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We’re building the first in its kind ads/promotion barter platform: http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram it

We’re building the first in its kind ads/promotion barter platform: http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram http://appstore.com/postforpostforinstagram it allows you to find peers in social networks and exchange shoutouts, e.g. promote each other on Instagram, so that both participants of the deal get additional followers for free, and grow together. It is known as #sfs #s4s #shareforshare, over 150m associated hashtags accross major apps. It is especially popular among professional and millenial influencers in the low/mid segments (e.g. 1K-100K IG followers). Due to sfs’ viral nature, our influencer base turned out to grow a lot faster than traditional influencer/brand marketplaces – this could make us a lot bigger and better place to buy/sell influencer ads than all these 120+ identical marketplaces in the list: https://angel.co/influencer-marketing-2 https://angel.co/influencer-marketing-2 The influencer ads are like the hottest advertising trend of the upcoming years :) We see we’re up to something great here and start thinking how we get the biggest piece of the pie in the long term. In order to sustain this product strategy competition-wise we’ve even submitted Patent App for the concept 'Advertising Barter in Social Networks'. …though what’d be a lot more interesting, I just realized an hour ago: rather than compete with all of them, try to create interface layer – build API for them, etc. I would like to discuss this – would be great to hear your recommendations/roadmap thoughts mb, other than ‘getting big enough first’

akharris 11y ago
Cool - feel free to ask your question :).
- sashakozak 11y ago
  Well, frankly that was the question hah. Ok, I realize it’s too industry-specific. Let me ask you more practical question then: It is time for us to fundraise – our team of 3 is running out of cash to finance full-time involvement. This investment round should include marketing expenses as well. We can measure our viral growth, but our core monetization is to be commissions on the influencer ads sales. It is quite deferred – more like the 2nd product phase – the shoutouts for shoutouts will be accompanied by shoutouts for cash over time. So at this point I can't really make any judgement re marketing spend vs. ARPU / MRPU etc. – the nature of our influencers is pretty different from the other companies in the industry because, as I said, we cover lower segments of influencers. ...and it is awesome, because it's the hardest market segment to cover, it's the major part of the market and at the same time it has the highest level of credibility / engagement for advertising effect …but we have no time / resources to test it. Moreover, we haven't tried any paid methods yet – so, we'll have to start trying different ones before we figure out what works best for our case. Any ideas re how we justify our marketing budget for the investor? For now, I am thinking to: (1) take something like industry-average number for marketing spend – probably $7-14k per month (not sure how it'll work out but at least I have public reference to this number) and start trying out Instagram ads; (2) get at least your respectful opinion and refer to it in talks, i.e. it is normal for such a first-in-its-kind venture like us not to know this stuff for sure – Aaron told me :))

akharris 11y ago

Cool - feel free to ask your question :).

sashakozak 11y ago
Well, frankly that was the question hah. Ok, I realize it’s too industry-specific. Let me ask you more practical question then: It is time for us to fundraise – our team of 3 is running out of cash to finance full-time involvement. This investment round should include marketing expenses as well. We can measure our viral growth, but our core monetization is to be commissions on the influencer ads sales. It is quite deferred – more like the 2nd product phase – the shoutouts for shoutouts will be accompanied by shoutouts for cash over time. So at this point I can't really make any judgement re marketing spend vs. ARPU / MRPU etc. – the nature of our influencers is pretty different from the other companies in the industry because, as I said, we cover lower segments of influencers. ...and it is awesome, because it's the hardest market segment to cover, it's the major part of the market and at the same time it has the highest level of credibility / engagement for advertising effect …but we have no time / resources to test it. Moreover, we haven't tried any paid methods yet – so, we'll have to start trying different ones before we figure out what works best for our case. Any ideas re how we justify our marketing budget for the investor? For now, I am thinking to: (1) take something like industry-average number for marketing spend – probably $7-14k per month (not sure how it'll work out but at least I have public reference to this number) and start trying out Instagram ads; (2) get at least your respectful opinion and refer to it in talks, i.e. it is normal for such a first-in-its-kind venture like us not to know this stuff for sure – Aaron told me :))