MediaKits lands $1 million to build out 'digital resume' platform for influencers

The internet makes it possible for people to earn a living through social media, but what happens when an influencer needs a resume?

MediaKits is a fledgling Valley-based digital platform for influencers, college athletes, bloggers, musicians and anyone else with a digital audience to create a press kit online. A press kit is a tool traditionally used by companies to communicate information to the press, but in the creator economy, influencers use these kits to interface with marketing opportunities, reporters and investors.

MediaKits was co-founded by Casey Adams, 21, and Kieran O’Brien, 22, and they’ve recently closed on $1 million in financing from some big-name investors to help fuel the platform’s growth (more on the investors below).

O’Brien saw the need for this product firsthand a few years ago, when a creator client of his called him in a panic, asking him to help him update his media kit for a business opportunity in a hurry.

“I'm just thinking through this in my head, there's got to be a more efficient way for creators to display their data,” he told AZ Inno. “The media kit, the press kit, the EPK [electronic press kit], whatever you want to call it, it has not been modernized.”

O’Brien saw a need for MediaKits, but filed the idea away for a few years until when he and Adams were living together in Scottsdale and found themselves with a lot of free time on their hands during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The MediaKit platform integrates with Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so a user’s online statistics are pulled into the system and updated in the press kit automatically. Users can also design and layout their materials on the platform. The company plans to add integrations with TikTok, Spotify, LinkedIn, Snapchat and SoundCloud in the future.

Connecting with investors

Though MediaKits is still in its early days as a company, it has already secured funding from some major players. The following people participated in the company’s $1 million fundraising round:

O’Brien said this reach is largely due to his co-founder’s podcast, "Rise of The Young with Casey Adams." The podcast first aired in 2019 and has since released more than 270 episodes featuring guests such as Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, rapper Rick Ross and Nikola founder Trevor Milton, before he was charged in an alleged fraud scheme earlier this year.

That podcast, O’Brien said, helped the MediaKits team build a network that gave them access to the high-profile investors who participated in the round.

Building for tomorrow

MediaKits opened to users on Sept. 8, initially with a scaled down, free version of the platform. O’Brien said they plan to roll out paid $19 per month subscriptions to the platform which come with more features, sometime in November.

O’Brien said he hopes that MediaKits will become a major, go-to source for creators looking to monetize their online brands and a tool for users to access and understand all their cross platform data in a single place.

Future market opportunities including college athletes on NIL deals, people broadcasting on Twitch, musicians and other people creating things and distributing them over the internet.

“When people think about creators they think of social media influencers or bloggers or fitness models or what have you," he said. "But really, everybody's kind of a member of the creator economy these days.”

The MediaKits team currently has 12 people spread out across the country. Though Adams and O’Brien originally brought the MediaKits business to life in Scottsdale, Adams has since moved to Los Angeles.

For his part, O’Brien, a native of Virginia, said he enjoys living in the Grand Canyon State.

“We all came out here for a meeting in early 2018 and we kind of fell in love with it,” he said of his first trip to Arizona. “We were like, ‘Wow, this is like California without the taxes and the ocean.’”