Image courtesy of Superjoi
Superjoi Raises $2.5 Million To Help Fans Fund Their Favorite Creators
Fintech startup Superjoi, which lets fans fund creators’ content projects, has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding.
Superjoi raised the funding from fintech-focused investors including Ascension Ventures, QED Investors, Systema VC, Tomahawk and Modern Venture Partners. The round also included participation from senior leadership at e-commerce platform Shopify, fintech firm Revolut and Los Angeles-based live-in accelerator Launch House.
Based in West Hollywood, Superjoi’s platform allows creators to run Kickstarter-like campaigns to raise capital for projects, while giving fans the chance to suggest ideas for new content. Creators can also reward fans who chip in by giving them event tickets, merchandise or a personal video call. Later this year, Superjoi plans to help fans reap financial rewards, too—such as a share of advertising revenues generated from projects that they backed.
A screenshot from Superjoi's platform.
Major online platforms like Facebook and YouTube have increasingly monetized the relationship between creators and fans, targeting users with ads and sharing some of the revenues with creators. But Superjoi’s founders contend that fans have been completely cut out of the equation despite driving creators’ successes. In September, the startup began building a platform that would give fans a share of the financial upside, co-founder and CEO Chris Knight told dot.LA.
“Superjoi, as we position it, is liquidity with love,” Knight said. “The reason why we call it that is, for somebody who's creative, there's no better funding source for their creativity than the people who love them—and that’s their fans.”
Knight learned a lot about what he calls “superfans” after helping to build Fantom, a fan-focused smartwatch launched with England’s Manchester City Football Club. The Premier League team consults its fans on decisions relating to its stadium and sponsorships, he noted. “I see huge opportunities in the future for creators to actually have a deeper engagement with their audience and actually mobilize their audience to a new level,” Knight said.
Fans will initially fund projects on Superjoi by buying “supercoins,” an in-platform currency that is worth $1 each. While supercoins are not technically crypto tokens at this stage, the startup envisions letting fans invest in creators, earn a financial return and receive ownership in their content based on tokenization. Superjoi collects a 10% cut of a creator’s fundraising goal.
The platform plans to launch in mid-May with about 25 U.S.-based creators with larger audiences, and will onboard more creators on a waitlisted basis, Knight said. A full public launch is expected later this summer.
Superjoi, which has 14 employees, plans to use the new funds on growing its team, acquiring creators and marketing the platform.
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Built up with user-owned communities, Niche’s “owner-members” purchase tokens unique to each group. The tokens, which can be exchanged for real currency, can also be used to buy content and attend events on the platform. Gulczynski said distributing ownership among its members re-incentivizes people to invest in smaller, more personal online communities even as it removes ad-driven motivations.
“We saw all the good stuff about Web2, with like connection and facilitating good engagement, but then we also saw the bad of how the larger companies were using that to actually make money,” Gulczynski said. “So I think it's a really unique opportunity now to take that experience and apply it to Web3, so that we can deliver on those promises.”
While at Facebook, Nahapetyan said the company noticed more users turning to private groups and chat threads instead of the ad-heavy news feed.
“It's a big part of why I decided to build Niche because we were like, ‘Okay, people want to be in close-knit spaces around shared identity or interest,” Nahapetyan said. “And if the current apps are not serving that, then there's a huge need that we can fulfill here with what we're doing.”
Niche's company logo
Courtesy of Niche
Crypto scams are easier to pull off on social media, with the FTC stating that Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp users have lost over $1 billion. As people question the fate of different platforms, Gulczynski said that a platform like Niche has the potential to replace the current social media landscape.
“If we can prove value to like the groups of people that we're going after, we don't have to worry about taking on Meta and Instagram and all that kind of stuff because we'll have made evangelists out of the people that we're providing value for,” Gulczynski said.
Mainstream social media sites are also exploring Web3—Snapchat is testing a feature that would allow users to incorporate NFTs into lenses, and Twitter allows paying subscribers to use NFTs as profile photos.
Even as crypto faces increased scrutiny and creators grow wary of promoting it, there are a growing number of social platforms dedicated to Web3. NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie’s Web3 social media app Calaxy recently raised $26 million while Message seeks to give online chatting the Web3 treatment.
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