A Colorado native and former University of Colorado undergraduates are turning the influencer marketing industry on its head with the launch of their new business.
Boulder-based Waves is an advertising platform that connects content creators with businesses looking to advertise their products. Waves launched its app and platform last week.
Traditionally, the influencer industry only focuses on the top 1% of creators, said Bruce Weaver, Waves co-founder. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the global industry’s market size has increased to $21 billion and consists of content creators who typically have 500,000 to 1 million social media followers.
“We got to thinking, with this new age of short-form content and the ability for anybody — whether you have 1,000 followers or a million followers — to reach millions of people with viral content, why can’t we expand this market to the other 99% of people because anybody these days can actually have a piece of content that influences millions,” Weaver said.
With Waves, anyone with at least 500 followers on Instagram and 100 followers on TikTok can become a paid content creator. The user creates a Waves account and browses businesses and products on the platform. Then, the user purchases the product at a discounted rate and has 14 days to create and post promotional content.
Waves doesn’t charge brands to join the platform or guarantee how the creator’s content will perform. Instead, brands pay the creator based on content performance. Waves co-founder Josh Jacobs said this model has allowed the startup to acquire brands quickly.
While in beta, Waves had 500 content creators working with 100 brands. The startup had at least 80 more brands ready to onboard once the app launched, Weaver told Colorado Inno in late August.
“It really removes a lot of the minutia and like the back and forth that goes into working with an influencer,” Jacobs said.
This structure also eliminates the need for brands to manually send hundreds of products to content creators across the world for free. Having the content creator purchase the product at a discounted rate also makes the creator more invested and helps ensure the content is authentic.
Waves’ core team includes Weaver, Jacobs, Roger Nowakowski and Justin Schwartz.
Prior to launching Waves, Weaver and Jacobs attended the University of Colorado Boulder. Weaver ran a marketing agency and e-commerce businesses and attended CU for two years. Jacobs started working on his own bottle manufacturing business in high school, but said nothing came of it. He attended CU for one year.
Waves now has a team of about 11 employees and has raised $675,000 to date in pre-seed and seed rounds. The startup plans to hire four to six more people to fill its engineering and sales teams.
“Raising funding is a huge milestone,” Jacobs said. “Gathering a team of competent individuals is huge and I think we’re taking the right steps, but we are definitely cognizant of the uphill battle that is still to come.”
The startup is based in Boulder, but its core team recently moved to Austin to be closer to its lead investor Allison Swope with Hanover, a VC firm.
Waves is currently targeting e-commerce brands but plans to expand to restaurants, festivals and other business types in the future.
“We want to only work with brands that actually have a very positive community built around their product from the start. ... [We] don’t want people to be falsely advertising their products and basically being incentivized to say things that aren’t necessarily true about the products just because they want to get paid more,” Weaver said. “We want to only work with products that are actually aligned with these users and people already know and love.”
