Don Templeman With Aemula

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Don Templeman with Aemula. Welcome.

Don Templeman: Thanks, Lee. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Aemula. How are you serving folks?

Don Templeman: Yeah. So Aemula is a decentralized platform for independent journalism. And what that means is we’re able to offer readers an affordable subscription where they can find diverse points of view from independent journalists. And we’re able to offer independent writers a platform where they can go and maintain full ownership of all of their work and still receive monetization rates comparable with running their own platform, but without having to take the burden of building their own audience or having to appease any editorial boards or other, uh, people at centralized publications.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea? How did this come about?

Don Templeman: Yeah, so I had the idea back in 2016. If you put yourself back in that time, it was a 2016 election cycle. I was in college at Wake Forest University helping to manage the business side of our university newspaper, and I was also studying computer science. It was when blockchains were really starting to gain traction, and I was thinking about how we were seeing a lot of polarization within the media, and got me thinking about how we could use some of these new technologies to combat that. And I actually attempted to build a platform like this at the time, but the tech wasn’t there yet, and I always told myself that once it became viable, once we had a few more advancements in the field, I would take another stab at it and try to make it work. And that actually occurred in March of this year, which led me to quitting my job in finance and going to pursue building out Amula full time.

Lee Kantor: So what what changed that enabled you to do it now?

Don Templeman: Yeah, it was really the increased efficiencies and decentralized networks, the cost of operating them came down by multiple orders of magnitude. Just for reference, when I was initially trying to build out the idea for the platform, it was about a million times more expensive to operate this than it is as of today.

Lee Kantor: And then, is that price continuing to plummet because of, you know, the exponential way that this kind of world works.

Don Templeman: Yeah, it’s a rapidly moving field. And as more and more people are starting to contribute to decentralized Web3 technology, we’re starting to see even further advancements. And the pace at which they’re coming along has only increased. So I would expect to continue seeing even further cost efficiencies as more people start to contribute?

Lee Kantor: Now everybody’s heard that the media is in trouble, that, you know, readership in traditional media sources are becoming, um, you know, it’s getting worse and worse from a business standpoint for them. A lot of them are moving to some sort of sub subscription model. Um, how have you how do you kind of view the media since you’re not? I mean, I know you were working kind of tangentially in the media at your college, but your career hasn’t really been in the media.

Don Templeman: Yeah, exactly. Um, so it is an interesting time to be getting into journalism. Like you said, readership is down, but I think that’s more of a symptom of how people are starting to view who they can trust and where they can receive their information. The business model for traditional media publications is fairly antiquated. I mean, the concept of having subscribers and subsidizing that revenue with advertisers was developed in the 1800s. So as we started to see new technologies for distributing information and more rapidly, it’s harder for those companies to keep up and maintain trust in their reader bases and what they’ve done As the market for journalism has seen new entrants and become more competitive. These publications have started to carve out their own niches of specific audience types, and that allows them to defend a smaller market share. But what it does is just continue to reinforce existing beliefs as they pander to an existing audience base, which as you start to try to find new sources for information. As a reader, you’re met with small, tightly clustered pockets of information that are harder to approach, and once you become aligned with one of them, it’s even more difficult to expand outside of that. And what people have tried to do to combat this is they’ve turned to social media, and a large portion of the American population gets their news, their primary news source, on a daily basis from people on social media. However, these social media platforms aren’t fundamentally geared for distributing high quality, factual investigative journalism.

Don Templeman: These platforms are meant to, uh, drive user engagement and to gain a user’s attention that they can then go on and sell to advertisers because these platforms are free and the advertisers are the ones that are paying the social media companies. So that’s where the social media companies align their interests. As a reader, it most people feel that they don’t necessarily need to pay for news, since there is such an abundance of information that is free to access on the internet. But creating quality, factual journalism is something that takes a lot of time and something that has to be compensated. These writers, and hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis, are working to report the news and to earn compensation for that effort, they have to be paid from somewhere. And as a consumer, as a reader of that information, if you’re not the one paying for it, someone else is paying to get that information in front of you. And this is something that on a daily basis, we don’t necessarily pay that much attention to. But at the end of the day, it’s the information that you’re receiving through the news is what you’re using to build your own worldview that drive decisions that you make within your own life. And if you’re not the one that’s controlling how you find that information, then you’re essentially giving something that is so important to how you experience your life up to someone else.

Lee Kantor: So then in your model, um, how would it work?

Don Templeman: Yeah, essentially, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for an independent writer to be able to share their expertise directly with an audience. There are a lot of very great and qualified independent writers out there that are struggling to make ends meet because they’re trying to enter a competitive media landscape and start from scratch. They have to go out and build their own audience, build their own subscriber base, and try to monetize and advertise and essentially manage running their own business while also trying to focus on reporting quality content, which is a very difficult and time consuming task. And while there are a lot of tools to help with the monetization aspect of it, no one is really helping these independent writers go out and compete with institutional publications. If you’re a staff writer at a publication, you have access to editorial rooms, you have access to coverage funding to help you go out and spend a longer time investigating the piece. But these independent journalists are having to take the risk of going out and doing this all on their own without necessarily having an audience there and ready for them. So what we’re doing is building a community of readers that have already subscribed to the platform, and we’re welcoming independent writers on to come in and focus solely on writing quality content. And we will handle the community building and the monetization side of it. And for the readers, if you wanted to find independent writers, you’re going out. You’re doing your own research. You’re largely finding them through your own social media, um, followings. And you’re going out and having to subscribe to all of them individually. And if each of these writers are charging 7 to $8 a month after subscribing to a few of them, you’re already paying something comparable to a premium subscription to a Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but you’re only getting access to a few independent writers. We want to make it affordable and accessible for readers to come to our platform, pay $110 a month subscription, and then be able to access a wide variety of diverse, quality content from independent writers.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned earlier about the polarization in the media. Can you talk about how this solution kind of addresses that? Because, um, I think it’s a saying that goes back thousands of years. But you know who watches the Watchmen?

Don Templeman: Exactly. So I think what is funny when thinking about a funny, maybe the wrong word, but, uh, when thinking about polarization in the media, we’ve seen a continuing and accelerating trend of polarization ever since the early 2000. But when you think about it, anyone with an internet connection theoretically has access to the entire base of human knowledge, which you would think that with better access to information, we would be able to more easily come together to a consensus point of view. However, as more people gain access to the internet, we’ve seen more of a trend of polarization. So it’s clear that there is some flaw with how we are routing information. And again, that goes back to institutional publications trying to carve out their own niche audience or social media algorithms geared towards driving user engagement to sell advertisements. But one thing that we have seen more recently and has become a bigger topic since the 2016 election, is just the level of factual content that we’re able to find. And as people move towards social media or faster news cycles, as we’ve been able to distribute information more quickly, we’re starting to see that people aren’t really held accountable for their mistakes if they are spreading misinformation, uh, by accident.

Don Templeman: It tends to get covered up in a news cycle that is rapidly moving. And when you don’t have to take ownership for that mistake, it becomes less of a burden for people to try to pay attention to it up front. What we’re able to do on our end and leveraging Web3 technology is we’re able to tie reputations to riders, and we’re also able to enable a community moderated platform where it’s not just a generic community modernization, like, uh, moderation, like you would see on a social media platform like Reddit. But we can actually compensate people for their time and track reputations and make sure that people are building up a track record of making good decisions and supporting quality factual content. Essentially, we’re able to take away the middlemen that you would typically trust of an institutional publication and distribute it to the community, but not lose any of that quality, because we are able to make sure that people are held accountable to actions they take on the platform, which helps to limit some of the cover up that you see through quick news cycles.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned earlier about how maybe the incentives weren’t really aligned with the the consumer when it comes to that traditional advertising model, you know, where, you know, the one with the most clicks wins the most money. And so therefore it becomes kind of a race in to the bottom on how can I manipulate in order to get clicks, uh, rather than get good factual information. So if your true north is factual information, how are you measuring that? Because like you said, that something might seem factual today, but in six months it might not be factual.

Don Templeman: Exactly. What you see with how typical platforms of today are monetizing content is, again, they’re incentivized by driving advertising revenue. So all the advertisers care about is the number of eyes that see the content. So they’re compensated based on clicks and article reads or opens, which means you can have some clickbaity, attention grabbing headline and then not necessarily follow it up with quality content or helpful, useful information for the community. But you can still get the monetization from people clicking into an opening that article. We want to take it a step further and only promote content that people widely agree with. So we end each article with a quick, uh, essentially upvote downvote like dislike. Uh, question for the user of do you want to support this article or do you disagree with the content of it? And through that, we can track how well received articles are. And if a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, with a lot of different points of view are all supporting an author, you can then assume that that author is creating quality content that is coming from a moderate point of view that a lot of people agree with, and those are the type of people that we want to promote.

Lee Kantor: And so where are you at right now in the evolution of the business? Like I guess it was created, at least in your mind, you know, quite a while ago. So where are we at today?

Don Templeman: Yeah, exactly. I spent about eight years thinking of this, but started seriously building out a proof of concept. Uh, over the past two years. It became apparent towards the end of 2022 that the roadmap for decentralized networks were going to hit a point where the business model would become viable, which started to get me looking into it, learning more about the platform. And again, I professionally was working in finance, so I was spending a lot of nights and weekends learning and studying more computer science in the Web3 space to be able to code up a proof of concept. Once I had that available in January of this year, is what gave me the confidence to start pursuing this full time. And in April, we launched a live demo of the platform so people can go and interact with articles that are just populated on the platform for testing purposes. It’s completely free to use, but you can go in and start to get a sense of how it would, uh, work from the user perspective. Essentially, you open the app and the user is presented with a personally curated daily newspaper, and anyone can go in and write and post and share their content. What we’re trying to do now is build a commercially viable platform that we can start to monetize, so we can start to pay through riders and incentivize them to create content to seed the platform with. Uh, we’re going out to riders and making sure that we’re able to offer them all of the tools and support that they would like to see, uh, to start posting to the platform and doing work to help make our systems more robust on our end, to make sure that everything is incentive aligned. And once we release it, uh, we’re able to achieve our mission successfully.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Don Templeman: Yeah.

Don Templeman: Uh, there are two main, uh, problems that we’re starting to work with. It is, uh, getting riders onto the platform to start posting. So if you are riding, if you are already generating content and you have ownership of that content, uh, there’s really no downside to start cross posting that to Amila because you maintain full ownership of your work. We have no exclusivity rights. You can promote other platforms that you’re already getting subscription revenue from. You can do whatever you want with it. You maintain full ownership. What we’re able to do is help to promote your content to readers who may be outside of your existing reader base, uh, try to drive new subscribers to whatever platform you’re currently writing for, and we can monetize your content through Amul as well. So there really is only upside. The other thing we’re looking to do is build out a larger development team to more quickly scale up development of the platform to handle more and more users. Uh, our initial user goal is to hit 75,000 daily concurrent users, which would take some considerable beefing up of our tech stack. And we’re looking for, uh, a few back end web three developers, as well as front end designers, to come onto the team and really help us start scaling up to achieving more users.

Lee Kantor: Now, what about funding? Do you have some funding now or are you bootstrapping?

Don Templeman: Currently just bootstrapped. Luckily again, uh, working uh, seven year career was starting to save up because in the back of my mind, this was always something that I knew I wanted to pursue and wanted to make sure that I would have enough runway to get this off of the ground and bring on investors. Uh, we are looking to start raising capital again, trying to build out a team, trying to begin reaching out to writers and onboarding the platform at a larger scale, which all will require more resources than I currently have available to me. Uh, so starting to have conversations about putting together a type of seed round of financing to really get us, uh, able to build more quickly.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, where should they go? What’s the website?

Don Templeman: Yeah, they can go to amula. Com that’s h e moola. Com. Uh, they’ll see a lot more information about the platform there, and they’ll be able to subscribe for weekly updates throughout our progress. Uh, and they can stay informed through those.

Lee Kantor: Well, Don, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Don Templeman: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a privilege.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.