Startups to Watch
#9 - Brandlovrs
Happy 2023!
For those who are new, this is a dedicated series that I send out every Wednesday on Latin American startups that are to a certain extent unknown and deserve the spotlight! This initiative started late last year, but it proved to be a huge success. Only in 2022, with the previous 8 editions, featured startups in aggregate were connected to 21 investors. The objective is to inform my readers of cool startups doing different things in the region always fomenting the ecosystem.
Note that this series is exclusively for very early stage startups that are under the radar – and have a good story to tell. The basic criteria is a company that is not on the media/spotlight and is NOT actively raising proceeds. There is also no bias – apart from the fact that I like the story. I am not an investor or get any financial compensation to promote startups featured here. This is intended for informational purposes only, using my solid base of subscribers to share intel of good people doing cool things. If you read this, and want to get to know the founder - feel free to respond and I will happily connect you! Are you a founder with a startup that fits the above criteria? Feel free to reach out too!
Brandlovrs:
Brandlovrs is a SaaS with fintech-like features that empowers brands with technology to activate and nurture relationships with creators at scale, driving social buzz, growing revenue and tracking ROI in real-time. While brands enjoy creator-led marketing that scales beautifully, creators benefit from making more income, in a more predictable way, and from a wider choice of partners. Our vision is to empower every creator in LatAm to make a living from their passion, enabling the region’s creator economy middle class to thrive.
Business overview:
The first creator management platform (SaaS) in LatAm where brands can discover, nurture, engage and reward creators all in one place. The solution allows brands to incentivize creators to create content, participate in sales challenges, and much more, using reward methods like treats, credit, cashback, gift cards, commissions, experiences, etc, while providing easy access to real-time analytics that ensure the best results. Creators now can proactively select whom they want to work with, increasing earnings potential, while managing their finances in real-time from their digital account (fintech).
What problem is it solving?
In a world of exploding customer acquisition costs, reduced ad efficiency and where consumers are looking for authentic brand experiences, companies face the constant challenge of improving customer acquisition, retention and advocacy. Creator-led marketing has proven a powerful strategy, but there’s no scalable and effective solution for brands to manage such collaborations in LatAm. Traditional methods such as hiring an internal team to do it manually, contracting a third party agency or using the existing service platforms have several issues such as being expensive, biased, short-term oriented, not allowing for relationship management and having low alignment around what success looks like.
Creators on the other hand are hungry to make a living from their passions, constantly searching for reliable ways to monetize their growing influence. Connecting with brands and products they love has proven itself an amazing and authentic way to create value. Still, creators have a terrible and unreliable experience doing so, with less than 50% making more than $100/month and 23% making no income at all. Creators face a low recurrency, reactive way of working, low pay and low trust environments.
Meta states that the number of creators in Brazil has reached 20MM, we think that number is lower - closer to 9-13MM. But, because of how the creator market is organized (few service oriented brokers focused on medium/large creators that drive scale and efficiency in their businesses), 99% of creator investment flows to the top 0.1% creators (13k people) that benefit from how agencies and current service platforms work. On the other hand, the long tail of that distribution has 9-13MM people that earn less than 1% of the total creator investment. The equation gets even more unbalanced when you factor in the engagement and reach of both groups and find out that the long tail actually has 10x more reach. All in all, because there is no way of working efficiently with the long tail distribution of creators, that group, who has 10x more influence is earning 100x less.
The platform:
Key Metrics:
Founded May/22;
79% gross margins and clear path to profitability;
3.591 creators on the platform (growing at 20%/week);
Brands on the platform grow revenues by an average of 11-14% within the first 30 days;
Real Use Case:
(Brand) Legbox, a small online apparel retailer, on its first activation built a community of 42 creators that collectively sold R$ 8.861,36 at a 15x return on investment in 21 days.
(Brand) GL Cosmetics, a medium sized online beauty retailer, built a community of 745 creators that collectively sold R$ 262.607.31 at a 7x return on investment on its first 60 days.
(Creator) Lucas Francos, a small creator with a few hundred followers on social media, who is currently collaborating with 4 different brands, made a total of R$ 14.777,75 extra income, in under 60 days on the platform.
(Creator) Poliana Dias, is a creator who sells perfumes on social media, who is currently collaborating with 2 different brands on this segment and made a total of R$ 7.084,00 extra income, in under 60 days on the platform.
Team:
Rapha Avellar (Creator, co-founder and CEO) Linkedin : Serial entrepreneur and Creator with over 400k followers and millions in monthly reach across all social media, Rapha started one of the fastest-growing digital agencies in Brazil prior to launching Adventures alongside former ABinBev CMO Ricardo Dias, and Gerard de Roure former Director at BTG Pactual. Having led hundreds of creator marketing strategies for brands such as Tiktok, Tinder, Kwai, Disney, Ifood, Domino’s, Stone, Americanas, ZAP, Ame, Arrezo, and many other leading global brands, also broke the world record for Youtube’s largest live event ever. At Adventures he co-founded multiple celebrity-backed brands with personalities such as Gusttavo Lima (100MM followers) and Ludmilla (67MM followers) and co-idealized BrandLovrs. Having grown Adventures to more than BRL 100Mn in revenues annually in under 2 years, Rapha has demonstrated a solid track record scaling high growth businesses with great capital efficiency.
Rômulo Galvão (Co-founder and Chief Product Officer - CPO) Linkedin : Former CPO/Head of Product in several venture-backed companies such as ZAK, Magalu's Super App & 99, having more than 15 years of experience in technology & product management (B2B & B2C products). At 99, he was responsible for more than 20 employees at LatAm Product Division, interacting with structures in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brasil. This team manages to deliver improvements of over 50 points in Net Promoter Score (NPS) for both driver's and passengers' experience. At Magalu as a Product Leader for Magalu Superapp was responsible for KPI conversion rate, with and daily GMV of BRL 80Mn, and as Black Friday leader event was leading more than BRL 2Bn in GMV at the event. Also at Magalu was a Chapter Lead for more than 120 product squads responsible for several points of the App journey such as discovery, and e-groceries. During his time at Zak, occupied the position of Cross Functional Leader of around 150 employees, taking the solution to more than 450 restaurants and helping to pivot the SaaS solution to Fintech, achieving from scratch more than BRL 40Mn in Total Payments Volume (TPV) within 6 months.
Rafael Marino (Co-founder and CHief Revenue Officer - CRO) Linkedin : Professional with 10 years working in the areas of growth and business development, Marino has worked for prominent startups in different segments, such as Travel, Education, and Finance such as Hurb, Nuuvem and EqSeed before Adventures. As head of Hurb's Marketing team, the biggest Brazilian online travel platform, Marino led a 30 people team that executed both brand and performance strategies, managing monthly budgets of 2-5Mn and leading several influencer marketing campaigns with creators.
Total amount raised (USD): ~USD 1M
Angel Investors: Luciano Huck, Marc Lemann, Veronica Serra, Adam Bain, Matthew Derella, David Peixoto, Mario Mello, Provence, Mercado Libre and other high profile individuals.