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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Numerous guardians took the mic and shared horrifying stories of finding their teenaged children dead in their own home after taking their own lives because of bullying on the app, or overdosing on illicit fentanyl obtained from drug dealers on Snapchat. The grieving parents carried bright yellow signs designed to look like Snapchat friend codes, with faces of their dead children in the center. Each poster displayed the date the child passed and noted they were “forever 17,” or the age when they died. They also had a slogan: “Snapchat is an accomplice to my murder.” The ages of the dead children ranged from 14 to 19 years old.
These protests have been happening for a while; dot.LA covered a similar march in June 2021.
Jeff Johnston, Sr., spoke about losing his son Jeffrey Johnston, Jr., to drugs he obtained via Snapchat. Johnston angrily took the mic and demanded CEO Evan Spiegel come out and face him. He also publicly encouraged Spiegel’s wife, Miranda Kerr, to divorce him, saying Spiegel was a “weak and evil man.”
Representatives from nonprofits including the Organization for Social Media Safety (OSMS) and ParentsTogether were also in attendance.
According to Snap spokesman Peter Boorgard, the company is working hard to stop dealers from abusing our platform. “We do this by employing certain technologies, working closely with law enforcement, collaborating with other technology companies, and by having a zero-tolerance policy where we shut off the infringer's account,” Boorgard said.
To his point, just last week, Snap announced it was a “founding partner” of National Fentanyl Awareness Day. And in 2021, Snap told Congress that banning drug sales on Snapchat is a “top priority.” But numerous parents told me that they feel Spiegel treats the problem of illicit drug sales on his app as “a PR problem,” and doesn’t view the situation as they do: A crisis.
As the modest group marched towards Snap’s inconspicuous headquarters at Donald Douglas Loop, I spoke with Amy Neville, the event organizer. She lost her son, 14 year-old Alexander Neville, in June 2020 to an overdose. Alexander unwittingly took fentanyl he thought was a pill of OxyContin or Xanax that he had received from a dealer that he’d connected with via the Snapchat app.
Samson Amore
Legal relief
In attendance were Glenn Draper and Laura Marquez Garrett, attorneys for the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, who are representing the parents of Sammy Chapman who died at age 16 after he took Fentanyl he thought was Oxycodone. The Chapman family is working to pass Sammy’s Law, sponsored by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz of Florida, which would require social media companies to integrate third-party softwares that would allow parents to track their kids’ usage and interactions.
“If fentanyl is the bullet, Snapchat is the gun that's delivering the bullet to our children,” Samuel Chapman, Sammy Chapman’s father said.
Draper is working with both the Berkman and Chapman families along with roughly 65 others, and filed a lawsuit against Snap on January 3 in LA Superior Court. He's optimistic that once that case progresses to discovery, the public could learn a lot about how Snap’s algorithms work.
Draper also said that he thinks Section 230, which protects tech companies from the consequences of their users’ behavior, needs to change, and noted that Congress is moving to consider federal legislation to change the statute to hold tech companies accountable.
Parental controls
Last August Snap created a feature called Family Center, which allowed parents to see their teen’s friend list, and who they’re speaking with (if the child consents). But Neville and Marc Berkman, CEO of the OSMS, said that wasn’t enough.
Neville said that the Family Center “means that you have to create an account, [so] now they’ve got increased usership. You can see who your kid’s talking to, but not what they’re talking about,” she added. “They [Snap] equate that to, ‘you don’t listen to their private conversations.’ Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But that option’s there, as a parent,” she said.
Disappearing content
One of Snapchat’s core features is the disappearing message. It’s been baked into the app since it launched in 2011, and it’s a key reason why people use the app. But the vanishing messages disturb parents who literally can’t see if their children are talking about drug sales, or being bullied. They’re asking for this data to be kept and accessible to users, a direct opposition to the app’s core function. The parents also allege the disappearing messages are why drug dealers prefer Snapchat to other platforms, since they can erase traces of their sales.
“This really isn’t a social media problem, this is a Snapchat-specific problem,” Draper said of the app’s unique functions. “You can use AI and all the most advanced moderation techniques to try and get drug dealers off of your site after the fact, but until you change the features that are attracting the drug dealers to your site in the first place, they're going to keep coming.”
Geolocation
Snap introduced a geolocation feature in 2017 called Snap Maps, which much like Apple’s FindMy app, lets Snapchat users see where their friends are. The feature was criticized almost immediately after launch, as parents raised concerns about it being perfect fodder for stalkers.
Users can turn this off, or choose to have only specific friends view their location. There’s also an option to go into “ghost mode,” which makes their location invisible. But parents argued that teens who might not know about these features’ settings and are liable to accept friend requests from strangers might misuse the feature. “They [dealers] use geolocation to find children in areas where they might be able to pay for the drugs, they solicit those children and then they use Snapchat to connect the dealer with the child and to make the arrangements for the drug deal,” Berkman argued.
Third-party monitoring
Neville and other parents also said they want neutral parties to be tasked with monitoring the company’s progress. “As far as our government and legislation are concerned, I really want that duty of care followed by third party auditing, because at this point, so much crime has happened on their platform,” Neville said. “We’re just supposed to take their word for it nowadays, we need third party auditing.”
These third parties, Neville suggested, could be law enforcement, the Organization for Social Media Safety, or anyone “who really can take a hard look at it and don't have any financial ties.”
Back in 2021, Snapchat said it was “generally open” to using third-party software, but Spiegel’s also said that it might not work, citing user privacy and scalability issues.
“We would take that on so long as we were completely independent of Snap,” Berkman said of being a Snapchat auditor. “The arrangement would have to enable complete independence and the funding for that process would have to be independent of a specific platform or the [tech] industry general.”
Editor's Note: Snap Inc. is an investor in dot.LA.
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Anaheim's 'Star Wars' Celebration is Canceled
Chalk up another disappointment to the coronavirus. The organizers of Anaheim's 'Star Wars Celebration' are calling it off this year, due to concerns about hosting an indoor event in the midst of a global pandemic. Would-be attendees can exchange their tickets for the 2022 event (plus a limited edition stormtrooper pin), trade them for merch or get a refund. You can find more information at their website.
L.A. Congressman Looks to Limit Police Use of Facial Recognition Technology
Amazon, IBM and Microsoft either pulled sales of their facial recognition technology to law enforcement or halted their business last week as pressure from civil rights leaders, companies and legislators grew over how the surveillance technologies were being used.
The issue has played out for years in the Los Angeles communities Congressman Jimmy Gomez represents. Activists regularly object to the use of technology that has the potential to exacerbate racial bias. Now, it has exploded anew on the national stage in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests.
Gomez, who sits on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told Politico last week he's drafting legislation that would place restrictions on local and state police from using the technology.
"If facial recognition is considered the future of policing, it's just going to perpetuate the same biases that are already out there because it's in and of itself is biased," he told VentureBeat in a separate interview. "It's been flawed. It's been shown to be flawed and can [misidentify] people of color, mainly black women, Latinos, African Americans — and the darker the skin color, the more mistakes it makes. That's going to lead to more negative interactions between law enforcement and people of color, which can lead to deadly consequences."
Gomez told the outlet Amazon gave him the run around as Congress probed the issue.
"We need them to cooperate and give us data so we can be better informed on how to craft this legislation," he said. "If not, we'll just work with the civil rights groups, and we'll just try to pass it through, and they're going to most likely try to oppose it, in my opinion, at the end of the day if they don't like it."
L.A. Seed Rounds Are Getting Bigger
Image from Amplify.LA
In the first quarter of this year, 19 Los Angeles startups raised seed rounds of more than $2.5 million. The average seed round raised was $4 million, according to Amplify.LA's latest LA Seed Report.
"While nothing new for larger ecosystems like SF and NY, it's a relatively new phenomenon here in L.A.," wrote Conner Sundberg, an associate at Amplify.LA.
Amplify also found seed activity in Q1'20 was nearly double that of Q1'19. 38 companies closed seed rounds in the first quarter while fintech re-emerged as one of the top dealmaking sectors.
"Since starting this project years back, we've noted more funds being raised in L.A., a higher percentage of capital coming from local investors, and early stage teams tackling more varied verticals," wrote Sundberg.
— Ben Bergman
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