Glimmr co-founder and CEO Jefferson Griscavage believes it’s important to help others achieve their greatest potential.
“Don’t be afraid to chase your passion in life. I feel like so many people give up what they really enjoy,” he said. “I believe if people believe in themselves, they can do it.”
Griscavage is a fourth-year student studying medicine and business at the University of Virginia, whose own dream of empowering others to live their best life has so far resulted in the creation of two startups to help achieve that goal.
In 2019, he helped found Vuetech Health Innovations to improve patient safety and optimize wellness through artificial intelligence.
And in May, Griscavage, along with fellow UVA students and co-founders, Andrew Wang and Evan Yang, launched Glimmr to help elevate content creators. As more people enter the creator space due to social media, Griscavage wants to ensure equity of income and opportunity, through the platform.
“My vision for Glimmr is to have a platform that works for creators of all interests and audiences,” he said. “Right now, the top 1% of creators are earning more than 80% of the revenues. I’d love to see a world where anybody who generates valuable content for followers are able to monetize that fairly.”
Griscavage said the startup is mostly bootstrapped. It also received a grant through the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and won several entrepreneurship competitions. He said they will begin to look at raising capital as Glimmr grows.
As the former Editor in Chief of a scientific magazine when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, Griscavage said he knows firsthand the hard work that goes into creating content.
The idea for Glimmr came to life, in part, after talking to friends with podcasts and video blogs, who were devoting nearly full-time hours working on educational or entertainment content. He said though they were putting in the work, they found difficult to make money off the value of the content.
“Creators are internet entrepreneurs, in my opinion, and I think we should stop seeing them as just people chasing hobbies; we should start seeing them as creators providing value to the marketplace and should reward people accordingly,” Griscavage said.
Glimmr’s platform aims to achieve this through an innovative, FairPay pricing model. Griscavage said it’s unique from other similar apps in that Glimmr allows fans to initiate the pricing, and the creator can decide whether to accept.
“So many creators say, ‘It’s so difficult for me to put a price tag on my time,’ but by flipping the pricing around and having the supporters propose a fair price, we reduce that load on the creator so they don’t feel like they’re imposing anything,” he said. “Everything is a willingness to pay, so that way they can maintain a good relationship with their supporter while also being able to make the money.”
The startup is set up to deepen audience engagement because users can pay to personally interact with creators, allowing for more genuine connections between creators and supporters, Griscavage said.
A public leaderboard is used as a tool to encourage fans to support the content creator community by highlighting the biggest supporters.
“You don’t have to be the top 1% of YouTube or the most famous Instagramer,” he said, “As long as you are creating content and you have people that value what you are creating, you are a star to those people.”