Henry Soong is trying to create a vertical microdrama series that doesn’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder is quite unique in its content multibillion-dollar industry of apps that release formulaic, surprising content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending.

“Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I’m in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and he doesn’t approve of me!'” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think it could be bigger than the sloppy, AI-adjacent romance soap opera.”

Soong’s comments were a bit of a struggle, but they weren’t wrong. Competitor ReelShort made $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year, while DramaBox made $276 million. The quality, he says, is too milquetoast to be possible with AI-generated scripts.

What is the potential revenue for a microdrama app that makes movies that are actually good and worth talking about?

Soong tries to answer that question with Watch Club, an app that features microdrama stories created by SAG and WGA actors and writers (leading apps like DramaBox and ReelShort don’t use union talent).

Soong, a former Meta product manager who describes herself as “a fangirl, always,” thinks that what makes TV so special are the communities that form around them. Because of his experience working on social products, he also wanted to differentiate Watch Club from existing microdrama apps by embedding a social network within it.

“I think you can make a more interesting business if you take away what makes TV the most fun,” he said, pointing to “Heated Rivalry” as an example of what he’s talking about. “You look at it, and then you want to gossip with your three best friends about it, or see what 100,000 funny, smart other young women or gay people have to say on the internet.”

Today, people are chatting about “Severance” theories on Reddit, or they’re reacting to the “Stranger Things” finale on Tumblr. Before Twitter became cesspool that is X, you have to work hard to avoid “Succession” or “White Lotus” spoilers. Soong saw the potential of putting the show and the fan forum in one place.

How does that app make money? As with most early-stage, venture-funded companies, that’s a question to focus on for now, until it’s clear how users interact with the app. The answer may be ads, but the idea alone is interesting enough to get seed funding led by GV. Watch Club has also received checks from individuals such as Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte, as well as current and former executives from Hulu, HBO Max, and Meta. Upside Ventures, the company run by the UK’s biggest YouTubers the Sidemenalso participated.

Soong has no background in film, which is why he brings Devon Albert-Stone as a founding producer. He said he plans to hire WGA writers to create a slate of 10 movies.

“We work with very talented people when they have a few months free to work on something that may not be big budget because we offer them a great creative latitude to do something that Amazon would never allow them to do at a speed and speed that feels more exciting than the glacial pace of the television industry,” said Soong.

He added: “I’m very good at figuring out how to monetize businesses that seem almost impossible to monetize.”

At Meta, his mission from 2016 to 2019 was to figure out how to make money in China, a country where no one could use Meta’s products. In 2019, Soong said, Meta generated $5 billion in annual ad sales for companies within China that want to advertise to audiences overseas.

Advertising sales in China may not be as glamorous as film and TV, but that job gave him more context to understand the business model behind microdrama apps, which boomed in China at the end of the last decade.

“I was about to leave Meta (in 2019) so these micro drama apps in China started spending all this money buying ads on Instagram so that Americans and Germans would download ReelShort and DramaBox,” he said. “I know this business playbook. I know how expensive and capital intensive it is, and I think you can do a way better microdrama business if you’re not 100% dependent on paid user acquisition.”

Watch Club will have the first opportunity to test its concept when it releases its first show, “Return Offer,” which it plans to distribute on its app with daily episodes. On Tuesday, the company shared the first trailer for the show — which is about a group of tech interns in San Francisco competing for a comeback offer.

“My goal is to prove that our high-quality stories can give birth to something that replaces streaming television, and part of doing that is to create welcoming, creative sets with talented professionals, where people have fun, despite small budgets, making something beautiful,” said Soong.