Read the 33-page pitch deck that landed the Gen Z founders of a digital résumé for influencers $1 million in funding and Wiz Khalifa as an advisor


startup founders of MediaKits pose with their arms crossed in front of a glowing background

  • MediaKits cofounders Kieran O’Brien and Casey Adams raised $1 million in pre-seed funding last year.
  • MediaKits gives influencers and creators digital résumés that update social metrics in real time.
  • The duo shared their pitch deck, including how they made MediaKits the solution to a problem in their industry. 

Before an influencer signs a brand partnership or makes any money from their content, they must first send advertisers what’s known as a media kit. 

This PDF is like a résumé that outlines the number of followers, engagement rates, audience demographics, and other key metrics of their success. Brands use these to determine whether the influencer is the right partner for their campaign and to determine how much to pay them.  

After working in content creation themselves, Kieran O’Brien, 22, and Casey Adams, 21, learned that by the time most influencers send advertisers their media kits, they’ve already gained more followers and their metrics are outdated, which means influencers can lose out on bigger brand deals and paychecks. 

So the cofounders created MediaKits, a digital résumé for influencers, bloggers, musicians, and athletes with real-time social-media statistics. Influencers can send brands their custom MediaKits profiles, which showcase numbers across their Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. Brands can also create their own profiles to market their businesses to influencers. 

“These brands have limited budgets,” O’Brien told Insider. “If they contact 10 influencers, they only have the budget to pay five of them.” The job is likely to go to whoever responds first, he said, positioning MediaKits clients as the ones to get the deal. 

MediaKits launched in August 2021, halfway through fundraising, with a summer party and performance by rapper Wiz Khalifa. In October, the startup closed a pre-seed round of $1 million in funding. In September of this year, the influencer-marketing agency Viral Nation acquired the startup for an amount that wasn’t disclosed publicly. 

O’Brien and Adams shared their pitch deck with Insider, including how they positioned MediaKits as the solution to a problem in the creator economy and what investors look for.

The deck starts with the MediaKits logo



Media Kits


The logo is purposefully playful and colorful, taking some inspiration from social-media platforms. 

“It’s a little play on a couple different popular social-media platforms from the color palette to the shape itself,” O’Brien said. “And then the letter M being the structure of the logo.” 

The second slide gives the MediaKits slogan



Media Kits


This slide gives a simple definition of what MediaKits’ purpose is, without providing too much information upfront. 

“It was important for us to put something here that really created that ‘aha’ moment in the minds of our investors,” O’Brien said. 

This slide transitions into the next part of the deck



Media Kits


This slide explains what a media kit is



Media Kits


This slide gives a definition of media kits to educate anyone who isn’t familiar with them. 

“It’s important for that context to be provided to an investor so that they know what it’s used for so that we can build on top of that with our solution,” O’Brien said.

This slide gives examples of how people create media kits in document form



Media Kits


“The goal here is to show the inefficiencies behind the current process,” O’Brien said. 

Later, investors will see a MediaKits version. “It’s a no-brainer which one looks better,” he said.

The next slide explains the most common options influencers have



Media Kits


O’Brien said this slide shows what influencers currently do without MediaKits, along with the challenges each DIY option poses.

This slide transitions into the problem



Media Kits


Then a few humorous memes keep the mood light



Media Kits


The next few slides inject some humor with GIFs and memes, which won some chuckles from investors, O’Brien said. 

“It was important to us to keep some humor and not make everything so uptight and professional,” he said. “Especially since we’re building a business in the creator economy.” 

One meme speaks to the influencer’s experience



Media Kits


This slide gives a visual representation of how a creator can feel when sending their media kit to a brand. 

“On a Monday, a brand asks them for a media kit, then on a Tuesday they have a viral video and they grow by 20,000 followers,” said O’Brien of a theoretical scenario. They have to go back to the drawing board, open up Canva, change every single number on their media kit, and update their follower account. “It’s gonna take them hours.”

This slide makes it clear that analytics can be ugly



Media Kits


“When you think of an analytics software, you think of a bunch of charts and lines and things that don’t look very nice,” O’Brien said. “One of the value propositions of MediaKits is that it’s a sleek, good-looking user experience.” 

Meanwhile, this slide points to transparency issues within the industry



Media Kits


Both O’Brien and Adams have worked with influencers who inflated stats like story views or engagement rates, which is a common problem in the industry. 

“It’s a big problem that brands are very aware of, and our tool — with the transparency of the data — is a huge problem-solver,” Adams said. 

This slide visualizes a ‘desert’ of options for brands



Media Kits


Identifying the problem is an important part of selling your business idea, O’Brien said. A founder needs to explain “the reasons the way that it’s done currently just isn’t good enough, and why our product solves all of those pain points.”

The next slide introduces MediaKits as the solution to the problem



Media Kits


Then the next five slides demonstrate what it looks like to have a profile on MediaKits



Media Kits


Even as the cofounders were still building their site, it was an important part of the fundraising process to walk investors through the platform. 

“Being able to pitch investors with a visual representation of what the product’s going to look like, even if it doesn’t actually exist yet, is a leg up for a founder,” O’Brien said.



Media Kits




Media Kits




Media Kits




Media Kits


This slide explains what MediaKits is



Media Kits


This slide gives a mock-up of what each profile looks like



Media Kits


This slide shows estimated influencer marketing growth year-over-year



Media Kits


O’Brien said this slide is one of the most pivotal in the deck. “Investors really got excited about why there’s a big opportunity in this industry and why we feel like we’re uniquely positioned to tackle it,” he said.

The next slide gives the amount of funding MediaKits needed



Media Kits


The founders told investors exactly how much funding they needed. 

“It’s important to just cut to the chase, especially when investors are busy,” O’Brien said, adding that it also leads to a more convincing argument. “We’re showing that this is a $20 billion industry and all we need to do to be competitive in that industry is raise a million dollars.”

This slide gives the two subscription models for a MediaKits account



Media Kits


A base subscription to MediaKits is free, then users can upgrade to a pro account for $19 per month to access extra features like widgets and customization.

This slide shows the multiple platforms MediaKits plans to include



Media Kits


“It’s important for an investor to know what platforms are going to be compatible with our product,” O’Brien said. “And that there are millions and millions of people out there that need a product like this.”

The next four slides introduce the founders, advisors, and investors



Media Kits


One of their advisors is rapper Wiz Khalifa, who uses MediaKits himself.  

“Future investors like to see that we have the ability to assemble a great team, both from the product side and from the investor and advisor side,” O’Brien said. 



Media Kits




Media Kits




Media Kits


This slide zooms out to the bigger picture



Media Kits


This slide explains that MediaKits is more than a digital résumé tool for creators — it can also help brands discover creators.

“This is mainly to show the investor that there’s a bigger vision here,” O’Brien said.

This slide explains how a creator can get discovered by brands



Media Kits


This slide transitions into one more point



Media Kits


The last slide gives a vision for what MediaKits could become for creators

“Our goal, like it says there, is to become the authority in media-kit creation and displaying real-time data analytics for creators,” O’Brien.



Media Kits


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