First up, what is Triller?
Depends on who you ask.
The company started in 2015 as an app very similar to TikTok/Vine for sharing short form videos, but never hit near the popularity of the others.
They also have a record for lying.
The company in 2019 claimed they had 13 million monthly users, but employees leaked that as a lie and it was under 2 million.
The CEO in 2020 claimed they’ve had 250 million global downloads and analysis showed it wasn’t even 50 million.
The companies owner Ryan Kavanuagh who bought the majority stake in 2019 previously founded Relativity Media, which went bankrupt in 2015 as a film studio investing in movies such as Ma Ma Mia, Dear John and many more. They still went bankrupt in 2015 for sketchy financial practices and Kavanuagh resigned in 2016.
Triller has still despite multiple lies and no traction on the core product raised 100 million dollars from investors.
Which isn’t that rare for startups.
Mobli was a startup that Carlos Slim invested 60 million into in the early 2010s to compete with Instagram. Triller raising money to be a similar attempt to ride off the success of TikTok isn’t that odd.
But here’s where Triller gets weird.
I doubt many people reading this know it’s an app. Most people have likely just seen it as a group hosting boxing matches such as the one with Evander Holyfield and Vitor Belfort which just happened.
They made a weird pivot that was originally supposed to market the app, but now the company seems more focused on just being a platform to host random celebrity boxing matches and make money doing pay per view.
After the Vitor Belfort fight, Triller came out saying they wanted to offer Jake Paul 30 million to challenge Belfort.
Which 30 million would be more than the combined earnings of the Paul Brothers personally on their boxing matches.
This sounds good, but the real question is this.
Where does the company keep getting this money?
The Holyfield v Belfort fight was a hyped flop selling only 150,000 pay per view orders, which means post marketing, it likely lost money.
The company has never made any money off the Triller app.
And Jake Paul who’s normally the guy who’d do anything for money said he doesn’t think Triller actually has it.
Which…
They lied about the app numbers.
They can’t sell boxing matches.
The owner is basically a sketchy film producer.
Why should anyone trust him.
Some people online believe they are a money laundering scheme or some form.
I don’t think that makes sense, but I really think some sort of stunt is being pulled here. It’s either they raised the money, know they failed at an app and are trying to breathe life into it via boxing matches or it’s some form of Ponzi scheme in the form of a tech company.
I’m writing this making the call we’re getting some sort of fraud here in the making.