Kyle
Kickstarter has become quite the phenomena as of late. Over $319 million dollars was pledged using the crowdfunding platform, across a myriad of products. After a company gets funded on KickStarter, what happens next?
Companies that reach their funding goals begin shipping their products. Those that have received a lot of traction may quickly land distribution deals, but those that don’t may have a hard time kickstarting again after their crowdfunding campaign.
That’s where Miami startup SocialTyer comes in.
“SocialTyer is a social-commerce website that helps entrepreneurs sell their early-stage products with the help of the powerful social media community. Inspired by the recent success of crowdfunding, we wanted to offer a way for entrepreneurs to make a direct impact immediately after getting funded for production. Apart from spending thousands of dollars on traditional marketing or getting absolutely ripped-off by wholesaling away, there aren’t many ways to do so in a fast and efficient way. . To do so, we came up with the idea of empowering the social media community and offering them the opportunity to become modern-day salesmen: they introduce these products to their network and get commissioned when a sale occurs. Entrepreneurs trusting our service pay us absolutely nothing to sign up and don’t have to worry about that until we actually create a sale for them.” Jonathan Gosper, co-founder of Social Tyer told nibletz.com in an interview.
Gosper, along with co-founder Girish Alwani, met at the University of Miami. Both young men come from vastly different international backgrounds. Jonathan grew up in France and was introduced to the entrepreneurial world after co-founding hi-tech luxury brand Colibri. His occasional struggles to market his products and the study of advertising greatly inspired him to come up with SocialTyer’s concept. Girish grew up in the Caribbean and studied finance. His belief that everyone should get a chance to be a micro-entrepreneur has fingerprints all over SocialTyer.
So far, spreading the word and communicating the idea behind SocialTyer has been the biggest challenge for Gosper and Alwani. The idea has started picking up steam after being in stealth mode for over six months. ” We had numbered goals for entrepreneurs to contact and sign up for beta listing, beta sign up requests and a people joining our social media accounts. Although some thought we were being too optimistic in our projections and goals, those milestones were all reached with 1/3 of the time we allowed us.” Gosper said in regards to their traction.
They hope to launch the full website atsocialtyer.com next month. Until then you can keep up with SocialTyer on AngelList.
