Watch Club is producing short video dramas and building a social network around them

Henry Soong is trying to make vertical microdrama series that don’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder quite unique within this multibillion-dollar industry of apps that churn out formulaic, cringe-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending.

“Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and she disapproves of me!’” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this can be so much bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance soap operas.”

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

What would be the earning potential for a microdrama app that makes shows that are actually good and worth talking about?

Soong is trying to answer that question with Watch Club, an app with microdrama stories made by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort do not use union talent).

Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes himself as “a fangirl, through and through,” thinks that what makes TV so special is the communities that form around them. Given his experience working on social products, he’s also seeking to differentiate Watch Club from existing microdrama apps by embedding a social network within it.

“I think you can actually build such a more interesting business if you take what makes TV truly the most fun,” he said, pointing out “Heated Rivalry” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You watch it, and then you just want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 funny, clever other young women or gay people on the internet are saying.”

Right now, people chat about “Severance” theories on Reddit, or they react to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became the cesspool that is X, you had to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Soong sees the potential of housing both the show and the fan forums in one place.

How will that app make money? Like most early-stage, venture-funded companies, that’s a question to punt for now, until it’s clear how users are engaging with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone was interesting enough to secure seed funding led by GV. Watch Club also received checks from individuals like Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, the firm run by major U.K. YouTubers the Sidemen, also participated.

Soong doesn’t have a background in film, which is why he brought in Devon Albert-Stone as founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a slate of 10 shows.

“We work with brilliantly talented people when they have a few months free to go work on something that may not be huge budget because we offer them huge creative latitude to go do something that Amazon would never let them do at a speed and velocity that feels way more exciting than the glacial pace of the television industry,” Soong said.

He added: “I’m really good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize.”

At Meta, his mission from 2016 to 2019 was to figure out how to make money in China, a country where no one could use Meta’s products. By 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion per year of ad sales for companies within China who wanted to advertise to audiences outside of the country.

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

“Right around the time that I was leaving Meta [in 2019] is when these Chinese micro drama apps started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so that Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know this business playbook. I know how expensive and capital-intensive it is, and I think you can build a way better microdrama business if you aren’t 100% dependent on paid user acquisition.”

Watch Club will have its first opportunity to test its concept when it releases its first show, “Return Offer,” which it plans to distribute on its app with daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — which is about a group of tech interns in San Francisco competing for a return offer.

“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to the thing that supplants streaming television, and part of doing that is by building welcoming, creative sets with talented professionals, where people are having fun, despite small budgets, making something wonderful,” Soong said.