Hey Y Combinator!

This demonstrates Creek in like... 5 minutes!

Overview

There are 5 basic components.

  1. Creek Stories: Studio-quality videos for anyone. (This is the big idea, and why I'm applying to YC.)

  2. Creek Recording System: A simple "cardboard studio" that improves recordings for Creek Stories.

  3. Creek Studio: Our SaaS that automates studios – and will allow people to book recording sessions for Creek Stories. (Live demo here)

  4. Creek Broadcaster: A device that reduces the friction to install Creek at nonprofit radio stations – the initial set of friendly studios that will record people.

  5. Creek.org: The public-facing organization that drives Creek forward.


COVID-19 and Creek — Two ways that Creek could assist:

  1. Helping people record nice-looking videos of themselves in their own home, rather than in a studio.

  2. Allowing radio stations to control their studios remotely.

See the red text below.


Creek Stories

View mock-up here: https://stories.creek.org – or click this photo:

Creek Stories is a way to answer these questions:

  • What if anyone could get their own short documentary?
  • How would they use it?
  • How could it help them?

Creek Stories is the opposite of Facebook Stories:  It's a way for anyone to get their own long-form, studio-quality videos for marketing or personal use – and they are preserved for decades, rather than for 24 hours.

It is especially for "non-technical" or "non-artistic" people. Creek can reach the millions of people who wouldn't otherwise create recordings of themselves.

Some possible uses:

  1. Small business owners creating advertising videos.
  2. Senior citizens preserving their stories.
  3. Nonprofits describing their mission.

Creek for Enterprise: Stories Wanted

This is how Creek Stories can be an enterprise product.

(View the mock-up above, and scroll down to Stories Wanted.)

Creek can give brands a way to create authentic marketing material, while simultaneously doing something good – helping people tell their stories.

  1. Imagine a brand like Nike sponsoring 100 stories – authentic, personal stories of people talking about sports, or their childhood pair of Nike shoes.
  2. Creek would provide the marketplace (an index of Stories Wanted) and the infrastructure of studios to create these videos at scale – recording people wherever they are.
  3. People who are interested in telling their Nike-related stories will visit a local studio and get recorded.
  4. Creek filters down to the best stories, leaving out low-quality ones.
  5. We edit the videos so that each one looks consistent.
  6. Nike gets a gallery of these stories, which they can post on Twitter, etc.
  7. Creek gets promoted, too – through "Creek.org" logos on the gallery.

Creek Recording System

(The "Cardboard Studio")

It's like Google Cardboard – but for building an instant video-recording studio for Creek Stories.

It can be used by studios, or shipped directly to some users – allowing people to record themselves at home or work.

Below – that's my goofy face in the "interviewer" position, acting as "story coach" to help a hypothetical Creek user tell their story.

Eventually, this system will allow us to add machine learning to catch video/audio issues in real time – since the main camera will be a smartphone.

COVID-19 and Creek — By shipping this to users at home, we can remotely help them record nice-looking videos of themselves. This could help small business owners create videos to sell their products from home.

Creek Studio

This is what gives us a path to getting the first 1000+ of those nonprofit/indie radio stations to use Creek.

Creek Studio is a CMS (like Ghost) but for creating podcasts, automating scheduled audio (i.e. running radio stations on autopilot), and managing media libraries.

The underlying music automation code is already playing music inside 200+ US restaurants right now. It will soon automate radio stations as part of the Creek Studio – freeing them up to record people in their local areas.

It's a standalone SaaS platform that we sell for $50-$100/mo, and so it provides monthly recurring revenue for Creek.

Right now, it supports audio, and we'll be adding support for video – i.e. managing the recorded videos of people from Creek Stories.

Lastly, studios can make certain 1-or-2-hour schedule blocks into available session times for Creek Stories.

COVID-19 and Creek — Creek Studio will allow radio stations to run their studios remotely, or allow each DJ to publish their audio from home (nonprofit stations often have 30+ DJs who need to come to the studio each week). Hundreds of small stations are struggling with this right now.

Creek Broadcaster

The Creek Broadcaster is a small hardware device that provides a complete software and hardware stack for nonprofit/indie radio stations – and there's about 3000 of these stations in the US and Canada.

Its bigger purpose is get Creek installed quicker at radio stations – giving us a strong foothold on an initial set of studios. (Then, we'll expand into the broader field of non-radio studios.)

That's me in the photo – after digging around under a table, and plugging in the cables – for the very first Creek Broadcaster!

I installed it at an FM radio station inside a youth center in Oroville, CA. It's streaming their audio live, and it will soon automate their entire radio station.

Shhh, just between us – it's actually a mini-PC that I bought on Amazon, and I added a vinyl logo sticker that I created on StickerMule.

Creek.org

Similar to Mozilla.org – Creek.org will move Creek forward as a company.

Creek.org will benefit Creek in these areas:

  • Marketing: Creek.org will get shared organically on social media simply by doing something important – recording people's stories. It will attract broad consumer interest, rather than just niche "studio" and "radio" industry people.
  • Donations: It will get free resources, like CDN usage (e.g. CloudFlare). This will help cover bandwidth costs when certain stories become viral.
  • Enterprise: It will augment our enterprise version of Creek (as explained above). Since corporations sponsor Creek to record specific types of stories, a "dot-org" will help garner the trust needed to record people's personal stories in the service of these corporations.
  • Long-term Archiving: Similar to Archive.org – Creek.org could be the enduring entity tasked with maintaining archives for decades.

Lastly, I may also follow Mozilla's corporate structure – if it doesn't break too many things. That would mean incorporating the Creek Foundation as a 501(c)(3) and Creek Inc. as a regular C-corp.