

And so we thought of it, not to say we're anywhere near this, but it's like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The reason they created that is they wanted control and to understand where these philanthropic efforts were going and to feel confident that it was being used in the right way. And so that was our feeling as well is there's so many organizations out there that support the arts, but how are they doing it? You know, how do we how do we know this is having the impact it can have?

So our idea was okay well let's create a foundation and find the right partners that we can change if we feel it's not being used and really have an active role in where this philanthropic investment is going.

Hogan Shrum 30:49

Yeah, you can sign up or look at us at gopippa.ai. That's G-O-P-I-P-P-A dot A-I. We also are have an app on the Apple Store and Google Play. So, Android and I sorry, iPhone native. I will say that, you know, when you start getting into content production, you're probably going to want to switch to the web app. Just for editing purposes and to have a bigger screen and all the tools, etc. But a great entry point is the app. And then I was going to say for your listeners, happy to offer a 25% discount on any paid plans that they choose if you just use the code GSM26, we will hook them up.

And now it is free to start. So you can get in there. You can try this out and see how it works for you and test everything that I've said here. Does it give me the creative control? But if you choose for a paid plan and you use that code, you'll get 25% off the any plan that you choose.