Yash Daftary With FanBasis Inc.

Intro: [00:00:04] Welcome back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors, and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web three, health care, tech, fintech, and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:39] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Startup Showdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Yash Daftary with FanBasis. Welcome.

Yash Daftary: [00:00:59] Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me on the show.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:01] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about FanBasis. How you serving folks?

Yash Daftary: [00:01:06] Absolutely. So. Fanbasis is the monetization platform for content creators, influencers, celebrities, and athletes, where we give them the ability to set up a digital storefront where they can sell experiences of all kinds to their fans. These experiences can be anything from one on one lessons, virtual meet and greets, social media interactions, take talk duets or anything that they can think of. Basically, we enable them to utilize their skill sets and the reason that they have a fan following and monetize on that directly with their fan base.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:39] So now what was the genesis of the idea? How did you come up with this?

Yash Daftary: [00:01:44] So actually started working on this idea in late 2020, around the time of the pandemic. And essentially I was utilizing social media a decent amount, especially tiktok. And this is kind of when Tik Tok blew up and I realized, you know, there were tons of people that were going viral and becoming famous very, very quickly. And Tik Tok kind of started that trend and gave people the ability to do that. So while I was using social media, I would see influencers that had 800,000 or a million or 1.2 million followers. And, you know, and it was crazy to me because in their bios I would see them having their Venmo or cash app links and tags. And what the thought that sparked that was sparked in my mind was if I had a million followers on a social media platform, I can guarantee you that I can create a business around that in some sort of way. So after having that thought, I reached out to all the people in my network that kind of had a fan following themselves and and figured out that this is a real problem. The only way that they really make money right now is through sponsorships and endorsements or selling merch. But they’ve got a million people that are following them for the content that they’re putting out and aren’t monetizing directly with the fans. So basically I realized that the solution to this problem is creating a bridge between the fans and the creators or celebrities in which they can interact directly and creators can monetize from the fans in a one on one and personalized way.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:18] So now in order to do that, they have to kind of get off the platform where the fans are and then go into the fan bases platform.

Yash Daftary: [00:03:26] Yeah. So we consider ourselves to be complementary to social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, where basically the way it works is a creator will make a profile in a storefront on fan basis and we’ll put the link to their account in their bio posted on Tik Tok on their Instagram stories. And, and the fans will go from that platform to this creator’s fan base page and browse the different digital experiences that they’re offering and choose whichever one is the most valuable to them.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:59] So now. So walk me through this like a real life example. Do you have like is this live now or are people using it?

Yash Daftary: [00:04:07] Yes. So we’ve got a decent amount of traction actually in the past year and we’ve got a lot of creators using our platform to date. We’ve just broke over 10,000 users total that are currently using the platform on a monthly basis. But we’ve we’ve seen a lot of really cool success stories and case studies come out of our platform so far.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:33] So is the platform. Does it kind of categorize the creator? So like you could have a creator that’s like a musician or a creator that’s a comedian or creator that is a athlete. Like, like, is there kind of a a different place for different artists?

Yash Daftary: [00:04:55] Exactly. So, you know, basically, fan basis is not limited to just people with a with a fan following as well. Anyone that has a skill set can utilize our platform to sell whatever they want. For example, we’re working with some LinkedIn, quote unquote influencers right now, but essentially business professionals that want to offer their skill sets. Like for 200 bucks, I’ll look over your pitch deck and give you advice or I’ll consult you on your business. And we’re basically enabling people to sell their services through our platform. But our main focus is on those creators. And yeah, if you go on to our website or on our app, you can easily see the different kinds of creators we have. We break them down by niches like cooking beauty athletes, actors, comedians, or you can do them by social media platform. And there’s a couple of different ways. But, you know, the kinds of users we have in our platform is a very broad spectrum right now, which is kind of by design.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:55] So say I’m a comedian, I’m on Tik Tok and I have a following of a million followers. What is kind of a practical way that I’m going to move them from TOK onto fan bases so they so I can monetize.

Yash Daftary: [00:06:12] Yeah. So we’ve got, we have a lot of TikTok creators and that’s kind of what Tik Tok is what inspired the idea for this business in the first place. So when we originally built the MVP of our platform is kind of focused towards them and the way that we see the most success from Tik Tok creators using or using fan bases is they essentially keep the link, their fan bases link in their bio and make a tik tok about it or just talk about it on their live streams and things of that nature. It really depends on the creator themselves and what kind of engagement they have. Some of them, you know, if they post a tik tok about it, they won’t need to even promote their page for another few months because that Tik Tok will keep on getting views from their fans and we’ll continue to sell experiences. But we see the most success with people that create a series of Tik Tok promoting different individual experiences that they have and bringing fans over that way.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:06] So like an example would be I have this following, I put I do a tik tok on fan basis and how I’ll do, you know, like me and this fan could do something together and it’s a unique experience for the fan that helps the fan out. It helps me kind of show that I’m interacting one on one with the fans and is that taking place back on Tik Tok or that’s happening on the fan bases platform.

Yash Daftary: [00:07:32] So that we built out our infrastructure so that everything can be done through our platform. The only things that are done off platform are you can purchase things like you can buy a Instagram shout out and follow back from a influencers that we have. Or you can buy a tik tok duet or stitch from a tik talker that we have. So those things are obviously they have to be done on the social media platforms. But overall, everything for the most part can be done through the fan bases, app and website. And going back to your your first question. So to give you an idea of how they they kind of use it is, for example, we have a beauty influencer on our platform that sells things like hair care and skin care routines. So essentially what he’ll do is kind of give a sneak peek of his haircare routine and say, hey, if you want to get the full hair care routine, check out my fan basis page links in the bio. Or we have normal tiktokers that are really going to dance. And they’re professional dancers. So they’ll sell, they’ll post a dance and say, Hey, I want to learn how to dance like me. You know, go to my fan bases page and you can see all the different kinds of dances I can teach you. So kind of, you know, incorporating it into their videos so that it still gets natural engagement. And it’s the content that our fans want to see. But also it gives their superfans the ability to interact with them in a more personalized way.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:50] So is that experience just a one off for that individual fan or is that like kind of a premium membership that gives you access to exclusive content?

Yash Daftary: [00:09:00] So it could be it could be both. Typically for those for what I just described, those would be one off experiences. But we give we give these creators the ability to set up a membership as well. So if they want to use it more as a Patreon style paywall, they can do so. And we have people that use the membership functionality for selling, like just access to exclusive content behind the scenes of music videos, unreleased music, things of that nature. We have fitness people that use the platform, that use the membership functionality to set to sell their monthly or yearly fitness plans so they have the ability to do so. But for the most part, the most of the transactions we have are one off experiences.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:48] And now so is that the biggest point of differentiation from you and the other kind of players in this space?

Yash Daftary: [00:09:55] So the biggest point of differentiation is we have the largest monetization toolset of any platform on the Internet. A good way to think about us is kind of like a Shopify for Creators or a cameo and Patreon on steroids, where on our platform you can do live experiences, prerecorded experiences, sweepstakes memberships, you can sell merch, and essentially you can also sell physical interactions in person. So essentially you can sell literally anything that you can think of as a creator. And we fulfill all of their needs, which is why we’ve been able to get so much traction. And we’ve converted tons of users from our competitors onto our platform because, you know, one of the main things that we help creators with is eliminating their link tree. Are you familiar with link trees and these influencers bios?

Lee Kantor: [00:10:47] Yeah.

Yash Daftary: [00:10:48] Yeah. So if you’ve ever clicked on one, if you go to any Instagram influencers page right now, you’ll click on their link tree and it’ll have a link to their personal website, to their Spotify.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:59] Right. Ten different places.

Yash Daftary: [00:11:01] There’s a million different things on there. We basically wanted to give them the ability to eliminate that altogether and say, Hey, you know, if you have a different merch store, a different website for your membership and all of this, people aren’t going to be going back and forth to check out every single offering you have with fan bases. You can put it all in one storefront. The storefront looks super nice and you can customize it literally however you want. So that’s one of the bigger problems that we’ve been able to solve and kind of differentiate ourselves with. As we’re the all in one toolset.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:35] Now for the creators, it’s something that they’re only paying a transaction fee when money gets exchanged. Or is this something that they’ve got to pay a monthly fee to be part of the fan based platform?

Yash Daftary: [00:11:48] No. So fan basis is totally free to use for creators. They can create a profile and we basically get paid with their success on our platform. So essentially we take a 20% platform fee every time a transaction is created.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:05] Now, when you came up with the idea and you started, you know, putting the technology onto the all the services that you were offering, when did you start seeing traction where, hey, this is something that is really got a chance to work here? Is there were there some breadcrumbs that you were like, I think we’re in the right spot here?

Yash Daftary: [00:12:26] Yeah. So no, there is definitely a little bit of a learning curve that went into this business. Basically we I started working on this business in late 2020, launched the MVP, which was a bare bones version of our platform, looked completely different with a limited feature set back in May of last year in 2021, and we launched a beta version of our platform in August. So essentially the roadmap was between the MVP and the beta version. We were kind of limiting it to between 50 to 100 creators on our platform so that we can start testing out different hypotheses that we had. And we think these kinds of experiences will work well. We think these kinds of creators will work well. Let’s see if this niche attracts a lot of users onto our platform. So we went through a little bit of a learning curve there and and it was extremely helpful in terms of figuring out what we should be marketing to creators to bring them onto our platform. What makes the most sense for creators to be pushing out to their fans? That’s something that’s super important because there isn’t really anything like this on the market. And, you know, this space is relatively new and it started booming recently.

Yash Daftary: [00:13:39] So, you know, even the creators don’t fully know what their fans are going to want to purchase. And we needed to learn a lot to be able to provide them with the correct insights to do so. But we essentially really started getting traction this year since January, because we’ve made some partnerships that really expanded the amount of creators that we have on our platform, and we’ve created a pretty large snowball effect. If you check out our social media is on like our Instagram or TikTok, you can see the different creators we work with and you can see that a lot of our posts have gone viral, which created a really organic pipeline of creators coming on to our platform. And frankly, right now, you know, we are we are scaling up our our human capital and onboarding teams because we want to be able to not have a bottleneck when it comes to onboarding a certain amount of creators a day, but be able to just keep on bringing on all the people that are interested in joining. So yeah, this year it was really the accelerator when it came to growing the business.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:40] Now as you since you offer so many different services in one place for the Creator, are you finding that sharing those best practices because you’re seeing which what what offers are working, which ones aren’t? Is that something that kind of again differentiates yourself from others because you’re able to give them the education that they need to kind of level up just by, you know, you running this platform.

Yash Daftary: [00:15:07] Yeah. No, 100%. It’s something that we didn’t really do too much when we first started the business, which is kind of what I was saying when it comes to the learning curve. But we realized it was a pretty vital element into making someone’s fan base successful. And I kind of break it down for you. There’s two kinds of creators that use our platform. Essentially, there’s some creators that say that hop on a call with us and they say, Hey, can you guys help me create my profile? I’m not 100% sure what experiences to offer. I’m not sure how to price it, you know, things of that nature. And we have an onboarding team and a customer success team fully set up to be able to onboard those creators, help them out and optimize their page for success. And the kinds of creators that actually perform really well on our platforms are the ones that jump on fan bases. They create a profile and they say to us, Hey, we actually don’t want you guys touching the page. We want to be customizing everything ourselves. And we realize that people that really take their own initiative and make everything themselves are the ones that know what their fans want the most and are very connected with them and kind of have those cult like followings. So those are kind of the two different kinds of creators we see.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:27] Right? So the ones that are kind of professional creators that already have success and are monetizing, they have a lot more data and they know what’s working. But the kind of the newer ones that maybe had a lightning in a bottle moment where they got a bunch of followers don’t kind of understand the nuance of their relationship yet. So they need help when it comes to monetizing.

Yash Daftary: [00:16:52] Exactly. That’s that’s honestly spot on. And it’s very interesting because, you know, TikTok is fairly a fairly new concept. You know, it didn’t really become popular until 2020 and that’s when it really took off. But with Tick Tock, you can post two videos. I actually have a friend, she posted two videos, you know, the first two videos she posted and literally one week she went viral. She got 3.4 million views on one of those videos and gained a couple of hundred thousand followers, which is crazy because there’s no other social media platform on the planet right now that you can have that ability with TikTok. If you can catch the algorithm, you go viral. And now she’s got she’s an influencer. Technically, she’s got hundreds of thousands of followers but doesn’t know anything about her fan base. She doesn’t know how to monetize them and doesn’t have any infrastructure set up. Now, if you compare that to a YouTuber that spends 8 to 10 hours to edit each video that they’re posting and their fans are viewing this content for ten plus 10 to 30 minutes and are super engaged. It’s very it’s a very different kind of experience than having a tiktoker where you look at their video for 8 seconds and then you scroll past it and go on to the next person. It’s a different kind of relationship between the fan and the creator.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:11] Right? And that and that’s a difference between making money and not I mean.

Yash Daftary: [00:18:17] In a lot of cases, yes. I mean, the people that have those cult like followings, by far the best performers on our platform.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:23] Now, how did you hear about Startup Showdown and Panoramic?

Yash Daftary: [00:18:28] Yeah. So, you know, I think I mentioned earlier I’m based out of Brooklyn in Miami, but, you know, there’s been a lot of stuff going on in the Miami Tech ecosystem. And I heard a lot of whispers about panoramic ventures and the different initiatives they have, like Startup Showdown, just by going through different events. Speaking of founders, but I really got interested and learned a lot more about it when I met Stephanie at Loandepot Park, where the Marlins play and when they were hosting a tech event last year and I met her, I told her about fan bases. You know, she heard a little bit about it from different digital events that we were running in the past. And she really encouraged me to apply for Startup Showdown, so I ended up doing so and it was a really cool experience and I’m very, very happy to have that opportunity.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:21] So what did what part of the experience did you find most beneficial?

Yash Daftary: [00:19:27] So just to break it down to people that aren’t super familiar with it, basically the way it works is you send in an application and if you’re selected out of pretty a couple dozen companies, I think there is like around 30 to 50 that were selected to make it into the second round. They bring you into the next phase and essentially what you do there is you meet with different venture and venture associates and people on the panoramic ventures. Investment team, and every single startup meets with 3 to 4 members from that team, and you give them a five or six minute pitch on your business. And after that, they they give you advice on how you could have made it better. And if you’re and I believe after that phase, there was about six companies selected that move on to the next round, 6 to 8 companies. But honestly, that that phase where we met a bunch of people on the investment team was really beneficial. I actually gained a lot of unique perspectives and validation on new ideas that we were thinking of implementing from from an investment perspective. So that was a very beneficial part of the process for me. And I think the another beneficial part was right before you actually compete in the event you get to meet with the managing partner at, at panoramic and that was a super cool, you know, he basically ran through the pitch with him and he gave us some great one on one feedback for an extended period of time on how we can improve the pitch and what parts of it we should be emphasizing, especially for the competition. So, you know, the process itself was a very exciting one and also a great learning experience.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:14] Now, when you were when you were kind of had this idea for the startup in your head, obviously you’ve gone through some iterations of this. There were some challenges. Is there any kind of. Maybe a setback that happened that when you were able to kind of get through it, it took your business to a new level. And just talk about kind of how you handle setbacks, especially at the early stage when it’s such a kind of loose idea. It’s more of an idea than a thing yet.

Yash Daftary: [00:21:47] Yeah, definitely. So I would say the biggest challenge and thing that I wish I knew understood better while starting this business was picking the right team to start the business with. And initially I basically raised these funds on using a family and friends round and a pre-seed round, all from individual investors. I didn’t take any institutional money and I’ll explain why in a second, but I was trying to stay lean on capital, which involved us not hiring employees and trying to do as much as as much as I could by myself, which definitely delayed the growth of the business. And what I would say is, you know, having a team is having a team where every member of the team has different specialized skill sets is super important. And that’s definitely one of the biggest contributors to our success this year, because I started hiring this team in March, and now I’ve got someone that I’ve got a CMO that focuses on the marketing. I’ve got CEO that his name is Lyle, that focuses fully on the onboarding process. I’ve got a team built out underneath Lyle that handles all the different initiatives when it comes to outreach, creating partnerships, things of that nature. And, you know, all of this combined just really enabled us to focus on what we’re good at each individual team member and optimize the business instead of having me just try to do as much as I can at once and then hiring contractors whenever I could to help out with the workload.

Yash Daftary: [00:23:30] So, you know, I would say that’s the biggest challenge and difficulty when starting a business is finding the right team. Another thing I would say is for founders that aren’t that don’t have a technical background, it’s very important to make sure that your partners on the technology side are extremely fluent and really understand the vision behind the product itself. You know, I think a lot of founders make the mistake of just hiring the first development team that they can find that fits their budget and paying them. But a good way to think about it is when you’re hiring a development team, you’re essentially getting a bunch of construction workers to build a house. But how do they know what kind of house to build if you don’t have an architect behind it? And without having a technical background, it’s hard to be that architect yourself because you don’t know which databases are going to work the best for your idea, what programing languages are going to work the best. So I would say finding someone that’s a really good CTO or having advisors on your team that have a lot of technical experience, is definitely key to starting a business where the majority of it is going to be SAS based or b b hosted on a web platform.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:45] So what’s next for fan base is where do you go from here?

Yash Daftary: [00:24:49] Yeah. So we’re actually currently raising a $1.5 million seed round to accelerate the growth. As I was mentioning earlier, we are looking to expand the amount of human capital that we have because we are close to reaching a bottleneck in terms of how many creators we can even onboard and given week. And these organic snowball effects that we’ve reached have really helped us accelerate that process. So it’s a good problem to have, but the next step for us is creating these creating and building out a long term onboarding and customer success team. And on the business side of things, we actually have some partnerships lined up with some mega creators and celebrities, which we are waiting for this round to fully launch because we want to make sure we have enough money to properly market the partnerships that we’re creating here, which is going to be a game changer. And we’re expecting it to increase the amount of traffic that we’re getting by 1000 x. So those are the two main things that are kind of in the works as soon as we raise this this next round.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:00] So if somebody wants to learn more about paying basis, what is the coordinates.

Yash Daftary: [00:26:05] Yeah. So I would say check out WW fan bases dot com. You can see a lot of information about what we do and you can get started over there or I would encourage everyone to download our app on the app store just called Fan Base. This looks really nice, very easy to use and we’ll give you all the info you need to get started.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:24] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Yash Daftary: [00:26:29] Absolutely. I appreciate you bringing me on the podcast and giving me this opportunity.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:33] All right. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:26:40] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast to. Get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next start up Showdown Pitch Competition Visit Showdown VC. That’s Showdown VC. All right. That’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.