NEXT UP

· Guy Stodel is a former senior executive at Lionsgate, New Line, and Paramount Vantage who has spent 30 years identifying emerging audience behaviors and building commercial platforms around them — from horror franchises to streaming originals.
Co-Founder - TBD.

The content exists. The behavior exists. The product doesn’t.
Consumers have already been trained to consume media through personalized feeds of clips. Creators are already making clipped content for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. But no one has built the audio-native version for passive listening.

Short-form clips — news, comedy, sports, culture — already work perfectly as audio. People are already half-listening while they drive, walk, work out, and do the dishes.

Every short-form platform requires your eyes. Every audio platform is long-form or music-first.

Nobody built the feed for your ears. That’s Next Up.

· Passive, personalized audio is a new consumer category.
· The car is the most overlooked attention environment in tech. CarPlay is now in ~90% of new cars.
· Creators solve both supply and distribution.
· Retention matters more than growth at the start.

Audio dominates huge parts of daily life — driving, commuting, walking, working out — but the products built for those moments haven’t evolved.
Radio isn’t personal. Podcasts require intent. Social feeds require screens.
The moment you put your phone down, the feed stops.

You open the app once, choose what you care about, and put your phone down. Next Up becomes a continuous personalized stream of short-form audio — news, comedy, sports, culture — that simply plays.
No searching. No scrolling. No decisions. One tap to skip from your AirPods or steering wheel. Built natively for CarPlay from day one.

· Working prototype live and testable.
· CarPlay integration validated.
· CTO committed as equity partner.
· Initial creator onboarding conversations underway.

Creators are both supply and distribution. Launch creators bring existing audiences into the platform while simultaneously populating the feed.

The CarPlay-native narrative creates a differentiated press and partnership story from day one. Over time, OEM, automotive, and navigation partnerships become the distribution moat.

Existing platforms optimize for either screen engagement (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) or intentional listening (Spotify, podcasts).

Next Up is built specifically for passive, screen-off audio consumption.

· Spotify built a $30B company on music streaming.
· Pandora built a $3.5B business on passive, personalized radio.
· TikTok, Reels, and Shorts trained consumers to engage with media through endless personalized feeds of clips.
· 584M people listen to podcasts globally. Americans spend nearly 4 hours a day with audio. CarPlay is now in ~90% of new cars.
Next Up sits at the intersection: personalized, short-form, passive audio.

1. Built natively for passive, screen-off listening from day one.
2. Creator-driven supply and distribution lowers both content and acquisition costs.
3. Deep creator, media, and platform relationships accelerate partnerships and adoption.

Radio was passive but not personal. Social feeds became personal but not passive. Next Up is the first product built to be both.

If this works, Next Up becomes the audio layer of daily life — personalized, passive, and always on.

Raising a $2–4M Seed round to build the product, launch with creators, and prove retention. V1 in 6 months. Series A ready in 18.