Passionfroot - Supercharging The Creator Economy

Company & Team Introduction

Online content creation is among the few “dream jobs” the younger generation strives towards, but it is tough to achieve. In 2021, one of the founding team members of Passionfroot, Jennifer Phan, cracked the code and built a successful online audience with her venture capital-focused newsletter. Even with a strong following, she struggled to monetize it and quickly became overwhelmed with the laundry list of tools she needed to string together to get paid for her work. She quickly realized this pain point was actually a massive market opportunity in disguise. She teamed up with now COO Jens Mannanal, and they made it their mission to help more creators monetize their online audience. Passionfroot was founded in Berlin, Germany, and their team has already scaled to 10 employees. The company has chosen on-site work to connect their team better.

Product Overview

Even if you catch lightning in a bottle and build a devoted online audience, creators still need to get paid to live. Paissonfroot is on a mission to solve this problem plaguing the creator economy with its sponsorship management platform. Passionfroot offers internet creators on social media platforms like YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram, newsletters, and podcasters the tools they need to monetize their audience. Some key features of Passionfroot include a scheduling calendar to display availability and the different sponsorship opportunities options, an online storefront to display audience information (pricing, audience size + demographic, testimonials), a creator CRM, access to a vetted network of potential sponsors to work with, and most importantly a secure and reliable way to receive sponsorship payments. The product is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, but it is also flexible and can effectively scale with a creator’s audience as they grow.

Total Addressable Market

The creator economy has transformed into a massive market over the past decade as content creation and consumption have exploded. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy is worth as much as 250B today and believes it could be worth as much as 480B by 2027. The industry is well positioned to surpass half a trillion dollars by 2030, making it one of the world's largest and most fragmented markets. Goldman also cited that sponsorships, Passionfroot’s area of expertise, is currently the primary source of revenue (up to 70%) and is expected to remain the driver of such rapid industry growth.

Business Model & The Numbers

Passionfroot utilizes an extremely straightforward transaction fee business model. Passionfroot currently adds a 2% fee on top of Stripe fees (2.9% + $0.05 per transaction) for every transaction facilitated through their platform but doesn’t charge the creator; they charge the partner (ad sponsor). This allows Passionfroot creators to keep the revenue they earn, and the 2% fee is a reasonable expense in exchange for access to a list of potential high-quality advertising partners from Passionfroot.

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Traction

Only two years into its founding story, Passionfroot has already won over the hearts of an impressive list of creators, including YouTuber Marina Mogilko with 16M+ subscribers, high-performance fitness coach Dan Go with 600k followers on X, Alex Brogan, a thought leader with over 110K+ followers on LinkedIn and 250k+ on X. The world's largest artificial intelligence and crypto newsletters, “SuperHuman” and “The Milk Road” also use Passionfroot for their sponsorship management. It is also crucial for investors to take note of the flexibility of their platform, allowing it to effectively serve the needs of creators spanning different/multiple types of social channels and centralize their sponsorship workflows.

Competitors

Competition in the space is severely lacking; passionfroot has been a trailblazer in the creator monetization space. Before Passionfroot, creators would have to use multiple tools to accept payments, schedule, build landing pages with relevant audience information, etc. There are massive platforms like Patreon (last valued at 4B series F) to help monetize an audience, but they lack the flexibility and aren’t designed for the sponsorship use case, missing critical features like the booking page with relevant audience information, scheduling tools, and curated sponsor list.

Deal Terms

Passionfroot has raised two rounds of funding so far. The company raised a pre-seed round of just 700k, later raising a substantial 3.6M seed as the company began to gain traction among creators and find product market fit, bringing the total capital raised to 4.3M from top venture firms and angels like Creandum (led the seed), Vlad Malgin (founder/CEO of Webflow), Ali Abduul (4M+ social following, strong distribution).In addition to the company’s strong backing, their investor base is very diverse; ~50% of Passionfruit’s angel investors are women or minorities!

Passionfroot is hiring a senior product engineer! Are you a 10x developer looking to join a top startup on a mission to help creators get paid for their hard work? Check it out here: https://passionfroot.recruitee.com/o/senior-product-engineer.