Heroes in Business - Brandon Austin CoFounder Millions.co leading watch part platform for sports

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

Get it together. Brandon Austin CoFounder Millions.co leading watch part platform for sports, bringing fans and athletes together in one is interviewed by David Cogan host of the Heroes Show and Founder of Eliances entrepreneur community.  

welcome back to alliances heroes where heroes in business align to be part of our super community and find out more about alliances visit www.alliances.com that's right and welcome back again super excited again you know we've got the top lineup that exists. And by the way, continue to stay tuned because we've got booked coming up later is Kevin O'Leary. That's right from Shark Tank. So make sure that you stay tuned. Well, I'm really excited about our guest today. Are you ready for this? Okay, very cool. Brandon Austin. He is the co-founder of Millions.co. Now you may not have heard of Millions.co, but I got to tell you, it's really cool. They bring fans and athletes together into one and how that's done. And we're going to be talking about some really cool features that are going on. Well, welcome to the show,

Brandon. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. All right, let's go into this whole thing too. And by the way, again, too, and we had your co-founder on also, Bruce. So exciting to hear again from you. How did you go about though? I mean, first of all, tell our audience that may not be familiar with your site about what it is. And then let's talk about the idea inception to actually launching because it's still somewhat of a complex thing that you've got. Yeah, a hundred percent. And for millions, where it really came from was myself and a couple other serial entrepreneurs, as well as celebrity UFC announcer Bruce Buffer. We kind of all joined together, we realized we had some friends that were professional fighters, and we saw them trying to promote and market themselves and really struggling to do so. And, you know, they weren't amateur fighters, they were world ranked champions. But even with their massive followings, we just saw them struggling to really leverage that fan base that they built for themselves and have the know how on how to market. And so we decided to

create an all in one social commerce platform that's just absolutely dedicated to the athletic world that really allows athletes to come into a community and a home of fans to be able to leverage and, you know, build off their name, image and likeness. And so we've expanded into every sport now. But really where that came from was the passion for sports that we had and, you know, just the need and the want to assist athletes from the start and infancy of their professional careers all the way from the collegiate level to, you know, throughout the peaks and even after they retire and through their, you know, alumni status. Great. And Brandon, how do you even like start to pull it together? So,

you know, you've got this idea yet, you know, it's always tough getting right the first customer. And in this case, it's the first athlete on the platform. Like, how do you get those wheels turning? You know, we treat every athlete like their own unique independent brand in store. So when you think about our platform and what it is, you have a team that is building and representing and running over 1500 brands simultaneously. We're like one of the biggest malls in the world when you think of it that way. And it takes a lot to try and figure out how exactly to build in that first customer. But the unique part about Millions is that all the customers are there. They all follow these athletes. They're all fans of these athletes already. It was really up to us to build the

right ecosystem to leverage those fans and leverage that customer base that was already there. Yeah. I mean, and that's awesome because you've got quite a lineup on there now. I mean, it's pretty phenomenal. Who are some of the ones that are on your platform that ones that others would recognize? I mean, I've been to your platform, so I recognize a number of them, but why don't you share with our audience? Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, we just hosted a watch party with Charles Oliveira just before his fight in order to promote that last pay-per-view. Since we're in football season right now, you know, we have awesome alma mater watch parties. So before Sunday football, you know, you can tune in on Saturday to watch old live college football

with some of the best alumni that came off those teams. So you have the Cook brothers, Dalvin and James Cook. You have J.K. Dobbins, who's going to be going live and doing a watch party soon. So you have a lot of really great names on the platform in all sports. And it's just a really exciting time for the business. Brandon, explain to our audience a little bit more about what the watch party is. So on Millions, as I mentioned, we built a really strategic ecosystem that allows fans and athletes to connect. And they do that through merchandise, through memorabilia, through unique one-on-one video experiences, as well as watch parties. And if you're not familiar with watch parties, maybe you haven't seen, you know, the Monday night football with the Manning brothers

or the Joe Rogan fight companions. But what we really did was take those concepts that are popularized by the networks and democratized it for all sports, all fans for free. And so on Millions, you can tune in as a fan with a number of athletes on any given sporting event, any given day, and you'll be able to watch that live sporting event with the athletes. So you're in their living room. It's a really intimate experience. It's very cool. You get to chat live with them. They're answering questions. They're commentating the game and the fight for you. That's awesome. And again, you're watching, listening to me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show. So make sure that you go to alliances.com.

That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com because it's the only place where entrepreneurs align. And while I may not be a MMA fighter, we've got with us Brandon Austin, co-founder of Millions.co, bringing fans and athletes together in one. And you can reach him by going to Millions.co. Easy website to remember. Once again, going to Millions.co. So, Brandon, how did you go about it? I mean, this takes money to put together. It takes a lot of technology behind the scenes.

How did you go about building a team for that? Yeah, so our co-founding team, we have a lot of experience and we all come from pretty unique backgrounds. The most recognizable names, obviously, Bruce Buffer, the host and announcer to the UFC. He obviously comes from a really strategic background of promoting himself, building his own brand and promoting tons of other brands that he works with. But in addition to that, myself and my other co-founders are all serial entrepreneurs. We've built successful tech companies, our CEOs. Last company most recently hit unicorn status. And all of us have experienced, you know, we've been fortunate with our backgrounds to have experienced exits

and had success in that manner. So when we grouped together for Millions, we each brought really unique and independent aspects to the model and to the ecosystem that we were building. And so that really allowed us to just have a very strong kickoff and launch to the business. From there, because of our experience, we've been able to identify really important key members and responsibilities that are needed to build a successful brand and a successful business. And so we went and we raised venture capital and started to put all the puzzle pieces together. That's awesome.

Brandon, how though, with someone who's got an idea for something though, how did you end up connecting with Bruce and the others? Because a number of startups have these ideas, but not necessarily the specific connection. So how do you even reach out to somebody like that? Yeah. So for us, we just reached out to Bruce on his website and reached out with a message wanting to set up a meeting. Originally, we had the idea for Millions, we started to put it together. This was pre-launch and we wanted to look at getting Bruce to do some launch activities with us. But after we told him a bit about the business, he fell in love with it. He really resonated with the idea, chose the power and the value of what we've created. Because once we told him

about what we were building and showed it to him, he wanted to be involved. And we welcomed him with OpenR. And we think he's a great business leader and wanted to bring him on board with us. Wow, that's awesome. So what surprised you most, Brandon, about building this platform that continues to grow? And again, we've got Brandon Austin, co-founder of Millions.co. So again, go to Millions.co. And of course, we'll have on our website at Alliances.com. Brandon, what surprised you most about building this platform? Because it is a pretty complex. There's a lot of things I'm sure behind the scenes of putting this together. You know, if this was my kind of my first go around, so going back to the first business that I started, you know, it took me five years and it was a huge

roller coaster. There was a lot of ups and downs. And so I, you know, I had a lot of scar tissue built up from that, a lot of lessons learned. And so with millions, there's a lot of pieces, but, you know, this go around, I have a lot of lessons learned. So I'm not making similar mistakes to kind of what, you know, the average entrepreneur makes on their first try. And I have great partners in this business that I can leverage their knowledge, and I can provide, you know, knowledge for where there's gaps there. So we really complement each other. And I think that's really important when it comes to building a business, you asked about how to approach partners, how to approach the right people and connections, I think that, you know, there's a

couple ways you can build a business, you can do it on your own or you can kind of start to build some advisor networks and mentors and, you know, some trusted partners. And that definitely makes the ride a little easier. That's awesome. I got time for really one more question here. I think it's important, too, is what kind of advice do you have for, you know, young ones out there, the, you know, the high schoolers and that that really kind of have this fantasy of, hey, I want to have my own business, start my own company. I've got an idea. But man, just where do you even go from idea to actual launch? Yeah. So my first business, I started right out of university and it was an idea that just stemmed from passion. I had a passion for fishing growing up. I always did it

growing up. And me and my brother had this idea and we just ran with it. And you know, I think that's kind of the first thing that you need to do is you just need to, you just need to jump in. It's kind of one of those things being an entrepreneur, it takes a lot of time, you know, it takes a lot of effort, it can be painful. It's not, you know, this glorious thing that people may see success wasn't built overnight takes, you know, years and years to do that. But if you can push yourself to persevere through those challenges and just kind of take that leap forward, you can really accomplish anything that you put your mind to. Well, that's awesome, Brandon.

I got to tell you, you bring fans together with their heroes, the athletes of the sport. That's a hero, Brandon Austin, co-founder of Millions.co, bringing fans and athletes together in one. Millions.co. This has been David Kogan with the Alliance's Hero Show. Brandon, you've got to dance with me too here.