On Startups, Capitol Wrestling, Failing Fast, And Pulling Off “The 720”
Modern Industrial Innovation — Especially In Entertainment — Is A “Double Rotational 720” Initiative
Introduction
My name is Marcus K. Dowling. I’m the Chief Executive Officer of multimedia entertainment group Capitol Media LLC. 18 months ago I was the CEO of start-up independent wrestling company Capitol Wrestling. Similarly, in the same time that Capitol has existed and grown, World Wrestling Entertainment — the recognized industry leader in our company’s primary brand of entertainment — has evolved past being just a billion dollar corporation two decades ago. Now, WWE is a worldwide digital and real-time multimedia conglomerate that has likely quintupled their assets and doubled their company’s worth and influence in the sports and entertainment marketplaces. But, there’s something fortuitous for Capitol about the idea that WWE has ideated a “WWE Universe” in theory that on the ground is still largely a bunch of wrestling and reality TV fans, and not a company that sustainably engages via content, to the entire world at-large.
This allows for a company like Capitol that’s much smaller and existing, like many now legendary start-ups do, as a company able to both fail fast and maneuver forward in an expeditious manner, to take pro wrestling past the 540 degree turn the industry has recently made. Capitol Wrestling best exists as the organization capable of allowing wrestling overall to complete the full, Tony Hawk on a skateboard-style, 720-degree double-rotational flip into the industry’s dynamic new wave of a future.
In what feels like a whole lifetime ago, on October 28, 2003, I was sitting in an internet lounge at the National Brownfields Conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon when I saw the future of professional wrestling — and namely what Capitol is becoming — brilliantly reveal itself. At the time, I was working as a contracted researcher for the Environmental Protection Agency, and instead of checking my work emails, I was surfing then Philadelphia-based independent upstart Ring of Honor’s website. Upon refreshing the portal, I noted that they announced the The Great Muta — a Japanese wrestling legend who made his initial star turn in America’s National Wrestling Alliance in 1989, and, nearing 50, was one year removed from a stunning career revival — was going to be appearing and wrestling for the promotion in two months at their Final Battle event.
The Rise, Fall, Stumble And Evolution of Pro Wrestling’s Classic-to-Modern Era
At that time, professional wrestling in North America had reached the apex of its creative potential from the “Hulkamania” era. Between his reigns as WWE’s World Heavyweight Champion in 1984 and 2002, Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon’s construction of what mega-marketed professional wrestling could become spawned 30 different — similar to Hogan — championship level and worldwide recognizable industry stars who, impressively, in 1999, allowed wrestling as an industry to earn $1 billion in gross revenue for the year.
However, by the turn of the 21st century, the wrestling industry’s massive success caused it’s swift failure of sorts. Because the exact same 30 people had been presented as the business’ most noteworthy stars for what had evolved into ten times greater amounts of time in 100 times more nations worldwide in 20 years, the entertainment marketplace’s overindulgence and annoyance with pro wrestling was swift. Impressively, in the time between 1999 and 2001, every mainstreamed wrestling organization that existed in North America except World Wrestling Entertainment ceased operations forever.
When I saw that Ring of Honor was bringing in The Great Muta, it made me realize that for as nationally ingrained as pro wrestling had become, it had to expand globally in order to retain its ability to provide uniquely and refreshingly engaging content to maintain its standout place in the marketplace. Ideally, I hoped that WWE would follow suit, and that maybe other Japanese stars, like Muta, would be more significant stateside fixtures. WWE, much to their disservice, did not engage in that manner.
Instead, WWE attempted to take a blend of charismatic, yet just-trained American performers, and very inexperienced wrestlers from areas of the world that lacked Japan’s established wrestling pedigree, to create their next-generation presentation of professional wrestling. Unfortunately, because the new-to-wrestling grapplers lacked the polish and panache of the previous generation’s superstars, the deeply ingrained wrestling market greatly dissipated. Moreover, that fertile global marketplace began to expand outside of WWE’s grasp and into the largely unorganized and unable to be significantly commoditized independent landscape.
It’s Time To Play The Game
However, by 2013, WWE — now earning 20% less total revenue with a significantly downsized domestic presentation as compared to 1999 — radically shifted their perspective. Paul Levesque — one of those stars of the “Hulkamania” era as Triple H — largely removed himself from an on-screen wrestling role and instead became the company’s Executive Vice President of Talent Relations. His chief role in this position? More than anything, he decided to focus WWE’s business growth on capitalizing on aggressively buying into — from a talent and promotional perspective — the, as aforementioned, largely unorganized and non-profitable wrestling ranks outside of WWE. In the past five years, Triple H has, via these wild moves, dramatically altered WWE’s future.
He has:
- Created the WWE Performance Center (think pro wrestling finishing school)
- Created a third, mainly digitally broadcast, NXT brand
- Created a global series of WWE-sponsored independent wrestling tournaments
What’s impressive about these developments is that WWE has become a company that, for wrestling fans, is the be-all, end-all promotion. In all ways and all things, WWE at-present successfully encapsulates pretty much anything, everything, and everyone that a wrestling fan could love. Smartly realizing that the pro wrestling industry’s fanbase was smaller, Triple H likely realized how much easier they would be thus to look at as an easy-to-serve sample population. The crown jewel achievement, though? The 2016 signing of New Japan superstar Shinsuke Nakamura.
To me, the signing of Nakamura is the 2016 corollary to seeing The Great Muta in Ring of Honor 15 years prior. Like Muta in 2003, Nakamura in 2016 was one year removed from being New Japan’s Heavyweight Champion and the Japanese wrestling business’ most charismatic performer. Unlike Muta appearing for one day, though, Nakamura was to be an everyday WWE roster member. Moreso than signing what seemed like every great North American and European independent wrestler, signing Muta-like Nakamura was the apex of WWE’s re-branding and business-redefining initiatives.
In realizing that this was the moment that wrestling as a whole had reached the heights I felt it could reach in 2003, I realized when Nakamura finally made his WWE debut on April 1, 2016, that I probably needed to get up off my ass and get into motion on creating what needed to next exist to allow pro wrestling to again become the mainstream-entrenched total entertainment vehicle is best deserved to be. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not shocked to realize that Capitol Wrestling debuted 359 days later in Jersey City, NJ on March 25, 2017.
How Capitol Wrestling Fails Fast And Pulls Off “The 720”
Capitol Wrestling works because WWE has altered their business plan to market to roughly four billion people simultaneously, with a rough average of return retention of one in every four thousand fans. Extrapolate that to a building the size of the 19,000 person capacity Barclays Center where WWE just held their SummerSlam pay-per-view, and for all 19,000 of those hyper-engaged fans, WWE leaves 75,000 plus fans out on the streets who likely have a passing awareness of pro wrestling, but lack the person or thing that can catch and hold their wrestling-ready attention span. Somewhere in between WWE NOT hyper-serving an incredibly large part of their full market demographic, plus there being 3.5 million OTHER people in the world who could potentially find a non-WWE related wrestling brand to be an exciting addition to their regular entertainment schedule, Capitol is too potentially intriguing and lucrative of a concept to not attempt.
In a marketplace where WWE has successfully targeted four million-plus people with their product, creating a similar, yet different product — and also doing so as a boot-strapped start-up company, is obviously difficult. In order to discover some level of calm in the face of my seemingly manic desire, I turned to the story of Zynga founder Mark Pincus. By 2015, he, at a scale greater than, but inspirational to Capitol Wrestling, created social mobile games FarmVille and Words with Friends. Plus, he took Zynga public with a $1 billion IPO.
Pincus, like myself, is a lover of data. Similar to Pincus, I love numbers because they don’t lie, and create trends that can be studied and mathematically extrapolated upon to create actionable, sustainable plans. As well, he, like me, is a big believer in the idea of “killing ideas” and “failing fast.” He noted on a recent appearance on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast that, “ with practice, killing your bad ideas will become second nature to you. And this ruthless killer instinct will clear the path toward your big opportunity.” Moreover, he stated, “I’ll try anything, and I’ll kill anything. And I’ll kill it quickly.” Given that Capitol is just 1.5 years old and is nine days out from running an event in a venue twice as large as any one we’ve ever run before with three times as many sponsors and partners, plus more public support than we’ve ever had at any time in company history, I clearly love Mark Pincus A LOT.
The craziest Mark Pincus-inspired move we’re pulling off as a company right now isn’t “Colossal Confrontation,” though. It’s what I call “the 720.” I sincerely believe that pro wrestling isn’t too far away from reaching “Hulkamania in 1988” levels of global renown and explosive market growth potential. The only thing missing? Mainstream pop culture at-large buying in again on how great pro wrestling is as an entertainment vehicle. The trick is to get pro wrestling to evolve again, thus pulling off a 720 degree turn that would allow for radicalized wrestling business growth.
For those believing that it’s WWE that’s going to make that happen, that’s probably not likely. For as much as WWE’s marketing plan is expansive, it’s core tenet is attempting to initially capitalize on the four million or so die-hard wrestling fans left worldwide. That means that the company is ideally attempting to use its $10 per month streaming subscription WWE Network and/or say attendance at Wrestlemania or any of its newly introduced massive global mega cards — its biggest-ticket events — as points of successful outreach and capitalization. That, at best, is a 1/1000 retention.
Differently, we at Capitol Wrestling are instead pairing wrestling with other similar, yet comparatively booming, niche-marketed industries. We’re well aware that WWE, via talent Austin “Xavier Woods” Creed’s successful “Up Up Down Down” brand has chosen video-gaming at large as a market of interest. As an analogue, Capitol’s lead weekly broadcast partner is Amazon-owned Twitch, which hosts channels for not just Capitol, but our production partner BeTerrific as well. None other than business guru Gary Vaynerchuk has noted Twitch’s exponential growth, entertainingly immediate connectivity, and extreme popularity as a gaming community stalwart. After nine months on the platform, we’re now topping out at upwards of one million views per month. We love Twitch, too!
Even further, we’ve expanded our reach in other avenues in similar, but different areas than WWE. Whereas “Hulkamania” era WWE favorites like Steve Austin, Chris Jericho, and Jim Ross, plus behind-the-scenes pro wrestling gurus like Bruce Prichard are wrestling-first faves in the burgeoning podcast community, Capitol takes a different look at how to engage with the world of digital broadcasting. Our partners in that space are GaSDigital, an independent subscription podcast service focused on comedy, music, sports, and pop culture related podcasts and programming. Founders Luis J. Gomez and Ralph Sutton are fans of the pro wrestling industry. While neither have headlined a WWE Network PPV, they have enough of a social media following where all of their followers and listeners could easily fill Uncasville, Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena to capacity. This is the same building that’s definitely hosted a WWE Smackdown event. We’re excited to have them on board.
Why Capitol Will Succeed
At the end of the day, Capitol’s part-to-whole strategy eventually allows for a “closing in” process to occur wherein the seeds of sustainable fandom are planted within a marketplace that is both inclusive of WWE’s large number of casual fans that are not likely to go to a live event or regularly engage with WWE’s streaming network or the company’s branded mainstream programming. As well, there’s the 3.5 million others. These fans of things other than wrestling are people who — if introduced to something similar to, but uniquely more intimate or different than anything in the vast, yet oftentimes similar broadcasting suite of WWE — might want to #ComeToTheCapitol.
As pro wrestling continues to evolve, the industry must also become bigger than its stereotypical notions of and expectations of grandeur. If aiming for global excellence, an out-sized concept both in theory and in physical practice that explodes all pre-conceived notions, is required. The future of pro wrestling can finally rest comfortably given what has finally arrived via the 540 degree turn of events that has allowed for synergy between places like WWE and New Japan, plus the considerable influence of the independent ranks. However, as far as the very real potential of a radical and even greater future? Capitol’s failing fast and about to hit a 720 of which even Tony Hawk would be proud.
