Ishan Goel knows social media platforms need influencers and content creators to exist, so he’s building a platform for them and some of their biggest fans.
An entrepreneur with a sizeable online following himself, Goel is raising funds for a new social media venture, called hyperfan, aimed at directly connecting creators with their most engaged followers. And he said there’s already around 45,000 people and more than 700 influencers on its waitlist.
“When you’re a creator on these platforms, you are simply renting space from them. You have no control over your actual audiences,” said Goel, who serves as founder and CEO. ”What hyperfan does is it allows creditors to finally have a safe place to actually connect with their most important followers in a secured environment. We want to make sure that whatever conversations are there, they're there for the benefit of the creator, as well as the fact that these fans get to… finally get rewarded.”
Goel declined to say how much the company is looking to raise. According to Crunchbase, hyperfan has raised $500,000. An SEC filing also names Chicago cannabis startup Fyllo’s Co-founder Aristotle Loumis, who Goel said is acting as chairman and advisor for hyperfan.
Built around gamification, hyperfan users take a 15 to 20 question quiz or complete a challenge to prove they are a top fan of a creator to connect with them, and so their interactions with their favorite influencers aren't just one in a “sea of comments.” Goel said monetization would come by giving brands access to fans’ data to help them find creator partners for advertising and marketing campaigns.
“Influencer marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, yet most of it never converts,” Goel, who splits his time between Dallas and Scottsdale, Ariz., said. “What a brand can do is approach a creator and say, ‘Hey, we'd love to also get your fans in on the project that we're working on. It's like whatever happens to the creator, happens to fans. Because they're the top fans, they also get a perk from that campaign."
In addition to fostering stronger connections between creators and their fans, Goel is looking to make the hyperfan platform a friendly space for influencers to create. He said the company verifies users to prevent trolling, adding that by curating a fanbase of their top followers, creators will more easily be able to source ideas for the type of content fans want to see.
“There are a lot of companies currently trying to get out there right now in the space. It's very noisy, it's very loud, a lot of people are building stuff,” Goel said. “And at the same time, I don't think anyone really has a real understanding of this space, or actual grasp on what they're actually building towards… which end result creates a product that isn't necessarily useful.”
The company has been largely operating in stealth mode for the past year, with plans to launch around the beginning of 2022. It currently has a fully remote team of less than five, a number he expects to grow over the next year while keeping the team “lean.”
While Goel said hyperfan has been gaining good traction, he said he couldn’t say what the company’s future looks like, saying the pandemic has made it to where “you never know what’s going to happen anymore.” However, he noted that the pandemic has caused widespread acceleration in the adoption of digital tools for people and businesses, leading to the rise in popularity of online creator communities in things like cryptocurrencies and web3.
“I was telling people, build a website, build a brand, get online, get a social media presence, and suddenly the pandemic hit… and everything is really going digital,” Goel said. “Right now, we're seeing the train about to leave the station when it comes to the birth of web3, the cryptocurrency world going into full-throttle. Adoption starting to come to an all-time high.”
Goel himself is no stranger to the space. He began interning for the Mark Cuban Companies while still in high school in Coppell. He’s also done a stint as Forbes’ head of influencer marketing and is well known for his role in getting a stock image of an egg to go viral in 2019, which at the time was the most-liked Instagram post of all time. Through his creative marketing firm Goel Strategies, he’s worked with names like AT&T, IBM and Toyota.
“The truth is, if these creators weren't on these platforms, the platforms wouldn't exist. I think a lot of platforms are forgetting that,” Goel said. “I believe (creators) are their biggest competition to the platform itself. One thing that's being missed is they're too busy playing the game, playing the algorithm or putting up a minimum amount of posts. But they're missing the fact that if creators stopped posting on any platform, that whole platform wouldn't exist.”
