- TalentX Entertainment, a new TikTok talent management company helmed by popular YouTubers Tal Fishman and Jason Wilhelm, is renting a mansion in Los Angeles dubbed the "Sway House."
- The new "collab house" hosts six of TalentX's 32 influencer clients who live together and shoot videos for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.
- The company assigns content quotas to Sway House residents to ensure the team remains productive.
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TalentX Entertainment, a new TikTok talent management company led by popular YouTube creators Tal Fishman and Jason Wilhelm, is joining the TikTok "collab house" trend this month with the launch of the "Sway House."
Located in a mansion in Los Angeles, Sway LA is the second content house that Fishman and Wilhelm have helped set up. TalentX chose six of its 32 influencer clients to live in the house and collaborate on videos for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.
The collab house model has a long history among YouTubers and Vine stars like Logan Paul, who moved into an apartment complex in 2014 with other top Vine creators on the aptly named Vine Street. Content houses offer creators the opportunity to cross-promote each other's accounts, create videos with other influencers passing through, and - in the words of Sway LA resident Josh Richards - build hype.
But putting four teenagers and two twenty-somethings together in a rent-free mansion in Bel Air could be a recipe for chaos, and for no work actually getting done.
So to keep the house in order, the company is assigning content quotas for its creators and leaning on the experience of co-CEOs Fishman and Wilhelm and creative director Nick Bean.
TalentX told Business Insider that it's applying learnings from its other creator mansion, the YouTube "Free Time" house, to make sure Sway LA isn't "just a house that people come to dance in."
"It's company-sponsored, so the guys don't have to worry about if they can afford rent," Fishman said. "Because of the structure that we put in place, they're able to be extremely productive."
"You wake up and they're just filming," Wilhelm said. "You walk in the house and they're filming. It's pretty remarkable."
TalentX has big plans for its talent this year as it looks to capitalize on the explosive growth of TikTok in the US. The 12-person company hopes Sway LA can be a launching point for brand partnerships, merchandising, product and intellectual property deals, live events, and television and film development.
In addition to Fishman and Wilhelm, the company brought on Fullscreen Media's former director of creator partnerships, Warren Lentz, to serve as its chief revenue officer. It hired Michael Gruen as its vice president of talent and recruited one of its top talents, TikTok creator Josh Richards, as a partner.
17-year-old Richards, who has 11.9 million followers on TikTok, said the transition to living in the Sway House had been easy.
"I'm like brothers with all these kids I'm living with," he said. " I've already spent long periods of time rooming with them and all that stuff, so, it's been a pretty fun move actually."
Brotherly feelings aside, Richards said he very much viewed the Sway House through a business lens.
"With the Sway LA account, what we've been doing a lot is trying to put as much promotion through all our main accounts as possible," he said. "We're able to create this massive amount of hype really really quickly around our Sway account on TikTok and Instagram."
TalentX's chief revenue officer Lentz said the company plans to take Sway LA and other creators on the road this summer when a lot of its young talent, as well as their audiences, are free from school. Lentz also said the company is setting up acting classes for some of its creators who want to break into television or film.
"We are partnering with them to really grow their career strategically on that front," Lentz said. "We are actually in talks with a few networks about a few of our talent to participate in shows in the next few months."
For a full breakdown of how TalentX Entertainment is making money from the Sway House and its 32 TikTok and YouTube influencers, read our story on Business Insider Prime.
And for more on how TikTok stars are building a business on the app, check out these Business Insider Prime posts:
- How a pair of 30-year-old video producers turned TikTok from a side gig to their main job: 30-year-old Greg Auerbach and his childhood friend Nate Twer are building a business making funny videos on TikTok. The pair have 590,000 followers and nearly 14 million likes on the app.
- A college TikTok influencer with 1.6 million followers explains how much money she makes - and her 3 main sources of income: Cosette Rinab has 1.6 million followers on the app and said that she splits her time between studying film and public relations for school and growing her page.
- Marketers share what it's like to use TikTok's invite-only tool for finding the right influencers to hire for brand deals: Business Insider spoke to marketers who are beta testing TikTok's new matchmaking tool for influencers and brands, "Creator Marketplace."
@theswayla unofficial sway house tour !
♬ The Box - Roddy Ricch