Numa Perrier on Building Black & Sexy TV and What it Really Means to Create Your Own [Transcript]

Kimberly Foster: Welcome to the Black Media Minute, where we dive into the ins and outs of the media business with black creatives and industry professionals. I’m your host Kimberly Foster. Most of us can agree that representation of black life is severely lacking in the media, but what does it mean to create your own? I caught up with Numa Perrier of Black&SexyTV to talk about how she and her partner Dennis built up their own distribution platform, self-financed their projects, and maintained relationships with HBO and BET.

All right, so I am here with Numa Perrier, one of the founders of Black&SexyTV. Thank you so much for joining me Numa.

Numa Perrier: Thank you for having me.

KF: Tell me the origin story of Black&SexyTV. How did you guys get started?

NP: Everything started with a feature film called “A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy”, written and directed by Dennis Dortch. That’s where it all started. He wanted to make a film that really brought back a sense of normalcy and black pride, and really wanted to update what he interpreted the meaning of dark and lovely was. The name came from an updated version of dark and lovely, that’s how black and sexy came to be. The film was really depicting us in an every day light, but also exploring intimacy in a way that hadn’t been seen before. That’s the genesis of everything that we are doing today, started from that film. When that film came out, it was selected for Sundance in 2008, and from there it was bought and distributed by Magnolia Pictures and then it was airing on Showtime. It had a limited theatrical release. We just found that there was a really wide audience that really wanted to see what they kind of would describe as a reflection of themselves. As much as he was excited about making the film, you never know when you put a film out there, how it’s going to come back to you.
The audience was just so hungry for more content, and so we started to create more content along with that same sensibility. We started with skits, and we always had a vision of creating something online that could grow and develop and be a platform where we could green- light our own projects and really speak to this community, which we found to be global, we found to be concentrated, and really ready for more. We just got to work. It’s been kind of a non-stop track since then. Those skits that we were doing and kind of supplementary episodes we were doing were really to support the release of the film when it came out on DVD, when they were doing DVD releases like that. That grew into “Okay, let’s move into doing serialized content” so that people have a reason to come back every week for something new and something more. That’s grown and grown and grown over the years and here we are today with our own streaming service.

KF: What year did you begin posting things online?

NP: 2008, the movie started doing its festivals. 2009 was DVD. We started filming in 2009 as well, and we started posting things online, I want to say, late 2009 or 2010 but it was on our own site. We had our own site called Black&SexyTV and we were working with a tech partner to try to get this site to work properly. We really didn’t want to be on YouTube in the beginning because YouTube was fairly new as well and we felt like the things that we were shooting, the quality would be so downgraded by the time we posted it on YouTube, that we wanted to build our own site.

Over a year of trying to work that out, the tech side of that out, we decided to go ahead and move over to YouTube because it was so difficult, we didn’t have the infrastructure, we didn’t have the funding to build something that was already there the way YouTube was. At the same time, everything was moving in the same direction. Other web- series were also starting to launch on YouTube as well and we just felt like, “Okay. Let’s try this out. Let’s do it on YouTube”, and that was late 2011 that we posted. We had been filming and trying to do our own thing for about two years before that.

KF: What was the first series that you published on YouTube?

NP: We dropped “The Number” first, which we just rebooted, we have a new season of it now. Quickly thereafter we dropped “The Couple.” Those two series both bounced off of each other, so it was the first time that we introduced the crossing over of one character from one series into another series, and that was the start of that.

KF: What was the initial response to those two series?

NP: This is actually interesting because the shows are very different. That first season of “The Number” was dealing with a couple who were engaged and they decide to tell each other how many people they’ve slept with, and they write it down on a piece of paper. So we as the audience, we never know what their number is. They know as a couple and we know as an audience that her number is higher than his. For the guy, he feels that her number’s much higher than his and he became very uncomfortable with it, and the whole series was unpacking how he was dealing with his own paranoia around that and his own insecurities and how could their relationship survive and could they actually get married now that he knew this about her that he didn’t know before.

In 2011, really 2012, the attitude around that type of storyline is very different than it is today. We just rebooted the series, and back then there wasn’t a term called slut-shaming, so people were really saying the character Melissa was a slut and a lot of women hated her but they couldn’t help but keep watching the show, and we had a really strong reaction to that series from men and women just about how sexualized this women was or how much sex she had had in her past, even though she’s in a committed relationship now. I’m seeing it as very interesting, it’s very different now that we’ve rebooted the series. Four years later it’s back, or three and a half years later it’s back, and it’s the same characters, same actress playing her, and people are like, “Oh Melissa’s a freak. Go get yours girl”. The attitude is so different now than it was then. That’s not only due to society, I think it’s due to the way we’re approaching the series as well, but that’s how that series was received.

“The Couple” was received very warmly and became a lot more popular than we had initially anticipated. We thought that “The Couple” was going to be a very quiet show about two people, chick and dude, who live together and get on each others nerves, and what it’s like, the difference between dating and living together. It was a very subdued series and we didn’t know that it was going to catch the momentum that it caught. I think I attribute it mostly to we haven’t seen a young couple on the screen that could just do normal things together and that felt real. I think that people really gravitated towards that series because they felt like the couple was really a couple and that was fascinating and they got into it. That was the early reactions.

KF: Recently I heard Effie Brown, who is a producer, a really noted producer, say that she just wants to see black people doing normal stuff, not having to overcome insurmountable obstacles or be heroic figures, just being normal and being in love and being in a relationship. That is something that Black&Sexy does really well and I think that’s one of the reasons why people gravitate toward what you do. I’m interested in, you guys have a really devoted following. How did you cultivate that following?

NP: Again, it started with the film. It’s crazy because now there are people who are subscribed to our network that have never seen the film, but it was really those early fans that we grew from them. We didn’t try to go outside of that at first. We knew that there was this fan-base that were really, really supportive of the film, and everything you just said really felt like they were seeing a slice of life on TV or in the movie theaters like, “Oh this is a slice of life. I want more, I want more”.

Because the film was airing on Showtime, that would bring a lot of love to our Facebook page at the time. Dennis and I would just take turns on that Facebook page building it. We were building it around the ideals of modern black pride, it’s the best way I can describe it. We would post things on there every single day and kind of compete against each other on who could do a better post on Facebook. We were feeding our fans whatever we could feed them until we were able to get more content. We’ve always grown our audience in a very grassroots way, one email at a time, one social media post at a time. The more tools that we’ve had we utilize every tool we can possibly utilize. It’s all about connecting as directly with them as we possibly can.

KF: You’ve mentioned your co-founder Dennis Dortch who is also your husband. How’s it like working with your-

NP: Not my husband, we’re not married.

KF: Your partner.

NP: Thank you.

KF: All right, yes, let’s be progressive. It’s 2016. Dennis is also your partner in business and at home-

NP: Love, parenting, everything. Yes.

KF: What is it like never being able to get away from your partner?

NP: It definitely presents its challenges. It has its plusses and its minuses for sure. The plus side is that we’re just more efficient when you’re always together. This morning we went on a 5K walk together and talked business for however long that took, 45 minutes, an hour, however long we were walking. It’s just convenient. If I wake up in the middle of the night or I’m going to bed with an idea, he’s the first person I tell, I’m the first person he tells, and for that it’s really incredible.

As far as not being able to get away, you have to carve that out for yourself. I have other interests and other projects that are separate, he has other interests, not so much as me because this is 100% his livelihood, but we just carve that out. You have to carve it out for yourself and you have to sometimes take a minute and breathe deep and try not to kill each other. I think because we have a bigger vision that’s not a huge problem, that’s just what it is, it’s just our lives, it’s just the way it is. It’s the way we get things done and it’s the way we’ve built a bond and trust with each other over these many years.

KF: Do you guys still work out of your home?

NP: Oh yeah. We definitely still work out of our home. That’s a thing, it’s crazy. There’s not one corner of our home that’s not used for filming or that someone else hasn’t been in. We don’t really have a space to call our own. Everyone’s been in our bed because we film in our bedroom, we film in our bathroom. Every time we try and say, “Okay. This area of the house is just for us”, it’s just impossible. When you have a start-up company, you have to use every resource you have, and right now, where we live, is a big resource for us because we’ve filmed almost every single series, at some point, within these walls that we live in. It is what it is. It’s one of the sacrifices you make. You got to use whatever you have.

KF: I’m sure you get the ill tax write-offs.

NP: Yeah. I just heard that we’re able to write the whole thing off. That’s good news.

KF: Great news. How big is the company? How many people do you have on staff?

NP: We’re very small still. We’re bigger than we were. We have three people full time and then we have a handful or so of freelancers, which is up from when we first started where we didn’t have any employees at all, it was just everyone pitching in and doing what we could do, what we could get done. I’m sure you know how that is.

KF: Absolutely. When you’re financing it yourself, you run a lean operation. I get it. You’ve built your own distribution platform and you’ve been able to launch that from the success that you’ve had on YouTube. What was that transition like? How did you get that started?

NP: It was a slow and steady progression. We’re still figuring it out in a way. We started on YouTube, we had seven subscribers when we first started. It was either four or seven, I think it was seven. Seven subscribers and we built that up, I think we’re at 120,000, something like that, right now. We built that by being consistent, as consistent as possible. We built that by not giving up. We knew that we needed to make a transition so that we could actually grow more and sustain ourselves financially as well. A lot of people might think you make a lot of money on YouTube, but you don’t really. Even people who make a lot of money should be making a lot more money. The way that it’s structured for the kind of content we do, for the numbers we do, we knew we had to do more.

We always wanted to have our own site. We started off trying to have our own site. As soon as we knew it was possible to try that again, we wanted to make that move. We had to slowly but surely coax our audience into being okay with paying for it. That happened by building the value and doing it one step at a time. In the beginning, we just charged for our finales only. If you really loved the series, you would pay for the finale. We just let our audience know we were making that move, like, “Hey. This is what’s happening. We’re moving to a streaming subscription service now and for all of you who want this to keep going, this is where it’s going, so follow us here” and many people did, and many more convinced other people to do so as well. Just slow and steady, it did not happen over night, and we’re still working to do more.

KF: That getting the audience to pay for it thing. I think it’s conventional knowledge that it is difficult to convince internet users or people who consume media on the internet to buy in, to actually put five on it, if you will, because we are so used to consuming media for free, or for very, very cheap. Did you have difficulty convincing your audience to actually pay for finales, and now pay for series?

NP: Of course we did. Any time that you give someone something for free and then you say, “now you have to pay”, people are going to whine, they’re going to complain, and then they’re going to criticize you down to every last detail where they would not have so much so before. You have to know what you’re doing as far as your vision. We always had the vision to have our own site and to build something that could be a place where everyone could find their home. Where we could find our home as creators and where our audience could find a home for the kind of content that they would actually be excited to watch and not feel like, “Oh I’m just kind of settling for whatever’s out there”. With that in mind, we were able to bypass anyone who was trying to dissuade us from that.

Because we had done a lot for so long, a lot of people were even asking us “when can we start paying for this?” It wasn’t a complete uphill battle of no one, everyone’s kicking and screaming and no one wanted to. People really wanted us to still be around and wanted us to grow and be able to do more series and do longer content. All the things that they wanted, enough people understood that they needed to pay for that thing they wanted. There’s always people, there’s to this day, we have some people that are on YouTube that refuse to subscribe to our service, but they’ll watch the little clips that we put on YouTube and they’ll comment on those, but they just refuse to subscribe. For some people, they may never come around or maybe next year those people will subscribe. You have to keep going with the people who are down with you where you’re at right now and just build on that. I don’t think that we approached it from a sense of entitlement at all, so I think that helped us a lot. We didn’t just jump in there and say, “Give us money”. We did one series after another after another, and then we said, “Hey. Please join us over here”. It was a different type of sell.

KF: How many series do you now have on your own platform? I think we have ten.

KF: Do you feel any pressure, now that people are paying for the content, do you feel a different kind of pressure to deliver or to perform?

NP: Yes, definitely we feel the pressure because we have a saying around here “you live and die on every week”, you’re only as good as your last episode, you’re only as good as your last blog post, you’re only as good as your last movie. I think that all creatives and every business entity are only as good as your latest product. Apple, they’re only as good as their latest iPhone. They do a crappy one, they’ve got to come fighting and do a better one next time to make you forget about the bad one. It’s just a constant thing and our audience is very progressive, they are very intelligent, and they’ll take us to task if they’re not feeling this, if they’re not feeling that, even more so because they are paying now.

Even though we have people that are still very understanding that we’re a grassroots company still, we’re a start-up company still, this is a network, no network was built overnight. No network was even built in five years and we’re not even five years old yet. Some people understand that. The people who don’t, they still come at us, most of us in a way that I think is actually helpful to us because can take those comments and we can better ourselves by what they say. We do get frustrated and we do take things personally because I want us to be great, I don’t want anyone to think badly of anything we’re doing. Those comments, once that emotion part goes away, actually drive you to be better. There is some truth in everything that everyone says. There’s some truth. We just have to fish that truth part of it out and do our best to be better, because if they’re commenting at all, that means they care. We do feel the pressure. We use that pressure to be better.

KF: Is your distribution platform profitable for you guys?

NP: Define profitable.

KF: Do you bring in more than it takes to produce the shows?

NP: I would say we’re more in the breaking even zone, but that being said, we are making money now, but we’re also spending more money now, like any company. Every time you make money, you got to reinvest that back into the company to make more of what made you money in the first place. That’s where we’re at. We have these different milestones. I just said, “we’re almost five years old”. You can take it back to the movie as one milestone, you can take the first time we dropped on YouTube as a milestone, and then you can take when we started our subscription service as another milestone, and that’s only been a year. It’s only been a year since we’ve had that type of consistent revenue. I would say it’s more like breaking even. We’re doing our best to scale, so that requires really flooding more revenue into everything.
I think there’s lots of pressure for even the smallest of content creators, the smallest publishers, to scale, get as many eyeballs as possible, get as many subscribers and views as possible. How do you manage, in your business, trying to make sure that you remain true to your mission and true to your values, but also reach as many people as possible?

I feel there’s a large amount of people that would want, and could benefit, from the content that we create at Black&Sexy, globally. That’s just from me traveling and having people come up to me and tell me that they live in Denmark, and there’s very few black people there, and when they watch our content, they feel like they’re at home. When I think about the company, I do think about us in a global sense, and globally speaking, you’re talking about a lot of people. I feel that we can do the same type of content that we’re doing and it will resonate with quite a lot of people. It’s not like trying to go “mainstream”, where you’re trying to get every type of person in the world to watch your content. We’re just trying to get the progressive, black, young-feeling, or actually young, people to tune it, and there’s a lot of us around the world. When we talk about scaling, we’re not talking about it from “Oh we’re trying to get every person in the world”, we’re just trying to get our people. We’re looking for all the opportunities available to us to reach our people.

KF: And you’re challenging the notion that black stories that center around black lives are not universal.

NP: Yes. Here’s the thing, our stories are definitely universal. We have white people that are subscribed to Black&SexyTV, it’s definitely the minority viewership, but our point of view is really about point of view. It’s stories from our point of view. Anyone who wants to hear a story or watch a movie or get addicted to a TV series that’s from a black point of view, you’re welcome here. Those stories are universal, but it doesn’t mean that everyone in the world wants to look at that piece of the universe. Even though they can say, “Oh it’s the same things. People are falling in love, people are dealing with their families, people are dealing with wealth and race. People all over the world deal with that stuff”, but they want it reflected back to them in a way that feels right to them. You know what I mean? I think that that’s when people talk about universal stories is like yes it’s true, it’s a universal story, but human nature, a lot of times, puts you in the pocket of wanting something to reflect yourself, and that’s what our audience hasn’t had enough of.

KF: Let’s get back to the distribution platform that you guys have created. Everybody likes to talk about just building your own. People who have done it understand that it is difficult, it’s expensive, it’s time consuming. On the technical side of building your own platform, how difficult was that?

NP:We have really great partners in VHX, which is a platform we use. We built that relationship with them as being their first beta-tester of what they’re doing. There’s so much more we want to do. Those things take time, those things take financing. There’s a lot more we want to do with the technical infrastructure, for sure, but I’m actually pretty happy with the way that it’s going because we’re just accomplishing one thing after another. We’re on Apple TV now, we’re on Roku. We have an iOS app now. All of those things we didn’t have a year ago and we definitely didn’t have it when we were only on YouTube. VHX has been a great platform for us, and YouTube was, and still is, a great platform for us because we didn’t have to build a player, YouTube had the player already. We didn’t have to build comments, we didn’t have to build all these things. YouTube was lacking in certain things and was not enabling us to do the subscription service, which was really our goal from early on. I look at it as we have good partnership with both companies, so we’re not where we were in 2009 trying to make something by ourselves. We look at those two entities as partners.

KF: YouTube, I believe, now allows for users to subscribe or users to pay for certain content, I believe.

NP: They do.

KF: Have you guys explored that or tried that at all?

NP: We did explore that, but we found that at VHX we had more flexibility and more profitability with them than we would at YouTube.

KF: I’ve heard from a few people that the revenue split with YouTube is disconcerting, should we say.

NP: I can’t even remember what it is right now, but we’re happier where we’re at right now as far as that’s concerned. I think that YouTube is making a lot of effort to change that where they can and how they can, but I don’t know what their plans are long-term and we didn’t have time to wait for it. We didn’t have time to wait for them to figure out how it’s going to work and how it could benefit us more, whereas VHX was ready to go and ready to really work with us in a close way to achieve our goals. YouTube, I think, was more focused on the people who were bringing in the huge, huge, huge numbers, and those people don’t look like us, mostly, and those people also aren’t creating long- form content. We just had different objectives. While we’re still on YouTube we’re figuring out how do we use YouTube in a way that works best. While we also use our subscription, our streaming service, in a way that that works best. They work together now.

KF: You have also partnered with major networks to introduce Black&SexyTV’s productions to larger audiences, one of whom is BET. How did that collaboration come to be?

NP: It’s a funny story, I’ll try to keep it short. We had been meeting with BET over the years. Dennis was taking meetings with BET right out of Sundance. Every time we met with them, nothing really came of it, and they were having a lot of different regime changes over there. We always take the meetings because it’s always good to keep your relationships firm and we do serve similar audiences. We were thinking if something could work out one day, cool we’ll see, but after a while we were starting to feel like, “well, we just keep meeting with them, I guess for fun, because nothing was ever really moving forward”.

Then we had a meeting with some new executives there and we could just tell from that meeting that they were approaching it very differently, that they were very serious about figuring out how to partner with us. We said what we would need and they said what the would need and we made it happen. Looking back when we were looking at it actually airing on BET, we were laughing about the process that it took to get there. I think they had a very specific plan for us and those plans lined up perfectly with what we wanted to do. All of our branding stayed in tact and they did something that’s never been done before. They took our series directly off of YouTube, as is, and put them directly onto BET, and all they did was edit for commercials, which was the only difference. We never ran commercials on our content. They made it into one-hour blocks, whereas our content would range from anywhere between eight minutes and twenty-five minutes, depending on what season you were in.

That’s how it happened. We just had people that were really excited and really dedicated to making it happen. It was great for us. We got a lot of visibility out of that and some good relationships over there at BET.

KF: Licensing can be a huge business. Vice is an incredibly profitable company, in part because they license their independently produced content to HBO and wherever else. Is that a part of your business model?

NP: It wasn’t initially a part of our business model, but it’s an option, it’s a revenue option for us, I guess. It’s not how we think of our business like, “oh we’re creating content in hopes to license it here and there”. If people want to approach us and it make sense and it’s not in conflict with what we’re already doing, then yes doing a licensing deal helps us create more content. That’s money that flows back into the company that we need to do more. It’s definitely a great option, but it’s not our key focus in any way because we want to give our content to our subscribers first and we want to build our platform as big as it can get. That’s why the BET deal was great because they were taking content that we had done a long time ago and hadn’t really received money back, in particular “Roomieloverfriends”. We put a lot of money into that series and we were able to see some of it back because of that deal. It’s definitely something that we will entertain, but it’s not something we’re chasing. Our number one objective is growing our platform.

KF: I believe I first heard about “The Couple” being developed as an HBO show back in 2014. What is the status of your collaboration with HBO?

NP: It’s still in development and any industry insider will understand when we say that when dealing with HBO, things really take time. All of our peers that have had shows lined up there have had to be very patient because they only produce so many shows a year and they’re very particular about which ones and when. They like to wait and kind of see. It’s still just kind of in developmental phase. In the mean time, we just have to keep … we can’t wait for that. We can’t wait for anyone outside of ourselves. We just have to do our own thing. It’s great that the show is there, it’s great that they fell in love with it, but there’s really no further update.

KF: I believe I talked to Issa Rae in September or October and that was after the pilot of her show “Insecure” had already been filmed. We’re still waiting on an update on when we’re going to be able to see “Insecure”.

NP: It takes time, but they’re working over there. It’s just that HBO takes their time. It’s one of the reasons why they’re one of the best. It can be frustrating for the creatives, I’m sure, sometimes, but at the same time, you know that you’re in good hands at a place like HBO. I’m sure we’ll hear from them.

KF: It’s very apparent that you and your partner are people who believe strongly that you don’t have to wait for gatekeepers, you don’t have to wait for anybody else to give you permission, or fund you. How do you think that that has impacted your ability to create? How important has that been in you being able to build an independent media company?

NP: It’s the most important thing. It is number one the most important thing and it comes down to just believing in yourself and believing in your community and what we’re capable of. It’s very easy to get tripped up into the game of other people telling you what’s hot when they’ve never been the ones to actually dictate what’s hot. You know? Somehow they get it twisted around that they’re the ones that know all the time, and sometimes they do know, but sometimes you have to know what you know, and we know what we know. We know when we’re excited about a show that we have something there. We know that if we don’t do that show, if we spend a year or more of our lives trying to convince someone else that this is a series worth investing in, that it’s just a waste of everyone’s time and we could have already done it on our own.

Not that that’s easy. We still need help. We still need partners. None of it happens all by yourself, I’m not saying that, I’m just saying that you have to find a way to just do it. if you’re going to build a media company, you have to. You have to have a vision that’s so big and that’s so exciting to you that you push through all of that because you can decide to do something different and a lot of people do because not everyone is born to build a network. Not everyone needs to do that, first of all, and not everyone has the wherewithal or the desire to do that. If you are doing that the way we are, that’s the number one thing that’s just in your head.

It feels so good that we get to green-light our own, that we get to make those decisions for ourselves, and then have stories that reflect us and have people telling those stories that also reflect us. You’ve got the full enchilada. It’s the number one thing. What happens is that people start coming to you when you do that and then you can pick and choose who you want to work with, who you want to partner with, who you want to spend time with, and trust your creativity with.

KF: I’m always real with people about the fact that For Harriet, the company that I run, has almost shut down multiple times. We’re almost six years old and there have been a few times where I have run out of money, when I was just like, “I don’t know how we are going to cover payroll next month”. I’m interested in, how many times has Black&SexyTV almost shut down?

NP: I’m not going to say that we’ve almost shut down. I’m going to say we’ve been brought to our knees a few times. We’ve had sleepless nights. We’ve had tears streaming down our faces, for sure. We’ve been incredibly stressed out and not known how we’re going to pay people, like you just said, how we’re going to make payroll. All the while, we still got to get that episode out every weekend. In the early, early days, we almost lost the apartment that we live in because we were putting all of our rent money into our shows. We almost got evicted. We didn’t have a car. We had a newborn. We’ve been through all of that.

As you start to make more money, the financial challenges just have an extra zero on them. We’ve gone through all of those things and Dennis and I are very different in that I’m always like, “Well if we talk about it too much, or get too down about it, we’re perpetuating it. We’re making it worse”. He’s like, “yeah, but we got to face it because we got to actually deal with the fact that we don’t have it” or whatever it is.

It’s a business and every business is going through that. Every single company is going through those ups and downs. I think the difference with a company like ours and a company with yours is that when we’re independently funded, you don’t have that softer landing of like, “Oh you got this other money flowing in from an investor”. We always have to focus on the next thing that we’re creating, no matter what, and that is definitely not to say we haven’t been brought to our knees a few times, but I won’t say that we’ve almost shut down because it’s just an option. We always have to find a way. The stress can be real, you have to find ways to manage it.

KF: This is 100% real and I actually agree with you. I’ve had to For Harriet work because this is how I pay my bills. Thank you so much for joining me Numa. This was a really enlightening conversation and, again, I am such a huge admirer of what you and Dennis have built with Black&SexyTV.