3 Things: Modern Endeavor, Pricing & Packaging Platform, Fertility Bot
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Modern Endeavor
Pricing & Packaging Platform
Fertility Bot
1. Modern Endeavor
Endeavor Group Holdings, formerly known as William Morris Endeavor or WME is one of the largest talent and media agencies in the US and the product of a merger between the Endeavor Talent Agency and the William Morris Agency in 2009. Endeavor represents artists across TV, movies, music, theater, sports, digital media, and publishing and also owns the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and Miss Universe. The William Morris Agency was founded all the way back in 1898 and represented the original Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. Both WMA and Endeavor Talent Agency made names for themselves in the Hollywood and sports arenas over the past few decades and the combined entity today represents some of the most well known celebrities in many disciplines from Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson to many of the top NFL players, tennis greats like Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic, and a plethora of the biggest names in movies and TV. After a series of failed attempts, the company finally went public in April 2021 and trades at an $11B market cap.
Talent agencies like Endeavor cater to the old crop of artists and the ways that those industries operated in the past. It was necessary to have a well-connected agent to help find clients work, negotiate deals on their behalf, and generally be the steward of their careers and public personas. In the modern age of TikTok, Instagram, blockchain-based rights platforms, and the creator economy with the ability to connect easily to fans on the internet, the concept of a talent agency needs to be reimagined. What used to be movie packaging will turn into modern collabs. Software can help find and facilitate opportunities for up and coming talent and also help with booking, scheduling, payments, royalties, and more. Modern “agents” need to be extremely social media savvy and understand how to help creators and artists navigate the content treadmill, new monetization platforms, and the modern talent landscape. Instead of negotiating deals on behalf of production studios and record labels, it’s all about innovative new revenue and placement opportunities. Instead of taking a percentage of a client’s booking price up front, it’s about helping them maximize their earnings continuously and in turn being rewarded for providing continuous value.
2. Pricing & Packaging Platform
At SignalFire, we spend a significant amount of time and resources on our platform which provides early-stage founders the knowledge, access, and data they need to go to market, find product-market-fit, and scale. Part of that platform includes a large bench of heavy-hitter advisors who work 1:1 with our founders. One surprising request that kept coming up over and over again was someone to help with pricing. We engaged a pricing expert (literally led pricing for LinkedIn and Salesforce) and he immediately became one of our most utilized advisors. For nearly every early stage company, figuring out how to appropriate price their product is a huge challenge and mostly a black box. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted as advising all B2B companies to “raise prices”, but founders often struggle to justify charging such high prices when they are embarrassed by the current version of their product (another famous Silicon Valley quote is Reid Hoffman’s “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late”). Then there is packaging. Which features are bundled in which tier? Where do you put the payment gate for a freemium/bottoms up/product-led-growth product?
Pricing and packaging have massive implications on a company’s growth, revenue, and margins. How a company thinks about pricing and packaging is also dependent on the GTM motion, industry, and product. While there are probably certain things that are bespoke to each company, I think a lot of determining how to price your product can be templatized or automated using technology and then augmented by human pricing specialists. A platform could ingest a bunch of information about the company including target buyers, competitive landscape, and a whole host of information about the product and GTM motion (plus any historical sales data). It could engage the company in a series of questions in an almost chat-bot like way and then come up with some pricing options. You’d then meet with a pricing specialist to help hone in on the perfect pricing and packaging strategy that could integrate with your CRM or other necessary tools. But, isn’t this just a one-time thing, you might ask? In my experience, companies change and revisit pricing VERY frequently. In addition, every time you launch a new product, version, bundle, package, etc it needs its own pricing and packaging so there is a good case to be made for why paying for a persistent solution makes sense.
3. Fertility Bot
For the last few years, venture capital dollars have been flowing into the fertility sector. This year, over $1B will be invested in companies helping people start or grow their families which is up 3x in only the last 4 years. As couples wait longer to get married and have children, paired with lifestyle and environmental factors, 1 out of every 7 couples will struggle to get pregnant. The majority of the dollars have gone to startups focused on IVF treatment, egg freezing, and ovulation tracking, many of which are sold to employers to offer as an employee benefit such as Carrot Fertility, Maven Clinic, or WINfertility. We are now also seeing home-based hormone testing, community-focused platforms, and more. And, it’s not just a female problem. In nearly 35% of infertility cases, there is a male component to the problem which has led to funding for startups like Legacy and Dadi which are focused on male infertility.
While solutions now abound to help couples start a family, the landscape is hard to navigate and when you are actively in the processes of trying to conceive, there are a million questions that will crop up. A simple text-based bot can act as an education, navigation, and product matching solution. The AI-based chatbot can help answer the common (and not so common) questions that people have on their fertility journey and suggest possible products and solutions that make sense. There can be an education component that provides a library of content to help make sense of a complicated, expensive, and lingo-ridden industry. The matchmaking piece will help match you with the right providers and products and help you leverage employer-provided or insurance-covered options. A community aspect will ensure that users are engaged, connected, and know that they are supported and not alone. Revenue could be generated as both a paid app where users pay a monthly fee for access as well as monetizing through affiliate revenue for referring to products and services. While the lifetime of a user might not be longer than a year (or maybe more), the price points for many of these services and products are such that you can monetize each user pretty well. There may also be adjacencies around navigating pregnancy and beyond (though this space is incredibly crowded) that you can tack on as well.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine