People Spread Proves the Most Effective Way to Get Promoted

QUICK PITCH: People Spread is a marketplace that allows you find the social media influencers that your target market follows and buy promoted posts from them in a fast and simple fashion.

THE BUSINESS: A search tool to find social media influencers with +10K followers together with an indicator of customer segment, social authority and price per post. It provides marketers with the ability to request promoted posts with a brief, then accept/ decline the posts the influencers propose and, when accepted, make a payment. On the other side of the marketplace, influencers receive push notifications for campaign opportunities, making it as simple as selecting “yes” when they are interested or “no” when they want to opt out of an opportunity. For every payment influencers receive, People Spread will keep a 5% commission.

THE “AHA” MOMENT: We had 2: 1. Martina struggled trying to lower customer acquisition cost at her previous startup. While searching for plan b´s, she realized that although word of mouth is the most effective way to get promoted, the experience of buying promoted posts from talent agencies (who manage the social media influencers) is like buying plane tickets from a travel agency! Time-consuming and expensive. Waiting for the proposals, limiting your spectrum of influencers to the ones the agency has exclusivity with, paying their expensive fees…. People Spread was born to solve this pain with a very googler mission: organizing influencer marketing´s possibilities for startups.
2. While conducting customer interviews to validate our idea, we found that clicks from followers of certain social media influencers were more valuable than clicks from a Facebook campaign. As an example, Facebook may tag a person as interested in fashion because he/ she liked a few fashion websites in the past month. For startups interested in targeting fashionistas, clicks from followers of Lady Gaga´s stylist are likely to be more cost-effective than the ones generated by a Facebook campaign.

HOW DOES IT MAKE MONEY?

– A 5% commission will be charged to the social media influencers.
– Finance: to give some time to the marketer to file any claims, People Spread will wait for 72 hours before paying the influencer.
– Ads: by year 2 we will allow influencers to promote themselves to get more deals.

BUSINESS IT COULD DISRUPT:
– Talent agencies (they are managing social media influencers with +50K followers)
– Advertising agencies
– Facebook ads

MARKET SIZE: We are excited to tap into the Internet advertising field, which revenue in the United States totaled $49.5 billion for the full year of 2014, 16% over 2013. Based on Facebook´s ad revenue, display advertising is an $11,47 billion market .

LIKELY COMPETITORS:

AdWords
Facebook
Ad agencies generating viral campaigns with influencers for startups
Online talent agencies such as Instabrand, Famebit, Creatrs, Tumblr, Plaidsocial, Traackr, Inside social, Revfluence, Topsy, Neoreach, Buzzsumo, Influential, Tapinfluence and others. Partnerships Or Collaborations:

PARTNERSHIP OR COLLABORATIONS : Manos Acelerator & Google for Entrepreneurs

MANAGEMENT TEAM: Martina Montana – Co-founder and CEO

Alejandro Rascovan – Co-founder and CTO

CONTACT INFORMATON: info@peoplespread.com, martina@peoplespread.com

WHO ARE YOUR ROLE MODELS? Martinas grandfather left a job that paid well to work almost for free as a cadet at an advertising agency. His dream was to be able to create advertising campaigns, although he did not have any studies or experience in the field. After a few years, he didn´t only become a creative director: he became a partner at the agency, won several Cannes Lions, produced many of the top commercials of his decade and, today, some of the slogans he created are still in use. Most importantly, he initiated a positive change in how the world perceives argentine creativity that still remains today. He is proof of how passion and vision overcome experience.

WHAT’S THE BEST THING ABOUT BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR? Being free to set your own limits, if you get to find them since you are not even limited by your own intelligence. Having a startups means being able to hire people that are more brilliant than you.

WHAT’S THE BEST ADVICE ANYONE HAS GIVEN YOU? “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” -Henry Ford

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO OTHERS? Don’t ever think you lack experience to do something. Passion and initiative are more powerful than experience.

Don’t fall for thinking that you need to belong to certain network or own a proprietary technology to start a business. It sure helps, but most people who recently made it to Silicon Valley big time didn’t meet any of these conditions. The team and the go-to-market strategy are the competitive advantage in every case.

Don’t build products that people don’t want. Google, college professors, mentors or specialists in something don’t have the answer to whether people want what you aim to build. Go meet potential customers!