How I Got Started: Fanhouse (backed by a16z, The Chainsmokers, & more)

Friends! It’s been a hot minute. By way of reminder, I’m Steph — 99% of the time, I make fun of investment bankers, MBAs, VCs, and founders (all things I’ve been / are 🙃) on Twitter. The remainder of the time I’m the founder of PIN.

“How I Got Started” is a series I’ve wanted to do for a while. I know this may surprise you, but as a person who works in tech and formerly lived in SF with a 2 hour work commute, I’m an avid “How I Built This” listener. The stories have always been inspirational. However, when it comes to actually building PIN, I found the most helpful resource for actionable learning comes from founder friends, particularly those that were 6, 12, 18 months ahead of me.

This series will share founders’ stories, and focus on the details of the big “firsts”, i.e. the first idea and the process of pivoting to the ultimate idea, how they met their co-founders, how they landed their first customer, how they got the attention of their first investor, etc.

I’ve talked to 15+ founders so far, and have learned a TON. I’m looking for more founders outside of my immediate network to feature, so if you know of any founders with interesting early stories to tell, please nominate them (or yourself) here!

If you have suggestions, feedback, etc., email me at [email protected]. And subscribe below if you want to be alerted about future stories (and upcoming posts including: guide on how to angel invest, how to pick a startup to work at, and more)

How I Got Started: Fanhouse co-founder & CEO, Khoi Le

Meet Khoi! One of my newest but instantly favorite founder friends. Khoi is the co-founder & CEO of Fanhouse, a creator monetization platform that gives fans access to exclusive content from their favorite creators for a monthly fee. They’ve paid out $13M+ to creators since launch, and have raised $20M+ from a16z, The Chainsmokers, Jeff Morris Jr., Li Jin, and more.

How he knew he wanted to be a founder
I’ve always liked making things. I taught myself how to knit with ribbon and colored pencils when I was a kid, and so I've always kind of been interested in creation and production of things.

Making physical things is really difficult. If you make a mistake, you have to start over completely. I discovered coding in middle school, and it was pretty fun to make stuff. If your code doesn't work, that's okay. You can tweak it.

In high school, I met Adam Draper at a conference and told him I wanted to work for him. I ended up running a podcast for his venture capital fund (Boost VC) and learned a lot about entrepreneurship from that experience.

How his early entrepreneurial endeavors lead to meeting his now co-founder
(Warning: talks about sexual assault at Stanford)

When I was 18, I got advice from a mentor not to follow my passions (because 18 year olds don’t know what their passions are), but to follow my curiosities, so I pursued projects that piqued my curiosity. (side note: Khoi has so many interesting projects - they’re described in more detail at the end!)

At some point, I got curious about using AR to create art, which lead to me working on an art project in honor of Chanel Miller. When I was in high school, a Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, who wrote an amazing memoir about her life called “Know My Name.”

The context behind the project was that Stanford had essentially promised Chanel that at the site of her assault, they would build a garden and put a plaque there with whatever she wanted. She pitched them a couple of quotes that came from her victim impact statement, which she had read in court. It went viral on BuzzFeed and really helped kick off the MeToo movement. However, Stanford rejected all the quotes she proposed, even though they had originally told her she could put whatever she wanted.

I don't know how I had this idea, but I was just like, "Well, screw what Stanford thinks. We could just make a digital plaque and project it into the space with augmented reality.” The thought was that people could literally come here, look and see what it would be like." It led to a whole wave of activism at Stanford, and last January, they finally put the plaque in.

Although I didn’t know this at the time, this was a big reason why I ultimately met my co-founder Rosie, who found me on Twitter after she saw tweets about the project. That lead to us meeting and realizing we cared about a lot of the same things, ranging from Asian American representation in movies and media to League of Legends. We became friends, and eventually co-founders, through that.

How he built his initial MVP that made $2K (with no code!) and found the idea behind Fanhouse
As I started to get to know Rosie (my now co-founder) more, I learned how she's the first generation in her family to go to college. Her parents moved here from Vietnam, and they grew up very poor. During COVID, she lost her work-study job when they got sent home from campus, and she needed to make money on the internet.

I noticed this thing where people would Venmo her randomly — "Here's $5. Have a nice day." She also had tried having an OnlyFans, but she wasn't comfortable posting nudity. Everybody on OnlyFans was like, "Wow, this is a scam. Where are the nudes?" They would just harass her and say super abusive stuff to the point where she turned off her comments. I was like, "Okay, there needs to be some middle ground. Why are you not using Patreon?" She was like, "I'm just a funny girl on Twitter. I don't make videos. What am I going to post on Patreon?" I was like, "Okay, there's something here. People are Venmo-ing her. Can we test around this space?"

We came up with an idea where she made a private Twitter account, and the bio says, "Venmo me $5, and I'll grant you access." I just logged into her Venmo and her private Twitter, and all day, I just sat there. Whenever there's a new Venmo, I would look up the handle on Twitter, and I would approve the follow request. I just did this for two weeks.

That was the MVP. She generated a couple thousand dollars. From there, that was enough for us to build Fanhouse.

How he got his first customers and paid out $100K to creators
Rosie, who was a micro-influencer at the time, had other micro-influencer friends who couldn't work at Starbucks or go to their jobs anymore because of COVID. We had this super jank MVP out on the App Store and a website, but she would just tell her friends, "Hey, I made $1,000 last week” and people were eager to sign up.

I think there's also a feeling of once you have 10K or 20K followers on Twitter, it feels like you have to censor yourself more, so people loved Fanhouse because they got to be more themselves. It's just like, "Oh, you're just kind of being yourself, and these people who really admire you and are excited about you are willing to pay to see that."

By the time we raised our pre-seed, we had paid out $100,000 to creators.

How he built relationships with VCs before he officially raised
From the beginning, we knew we eventually wanted to raise money, but it was COVID, and we knew we were super privileged to be able to live at home with our families and not have to have a job. We also wanted to raise money only after we had traction.

We were very lucky to have gone to Stanford and have that network, but it was overwhelming and I didn’t know where to begin. I remember just trying to follow people on Twitter, and see their webinars and stuff like that. We framed it as getting to know people first.

One of the first investors we talked to was actually Li Jin. She coined the term "passion economy," and she helped do the Patreon and Substack deals and all that creator economy stuff. I went to a talk she did, and afterwards, she was like, "Oh, what are you working on?" And we told her about it. And she was really excited.

Another early investor we talked to was Jeff Morris Jr. from Chapter One. My friend Gaby Goldberg had interned with him and had spoken very highly of her time at Chapter One and was really excited about it. I actually just DM'd Jeff on Twitter. I was like, "Hey, I'm friends with Gaby. She's spoken very highly of you. I'm working on a consumer subscriptions product. You are the consumer subscriptions legend. Would love to just jam with you.”

When we chatted, he gave us great advice (Steph side note: more on that below), and when he saw our growth, he told us he wanted to invest. We weren’t raising at the time, but when we decided to 6 weeks later, I went back to him first and he lead the round. It was a really exciting way to kick off a fundraise.

Bonus (fun) highlights from my interview with Khoi

On why he tells his investors how he feels
(in reference to our conversation about using language from Stanford’s Touchy Feely class)

It’s helpful in general, but I’ve found it’s actually most powerful when I use it with investors.

If I'm talking to our investors and I'm like, “Okay, this is what the business did this month,” they respond with, “Cool.” If I'm like, “Hey, I'm really curious about this, or this is one thing I'm anxious about,” then they actually will jump in and give feedback. It’s more effective at getting a response than sending metrics or even a story. I’ve found investors will respond most to feelings and say “Hey, don't worry, I've seen this before. I think you should do this XYZ.”

On what he learned from Jeff Morris Jr (former VP of Product at Tinder) about building in consumer
When you're starting out, there's this tension between differentiators and bare minimum equality with existing products. So when I first met Jeff, I asked him for advice on whether Fanhouse should make polls because Instagram/Twitter both had polls.

He gave us great advice on focusing on our differentiator. He told us, “If your value prop is monetization, don't try to copy other social features like stories, polls, nested replies, all that stuff”.

That helped us a ton in the early days.

On a bunch of other cool products that Khoi has built and launched
(Steph side note: Khoi has too many to cover, but has one of the coolest websites here that covers more)

I was obsessed with VR, so in college, I joined the Stanford VR Lab and became super interested in social communities and how social interactions through tech and media impact how people interact with each other. For example, the idea of digital identity in VR: if you look in a virtual mirror and see an avatar that doesn't look like you, maybe someone who's taller or of a different race, there are actually a lot of psychological effects. People who see themselves as taller in VR will actually act more self-confident and self-assured after leaving VR, just by feeling like they're taller.

I grew up playing a lot of video games, and games are a really exciting way to design interactions and understand human psychology. That lead me to building my first VR game, a bow and arrow game called Kingdom Watcher. I met someone at a VR game studio who I ended up working for and actually produced it. I got very lucky and worked with a few other engineers and a fantastic artist to produce and ship it, but I learned that it’d be difficult to build a business in VR. It’s a tiny market with very few actual users.

For the rest of my college days, I was more excited about making art in virtual reality - like how can we make interactive experiences that aren’t meant to be used at scale or become billlon dollar businesses. One of the most notable installations I worked on was an augmented reality experience centered around monuments. We did two studies of monuments, and one of them was in Charleston, South Carolina. In the center square in Charleston, there's a 115-foot statue of John C. Calhoun, who was a notorious advocate for slavery. This was during the time where there was a big public debate about taking down confederate monuments. I thought we could use AR to alter the space and see how it actually looked.

I also built a CMS for museums where they could upload a picture of the painting, audio files, like text snippets, video clips, and it would put it on a website and generate a QR code. The QR code is then printed out and placed on the plaque next to a painting in their museum. I realized quickly that the biggest museums just contract custom solutions, and the small museums don't have enough money for such solutions. I also tried to bring tech integration into the museum experience, but it turned out to be a challenge.

After a few years, I worked on a digital fashion project also in the AR space. We were thinking about how cool it’d be if we could offer unique clothing to people via AR that wouldn't be available otherwise. I visited several fashion exhibits, took pictures of the clothing from different angles, and then photoshopped them onto myself before posting them on Facebook. Everyone was impressed and commented on how cool the jackets looked. No one asked if they were photoshopped. While this was nice, it didn't really solve a problem.