Why I Left The VC World And Started Building For Creators

Jennifer Phan

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Published: October 13th, 2023

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Jennifer Phan

Founder, Passionfroot

Founders

Employees

Passionfroot

passionfroot.me

from Berlin, Germany

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Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Jennifer recommends to grow your business!

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Figma

G Suite

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Auth0

Superhuman tool-icon

1Password

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Linkedin sale...

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Instagram

Twitter

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Stripe

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Want more updates on Passionfroot? Check out these stories:

Hi, my name is Jen and I’m the co-founder and CEO at Passionfroot. Passionfroot is a platform that helps creators and media companies with a newsletter, podcast, Youtube, or social media accounts get and streamline sponsorships.

With Passionfroot, you can share your availability and pricing, accept sponsorship requests and collect creatives and payments in one place. On top, our Passionfroot Network connects relevant companies and creators for sponsorships.

We’re currently in a private beta and have grown over the past 3 months our GMV by more than 100%.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Before starting Passionfroot end of 2021, I was working as a VC investing in startups.
In 2020, I decided to start a newsletter called Tech for Good as a way to share my perspective and shine a light on everything that created a positive impact in our society or environment.

I loved what writing and creating content enabled for me. I felt I could creatively express myself, share learnings and thoughts, and connect with like-minded people who came across my newsletter. So, I started to think about leaving the VC world to pursue this unconventional path of becoming a full-time creator.

VC is an industry that is kind of defined by gatekeeping. And what I love about the creator economy is that it's exactly the opposite. Your background, financial situation, and educational background don’t matter as long as you show up and you put yourself out there. I found this incredibly empowering.

I started to talk with a lot of creators and people who have a newsletter, podcast, or YouTube channel, and just asked them simple questions like “How do you make money?” “How long did it take you?” “How do you manage all of that?” At some point, I realized that I could create a much bigger impact by empowering this new generation of entrepreneurs.

And that in the end is how I did not become a full-time creator but built for them instead.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

Before we even started to build anything, we’ve done 100+ user interviews with creators and I even worked as a COO for a creator to understand their pain points deeply. One learning that struck us was that creators spend 70% of their time with admin, negotiation, and business-related tasks while only 30% of their work is being spent on the thing they’re passionate about and good at: content creation.

At the same time, we saw during the conversations and working with creators that sponsorships seemed like one of the biggest revenue streams for a creator, but just an incredibly broken and inefficient market.

We’ve done a lot of design thinking workshops and worked with a product designer to come up with the first design prototype that we designed on Figma. From there, we iterated, showed the prototype to potential users, and validated the features that were needed and that were lacking until we had a version that reflected our vision well.

Our team had three engineers and a designer and built the first Alpha version. With the first version, you could create a storefront, add available slots in your booking calendar, accept or reject sponsorship requests and collect creatives and payments already.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We raised a first pre-seed round from Creandum (an early investor in Spotify) and some angel investors and creators in December 2021. With the funding, we could start to hire our first founding team members, including our product designer and two engineers.

We built the very first website version with Typedream, a no-code website builder. Our second version was built with Webflow and was recently featured on Webflow’s website.

We launched our website with a waitlist. This enabled us to build the product while collecting potential leads. It also helps with experimenting with the messaging and positioning of your value proposition, features, and benefits. We reached out to creators that we talked to during the user research and shared with them the website to sign up to. We also used social media and content to increase awareness of Passionfroot across platforms.

When you're building something up when you're doing something incredibly hard, you're supposed to feel one-third of your time great, one-third of your time okay, and one-third like crap.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Creators find us through several channels:

The majority hears about Passionfroot through word of mouth and creators who recommend our product. This one is the best as it shows creators love our product and tell their friends about it!

In the beginning, we onboarded creators manually one by one in a call to set them up for success and learn from their questions. We put a lot of emphasis on providing great customer support and care about each one of them because we know that happy customers are the best way to grow.

Many users find us via social media as our users rave about Passionfroot on Twitter, Linkedin, or Instagram which is great for social proof.

It’s mostly organic growth on social media as creators share their Passionfroot storefront to find sponsors, which lets us tap into product-led-growth loops. We also share product updates and just fun or helpful content mostly on Twitter.

On top, we have our podcast Creators on Air that functions as our pillar content. Based on this, we can create and share micro-content and repurpose the podcast into a YouTube video, IG story, blogpost, and carousels.

As users share their Passionfroot link in their newsletter, link in bio, or on social media to get sponsorship requests, product-led growth is another big aspect of our growth.

On top, we’re building a media company alongside our product: We have a weekly podcast called Creators on Air, a bi-weekly newsletter Frootful Creator, and a YouTube channel to share learnings and insights from the most successful creators. This works well as we are creators ourselves and build an even bigger empathy for our users, creates brand authority, and helps us to embed ourselves in the community.

Lastly, we also reach out to relevant creators directly via Twitter DM, or e-mail. This is not very scalable but helps us to onboard very targeted users that could be a great fit.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We’re currently focusing on continuing to build a great product for our users and growing the number of collaborations and GMV that are being processed through Passionfroot.

At the same time, we’re also getting great feedback from companies who are looking for ways to improve their GTM efforts by working with creators and media companies.

In the long term, we see Passionfroot becoming the operating system for the creator economy!

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I think one important lesson I learned is that things are never as good as they look and never as bad as they seem. One day, we could experience an outage in our product, users complaining and customer churning, and the next day, we could have our biggest transaction that turns around the whole month - it truly is a rollercoaster!

I love building for creators - they can be a bit chaotic though, buried in emails and all over the place as they run the show in front of the stage and backstage, so persistence is something that you have to show especially for this type of customer.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

For my productivity, I use Superhuman for emails, Notion as my own Wiki, and Cron as my calendar.

In our business, we use Figma for our designs and Miro and FigJam to facilitate workshop sessions. Linear is a great tool for project management and organizing our work to build our product.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

As a company that serves creators and media companies, we’re always exposed to the most interesting writers, podcasters, or Youtubers out there! Lenny’s newsletter and podcast are still some of my favorite resources for a founder who is incredibly insightful as he shares insights, lessons, and in-depth knowledge not only about the product but also about growth, starting up or building teams.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

One mental model that I came across and helped me to build resilience as an entrepreneur who is starting out is the Rule of One Third: It kind of goes back to when you're embarking on a journey and when you're building something up when you're doing something incredibly hard, you're supposed to feel one-third of your time great, one-third of your time okay, and one-third like crap.

And that shows that you're out of your comfort zone. You are growing, you're learning. And sometimes some days are shitty and then you just show up on those. And then it's just one of those shitty days and that's okay.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re always looking for great talent.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!