How Incast CEO Vera Kopp grew to $506K revenue and 110 customers in 2024.

guys in cast on me has done something special Marketplace model they connect Brands like PepsiCo to micro influencers all around the world including dogs pets people you name it they connect it they did over two million dollars of sort of AD Volume last year of which their take rate is anywhere between 10 and 25 percent their take rate revenue is about 400 000 last year they have a team of 35 building or sorry 32 building the company they served over the past 12 months over 110 Brands like PepsiCo who put at least a dollar of AD Revenue sort of through them looking to scale moving forward with a new platform called Rainmaker hey folks my guest today is Vera Kopp she's a female founder and serial entrepreneur of influencer marketing businesses she graduated with from business management in California Am Pm at Stanford at an incast dot me and funcast.me along with Rainmaker is what she's focused on today she's got Global clients including Tick Tock shop the Amazon Visa Ubisoft and many more and if she looks familiar that's because she was on the show back in 2018 when she had just passed 20 customers and 30 000 bucks of mrr at the time we're excited to have her back on Vera are you ready to take us to the top incredible I'm ready and then you're bringing the numbers from back in 2018 it's just so great to see how much I was gonna say I can't wait to get caught up here so for folks that missed that episode you know what was that four years ago at this point who was in cast selling to what are the customers paying you for they're selling they're buying strategic planning we uh set the entire strategy with incast uh majority of our clients are from China U.S Europe so shopping Amazon Tick Tock we create a business plan for them how to work with creators we identify the best creators for that particular brand but identifying not only the creators which is most important is the audience right who are the creators that have the best audience that will communicate and have this strategy and a lot of times Brands come up with you know um different kpis so we have to be in tune with the kpis for the brands it's Performance Brand awareness um conversion clicks daily active users we are on tune into innovating a way of working with creators as well and so Vera of PepsiCo comes to you and says Vera we want to launch a campaign but for the Super Bowl targeting males and America between 20 and 30 years old GoFundMe the top tick-top influencers and you say well how much do you want to spend on this and they say up you know 500 000 what's your model are you taking a percent of the money they spend through you or is it a flat one-time fee we take a percentage of the budget uh depending on the campaign if we have more Talent managers it varies from 10 to 25 percent um we have the ability to negotiate with creators we work frequently with the pool of creators they're part of our Network community so it's more it's cheaper for the brand to work within cast and trying to figure it out on their own and if we get five hundred thousand dollars for Pepsi we'll definitely uh look for a good way to attain a cost per CPM base right um talking to this uh male audience and driving driving traffic to where we need to drive it's for a specific campaign or you know taking people to the stores to buy the product how many how many brands are you working with like pepsicos how many brands have you processed at least a dollar of volume for over the past 30 days over the past 30 days we have 12 clients in-house right now but overall historically we have 160 um clients we consistently plan and and execute okay so like 12 like that are running campaigns like right now but over the past 12 months that number is closer to 130. 110. okay and if you add up all of the dollars they spent through your platform those 110 customers about how much money would that be about 1.4 million so we we took a company right 2018 from 30 000 in Revenue to 1.4 in 2012. oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's 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you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and your take rate you set is 10 to 25 percent assuming your highest take rate of 25 percent on the 1.4 million that would be about 350 000 and quote take rate revenue for incast is that your only Revenue stream or how else are you making money we do have also funcast which is Phi digital experience uh we went to five different malls stores are having a very challenging period right now to drive traffic right to the stores and to the malls so we helped to engage the the the audience to take them into the mall um Instagram above experiences we did that for PepsiCo with a chocolate powder called toji and also with Heineken um a drinking soda we had spaces packed with products so people were interacting with the product they were taking uh photos and posting and that drove traffic to the malls over 60 65 percent over you know the 30 or 60 days that we stay with our installations into the mall so we take creators we do strategic planning and also um have the the photos the images going out on Instagram like explosion that's awesome now you launched in 2017 how many folks are full-time at the company today we have 32 people in our team um for Marketing sales operations strategic planning and now we're launching a new product uh which is a self-service um Community for creators called Rainmaker and with that we're offering a solution to small businesses to be able to buy a campaign for 5.99 a month and get a hundred thousand dollar a hundred thousand views so for 5.99 a month they're able to get 100 000 views with up to two creators either on Tick Tock or Instagram how do you convince a Creator I mean you only have six bucks to incentivize the Creator to drive 100 000 views that's a lot how do you get creators to say yes when you have an inventory request we do have a lot of my career influencers that wants to grow and wants to partner with Brands so a lot of the creators most of the times they're not interested only on the money side but on the growth on to a brand that makes sense to them as the matchmaking all goal that we developed with Rainmaker that allows us to put like Brands into um the neighborhood Creator right local people uh local language and with that we also have higher conversions for traffic and for purchases and services so to sum all this up if we look at total revenue in 2022 for the company where were you guys at is something to be half a million a million something like that uh 2022 we did 1.4 with incast funcast was another 500 000 with them but that's the Top Line right that's the top line gmv I'm talking about like your your take rate they create 400 400 okay so you did about 2 million of volume across all your products and you kept about 400k take rate for yourself yes and how much this is a cool story here how much did you pay out to creators we usually pay out to creators uh 65 75 of the budget okay got it so if you're processing one you know two million dollars a year we could assume that about one 1.3 1.4 of that is getting paid out to creators exactly interesting so if the creators get 60 and you're getting 10 to 20 who gets the other 10 to 20 that's left is strategic planning and add-ons um that we put it into the creative side so you guys keep that or the creators keep that we keep that uh we've asked for this strategic planning and operations so not all the clients will um get to strategic planning and the creative a lot of times they come with the the creative briefing already ready and that's when we operate with 10 or 20 Cuts depending if it's micro influence or a top Creator the higher the budget the less of our our fee because it's it's you know it's hard to close I do for example uh Tony Hawk right he charged 100 150 000 for a post uh we we take a cut of 10 because he has a management and he has another agency so then it doesn't add up to the client so much but if you go with micro influencers we're working with 50 or 100 micro influencers we need more people to manage uh we increase our margin to 30 35 percent I see so are you like Patrick Star Tony Hawk Jillian Michaels food God like are you working with their agents at CAA to process this stuff or are you working directly with them we work with agencies CAA UTA and their managers as well to close so they're they're taking a cut in between there too then yes yeah but you would say your strategy really is to put those big names up as posters on your website but they're not where most of your volume goes you actually use to focus on the micro influencers if you can correct and um there are a few strategies we did especially with um with Tick Tock we work in different verticals that's where we're able to keep all the channels and all the verticals especially for clients too so you know talking about paths we we worked with the top top 100 Paths of the US and there were micro influencers back in the days now they grew right we onboarded them into Tick Tock when Tick Tock was what what was Tick Tock at the time yeah it was very interesting to see them now with millions of followers but at the time they were just you know micro influencers pets that we were migrating from different social media from Instagram and YouTube and taking them into a new platform and it's fantastic to see the growth of our clients and also see how much we contributed to their growth right when we when we last spoke you were a bootstrapped are you still bootstrapped today or did you raise capital is still but strong yes great we love that we love that very cool well hey we're out of time here let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book Jesus how to make big plans number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh Ben from um Bain entertainment uh Ricky Ray yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building incast right now we're Preparatory uh Rainmaker number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night six okay that's good and what's your situation married single kids ah God you have to get to that question of course you know it's coming separate it not divorced yet but getting there getting okay close you're almost there hang tight any kids or no no kids okay and can I ask how old you are ah no oh just give me a Range give me a Range what a secret I am on the 4.0 era of confidence yes that's fair I will say under way under 40. all right last question Vera something you wish you knew when you were 20. I wish I would have all the knowledge that I have today in my 20s and the confidence too guys in cast on me has done something special Marketplace model they connect Brands like PepsiCo to micro influencers all around the world including dogs pets people you name it they connected they did over two million dollars of sort of AD Volume last year of which their take rate is anywhere between 10 and 25 percent their take rate revenue is about four hundred thousand dollars last year they have a team of 35 building or sorry 32 building the company they served over the past 12 months over 110 Brands like PepsiCo who put at least a dollar of AD Revenue sort of through them looking to scale moving forward with a new platform called Rainmaker Vera thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much for having me Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya

hello everyone my guest today is vera cope she runs a company called incast a leading influencer marketing platform focused on instagram incast works with top instagram celebrities and micro influencers on marketing campaigns in brazil and the united states the company is a member of startup farm incubator based program based at the google campus in sao paulo vera are you ready to take us to the top all right i'm here uh thank you so much for having me on the show um i can share all the information that you like be part of the start of our program uh definitely took our company to a different level we started 2017 with a revenue of over three thousand dollars a month we're generating um a couple hundred thousand now so how many hundred thousand like 300 um a little bit more than that okay and how many customers we do have active uh 20 companies that we work on a monthly basis uh majority of our clients they renew because we provide an amazing service so we keep renewing clients so our cost of new client activation is um relatively low we're expending our team to be able to fulfill all the orders um they're becoming larger and larger how many folks on the team today uh we're 15. one five all in la uh we have four people here in l.a and 11 in brazil sao paulo sao paulo and la very good and you mentioned 20 brands paying you what do they pay on average per month um campaign ranges from 25 000 to right now a million okay now if i take 300 000 bucks a month divided by 20 that would mean each one pays you about 15 grand per month on average yes correct okay um you just said campaigns are 25 30 grand per month uh why doesn't it add up well um every influencer has a different price so we have to contact well first we need to get the briefing from the brand and access the niche that they want to talk to which demographic what kind of segment the product is and help them to to with the creative as well so once we select the influencers we have to put offers out in the market and prices vary we created a insta price is available on our site on incas.me you can access our basic estimate which is calculated within uh the reach of the influencer and their engagement and for youtube we can youtube price which has also the same metrics but one very important thing which is the dislike mentions um so we know if that influencer is more appropriate to be presented to a brand or not interesting so i just typed in uh at nathan latka and your calculator says 18 000 followers um 18 average reviews 804 likes and engagement rate of 4.5 percent for 110 143 earnings per post is that good or bad it's really good especially because they're not all the way up there in terms of followers we need to build your fellows your engagement's really good we try not to present any influencers to our clients uh below three percent engagement but you have a factor that our calculator cannot uh identify yeah which is the celebrity right you have a factor so we can add three times uh your values very i would say you're making me you're making me feel very good but the questions are not going to get easier but keep the con i love the compliments this is great [Laughter] no i will tell you i will tell you the only the only comparable i have to this is um i'm signed with caa because of a big deal with a linear tv kind of cable show plus my book coming out in a few things and they've brought me deals uh i won't say who the advertisers are but you know where it's like ten thousand dollars uh for example for a um a series of three instagram posts plus a quick video with product placement um are you essentially repping or working with agencies that represent big brands or you're working directly with the brand uh we work with advertising agencies that do represent brands and also brands directly so um in response to uh what you're mentioning in terms of like price negotiation um it varies like you have to create like you have to create unique content that's outside of your social media as well then then there's you know add-on on to the package so um we would love to create very soon we're working on it um it's a calculator that will identify this elaborate fact to it and then we'll give um a market price it's more adjusted to what you know george clooney would um ask versus a non-celebrity and answer so so if you sign up one of these ad agencies and they pay you fifteen thousand dollars per month um is that all going to you or you then have to go pay out you know 10 grand per month to influencers to actually execute the campaign we pay a little bit more than that we pay 12. uh we we have our you know sorry 12 12 what about 12 000 so our margin is 10 percent that we take from the bottom down so to explain like if the influencer comes to us with the budget of 10 000 us dollars for post we will pass that cost to our clients so it's not more expensive to our clients to work with us and we'll take 10 percent from the influencer or from the agency that's representing the influencer i see so if so on 300 000 per month right now that you're doing in revenue you're keeping about ten percent of that it's about 30 35 grand per month correct i see okay i see very good um okay so and help me understand how you do this do you scrape instagram and look at all kind of you know everyone's followings and then recommend back to the ad agency who they should sign up for their client or do the influencers have to opt in via your website uh we work uh with both we have an internal tool that our team uses to search um influencers and we have our platform where influencers can opt in and receive direct offers okay interesting and help me understand growth so if you're doing kind of 30 000 bucks per month today what were you doing about a year ago in november 2017 i was doing three thousand dollars a month oh yeah i guess that was year one huh actually 300 in profit because you know our uh tickets were about three to five thousand yeah three thousand per month but then you gotta pay out ninety percent to the influencer you only keep 300 right correct how did you make it work did you have a bunch of savings from you know you you started some reality show and they paid you a lot of money or what well i have to be um what we call locked in a room starved myself for about nine months learning really how um to change and pivot our business model from being a platform we were a jobs um marketplace and we converted into being a creative marketing agency as well as you know the platform to manage all of the posts and um it was a lot of sacrifice um today to operate with budget 12 you know a million plus it's it's wonderful it's very rewarding and um you know when we take you know advices from our you know advisors we always hear like oh you have to focus on your clients yeah we have to focus on a client when we don't have a client you don't know how to charge you don't have the technology to really like execute and it's easy to say but once uh we start building the right tools uh with engineers that on board on the company with like no pay like you know like i did as a ceo for many months um so are you are you bootstrapped today or have you raised capital i am bootstrapped totally bootstrapped yes that's great i love that um and walk me through churn so it sounds like you know agencies if they run a campaign through you the nature of campaigns is they start and they stop so does your revenue really recur every single month or do you have to go get new sales every single month we get new sales every single month we've been very lucky that most of our clients uh we have a churn or maybe like the 10 which um are based on small budgets we we we tend to advise clients budget less than five thousand dollars it's really hard to measure results because influencers pulses are really expensive nowadays so um and then on those clients are the ones that you know it tends like to be much harder to to quantify return uh work with the influencers you have to have reach and frequency so we always advise our clients to do two months and longer because that's when you get to see uh results okay so 10 revenue churn per month or logo churn per month uh there's no revenue turn like you're saying like clients turn 10 of the clients but our ticket average ticket per client is increasing so we went from beginning of the year of 500 000 revenue right now we're to close a million yeah just and just to be clear again that's top line revenue you're keeping really a hundred grand of that so your your gross margin is about 100 grand yes okay um the reason i say that there's a lot of ad tech companies i interview where they'll tell me their revenue is a billion but they take two percent of it right because they have to spend that money on the actual placement so their true kind of revenue is you know call it two million versus a billion so i just want to understand that um so 10 logo term per month but your average kind of ticket size or your is increasing which is great um walk me through how you're getting new agencies signed up how are people finding you um mainly to do relationship basis um and also um a lot of like what do you say how do they find us yeah like are you are you the only salesperson like of the 15 people on your team who's doing sales we have uh three salespeople uh including and with me of course i'm always uh meeting new people and bringing clients to uh to to to our team um it's it's you know the the influencer marketing and advertising industry it's a lot of to relationship base if i can pull out of all of our clients 80 of them were referrals or acquaintances or people that we you know did business in the past um there are leads that we we work on seo sem on um on google and actually social media and getting our influences to endorse we have a 20 conversion on every lead capture that we get it's pretty good actually yeah in terms of in terms of agencies coming to you if 100 come to you you'll close 20 of them correct educate us a little bit on kind of just the state of influence or marketing as a whole tell me about a campaign you recently ran via your platform and how it performed um we have several recent uh campaigns herbalife samsung bmw um a big tech company it's it varies um right now we're working on the current project 24 influencers we have what we call top tier which is above 1 million followers and um consolidating another 30 influencers below amelia so for which brand is this i don't know if they can disclose well let's let's talk about one that you can actually talk about so for bmw what was that campaign what did bmw come to you and they said hey vera we want x they were launching a new motorcycle in brazil and they wanted a top tier celebrity influencer and they had a tiny tiny little budget like i think 15 000 at the time and they wanted like two years exclusive uh image usage a lot of those items are you know very difficult to to negotiate but we went there we got the talent and then we fulfilled with another 50 um smaller influencers to propagate that content from the top celebrity got it and who was the top celebrity felipe hockey [Music] global global tv influencer oh and very recently we did a campaign with winderson nunes well hold on i want to stay on the bmw one for a second philippe felipe what's his last name r-o-q-u-e r-o-q-u-e yeah because i want to pull up his account and understand and it's and it's p or h at the beginning or sorry f or p at the beginning f f i l i p e yes r o k u e r o q u e yes okay interesting um let me see if i can pull up felipe okay and how many um when he when you worked with him how many followers did he have he was probably 30 percent uh less than what he has now it's been like three months for bmw yeah very cool um yeah i'm on my web browser i can't find him but um okay so you find him you negotiate the price and then basically you pay 50 other kind of influencers to go kind of like and share that content right when he posts is that accurate yes correct interesting that's really interesting so so how can one of my listeners um you know who are all running their own kind of software companies how could they potentially use you we help them to scale um in three ways either is a brand awareness or it's direct sales or engagement to the content so what we did with bmw was more engagement to the content when we want to drive sales we we tend to share links or promo codes and smaller influencers that talk and they personalize their communication with their audience tend to convert at least 63 percent better than regular communication and we we're talking to millennials um over um 50 of them do not make a decision on purchasing a product if they don't read something on the blog or if they're not induced you know by um someone that they follow on social media so for tech companies that have a product if they want to create brand awareness or simply you know direct to sales we can help them to be skilled and connect them with influences that will talk to their audience that's the most important key factor uh you can't get a fashion blogger to promote a nerdy technology app if that's you know not the audience that she's talking to sure yeah but not as effective so we do the search on influencers um back-ordered we go to the audience interest age demographics and all of the informations and and work with the kpis for the brand to make sure that we're connecting them with the best um audience and influencer that's great vera we're out of time so let's wrap up quickly with the famous five one word answers here if you can number one what's your favorite business book my favorite favorite i think it was um the instagram uh one of the founders kevin is actually brazilian so for me was very inspiring how so what's the book oh the book name of the book come on god help me um is it like a bot is it a bio he did he write it uh he he yeah he wrote the book um okay i'll look it up kevin instagram book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying the system um i'm inspired by um i don't know um yahoo but it's a mayor everybody criticized her and her mentor i think her decision making i think she did great when she you know took a chance and took yahoo from being like email provider to e-commerce platform by um alibaba so for me i think she's a woman she's a go-getter and um one of the highest paid ceos in america right yeah she did by the way the alibaba investment was before i believe she joined yahoo but that did turn out nicely during her tenure and i do i do think she's extremely talented um number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company online two for building my company trello number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh right now four or five okay and what's your situation married single kiddos married for over 12 years and together for almost 20. that's amazing any kids no kids no kidding no kid total freedom all right last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i'm sorry what was the question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish i knew what i know now um don't be scared don't be scared you have to learn like we say like fail fast right learn fast and the more risk you take within barriers right don't go throw yourself out of the building but um the more risk you take i think the more rewarding you're going to feel and it's like life is that just like risk-taking i wish that i would have a little bit more capital to start businesses or be more risk-taker at earlier age guys there you have it take bigger risks earlier in cast founded in 2017 helps agencies find instagram influencers to propagate their clients material and marketing campaigns they're bootstrapped serving about 20 customers today each customer will maybe run a campaign for 20 or 30k so 300 grand and spend kind of through vera's platform she keeps though about 10 of that so she's doing about 30 000 bucks per month right now that's up from just 300 per month about a year ago so healthy growth 10 logo term per month again team of 15 based between la and brazil vera thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much for having me and if you guys want to learn more about our company go to incas.me and it will be happy to help you with your campaigns