What Could Cameo Do Next?

Cameo recently became a Unicorn when they raised their $100 million Series C (March 2021) . Inspired by Swyx’s Bull Case for Temporal , I was thinking about what directions Cameo might take to continue growing & justify such a huge valuation.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the company other than admiration, so this is neither investment advice nor inside information, just ideas.

Get more people in on the action 🔗︎

Cameo often has a steep price tag, and it makes it hard to engage with it if you aren’t ready to drop a stack - there isn’t a lot you can do other than search for people to pay a lot of money to. Consumers may also be interested in non-standard celebrities who aren’t on the platform

Goal 🔗︎

allow more people to get in on the action with Cameo.

Why? 🔗︎

Turning non-consumers into consumers; if it’s currently inaccessible, the brand is forgettable. Get them involved, even if it doesn’t pull in capital right off the bat.

How? 🔗︎

• Expand the Cameo Creator Middle Class : Unlock smaller creators - I want access to my local weatherman or small town celebrity more than I want to talk to Bruce Willis.
• AMA: Have a forum where people can upvote questions to be asked, similar to AMAs, or pay to get them bumped. Allows people with less capital to not be excluded entirely, it’s like Pay to Win video games. Reddit AMAs with celebrities were incredibly popular when they were done well.
• Personalized SMS: Cameo should do texting, creators set a drop of 100 people can directly text them each month. As it narrows, price goes up. Combines Onlyfans, drop culture, and direct personal connection that SMS provides. Already have some infrastructure for limiting number of tickets to the Creator Calls.
  • This avoids creator burnout from too many messages and creates scarcity which is good for hype and drop culture.
  • Theoretically these texting opportunities could act like sneakers, with the drop culture and trading around. People able to snag them can resell, but also thats somewhat of a bad side of the maker with Cameo acting as a source of truth for who currently owns it. Avoids some issues of swelling digital goods with trust.
  • Makes Cameo more accessible, even in markets that don’t have the ubiquitous cheap data plans. Everywhere has celebrities of some degree even if the average person isn’t crazy wealthy. SMS is lowest barrier to access cuz even a flip phone can do it.
  • Have to be careful with how they roll this out. When Ashton Kutcher put out a number people could text, a lot of people were frustrated because they thought it was a personal invite and not just a way to mass market direct to people’s phones. The consumer expectation was different than Ashton’s/the business.

Random Thoughts 🔗︎

A few smaller things I noticed while playing with the platform.

• Use demand to entice creators: If a person isn’t showing up in search, show an option to Request they join Cameo. Once some critical threshold has been met, that’s a signal for the Cameo sales/marketing team to invest the effort to get that person on the platform, and with concrete requests to back it up. “X number of people have want YOU on Cameo/You could make $Y/month based on the outreach we’ve seen.” This can tie into getting small & large personalities onto the platform.
• Expand the charity side of things: I’m not sure what direction to go here, but it’s not featured anywhere and I stumbled onto a charity cameo on accident. It was just a small tag in the corner. For me personally, the money going to charity would actually make me consider getting one, and I’m a person that otherwise has no interest in most celebrities.
  • Making a section for it on the homepage, maybe marketing those specifically, kinda falls into the vein of the giant telethons and money raising streams that happen. Could do something with 24 hours, everything submitted goes to charity kinda like a stream. I believe this would build the reputation of the brand significantly as a platform that’s not just for rich people with disposable income.