Drag Me: The App Supporting Drag Artists

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Welcome to the Business Gay podcast, where we talk about all things business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode, I have entrepreneur and founder of the app “Drag Me,” Ailsa Blair.

Ailsa is a neurodiverse, trans non binary queer who grew up in Liverpool, England. At heart, they are a product design leader, having spent over a decade in the field. Ailsa was part of the project team that was third in the world to build out instant payouts behind only Square and PayPal. In 2023, Ailsa began their own adventure, building Drag Me, a mobile app that globally supports both fans and artists of the art of drag.

Outside of work, Ailsa loves to hike with their husky lab mixed pup, Bruce. If they’re not in the woods getting lost somewhere, they’re on a beach, and if they’re not there, they’re in or on the water. I’m excited to dive into how Drag Me is revolutionizing the drag scene for artists. So, let’s jump in.

[00:01:48] Calan Breckon: Hello, Ailsa. I’m so, so excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing?

[00:01:53] Ailsa Blair: I’m doing really great. Calan, how are you doing?

[00:01:55] Calan Breckon: I’m very excited to have you on the podcast. So I’m doing very good. You reached out to me, and I actually had followed drag me, which we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. I actually followed it on Instagram and already liked it and was excited. So this was a very exciting, like, you know, serendipitous moment for me. So in saying that, can you tell us more about drag me? What is it?

[00:02:19] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, so drag me is basically a one stop mobile app that is made for both fans and artists. So we have basically two sides of the platform on one side, it’s basically an aggregation of all of the events for drag that exist because right now they’re fragmented across the Internet.

And on the artist side, it’s more of, like, productivity tooling or support to make sure that folks can really create a sustainable career in drag for themselves without having to go onto reality tv to be able to kind of do that.

[00:03:02] Calan Breckon: Nice.

[00:03:03] Calan Breckon: That’s awesome. So it’s creating this space where if you want to go to a drag.

[00:03:07] Calan Breckon: Performance, you can go to drag me the app.

[00:03:10] Calan Breckon: You can go see who’s performing in your location and, like, buy tickets to their shows. Is that possible on the app?

[00:03:17] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, exactly. So you can buy. You can buy tickets to the shows. We’ll recommend local shows that you probably haven’t heard before.

We’re building in a recommendation engine, so we’ll be learning all the time all of the different things that people like, and we’ll be able to make more accurate recommendations to what events to go to or tickets to buy or, um, what merchandise to buy as well. Kind of house e commerce in the app as well. Um, so I’m really excited about that because over time, that’s only going to get better, and that means the app’s going to get better.

[00:03:53] Calan Breckon: So, yeah. And from. From my point of view, looking in, it seems like this is also very, like, community centric of, like, supporting drake artists, because we know, you know, you go and watch your Drake performer at your local bar or your local whatever, it’s not exactly the most lucrative career. So what kinds of things do you have baked in there that really help support the artists?

[00:04:16] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, so I think the main thing for the artist support is we try and put as much of the fees on the fan side as possible. We make sure that anytime an artist is posting an event or ticketing event with us, they’re going to get the full face value of the ticket and we’ll charge the transactional fee to the fan.

So that’s going to be a big step up given that, you know, eventbrite, Ticketmaster have all recently, I think, increased their fees. Industry average is like ten to 24%, and we’re hopefully going to be charging around 9% to make sure that we kind of undercut that and we can support the low income community that the queer community is.

[00:05:02] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:05:03] Calan Breckon: Because we’re tended to get the shaft when it comes to a lot of just life in general.

So it’s nice where we can support community and each other.

I’m curious, what lessons have you learned from building the app so far? We’re going to dive a little bit into like, the entrepreneur side of this endeavor.

[00:05:23] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, I think for me, I spent twelve years in product development and product design. So the idea of like building an app is fairly natural to me. I think the thing that really was the big jump was making that leader from product design to owning my own business and having to wear many hats.

Whilst product design, you have the balance of research and design itself. Now I’m doing about 20 different disciplines as an entrepreneur, so I’ve learned a lot even in the short time that I’ve been doing this, which is about a year.

[00:06:03] Calan Breckon: Okay, so was this your first jump into entrepreneurship?

[00:06:07] Ailsa Blair: It was. It was, yeah. I spent about twelve years navigating the tech industry and a big component of why I started this was I was kind of sick of working for other people and the toxicity that really exists in the tech industry in general.

And I wanted to create almost like a safe haven in tech where folks could go and know it was going to be psychologically safe or at least safer than these kind of places that exist currently.

[00:06:38] Calan Breckon: I hear that. I’m sure you’re very familiar with queer tech, so I know that queer tech is doing really great work in that environment, trying to change those stats, trying to change those things in the typical working world. And then I think it’s out in biz, no, out in tech in the US has also got their stuff going on. So basically the old toxic sayings of like, olden day work is driving a lot of us out of that work. I have to admit that’s also why I left. I wasn’t in corporate world, but like, that’s why I had to leave kind of that world, because I was like, I can’t work with people anymore like this because they just don’t understand our community to the degrees that I will want them. And some would argue we need to stay there to balance that out. But I know there’s good people doing that. So we’re going to be the entrepreneur.

Yeah. What was the hardest part about starting your own business as a Tus LGBTQIA founder, do you think?

[00:07:41] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, I think. I mean, I’m experiencing it right now to a degree, which is like getting funding. So far we’ve been entirely bootstrapped. I’ve managed to kind of survive off of business loans and my own kind of savings.

Going into fundraising is an entirely different beast, I found.

And it’s really hard to talk to Cishet kind of investors about a market as niche as folks consider drag to be at this point and also queer community to be.

It’s really hard to kind of explain how big that is on a global level at this point.

[00:08:24] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely the hetero community doesn’t. Well, maybe some of the women, but the guys definitely will just kind of glaze over. I was just in Montreal at startup Fest, actually, because there was the queer tech had the pitch going on for, I think it was like, sixty k. I think the winners actually ended up binder. Shout out to binder. They’re a queer dating app that ended up winning. I think they actually ended up getting 70k.

But in that environment, it was a very heteronormative environment.

[00:08:58] Calan Breckon: And every time somebody came up to.

[00:09:00] Calan Breckon: Me, more specifically, the men would come up to me and they would ask me, oh, what’s your business? What’s the bow? What do you do? And I was just like, okay, here we go. Queer Netflix. And you just see, like, the glaze that happens on the eyes, and you’re like, ah, don’t worry, I’ll give you an out. I’ll tell you what we do, but I’ll give you an out of being like, okay, gotta go this way now. And it’s just kind of what happens in that world. So when did you start doing your fundraising? And is there any specific experiences youd like to talk about that?

[00:09:31] Ailsa Blair: I think I knew from the beginning I was going to have to start prepping for fundraising, to be honest. So even from the beginning, last summer, I was reaching out to investors here in Vancouver just to build my network and, you know, figure out how to navigate the world both physically and digitally as we’ll be going into the states as well, and how to do that to the best degree, as, you know, a queer founder. And like you say, I’ve definitely found, like, women in particular or folks who are running those underrepresented groups in tech are super understanding. And when you get to that very kind of normal corporate culture, it’s that glaze over momentous where you’re just not going to win them over until they have kind of found out for themselves the power that kind of exists. Right?

[00:10:30] Calan Breckon: Yeah. And I also find that with those kinds of specifics, numbers talk very loudly. And so it’s. It’s unfortunate that it’s a sad truth that, as LGBTQ founders start out, did a study, actually, that we are better than our cisgender, heterosexual counterparts at, you know, providing more jobs, having more exits, and filing more patents, but we get, like, literally 0.5% of the funding, and it’s just insane when we have the data now to back it up, saying, well, we’re actually a better bet that you still have to go above and beyond any, like, cisgendered white guy to be like, look, my numbers are so much better, and you just have to work so much harder to get that when, like, somebody else could just be like, oh, I have this idea. And they’re like, oh, here’s money. And it drives me absolutely bonkers. But, hey, we’re going to be around to prove them all wrong.

[00:11:28] Ailsa Blair: It’s very true. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve definitely kind of noticed that as well. And, you know, navigating that world is always a little harder.

I found dipping into it as little as possible has been helpful, to be honest.

[00:11:44] Calan Breckon: Yeah. Is there anything else other than what we’ve just been talking about that you didn’t expect about being an entrepreneur?

[00:11:52] Ailsa Blair: I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much, if I’m honest. I put it off for a very long time.

Even back in 2017, I was working at an agency with my direct reports, and we were all gearing up to leave because the environment was not great. And they had basically told me to kind of start my own agency or my own thing. And I’d always told myself I didn’t really have it in me to be like, a founder or a CEO. I wanted to kind of stick to my product design role, but when it came down to it and figuring out what I wanted to do next after I got laid off last October, it just. It didn’t make sense for me to go back into that world. I wasn’t happy in that world, and I kind of decided it was just time to bet on myself and, you know, believe that I can do this and believe in the idea that I have and the community that’s around me.

[00:12:53] Calan Breckon: I love that, and I’m very happy that you’ve done that. I recently had Bobbi reset on the podcast, and she started virtual gurus, if you’re familiar with it. And she tells the story of how she was so insecure about her own capabilities coming from an indigenous background, a queer background, a woman background that she actually put on. I think she says Kijiji, where she’s like, somebody needs to be my CEO of my company and put it out.

[00:13:22] Calan Breckon: There when she was already doing all.

[00:13:23] Calan Breckon: The stuff and it was already rolling, but she felt that she still couldn’t be that role, and so hired the CEO, but then eight months later was like, no, this is not the vision. This is not what’s happening. And then had to fire him and took back over. And like, that journey taught her that. It’s like, I can do this. I am capable, more capable than I think.

And I think what the queer community specifically needs to lean on is our mentors and being able to make those more accessible and to be loud about what we’re doing so that we can.

[00:13:58] Calan Breckon: Get access to those mentors but then.

[00:14:00] Calan Breckon: Also become those mentors later on to other folks.

[00:14:04] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, absolutely. And there are some wonderful places that are doing kind of mentorship.

You mentioned a couple of them, like, out in tech, start out is great as well. Out of the states, there’s even trans tech as well, which has been spun up by Angelica Ross, and she is running that right now. So there are definitely the groups and the communities to be able to support us starting to kind of collectively do that. I think we’re still a long way off even looking at that 0.5% for us. If you look at women, even, they’ve struggled to get from 2% to 3% of that venture capital money and for decades, and it’s going to take a long time. But I think our community is so supportive of one another that it’s going to be a lot easier for us to do that, hopefully.

[00:15:03] Calan Breckon: Yeah, and I think it’s our resilience that, like, comes our natural resilience from being of the community that we just, like, it’s baked into us because we have to.

[00:15:13] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, absolutely. We have that resilience, but we also have that impostor syndrome. Right. Like you were talking about, like, I can’t do this because I haven’t seen someone like me do it before, and so someone’s got to do it first. And I guess I opted into that. You opted into that. We’re all opting into that to some degree by pursuing this.

And so that makes me really excited because you start to see those changes happen throughout the industry a little bit at a time, which is great.

[00:15:49] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely. I look at it almost like a little bit of like a protest of like, the way that things are. Just because things have been the way they are doesn’t mean they should stay the way they are. They need to grow and evolve and us becoming entrepreneurs and actually baking in those differences and those changes we want to see happen into our companies and being like, look, we’re doing so much better than you, and we implemented all these things we were telling you to do in this corporate position that you weren’t listening to. So I like to use it as, like, my own little, like, protest against rage against the machine.

[00:16:22] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, I definitely feel that I was. My last corporate gig, I think really swung it for me. I was like, if these folks can lead a team, I can lead a team.

[00:16:33] Calan Breckon: Definitely.

[00:16:34] Ailsa Blair: Like, if these folks can do this, I can definitely do a lot better than that.

[00:16:38] Calan Breckon: 100%. And on that note, I wanted to add into the mentor list is the CGLCC, the Canada’s two S LGBTQIa plus Chamber of Commerce. Because I know that very soon, because we’re in the summer months when this is coming out, that they will be accepting mentees and mentors for their mentorship program.

[00:16:59] Calan Breckon: I believe that starts roughly around September.

[00:17:02] Calan Breckon: October, but they’ll be accepting applications probably through August, maybe early September. I’m going to get the details on that, but just so folks who are listening know, that’s also a really great resource to look into. I went through their mentorship program and it was. It was phenomenal. I want to dive back more into the actual Dragme app. So what are you working on currently that you’re excited about?

[00:17:27] Ailsa Blair: So actually what we did last week is we released the artist side of the app, which is exciting.

We put it in kind of a test environment and invited some of the opt in drag queens who had volunteered to kind of test things for us. So I’m really excited to start getting feedback on that so that we can get that out to the public fairly soon. Once that’s out, the artists will really have the tools that they need to post the events and ticket those events. So we’ll start to see the app growing and we’ll start to be able to build an audience.

And I think that’s the really big thing that I’m super excited about, is just watching as this thing grows, watching as we kind of learn from folks in the drag scene, whether it be the artists or the fans themselves, so that we can really shape these apps to how folks need drag to be or want drag to be in their lives.

[00:18:26] Calan Breckon: Fantastic. So just to be clear, you’re not fully launched yet to drag artists to add their stuff on, but you have your test group that you’re working on things with, correct?

[00:18:37] Ailsa Blair: Yeah. In the next couple of weeks, we actually will be releasing the full app, which will be exciting.

We have about 83 partners in the states right now, drag queen wise, who we will be launching to first and hopefully then start to see the ball rolling on those things. So hopefully in a couple of weeks, you’ll start to see a lot of launch posts coming from our social media, maybe a little bit of change in website so, yeah, fingers crossed. Keep an eye out.

[00:19:08] Calan Breckon: That’s really, really exciting.

Continuing on with that thread of thought, what are exciting things in the future that you’re really excited about with drag me?

[00:19:18] Ailsa Blair: I think, like, coming from my product design background, I’m really excited to get back into the research stage of it all. So when I was starting this, going through product development, I did a bunch of user research, user interviews with drag artists and fans to kind of really learn what they needed. That, for me, was the most exciting part of this, being able to just sit down all day and really dig into what people need and start to figure out the solutions to those problems. I think that is where I really shine as a leader, just given that I have that product development background instilled in me.

[00:19:58] Calan Breckon: Nice. That’s exciting. Okay, so where can folks find out more about yourself and find out about drag me?

[00:20:06] Calan Breckon: Can they download the app right now? What’s the details?

[00:20:09] Ailsa Blair: Yes, the app is available on the app store. You will only be able to sign up as a fan if you’re doing it right now. Hopefully, if you’re listening to this in a couple of weeks, then it will already be available to you. So, yeah, please go to the app store, both for Apple and also for Android. And then we have socials. Our tag across socials is dragme.io, which is also our web address.

[00:20:36] Calan Breckon: Perfect, so people can find you there. What about yourself? Is there anywhere you’d like people specifically to reach out to you if they’re interested in connecting?

[00:20:44] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, I mean, if you have any ideas, if you are interested in being a partner, please reach out to me. Ailsa. So, [email protected], I’m always happy to kind of hear from the folks that we’re trying to serve, because that’s how we get better. So please, yeah, shoot me an email anytime, and hopefully we can learn a lot from all of you.

[00:21:12] Calan Breckon: Perfect.

[00:21:12] Calan Breckon: We’ll make sure to have all of these links in the show notes so that folks can get in contact with you if they’d like. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This has been absolutely delightful, and I’m so excited for when drag me actually launches and, like, it’s, like, international and supporting our Drake performers, because that’s probably one of my favorite parts of being part of the queer community growing up.

[00:21:36] Calan Breckon: 19.

[00:21:36] Calan Breckon: The moment I could go to the club, dreg performances were, like, my favorite part of it. That and dancing. But, like, to go and watch drag, it’s the. It’s the perfect kind of balance between. I’m a little tired. I want to have a drink, but I don’t want to talk in this super loud environment. I just want to watch something. So I’m very glad that you’ve come up with this and that you’re going to be supporting our, you know, our performers.

[00:21:58] Ailsa Blair: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a huge reason why we’re doing this. I mean, growing up in the UK, there was a drag queen from my hometown, so I got to see that on mainstream tv as a kid. And I think that was the first time I’d really thought about getting to adulthood, you know, going through that adolescence part. So I think hopefully we’ll start to be able to see more and more queer folks in those positions, you know, supporting, building community, and also just entertaining us. You know, it is a great art form in itself.

[00:22:34] Calan Breckon: Awesome.

[00:22:34] Calan Breckon: Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Ailsa.

[00:22:37] Ailsa Blair: Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.

[00:22:39] Calan Breckon: Before we sign off today, I want to make sure that you go and download the drag me app. So make sure you click the link in the show notes to go and do that. Thanks to for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that like and subscribe button. If you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The business Gay podcast is written and produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.