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Read the 18-slide pitch deck that creator-marketing startup Pearpop used to raise $18 million in fresh funding
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- Pearpop is a creator-marketing platform that first launched in October 2020.
- It just completed a $18 million fundraising round at a $300 million valuation.
- Here’s the pitch deck it used to woo investors at a tricky moment for the creator industry.
It’s been a tough year for the creator economy as companies have cut back on hiring or laid off employees to prepare for a potential economic slowdown.
But influencer-marketing startup Pearpop appears to be bucking the trend. The company announced on Tuesday that it raised $18 million in a fundraising round that valued the company at $300 million, adding to last year’s $10 million Series A round. It’s raised a total of $34 million since it launched in October 2020.
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Pearpop started as a tool for TikTok creators to get paid to post videos for fans, either through duets, stitches, or by including certain sounds in videos. Its business has since evolved to focus on Challenges, a product that enables brands and music marketers to post sponsored-video contests for social-media creators. Those who participate in a challenge are paid on a sliding scale based on the number of views their videos generate. TikTok introduced its own competing product earlier this year.
Pearpop plans to release in the coming months two new features: a first-party audience-marketing tool called Ovation and a data-analytics product called Passport.
Investors who participated in Pearpop’s most recent fundraise included Sound Ventures (a firm co-run by Pearpop’s other founder Guy Oseary), Seven Seven Six, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, Blockchange Ventures, and C2 Ventures. Its existing investors include celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Amy Schumer and venture-capital firms Bessemer Venture Partners and Slow Ventures.
“I think great companies are still getting funded in this environment,” Pearpop’s cofounder Cole Mason told Insider. “The biggest thing I’ve learned is just investing in the right team. We’ve been super fortunate from early on to be able to have some of the best talent.”
The company plans to spend its new cash pile on engineering resources, product development, and growing its sales operation, Mason said.
Pearpop shared with Insider the 19-page pitch deck it used to raise its $18 million round. The company redacted data from one slide that highlighted its projected 2023 growth. Insider omitted that edited slide in the 18-page version published below:
Pearpop is an influencer-marketing platform centered around branded challenges.
Pearpop.
In its first slide, Pearpop described itself as a “creator collaboration platform.”
Its business currently centers on its influencer-marketing technology, but paid creator collaborations are in the company’s roots.
This slide also highlighted that Pearpop was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” in 2022.
Influencer marketing is a fast-growing advertising category.
Pearpop.
Pearpop then included two data points around the growth of influencer marketing.
It cited a Statista report that projected that the influencer-marketing industry would hit $4.6 billion in the US by 2023. And it wrote that 93% of marketers use influencer marketing, a data point pulled from a SocialPubli report.
Pearpop called out a common pain point for marketers that run influencer campaigns.
Pearpop.
One criticism of influencer marketing is that it can be a headache to run campaigns that involve a bunch of creators at once. Automated social-ad platforms and programmatic buying on Instagram and TikTok are viewed as easier to scale.
In its pitch, Pearpop posed this challenge to investors. It will later present its platform as a solution.
The company suggested that lower-follower-count creators are hired less frequently than influencers with millions of fans.
Pearpop.
The challenges associated with coordinating a campaign with multiple creators has led some brands to focus on working with just the top tier of social-media talent, the company wrote. This approach is leaving the “mid-tier” and “long-tail” creators behind.
“88% of creators earn less than $50,000 per year,” the company wrote, citing a report from the link-in-bio upstart Linktree.
It then teed up how it’s going to solve those problems for brands.
Pearpop.
“What if Influencer Marketing could be tech-enabled, measurable, and virtually instant?” Pearpop wrote.
Like some of its peers, Pearpop is focused on how its tech can streamline the influencer-marketing process.
“The world is still figuring out what’s the most effective way to do social marketing,” Mason told Insider.
The company then showcased its flagship product, Pearpop Challenges.
Pearpop.
Pearpop’s lead product, Challenges, has helped the company differentiate itself from other influencer-marketing upstarts.
The format encourages creators with followings of different sizes to participate in a marketing campaign.
One Pearpop challenge from last year, meant to promote Tyga’s song “Splash,” helped boost the track from 8,500 user videos featuring the sound to more than 100,000, Mason told Insider at the time.
“The initial way influencer marketing would work would be you would go and pay a few people with big followings, but it would be like throwing a few big logs onto a non-existent fire,” Mason said. “With challenges, there’s a way to actually start the fire.”
It outlined the value proposition for Challenges.
Pearpop.
In its description of why Pearpop Challenges are superior to other forms of influencer marketing, the company wrote that they were “simpler,” “faster,” “better,” “performance-based,” “authentic,” and “brand safe.”
The slide reads:
Simple. Faster. Better.
Influencer marketing used to take a lot of work. So we fixed it. Pearpop is a technology platform allowing brands to instantly collaborate with the most relevant creators across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter at the click of a button.
Performance-Based.
Predictable and measurable Return on Influence. Stop paying based on follower count and start paying creators for verified views and engagements on a CPM, CPV, or CPA basis.
Authentic & Brand Safe.
All creators are Pearpop Verified and submissions are monitored continuously to ensure brand safety.
It then displayed some of its brand clients, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Instagram.
Pearpop
Pearpop included logos for its roster of clients, which included:
- Amazon
- Netflix
- American Eagle
- Chipotle
- Beyond Meat
- Panera Bread
- Sonos
- Rakuten
- State Farm
- Paramount
- 4Hunnid
- Live Nation Entertainment
- Universal Music Group
- CreatorDAO
The company touted how many creators use its platform, and what they’ve been paid.
Pearpop.
Pearpop then listed out high-level stats around its user base.
It wrote that it has paid out in 2022 more than $10 million to its user base of 200,000+ creators, and that 71% of compensated creators had fewer than 1 million followers on social media.
It then teased the features it plans to launch in the coming months.
Pearpop.
Pearpop plans to launch two new products in the coming months, Ovation and Passport.
“Right now, we’ve been laser focused on scaling Challenges,” Mason told Insider. “Ovation will launch in Q1 and Passport will launch in either Q1 or Q2.”
Ovation is a new feature that will enable brands to send Pearpop contests to their own customer lists.
Pearpop.
When it does launch, Ovation will let brands launch custom challenges targeted to specific users within their customer base. The feature works through links that brands send to their existing audiences to encourage them to join a contest.
If Netflix wanted to promote the second season of “Squid Game,” for example, it could send an Ovation link to its users that watched the first season of the show, asking them to post videos about why they’re excited for season two, Mason said.
The company used Starbucks as an example of what an ‘Ovation’ might look like.
Pearpop.
In another possible use case for the Ovation product, Starbucks could ask customers who purchased a Starbucks beverage to “tell your audience about how Starbucks creates a happy moment in your day.”
“Brands have multiple subsets of their communities,” Mason told Insider. “There just isn’t a way to rally them to be your advocates across social. Ovation is a way to do it at scale.”
The ability to run contests against specific user groups was a frequent ask among brands, Mason said.
Pearpop.
In other example of uses for Ovation, a company like Nike could ask customers who purchased Nike ZoomX Vaporfly shoes to “tell your audience about how the Nike ZoomX Vaporfly shoes have shaved off time from your personal record miles.”
The feature would reward participating users whose videos performed well with discounts like 10%, 20%, or 50% off Nike products.
The startup also mocked up examples from acne-treatment brand Proactiv and streamer Netflix.
The company then teased its plans to release more campaign-measurement tools.
Pearpop.
While Pearpop’s Web3-measurement tool Passport is still in development, the feature is slated to roll out in the first half of 2023.
The company teased the product in its pitch to investors, several of whom, including Blockchange Ventures and Seven Seven Six, have Web3-creator startups in their portfolios.
Passport is a blockchain-based tool that will track and predict audience engagement for creator campaigns.
Pearpop.
When it’s released, Passport will be a blockchain-based tool that tracks and predicts audience engagement across multiple platforms and sources.
“Passport is an open protocol that gives you the predicted value of social posts,” Mason told Insider, noting that the company isn’t sharing much more publicly about the feature at this point.
Pearpop’s cofounders are Cole Mason and Guy Oseary.
Pearpop.
Pearpop’s two cofounders are Mason, an entrepreneur and former model, and the talent manager and investor Guy Oseary.
Its leadership team hails from media companies like Tinder, TikTok, Netflix, AXS, and R/GA.
Pearpop.
Its leadership team includes:
- Alex Morrison, chief marketing officer
- Rebecka Marcucci, head of product and operations
- Sam Christie, head of sales
- Adam Maltais, head of growth
- Arik Betesh, general counsel
- Will Price, head of engineering
- Nate Lu, head of design
Pearpop ended its pitch with a simple ‘Thank you.’
Pearpop.
The last slide in Pearpop’s deck is a straightforward, “Thank you.”
Correction — December 16, 2022: An earlier version of Pearpop’s slide deck incorrectly identified Coinbase as a brand partner. Pearpop sent an amended slide with the correct information after publication.