Watch Club produces short video dramas and builds a social network around them

Henry Soong is trying to produce vertical drama series that aren’t bad. This makes the Watch Club founder quite unique in this multi-billion dollar industry of apps that produce specific, attention-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending.

Ninety percent of these stories say, “I’m a poor girl!” You’ve fallen in love with a secret billionaire! “He’s a werewolf, and his mother’s a vampire, and she doesn’t approve of me!” Song told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this could be a lot bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance series.”

Song’s comments are a bit aggressive, but they’re not wrong. Competitor ReelShort made $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox made $276 million. He said the quality is so great that it can be made using AI-generated texts.

What are the earnings potential for a small drama app that offers shows that are actually good and worth talking about?

Soong tries to answer that question with Watch Club, an app with mini-dramas produced by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort don’t use union talent).

Song, a former product manager at Meta and a self-described “fan in every sense of the word,” believes what makes television so special are the communities that form around it. Given his experience working on social products, he also seeks to differentiate Watch Club from existing mini-drama apps by including a social network within it.

“I think you can actually create such a more interesting work if you take what really makes television more interesting,” he said, pointing to “Heated Rivarly” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You watch it, and then you just want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 funny and intelligent young women, men, or gay men on the Internet are saying.”

Right now, people are talking about “Severance” theories on Reddit, or reacting to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became a cesspool of X, you had to work hard to avoid burning Caliphate or White Lotus. Soong sees the potential to host both the show and fan forums in one place.

How will this app make money? Like most early-stage venture-funded companies, this is a question that should be asked now, once it’s clear how users will interact with the app. The answer may be advertising, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. Watch Club also received checks from individuals like Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conti, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, the company run by top UK YouTubers The Sidemen, also participated.

Song has no film background, which is why he hired Devon Albert Stone as founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a list of ten offers.

“We work with brilliantly talented people when they have a few months free to work on something that may not be a huge budget because we give them tremendous creative freedom to do something that Amazon has never allowed them to do at a pace and speed that seems more exciting than the slow pace of the TV industry,” Song said.

“I’m really good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize,” he added.

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 products. By 2019, Meta generated $5 billion a year in ad sales to companies inside China that wanted to advertise to audiences outside the country, Song said.

Chinese ad sales may not be as glamorous as movies and TV, but the job gave him additional context for understanding the business model behind microdrama apps, which boomed in China at the end of the last decade.

“By the time I was leaving dead [in 2019] “This was when Chinese microdrama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so Americans and Germans could download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know the rules of the business game. I know how expensive and capital-intensive it is, and I think you can build a much better micro-drama business if you’re not 100% reliant on paid user acquisition.”

Watch Club will have its first opportunity 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 revolves around a group of San Francisco tech interns vying for a comeback offer.

“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can generate the thing that replaces broadcast television, and part of doing that is by building welcoming, creative groups with talented professionals where, despite small budgets, people have fun making something great,” Song said.