In this interview, Gabriel Isserlis, a serial-entrepreneur based in London, discusses his background and his mission to give creative people more time to be creative by using technology. Gabriel explains his transition from various fields such as music, filmmaking, and computer programming to building tech solutions for the creative sector. His initial project, Tutti, was an 'Airbnb for creative spaces.' This led to the creation of Super Scout, a subscription-based CRM software for location scouts in the film and TV industry, repurposing the technology from Tutti. He outlines his team's structure and his journey through capital raising, and talks about the importance of regular customer feedback. Gabriel also highlights the potential of expanding Super Scout’s GIS (geographic information system) to other industries beyond film and TV, describing a big future vision.
Gene: Hi everybody. Today I'm here talking with Gabriel Isserles from London. Gabriel's worked in film, TV, music, theater events, and in technology and computers. He's a multi - entrepreneur and on his website, it says his mission is to give creative people more time to create with technology, which is right up my alley. So thanks for taking the time to chat.
Gabriel Well, thank you for having me.
Gene: So why don't you, do a better job of introducing yourself than I did! Talk a little bit about the tech stuff that you've done so far and what you're focused on now.
Gabriel Yeah, sure. So the reason that I have a background in all of those things is kind of one, I have ADD, but then also I grew up in a family of musicians and I kind of tinkered with the idea of being a musician, but I chose the same instrument as my dad, and he's well known in his field, so didn't want to follow that.
Then I went to university, and I studied filmmaking to start with, and I studied computer programming, and I love both of those. I have so much appreciation for the people who managed to build careers in those, but both of them separately weren't really my thing.
However, I suddenly started coming up with ideas on how I could support the creative sector with technology. And I thought, you know what? I'm in a perfect place. I know all sorts of different fields. I'd also dabbled in, as you said, all of those other things. I'm in a perfect place to start building technology that gives creatives more time to create.
And the first idea is a company called Tutti. You can see the logo over my shoulder. It was essentially “Airbnb for creative spaces”. It started as a way to help musicians find and book amazing places for rehearsals. That's way too niche in a niche of a market, we realized in a few months, so we expanded to creative spaces.
You could book any place for music, theater, dance, film, and photography, and it could be someone's front living room, a church, a theater, a studio, whatever. We built this technology. It's a great. thing in theory, it's just very hard to be successful as a business because the business model is you get one off bookings, you're taking a very small commission, otherwise no one's going to pay you.
I still love it, but I realized that if I was to succeed in business, I needed to move on. And while I was trying to figure out what to do next, I was talking to a lot of customers of Tutti. And the main customer type that I was super excited about was location scouts in film and TV. These are the people who find the amazing backdrops that you see in the movies and shows that most people watch.
And I asked them, how do they manage, how do they find locations? And why don't they use Tutti more often? And their answer was really interesting. The people I spoke to first, they said, “I have my own database of locations that I've been building my entire career. And every single one of my colleagues has that as well. And so we look at our own database, every single location we ever research goes into that. Then we ask our colleagues, then we look online to people who do this professionally, and then we look at a site like Tutti. “ And I was like, Oh, OK, that database that you have personally must be really well organized.
And every single scout I spoke to smiled and was like, no, not really. They spend a lot of time trying to organize it. But the technology they need to organize it is not very good. In Europe, mostly people use Dropbox and other people use SmugMug, which is a photography portfolio website.
Neither technology is built for the sector and it's not really designed for the way of organizing locations that they would want to. So I was like, hang on a sec. I've built the technology that you need underneath Tutti. We've already built that technology. Could we repurpose Tutti’s, technology and build a new product for you?
That is - a subscription software, CRM style software for property for locations. And people were like, that sounds like a cool idea. Yeah, I would pay for that. I don't like paying for Dropbox. I would pay you instead. I got that enough times from, in about four months I spoke to about 400 people. I got that enough times, so I was like, okay, there's a business here. There's an opportunity here. Let's build this. And this year we have been building with about 20 global users who give us feedback on a weekly basis. They range from location scouts, location managers. We have a photographer director. We have a film school, and a few other people. And we're making sure we're building the right thing by talking to our users every week. And it's going really well.
Gene What you just described is such a wonderful textbook case of two particular things that I think every entrepreneur needs to pay attention to. One is, you discovered a real business need almost by accident, but you discovered it. Number two, then you went and validated it.
You went and talked to hundreds of people and you had a gut. Your gut said, you know what? There's a there, there, and people said the magic word. I would pay for that. And actually they're already paying for something that's inferior. So as an entrepreneur you, you jumped on this business need and it also was sort of relevant to something that you've already built.
So, and then the second big thing, which as an entrepreneur myself, that's done businesses, the idea of having regular customer feedback is absolutely something that I just can't emphasize enough. It is so smart because what I found happens, and I'm sure you're finding this, is then when you launch the software, to new users, their response is one of glee because you've already thought about all the issues. You you almost don't get any new comments because you've already had them! So I just I just love all of that.
So tell me a little bit about the team. How many people are working on it? Where are you situated? How do you really operate every day?
Gabriel Well, we're a very cash efficient team. That's one thing I'm quite proud of: we are a remote team. So I am kind of, I am the CEO. I call myself the chief everything officer because the only thing that I don't do is actually coding.
I think I do almost everything else. So my superpower as a founder is product. I'm very good at listening to someone's problems and frustrations with how they work today and inventing a technical technological solution, not just that works for them, but the scales, like an infrastructure system that we can build that works for hundreds of users.
I proved that by building Tutti and it runs itself today. And that's entirely out of my hands. And now I'm doing the same for SuperScout. Then I have a brilliant team of engineers. who are in Ahmedabad in India . My CTO is over there, Dharmil, and I've been working with these guys for about two years, some four years, but everyone's been with the team for a while.
And then I have some part time people in the UK who help with SEO, which is a big way we're found and general marketing things, which is one of my weaknesses. And I'm thrilled to say that we just brought on board our third co-founder and lead investor for this round and chief commercial officer who is Alan Jay.
And he is a three times exited founder. And he has founded things that some people may have heard of. His first business was IMDB, and he co founded that, exited that to Amazon, and then he co founded Digital Spy and Sportsmore, which are both like online magazines, first for the film and entertainment industry, and then for the sports industry, and he co founded, exited those.
Gene Excellent. And so as long as you've hinted at capital raising, why don't you talk a little bit about the journey of capital from the very beginning to where you are now -- and generally your point of view about how easy or hard it has been and what your challenges have been.
Gabriel Oh, capital raising is never easy. But I have managed it. So I guess I came from a fortunate position. So I have limited outgoing costs personally. And my wife is incredibly supportive and has been the entire journey. So we're lucky there, but the first three to four years of the journey across Tutti and SuperScout was actually bootstrapped.
That was all self funded, and then when we were building Tutti up in 2022, we had an idea for a software solution to go alongside Tutti. And ,we raised some money for it. We raised crowdfunding, friends and family and angels. So we raised £300K from about 330 people, anything from 10 pounds up to, I think the biggest ticket was £25 grand.
And we only have about 20 people on the cap table. We are smart with nominee structures, SPV structures. But. We succeeded that in ‘22. And in that product I made all the mistakes that I learned to build SuperScout. ie: I didn't talk to customers- built too much before selling, etc/
But then with that knowledge, we went on and at the end of 2023, we realized the idea for SuperScout and built an MVP in January, 2024. And it's been a tough year, but we are still here and we're in the strongest position we've ever been in throughout 2024. I've been raising kind of at the same time as spending, so I have raised a £100k, no, £200k.
In 2024 and we spent about £180L of that in that time, but now we've had, we have another 60 K on the way into the bank, actually more hopefully I just had a good conversation and we're looking for an final £150K of this round, which gives us enough runway. We believe to get a cashflow break even next year.
Gene Yeah. So, that's exactly the segue I was hoping for. Talk to me a little bit about the commercial model of how you're planning to sell it. What's the TAM look like and what's your go to market strategy?
Gabriel Yeah. So the software that we're building, one thing that we've discovered throughout our time of building this is that it is very useful to the film and TV industry, but it's also useful to other industries. What we are building is essentially a GIS, which some people may know, a “geographic information system,” And those are used in almost every industry. Most of them are kind of enterprise grade things. There are two large companies out there. One of them makes £1. 5 billion annual revenue, which is a GIS. And then the other one just raised an £81, sorry, £61 million series C round and makes £27 million annual revenue. Then there's some other technologies around that market, but the interesting thing with the GIS is that it is applicable to so many different industries and what we're building is one that's super easy to set up, super easy to fit into pretty much any workflow So the big vision of where we're going with this technology is to take the technology and apply it to different industries Even though we start in film and tv. The TAM (total addressable market) for just film and TV is roughly half a billion but with not that outrageous numbers with 5% of our market, 30, 000 potential users paying an average of £50 a month, we can get to £18 million ARR, which is pretty sizable. .
Gene I think I heard you say, so the sort of entry level subscription model is around, what did you say?
Gabriel £50 pounds per month. That's an average. So our individual, we have an individual subscription, which will be anywhere between £20 and £60 a month. And then today I sold. Two subscriptions, one for £50 pounds a month and one £100 hundred pounds a month. This is the MVP - before we have all of the the amazing feature sets.
Gene: The crazy thing is that you answered my last question already because I was going to ask you once you, once you're successful at this, where do you go? And your answer around GIS systems is, is exactly relevant. And it's also. It's a fantastic, story for entrepreneurship, which is you started out expecting to build something for a particular market segment, and suddenly you realize, Oh, I actually have something that's relevant here, here, here, any here that I didn't even realize at the beginning - which, which as an entrepreneur is thrilling. And it also gives you the opportunity to then expand from a base of current users in your first market. So, this is just a great, great story, and I wish you all the luck.
Is there anything I haven't asked you about the business or what you need that you'd like to attach on at the end of this conversation?
Gabriel I mean, if anyone hears this and thinks that this would be relevant to their business, I'm always keen to talk to more people about literally anything startup wise, if you get excited by what we're building, reach out to me. And if anyone kind of wants to get involved, wants to help, I'm always open to anything. I love having smart people around me.
Gene:That's great. Well, listen, you're, you're, you're terrific for doing this conversation. I have so enjoyed it for all of the reasons that you can tell. Great, good luck to you. We'll keep in touch and we'll see how you do over the next year or so.
Gabriel Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much.
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