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2022 has been a year of change - good & bad. A year of pivoting, learning and impact. I started Social Currant with the goal of giving young people voices in rooms where decisions were being made about how to reach us without us.
What started as a social media agency - now a tech platform - has brought immense learnings through working with hundreds of people on countless campaigns. So let’s dive in. The good & the bad - 2022 in review:
The Good: The things you already know because we’ve been talking about them all year.
- Helped clients match with over 500 creators through the year to run collaborations and build long term relationships.
- Facilitated over $1M in payments to creators.
- We niched down to focus on the impact space and build a platform that matched impact brands with the right creators.
- We were able to grow our team to have full time employees, provide benefits like health insurance and even bring us all together in person.
- Features in Business Insider & New York Times.
- We built our MVP and signed up our first 300 creators.
- Relationships: We focused on relationships and community through the year and are going to be focusing even more in 2023.
- Our North Star: Every time we thought about our business, we came back to a single metric: payments to creators. It allowed us to evaluate our impact, our traction and our core metrics all through one lens. We’re going to continue focusing on this in 2023.
The Bad: Not enough people talk about their mistakes, so I thought I would in the hopes that you don’t make the same. Some of the mistakes Social Currant made:
- Reactive vs Proactive: More often than not, we were reactive - not proactive. Whether it was hiring, customer success or creator relationships - we would do things in bursts of energy. In 2023, we’re focused on being consistent.
- Too many things: We did too much. Who doesn’t say that, right? But it’s true. We did too many different things, too many types of services. Moving forward - we’re going to stay focused on one thing: impact brands x creators.
- Fear: Many times I found myself acting from a place of fear - we need this revenue, we need this client instead of operating from a place of value - how can we help? That started changing over 2022 and will be different in 2023.
- Trust yourself: We didn’t trust our gut reaction when it came to clients. Not everything will work out and if you have any indication that something won’t work out at the beginning - trust it. This is true not only for clients - but for team hires, contractors, decisions.
- Test & Evaluate: We tested a lot - which is great, but we didn’t follow through. It’s important to test things as a startup and to keep testing things but you also have to focus on what works and continue optimizing and evaluating it. We did step one perfectly - step two was what we needed to focus on.
Where we’re going: We got a lot done in 2022, and we’re going to get more done in 2023:
- Pre-seed: We’re raising our pre-seed round to continue scaling our foundation and support more creators.
- Product: We’re integrating core features to help impact organizations match with the right creators.
- Creators: We’re expanding our creator base to sign up more creators.
- North-star: We’re targeting 5M in payments to creators.
As an early stage startup, we’re still figuring things out - but we’ve learned a lot and we’re excited to learn a lot more in 2023. We’re hyper focused on getting creators paid around mission aligned causes and we can’t wait to keep building in 2023.
P.S. If you know a social impact organization looking for a new marketing strategy, reach out - We’d love to talk through what influencer marketing could look like to accelerate impact.
P.S.S. We’re also looking for introductions to investors, particularly in the influencer marketing or impact space – any connection or introduction is appreciated!
