Pay a fashion creator $20 a video, then make him a co-founder with equity

Reed Mancataum you know, I watched his TikTok account grow from, like, 0 to, like, 3 million followers on TikTok, and they drove all this traffic and engagement. And the playbook was: find a content creator that had an audience that is overlapped with the target market that you're going after, give them meaningful equity and upside into the company, and then bring them on board. And

Reed Mancatawhen I set forth on building Fitted, I had six friends send me this TikTok of who is now my co-founder, Max, who created this outfit generator for himself in class, and it went viral. And reached out to him on every single platform imaginable, LinkedIn, Instagram, I guessed his email, you know, you name it, and before I even had a product, and I would pay him 20 bucks a video to just, like, just cook. And

Reed Mancatait worked. And he would get videos with like 20 to 30,000 views, and we didn't even have a product, he was just talking about his fashion, so I was like, "Okay, there there is something here." So we did that for a little bit, went cold, and as fate had it, he lived in LA, and he graduated without, you know, anything lined up after, and he said, "Hey, I'm I'm down to go all in." And at this point, we were still, like, really bootstrapped, and I raised, like, 10k from a homie, and I flew everyone out for my team into a apartment in Palm Springs, and

Reed Mancatauh for a week, we just like cooked with the devs and our content creator. And it was like magic, that first day we woke up with a video that had 2 million views, and then we threw on a waitlist, and then we got 100,000 people on the waitlist, and, yeah, it was just like pretty crazy. And then we built that initial momentum, and then we just kept riding it. In the past year and a half, I'd say that we have a video go viral about like once a month, …

Joseph Choi… you would replicate this in another industry, cuz I feel like there's a lot of influencers like this out there where they're not really monetized. Like they're building really powerful, thriving communities and audiences, and all they do is like shill random e-commerce products. Like there's just so much potential there to combine that powerful audience with a really good app. What industries would you say potentially might have some of those?

Reed Mancata… go and actually like build something and like figure it out? It's not easy, but also at the same time these people are like very visible. Cuz if you go to like someone that has like 50 to 100,000 followers, like they know that they're an influencer, they know give or take their worth, they know that they have a little bit more leverage going into it. There's also this like kind of bucket of creator that's like between 1,000 to like call it like 50,000 that might not be like a quote, unquote influencer, but they're good at making content, they're good at getting views, and they're building, you know, engagement, right? So like there's this spectrum of kind of creator/influencer, so like finding that like sweet spot of creator where they're not going to like be really expensive, they're not going to like want to take like expect like huge payouts, or expect like crazy amounts of equity, right? Then it's like a crawl, walk, run approach.

Joseph ChoiCan we walk through each of those three phases? So, in the crawl stage, what type of partnership are you trying to create with that?

Joseph ChoiAt what point did you decide to start to give equity? Like were there any metrics or any milestones that you you you kind of made that transition?

Reed MancataI think we were pretty eager in the beginning cuz it was like vested, uh and then, you know, basically like the rev share was just like a percentage of, you know, any of the revenue generated on the app, uh and so like that incentivized him to just go viral more.

Joseph ChoiYeah, rev share seems like a pretty low-risk way to start out compared to equity. Do you think that you could scale to more creators?