How Incast CEO Vera Kopp grew Incast 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 different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what 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...