The watch club produces short video dramas and builds a social network around it

Henry Soong is trying to make a straight microdrama series that doesn’t suck. That makes the creator of Watch Club very different in the multibillion-dollar app industry that releases structured, relevant content and uses powerful tactics to increase in-app spending.

“Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl!'” There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this could be much bigger than a sloppy, near-AI romance series.

Soong’s comments are a bit controversial, but they’re not wrong. Competitor ReelShort did $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox did $276 million. The quality, he said, is so milquetoast that it can be done using AI-generated scripts.

What would be the potential to gain from a microdrama app that makes great shows worth talking about?

Song is trying to answer that question with Watch Club, an app featuring microdrama stories created by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort don’t use union talent).

Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes himself as “legendary, through and through,” thinks what makes TV so special are the communities that build around it. Taking into account his experience working on social media products, he also wants to differentiate Watch Club from existing microdrama apps by embedding a social network within it.

“I think you can actually create a much more interesting business if you take what makes TV so fun,” he said, citing “Heated Competition” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You watch it, and then you want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 other funny, smart or gay young women are saying on the internet.”

Right now, people are discussing the “Severance” theory on Reddit, or reacting to the “Stranger Things” conclusion on Tumblr. Before Twitter was an X cesspool, you had to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Song sees the potential of building both a program and fan forums in one place.

How will that app make money? Like many startups, funded companies, that’s a question we have to answer for now, until it’s clear how users interact with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. The Watch Club has also received checks from people like Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, a firm owned by major UK YouTubers the Sidemen, is also involved.

Song has no background in film, which is why he brought on Devon Albert-Stone as an executive producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a series of 10 shows.

“We work with talented people when they have a few months free to work on something that may not be big budget because we give them a lot of creative space to do something that Amazon won’t let them do at a speed and pace that feels more exciting than the glacial pace of the television industry,” said Soong.

He added: “I’m very good at finding a way to make money with businesses that seem impossible to make money.”

At Meta, his job from 2016 to 2019 was to find a way to make money in China, a country where no one can use Meta’s products. In 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion in annual ad sales for Chinese companies looking to advertise to overseas audiences.

China’s ad sales may not be as glamorous as film and TV, but that job gave him more context to understand the business model behind microdrama apps, which flourished in China at the end of the last decade.

“When I left Meta [in 2019] that’s when these Chinese micro drama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know the business playbook. I know how expensive it is and how much money it takes, and I think you can build a better microdrama business if you don’t depend 100% on paid user acquisition.”

The viewing club will get its first chance to test its concept when it releases its first show, “Refund Offering,” which it plans to distribute on its app in daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — about a group of tech interns in San Francisco who compete for a refund.

“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to something that can replace broadcast television, and part of doing that is by building welcoming, creative sets with talented crews, where people are having fun, despite a small budget, doing something amazing,” Soong said.