Escapist Success Stories

It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

People typically get invited onto shows like this because they’re successful. So, it will come as no surprise to you that my two guests on Out to Lunch today have success stories. What might surprise you, is the magnitude of their success.

Cathy Deano is the founder of Painting With a Twist. It’s a pretty simple concept: you get one or two friends together, you go to a Painting With A Twist studio, you get given a canvas and paints, and with the gentle guidance of the resident artist, you sip wine and paint a painting.

Cathy lives in Mandeville and founded the company in 2007. When her local studios started getting popular, Cathy started franchising the concept. Today, there are over 230 Painting With A Twist franchises, in 38 states. Over 5 million people have created over 10 million paintings. 86% of Painting With A Twist customers have gone more than once, and 51% have visited 6 times or more.

Painting With A Twist is a genuine franchise success story. And its corporate headquarters is still in Mandeville.

Sami Khan is a graduate of Tulane Business School, and the creator of an online game called Atlas Earth.

The world is divided into two kinds of people. Those who say, “Wow, Sami Khan is here?” And those who say, “What the heck is Atlas Earth?” If you fall into the latter category, Atlas Earth is the number-one ranked, top-grossing gaming app in its category in the United Sates - and in every other country where it has launched.

It’s a digital re-creation of the real world in which players buy digital real estate that corresponds to real estate properties on earth. You can’t buy just anything though, you have to be in actual real-world proximity to what you’re buying.

Players buy and sell properties using digital currency called “Atlas Bucks,” which they can also earn by buying real-world products at participating vendors like Sonic, Popeyes, and Jimmy Johns.

Atlas Earth is a hybrid digital-real-world experience, like Mark Zuckerberg was envisaging when he launched Meta. Except Atlas Earth has over 850,000 monthly users, three times more than Meta’s Active Universe had at its peak.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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