Influur is a marketplace where brands and influencers can connect and work together. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Influur co-founder and CEO Alessandra Angelini to learn more.
Alessandra Angelini’s Background
Angelini attended the University of Miami and graduated with a Master’s in Business Administration and Leadership. Angelini said:
“ I worked at CNN as a journalist in the finance division, where the idea of Influur was born. Currently, I am the CEO of Influur, a tech start-up company. We are a marketplace platform that seeks to connect brands that are trying to engage with their audience, with influencers that have engaging audiences, as well as ambitions to partner with companies.”
Formation Of Influur
How did the idea for Influur come together? Angelini reflected:
“I was working as a journalist at CNN with Paula, our COO. We needed to contact an influencer urgently for a news cover, but they never replied to their direct message (DM). We could not believe the fact that contacting an influencer was harder than contacting high-profile personalities in the government or Hollywood. We started researching and realized the huge accessibility gap that exists between brands and influencers. Both parties need each other and are eager to collaborate but there was a bridge missing for them to connect. That’s how we thought of Influur. We wanted to be that bridge!”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Influur so far? Angelini shared:
“In a non-transactional way, one of my favorite memories was to close our funding seed. This made us see we were doing something right. We were on track to solve the issue we had our minds set on solving: Connect brands with influencers that would help them engage with their target audiences.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Angelini faced in building the company? Angelini acknowledged:
“A positive challenge we have right now is having demand from all types of businesses. We have businesses all over the world and of all sizes wanting to do influencer marketing through us. It has been a challenge to cater to all of them and define who our target client will be.”
Core Products
What are Influur’s core products and features? Angelini explained:
“We are an all-in-one influencer marketing platform. Within it, you can find, sort, and hire influencers from all over the world. Our key features are:
1.) Price transparency. We don’t have any subscriptions or hidden fees. We provide users with a clear percentage fee upfront.
2.) We vet all our influencers, and at this moment, we count more than 9,000 of them.
3.) Influur offers direct contact with the influencers you have hired. There is no middleman, and there is no need to go outside the app to communicate with the hired person.
4.) Curated influencer lists based on each user’s needs.”
Evolution Of Influur’s Technology
How has Influur’s technology evolved since launching? Angelini noted:
“We have focused a lot on perfecting our data reading so we can make our product better for our users and make more data-based decisions for Influur. We are also in the early stages of incorporating AI in our platform.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Influur’s most significant milestones? Angelini cited:
“Some of them are reaching more than 10,000 users. We also expanded the number of countries we have done campaigns on (So far, we have countries in South America, Asia, Europe, and North America, of course). We have reached our revenue goals and are now on our way to raising our Series A funding.”
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Angelini about customer success stories, she commented:
“One I can think of is the campaign we did with Shark Beauty. We were supposed to do the launching campaign and then a holiday campaign. The first campaign did so well that we sold out the product in less than two weeks… we were not able to do the holiday campaign because there were no products we could sell.”
Funding
In late April, Influur raised $5 million in seed funding. And Angelini told me that they are currently ahead of their planned Series A round.
Differentiation From The Competition
Q.) What differentiates Influur from its competition? Angelini affirmed:
“Firstly, you can book an influencer in less than 24 hours. We also offer price transparency, ensuring no subscriptions or hidden fees. All fees are communicated upfront, and we aim to standardize prices through our rates functionality, enabling influencers to share their rates directly with brands. We prioritize safety in transactions by paying influencers promptly upon content completion and securely holding brands’ funds in an escrow account until content verification. Lastly, we facilitate direct and efficient communication within our app, eliminating the need for external emails or DMs, resulting in faster and more effective conversations between influencers and brands.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Influur’s future company goals? Angelini concluded:
“Reaching our series A funding and having a strong presence in every continent.”
