The Story: How and Why I Started Boostinsider

When I was bootstrapping my previous startup, Pocomaru, I wanted to photograph models for the stylish mobile accessories we sold at Pocomaru.

 The business was tight on money, yet having our mobile accessories modeled was necessary for sales. Fashion models were expensive to hire, so I started asking my good looking friends to model for Pocomaru. The photographs I took I posted to Facebook while tagging the friends who modeled for me. I began to notice that many of their friends from Facebook were commenting on the photos praising the photos and asking if they had any special discounts for Pocomaru’s mobile accessories. In turn, my model friends came to me asking for special discounts for their friends. I gave them unique promo codes–for example, Amy’s promo code would be Amy50 which means all of her friends could use Amy50 for a special 50% off deal. These promo codes also became the tracking codes to see how many products each model sold for Pocomaru.

 My strategy worked! Before long I was shooting hundreds of models in Seattle. They were Miss Americas, pro football players, students, entrepreneurs, high ranking executives of large companies, housewives, NGO workers…everyone was modeling for Pocomaru! Soon my efforts captured the attention of the local media, and I was featured on Girl Power Network, Seattle Magazine, and GeekWire as Geek of the Week for Christmas of 2012. My friends in the startup industry began to ask me to recommend models for their own businesses. My success was unveiling a new demand for people to not only model for brands, but for the brand to also connect to that model’s followers and friends.

 In total, I photographed almost 500 models in Seattle. People were beginning to joke, hey, if you need to find beautiful girls and guys, just go to the Pocomaru website. I soon started a program with the theme ‘everyone can be fashion model for a day’ where we recruited online models. People would send in their photos along with their social media accounts, and we would send them a free Pocomaru product. In exchange, they would post on their social media for us. Some wrote reviews for the products, while others posted selfies holding the products. We started to accumulate thousands of influential models for Pocomaru.

 There were two types of people that could sell really well: big influencers with millions of followers and everyday influencers who had a close circle of friends. When these influencers liked something, their friends and followers would become interested as well.

So I began to think: what if there is a way for influential people who love recommending products to connect with brands looking for influential people to shoutout for their products?

I started to think about this idea more and more. In 2013, we created the first version of my vision: BoostGuru. It was an open marketplace where everyone could set up a profile with their interests displayed. They could show off their shoutout history and successful collaborations with brands. Brands could also create a company profile and post products they wanted shoutouts for. Influential people could then bid to shoutout for the product with the price they would charge for the shoutout.

To gain insights and feedback for BoostGuru, I interviewed numerous businesses. A moment of inspiration struck when I had a conversation with Peter, a marketing manager for a large company. He said, Heidi, your market is definitely cool for small and mid size businesses when they are looking for influencers on an individual scale. For large companies like mine, I don’t have time to talk with each influencer and select them one by one. I have a huge budget and I need to spend it and see the results. How can you help me with this?

Bingo!

How can I create a performanced-based influencer platform that minimizes work for brands and generates trackable results? Currently, brands are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads or Google ads seen by millions of people. The results are trackable and can be easily scaled up. But those are just ads, not personal recommendations.

 I believe that everybody has social influence. Brands have traditionally turned to celebrities to market their products but there has never been a platform to tap into the power of an everyday person’s influence. My vision is to create a platform for brands to plug into the power of social influence while giving people an opportunity to monetize their social influence.

Just like Uber, if you have a car and you like to drive, you can run you own driving business. Now, if you are active online and you love to share things you like with your audience, you can get paid as an influencer. Before, when you talked about things you like, no one would pay you. Now, you can still keep talking about things you like, and you can get paid. How cool is that? I believe this has the potential to change the future of the advertising industry.

 In May 2014, we left behind BoostGuru and started the journey of Boostinsider. Following Peter’s advice, Boostinsider connects brands to a large pool of relevant influencers who can create buzz about their product. Our platform is for large influencers and everyday influencers to get paid to recommend cool products! In November 2014, we launched Boostinsider in beta…and things are doing great. Stay tuned as we continue our journey!