How I Started My Own Collective | The Payton Dunn Story | Co-Hosted

Payton Dunn: So welcome to Co-Hosted. Today we're gonna have special episode for you. ⁓ it's just gonna be me, singly hosted, and I'm gonna tell you my story ⁓ to basically give you bigger background on myself and also that you know Rally Point Media and Co-hosted is going through a little bit of a transition right now as we get ready to cover more of a national area instead of just Arkansas. And so ⁓ you know, it's gonna be a little bit slower developing co-hosted because So, you know, we have this very low barrier to entry, right, for fans so they can feel like they're engaged because I feel the the number one issue in the NIL era is that schools I guess less want to engage fans. They want to do it on their own. ⁓ I feel like fans are kinda being left out. Like they're in the background. And so, you know The the thing that makes college sports great is that these teams are in your backyard, they're only your teams, right? Arkansas only belongs to Arkansas, Tennessee only belongs to Tennessee. They're not really national. So it's like, yes, let's use Arc Arkansas to build Arkansas. so you know, I'm going through this. John Hawes introduced me to Courtney Mims, get on the news that way. I have a lot of media attention. Arkansas media was great, well accepted, well ready to get behind this, but We're also developing a documentary right now that covers NIL as a whole in the current college sports ⁓ you know ecosystem and sphere. ⁓ and right now, you know, a lot of my time is going into that documentary, right? ⁓ we got a lot of interesting interviews coming up and we're going to different universities to get footage to be able to really show the whole picture of NIL. Our goal is to interview around forty people in the space. there were problems, you know, getting to the school. So, you know, as you're starting this journey, you know, I use AI, Chat G V T, I'm like, hey, help me be an expert, read a lot of books, listen to a lot of podcasts, reach out to people. ⁓ so you're setting it up, I'm setting it up for the first deal. And, you know, getting to that point, you know, I learned that that the school only really wants us to go at five ninety-nine. So So that way we can tell the story that we have written out the best way possible and to hopefully get as many eyes on it and to get the biggest audience on it. So today I'm I'm gonna tell you my story. So one, when you see me with these athletes, you understand who I am a little bit more. ⁓ if you haven't followed my story since the beginning, which you probably haven't because I'm not that well known yet. so it starts with You gotta learn how like how can we engage, right? Like the fans want football players, but you know, objectively we need to help all Arkansas sports. So as we're growing, you know, you run into more and more people, you run into a lot of ideas, people wanna help you out. I met a lot of great people along the way. and you know, it just kinda continued to evolve and we were able to make deals with players. I guess the story is the title of this episode's gonna be How I Started My Own Collective, right? And a lot of people have told this story through news articles or whatever, but I personally have not publicly told my story. So this will be the time where I tell the story through my own narrative, which is the whole point of co hosted where we can have athletes come on and answer questions themselves without their school's PR team telling ⁓ how to do it. ⁓ We were in a we were able to convince these kids that make a lot of money from the school to take less deals to go out and meet the fan base to be involved in the fan base. And we were able to help ⁓ out. Like I mean, what college kid isn't gonna you know, what's two hundred you know, two hundred dollars is gonna help out. Like that's something, you know? That's a night out and a couple nights out in Arkansas. And I I just found out in this process that I really enjoyed helping college athletes. And they can give a little bit more of a personal background to the fan bases so that way they know who they are. And, you know, my story is that, you know, we're gonna have to go back to October of last year, twenty twenty five. I'm, you know, watching the Arkansas Razorbacks play. And I go with my friends to the game in Memphis because, you know, I'm in Nashville, just got out of Fort Campbell with active duty, you know, back to being in the guard. you know, grow their own brands, engage their own audience, you know, making sure that they were taken care of because there was a lot of sketchy stuff through this process that we found. ⁓ that wasn't great. And you know, you're able to really help kids develop and get to that next stage in life. And, you know, help them engage their own fan bases and tell their own stories. And that's what I found out my passion was for. And ⁓ don't have a full time job, got off a deployment, yeah, you know, from college deployment to active duty to now, you know, having did not have anything to do, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and you know, I had the opportunity through active duty to have a little bit of money set aside. ⁓ but we start off with going to this game in Memphis, right. I'm at the game, I think, you know I think through this this process, which this isn't supposed to be, you know, a diss tracked or anything negative, it's just supposed to be very positive of hey, here's how I did it. ⁓ and and yet that's that you know, eventually there came a time we didn't see the same vision. I move on, right, 'cause we upgraded it, you know, from a collective to this new model that doesn't have collective in the name, but collective was really just a fan named thing that Florida invented first and everybody adapted and You make the travel to Memphis because you think that's gonna be an easy win. yeah, they play teams tough at home, but you just destroyed two teams. ⁓ you look really good, your offense is amazing, your defense has questions. We go to the Memphis game, and at no point during the game did we ever think we were gonna lose that game. But we ended up losing it, and it was just an absolute total embarrassment. I actually had money on the game. So now, you know, they're off on their own doing that and I'm gonna go do my new thing with Riley Point here and, you know, try to help athletes tell their stories and engage audiences. B but the whole the whole point of this was just to show you that, you know, fans can still do it. You know, there was an impact to what I did. I've learned a lot and now I'm making this documentary to be able to tell the whole story. But don't, you know, don't let people tell you you can't do something, right? I'd money on the over, add money on Taylor and Green's yards, and add money on Arkansas to win. And the over hit, and I was cheering for the over because Arkansas had such a lead at halftime, Memphis scores the last second touchdown, and you're like, ⁓ my god, yes. And you know, a lot of people want to go back through that game and say, ⁓ Memphis was coached very well, it was a very good game. No. They tried an onside kick in the first half that didn't work out. So Arkansas got the ball back. Arkansas played Go out and try. Like people in this industry will accept you. There will be people that don't because you didn't do it the same way they did. But you know, you as a fan have every right to your team. As long as they're public, right? And you do not need to let other people take that away from you or people that don't understand. We have to fight for our teams to not lose them. One of the worst games I've seen in person in the second half to allow that g like the game was not played great on either side and the players will admit that. ⁓ no team had business winning that game. Both teams should have lost. But Arkansas loses. And you know, f to be an SE C team and to be in the NIL era where you're spending twenty million dollars or more on a roster And this is the best way to do it. And I just want to say I I thank everybody that was supportive of me. I thank everybody that's still supportive of me and that helped me through this entire process. But if you want to go out and build something on your own, go do it. Don't let anybody tell you you can't. ⁓ that that's the biggest push or biggest words of advice that I would say through learning through this process. Now, I will say this. And to lose to a team that barely has those capabilities and Memphis has probably some of the best resources outside of the power four, but that's still no like there's no shot that Memphis should ever compete with you unless you're just poorly coached, poorly ran. And you know, the story we were told because our athletic director, Hunter Jurachek, came out ⁓ and said that they weren't properly fit. I'm still an Arkansas fan, right? I still love the univers like the state of Arkansas and the university, right? But I'm not a University of Arkansas fan. There's a lot of stuff that the university did that made things a lot harder, but I understand. You know, I I can see their viewpoint. Why let a bunch of fans go in when we can do this inside and we don't have to worry about that? We can circumnavigate the system, we can do what we need to do, we can do what we think is best and we don't have to deal with fans because funded, which there's no reason they shouldn't be. You know, you get this idea as a fan, you know, hindsight's twenty twenty, after being on this side, I know more, that we don't have enough money. So maybe there needs to be a way we need more money. So I start to have this idea. I'm like, well what if you know, we made a fan ran collective, which we don't have. The institution had one at the time. You know, we are difficult at times to deal with and we are a lot of work compared to just being able to do it with the big guys. But you have to still have the little guys. The little guys buy the products, the little guys go to the games, the little guys grow up and become more little guys like they have families that become more little guys, right? You know, you can't always depend on just the big donors, right? And we gather the fans together to make some kind of extra revenue that can go towards, you know, the sports to make us more competitive. ⁓ so, fast forward to the next week, we have Notre Dame at home. Ha ha and we got the crap rocked out of us. Like that was not the response we needed. It was Sam Pittman's last game and you knew it. Like he should have been fired after Memphis, but I think Like viewership matters and there's more little guys than there are big guys. So I hope, you know, this was educational to some point and I hope it, you know, tells you a little bit more more about myself as I went through this process. But I just ⁓ enjoy that you engaged on co-hosted today, and I hope you enjoyed the future of what co-hosted brings as we go through our new changes, and I hope you have a great rest of your day after viewing this. Thank you. They had a bye week into Notre Dame. No no the bye week was after Notre Dame, so it made more sense to change things on the bye week. So, destroyed by Notre Dame, absolute embarrassment, and this was a Notre Dame team that started off 0-2. And I officially filed that day. Like I filed for the Pig Pen Collective, we became an official Arkansas entity, got an EIN, worked to get a business bank account, worked to build the website and I was like, okay, we're gonna do it. You know, I use Chad GBT, and used the resiliency and what I thought would be a really easy thing to get people on board for, but that could be, you know, the naive part of being twenty four at the time. So, you know, I started out and I run into this guy, ⁓ which is where I first got my attraction named John Hawes. A very great dude. He had the idea of what about a dollar a month, a dollar a week. And that was even better. Because the whole point of mine was that I wanted to make the entry point as cheap as possible because I came from a poor background in Arkansas and a lot of famil like fans don't have money to give Dan IL. Like Chris The guy who runs SEC Unfiltered, as you will see in the documentary, comes out and says it's the craziest thing ever that, you know, they're asking fans to raise the money for this. ⁓ when fans have to buy the tickets, the concession and everything else, and now it's like, hey, can you also give more money to? and you know, it i it is very crazy, but I feel like my defense to collectives is it gives the fans a voice, gives fans a seat at the table. And people can think that they are contributing, right? Because people want to contribute, people want to make their team better. So you make that barrier to entry as cheap as possible. And I think I might have had a great idea because the university's current partner now offers a dollar a month, dollar a year platform so everybody can contribute. So I think that helped. And I would urge you, you know, if you are an Arkansas fan, to go and support this. ⁓ You