Why have we started a "Creator-led" Venture Builder model?

Mainly because we wanna get filthy rich. LOL KIdding.. There are other important reasons.

So a few weeks back we’ve officially kicked off our “Creator-led” approach to venture building. Meaning we are now actively looking for:

• Startups that want to partake in the program

• Creators that want to create their own brands/products

• Investors that want to throw heaps of money at us!
  

Why the “Creator-led” model? What is it?

The whole ‘creator economy’ is on its way to a new stage of evolution. A stage in which creators are moving well beyond pure advertising to building their own products, brands and even VC’s.

Because they’ve come to realize that they have one of the most powerful assets…. D-I-S-T-R-I-B-U-T-I-O-N.

Meaning they have the ear of the customer. Which is extremely powerful.

Because they know that they can acquire customers among their audience pretty much for free. Unlike traditional startups which need to spend precious ad dollars.

And these customers will be much more forgiving and flexible. Meaning if the product is not right at the beginning (which for startups is almost always the case), then the customer is not just gonna write them off immediately.

Rather for influencers they care about most customers are willing to be flexible and give feedback. And this feedback in the early days is often what makes or breaks a company.

So the “Creator-led” model is essentially when an established creator creates a product for their audience, is the face of it, and essentially continues to plug it.

Creator-led models are taking developed markets by storm

In places like the US you are already seeing a ton of activity in this space. For example not long ago MrBeast’s management company, Night Inc., formed an investment company with a $100m cash injection.

Part of this money will be used to help creators build powerful products and brands.

For example MrBeast’s, Night Labs, already has several highly successful MrBeast related products & services under its belt like “Feastables” chocolates, which you can now find in any US Walmart.

Almost every major celebrity in Hollywood now has their own product or service of some sort. Because they are all starting to see that this is where the “real” wealth is generated.

For example, the Rock (Dwayne Johnson), started a tequila brand Teremana Tequila, and his stake in it is already worth north of $1 billion. This is more than his entire Hollywood and wrestling career has netted him.

And he essentially created it on the side in just a few years. There is money to be had!

We see how the foundation in SEA is getting rich for this model

SEA is seeing an influx of startups. The environment has improved massively in the past 5 years or so with venture builders like Whatnot, Iterative.vc, Antler, Accelerating Asia, etc.

And lots of new seed funding and angel funding networks.

Concurrently, creators are growing logarithmically in the region. Particularly with the thrust of Tiktok the past few years.

And we see this combo of growth of startups and creators as being the perfect fertile ground for this model.

Creators solve the distribution problem that startups have

You see…. even though the number of startups is rocketing in the region.. the number of true success stories is few and far between.

And the failure rate is very high.

Why do many of them fail?

Distribution.

They build a product… but then getting it in the hands of customers turns out being too expensive and not ROI positive early on. And so they burn through their cash before they ever hit the phase of scaling.

That is where the creator comes in. The creator solves this distribution problem without emptying the cash reserves of the young company… rather they take a bite out of the equity pie.

We think we can further de-risk startups with our team

Over the past years that we’ve run a venture builder we’ve created a number of startups already. And we’ve learned a lot of the mistakes that young ventures will make.

We’ve also started to create systems and processes that avoid some of the mistakes that we’ve made in the past.

And by applying these systems and our support, we think we can reduce a substantial amount of risk from a startup’s journey.

Interested?

Do you like what you’re hearing? Are you excited for this path that we’ve laid out?

Well, contact us via Linkedin.

Regardless of whether you’re a startup, a creator, an investor, or even just a dude who likes the way our pictures look. We wanna hear from you!