Henry Soong is trying to make vertical micro-drama series that aren’t crap. This does it Watch Club founder quite unique within this multi-billion dollar app industry of producing worthwhile content and using aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spend.
“Ninety percent of these stories are: ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf and his mother is a vampire and he’s freaking me out!'” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at it, but I think this can be much bigger than just sloppy romantic soap operas bordering on artificial intelligence.”
Soong’s comments are a bit combative, but they’re not wrong. Competitor ReelShort made $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox made $276 million. The quality, he said, is so soft that it could be done using AI-generated scripts.
What would the earning potential be for a micro drama app that makes shows that are actually good and worth talking about?
Soong is trying to answer that question with Watch Club, an app featuring micro-drama stories created by SAG and WGA actors and writers (top apps like DramaBox and ReelShort don’t use union talent).
Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes himself as “a fan, at times,” believes that what makes TV so special is the communities that form around them. Given its experience in social networking products, it also seeks to differentiate Watch Club from existing micro-drama apps by integrating a social network into it.
“I think you can really create a much more interesting business if you take what makes TV really fun,” he said, pointing to “Heated Rivalry” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You see it and then you just want to gossip about it with your three best friends or see what 100,000 funny, smart other young women or gay people on the Internet are saying.”
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Right now, people are debating “Fired” theories on Reddit or reacting to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became the cesspool that is X, you had to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Soong sees the potential of housing both the show and fan forums in one place.
How will this app make money? Like most early venture-funded companies, that’s a question for now, once it becomes clear how users interact with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. Watch Club has also received checks from the likes of Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives at Hulu, HBO Max and Meta. Upside Ventures, the company run by major UK YouTubers The Sidemenalso participated.
Soong has no film background, which is why he brought Devon Albert-Stone as a founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a ten-show slate.
“We’re working with extremely talented people when they have a few months free to work on something that might not have a huge budget, because we’re giving them huge creative leeway to do something that Amazon would never let them do at a speed and speed that’s much more exciting than the glacial pace of the TV industry,” Soong said.
He added: “I’m very good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize.”
At Meta, his mission from 2016 to 2019 was to figure out how to make money in China, a country where no one could use Meta’s products. By 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion a year in ad sales for companies inside China that wanted to advertise to audiences outside the country.
Advertising sales in China may not be as glamorous as film and TV, but this job gave him additional context to understand the business model behind micro-drama apps, which boomed in China at the end of the last decade.
“Just as I was leaving Meta [in 2019] was when these Chinese micro-drama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know this business book. I know how expensive and capital-intensive it is, and I think you can build a much better mini-drama business if you’re not 100% dependent on getting paid users.”
Watch Club will get its first chance to test its concept when it launches its first show, “Return Offer,” which it plans to distribute on its app with daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — which is about a group of tech interns in San Francisco who compete for a comeback bid.
“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to what replaces streaming TV, and part of that is building welcoming, creative settings with talented professionals where people have fun, despite small budgets, making something great,” Soong said.
