Laylo's Drop Dreams
We talked with Alec Ellin and Saj Sanghvi about their winding road in launching the “Salesforce for Creators”
This piece is part of our second edition of Creator Mag. To read the rest of the magazine, click here.
I have an hour to kill before my interview, so a friend tells me I should head over to Venice a little early and walk around the famous network of canals.
I thought he was joking, but as it turns out, my Uber driver drops me off and here I am, smack-dab in a neighborhood that trades asphalt roads for constructed waterways. Compared to its Italian counterpart— a not-so-subtle inspiration — this canal system is markedly smaller in scale, yet I can’t help but marvel at the arcing bridges, sitting in front of million-dollar mansions and their accompanying docks.
Maybe the reason I’m stunned is because it’s January. While it’s snowing in Chicago, here in sunny Los Angeles, I see a woman working at a standing desk, windows wide open and a beautiful view of the water out her front door.
Or maybe it’s because I noticed a real estate brochure labeling the area as “Silicon Beach.” It’s a clear nod to the growing tech scene that’s descended upon Los Angeles, though it won’t be the last sign I see that Venice — a neighborhood historically known for its eclectic mixture of fine foods and beach bums —has become a hotspot for the city’s transplants.
As I leave the canals and head over to my interview, I conclude that the area gives me the vibe of a sleepy little beach town that realized it was next to the entertainment capital of the world. I note as much to Alec Ellin, the CEO of Laylo, after he welcomes me into his house and we sit down to talk.
He tends to agree. “Snapchat basically made Venice a tech hub when they built an office here,” Alec says. “Then people started waking up to, like, ‘Oh, just because we’re in L.A. doesn’t mean we can’t build startups here.’”
With respect to the remote, decentralized nature of modern-day businesses, given how many creators and companies are in Venice, the neighborhood might as well be championed as the worldwide center of the creator economy. And it’s here that Alec and his co-founder Sajan Sanghvi (who goes by Saj) are building a next-generation CRM, or — as they refer to it— the “Salesforce for Creators.”
When a friend and I got breakfast with Alec the previous week, we talked about how — among many things — the founder takes 15-to-20 sales calls a day.
For some, this would sound like a weird flex, but hearing him speak, it came off more as a factual statement, a testament to how much he truly believes in what he’s doing. Plus, I know he’s not lying , as I’ve seen his Calendly. When accounting for time zone differences, some days, the dude was hopping on Zooms at 5:30 a.m.
Like most new people I seem to meet, I got to know Alec after sliding into his DMs in March 2021. We had followed each other on Twitter, and when I went to check out his profile, I stumbled upon what he was working on with Laylo. A lot of startups overcomplicate things on their websites, but as soon as I logged on to his, everything instantly clicked.
Growing up, I was a huge sneakerhead, which meant waking up early on Saturday mornings to try and cop the latest pair of rare Jordans. Streetwear companies like Supreme perfected the drop model, teasing fans with product images ahead of release dates and manufacturing hype through strategic scarcity. If you logged onto Twitter and saw “Nike” trending at any point in time, chances are, sneakerheads around the globe were publicly fuming over their most recent L.
Past just designers, though, more parties have begun to employ this model as a way to generate excitement among fans ahead of a drop. From artists to podcasters, creators are no exception. It seems pretty cut-and-dry: If you own a direct relationship with your audience — a community emboldened by your content — it makes sense that you’d want to make product releases feel even more special.
Yet there wasn’t always a streamlined, efficient method for creators to drop new albums, merch, or tickets. Even if it seems like a simple problem to solve on the surface, no one had hacked together an effective solution, which meant this vast market opportunity was up for the taking.
That’s where Laylo swooped in. But before they got to where they are now, working with some of the biggest artists and brands in the world, Alec and Saj were racing against each other, competing to build the same product.
For someone as busy as Alec, he’s ready to go as we dig into his story.
He grew up in New York before moving out to Los Angeles when he was in fifth grade. During high school, he started a music and lifestyle blog called “The Laidback Life,” where he interviewed artists across genres. While he grew the monthly readership to about 25,000, he was never really able to monetize it. The experience did, however, allow him to cold email key players from across the industry, regularly talking to A&Rs and managers at the country’s biggest labels.
Alec went on to trade the sandy beaches of Los Angeles for the unforgiving coldness of Upstate New York, as he studied screenwriting at Syracuse University. He’d dreamed about pursuing a career in entertainment since he was 6, further inspired by the summers he spent hanging around the set of HBO’s hit show, Entourage (his uncle, Doug Ellin, was the showrunner). But during his freshman year of college, he took an entrepreneurship class with a professor that would go on to influence how Alec looked to break into the space.
Alec at his house in Venice (Photo by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)
“Most of Newhouse [Syracuse’s School of Communications] was like, if you want to be a screenwriter, do this, and if you want to be a journalist, do this and this,” Alec says. “He [the professor] was like, ‘Screw all of that. You guys can go do a million cool things. Like, some of the most successful alumni to come out of this school work in tech and gaming and all sorts of different mediums.’”
Through his blog, he met an A&R who would go on to become a VP at Epic Records, a division of Sony Music. The latter loved how Alec was always discovering the next big artists, so one summer, he called Alec up and offered him an internship.
In the mid-2010s, there was a lot going on at Epic, which led to a “chaotic” experience internally at the label. Alec found it frustrating that he couldn’t really move on a lot of the stuff he was bringing to his boss, and he wasn’t sure afterwards if the music industry was for him. “There’s so much of, like, you have to impress this person and know that person and all that,” he tells me, referencing the time spent learning how the sausage gets made.
He did, however, end up working at a music management company the following summer, enjoying the experience. During his internship, he was thinking more and more about The Laidback Life and how he’d used it to discover new artists and, in turn, provide valuable information for labels. He took those ideas a step further by starting Darkchart, a platform that made A&R into a “gamified experience that anyone could participate in.”
After graduating from Syracuse, he moved back to Los Angeles with this new product in tow. Even after his time at Epic, Alec still wanted to work in the entertainment industry, though through a tech-enabled angle. Two weeks later, though, he received a DM on Instagram, informing him that Darkchart “sucked” and another platform called Sylo was “better.”
He didn’t realize it at the time, but that person heckling him online would become his co-founder.
As I talk with Saj over Zoom in March, it becomes increasingly evident that he checks all of the boxes for your stereotypical entrepreneur.
He’s wearing a hoodie emblazoned with Laylo’s logo, an astronaut adorning over-ear headphones and jamming out to music. Originally from San Diego, he wound up studying computer science and electrical engineering at UCLA, ultimately dropping out halfway through.
“Along with always making music, I wanted to, like, build something,” Saj tells me. “And during class, I’d spend all my time learning how to code apps. Eventually, I built Sylo and put it on the App Store, and I ended up leaving college for that.”
On the side, he continued to perform with his band, No Suits, which he started with a friend he’d known since kindergarten. When they were in high school, they came up with the inspiration for the name, proclaiming that they were going to become entrepreneurs and, therefore, never have to wear suits to work. “So that’s kind of, like, what I feel I’ve lived my whole life by,” Saj says.
Saj, pictured with his bandmates (Photo via No Suits)
To some, music and code might seem at odds with one another, artistic expression clashing with technical jargon. Saj doesn’t see it that way. “In general, my interest is just always in creating something from nothing, and I’m able to do that through both,” he says.
In talking to both Alec and Saj, it’s evident that they’re wired in pretty similar ways. Which is why they both laugh when telling the story of the first time they met.
Saj clarifies that it wasn’t him who messaged Alec — it was a friend with access to the Sylo Instagram account. Nevertheless, Alec ended up checking out what his newfound trash talkers were up to and quickly came to admire their product. He realized Saj was located in Los Angeles; the duo wound up meeting at a café a couple months later, and Laylo was born.
Together, they combined their resources and made an advanced analytics dashboard for artists. The Orchard — a subsidiary of Sony Music, where Alec had interned with Epic— invested as their first backer. “That was a high point for us,” Saj says, as they were able to form a team and bring on four other employees.
They continued to work on the product before eventually realizing that their ceiling was capped. “The sales cycle for having big distributors like The Orchard integrate Laylo was insanely long, and we couldn’t get revenue up,” Saj says.
“We got into [startup accelerator program] YC, and we continued to build this dashboard,” Alec tells me. “Everyone tells us it’s, like, the coolest thing since sliced bread, it’s genius…and then they’d never use it.”
“As we’re going through YC, their mantra is, ‘Make something people want,’” Alec continues. “They, like, hammer that into your head, to make something people actually use and pay for.”
By the end of the program, Alec approached Saj. They both agreed that they needed to switch the product. “And I was like, holy shit, this is so scary,” Saj says. “We have a team of six right now. What do we tell them?”
Their advisors thought they were insane. You made something that’s generating revenue, you have employees, and you want to pivot now? From the outside, it seemed like Laylo was on the right track; fortunately, their advisors trusted Alec and Saj to figure it out.
They tinkered with a lot of different tools and continued to talk with their customers. “And we kept asking people, like, why aren’t you using this thing?” Alec says. “A lot of the responses were, ‘It’s great to know who my biggest fans are, but how do I actually talk to them? How do I take action on this data?’”
That’s where it clicked: A simple, easy-to-use tool for selling individual drops, from albums to t-shirts to even new podcast episodes. “We had this thesis that, like, creators really want to make money, and they were dropping cool stuff all the time,” Alec tells me. “But it’s really hard for them to monetize their fanbase, so we put a ticket on everything,” explaining that users would charge fans to get access to their exclusive waitlist.
Similar to before, people thought it was really cool. But yet again, they didn’t end up using it.
“To Saj’s credit, he was like, ‘Yo, my band would never use this because we don’t want to charge our fans,’” Alec says. “And I said, ‘Dude, you’re wrong. People want to make money like that.’” Saj kept pushing, and eventually, his co-founder finally relented.
“Pretty much overnight, it was like, ‘Oh, this is the secret sauce,” Alec laughs. “People don’t want their fans to pay for an exclusive list — they want to connect with their fans around these drops.”
“And that was basically what Laylo became.”
Alec is pretty active on Twitter — it’s how we met, after all. But on December 19, 2021, one of his tweets stood out, catching my attention.
“Last December we did $50 in revenue. You read that right,” it stated. “Today alone we did over $1k. What a year”
I ask him about that tweet — not only what prompted it, but also how he’s reflecting on the rollercoaster ride of 2021. “YC really teaches you that you will really feel when you build something that people love and want,” he responds. “And so when we started rolling out Laylo [in its current form]…it was so clear that, like, for the first time ever, people actually want to use this all the time. And they’re talking about it, and sharing it with their friends, and, ya know, introducing us to other managers and artists and creators.”
It’s important to note, though, that — in Alec’s words — this upwards trajectory only came after “f**cking up 95%” of the time. “I wake up positive…I, like, know that about myself,” he says. “But there were definitely points where I was depressed. I wasn’t sure if I should leave the company, if I was disappointing all of our advisors and investors…I was feeling, like, pretty worthless.”
They did have to hire an entirely new team after most of their employees left during the previous pivot, but they seem pretty happy with the new people they’ve brought on. “We’re back to a team of seven, with more revenue than we started with,” Saj tells me. “I’m very confident that with this team, we’ll figure out what to do with whatever obstacles come our way.”
Alec’s tweet from December 2021 (Photo via @AlecEllin on Twitter)
Naturally, both co-founders are excited to be working with some of their favorite artists, creators, and brands. From dropping NFTs with Grammy-nominated producers like ODESZA to partnering with tech unicorns, the sky truly feels like the limit for Laylo. According to Alec, their freemium model —where the price goes up only as users scale their following — has recurring revenue growing and their competition sweating.
But at the end of the day, that’s not really what gets either of them up in the morning. Both co-founders simply share an unadulterated love for putting their heads down and turning their respective visions into a reality.
For Saj, he still loves performing with No Suits. When we talk, he has just gotten back from a five-show tour. “We’re [No Suits] a full-on business now,” he says. “We do pretty well — we actually have 20 million-plus plays on Spotify. Nowadays, it’s not always the thing I do [on the side] to keep me sane; sometimes, it’s making me more insane. But I think that’s a sick transition, when something like that becomes a real thing.”
For Alec, he just wants to ship a product, particularly one that can impact a lot of people. If it’s in — or tangential to — the industry that he cares deeply for, the one he started writing about when he was in high school, it’s all for the better. “I don’t ever want to look back and be like, ‘Damn, I could have tried that, but I didn’t and now I regret it,’” he tells me. “I just always want to see the best thing I can possibly do.”
As more and more startups set up shop in sleepy little Venice, it’s evident that VC money will continue to flow into these interconnected waterways. Yet as the hype in the space reaches an all-time high, I tend to defer to the artists moonlighting as entrepreneurs, the ones who build in the dark while practicing their craft along the way.
After all, who knows more about manufacturing hype than creators themselves?