SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Why Brands like Pepsico Pay $2m For Influencer Ads via InCast
12 Feb 2023
Chapter 1: What event is being highlighted at the beginning of the episode?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have 1,000 SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit. Again, hundreds of speakers, 1,000 plus attendees.
And we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait. Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today.
Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now
building or sorry 32 building the company they served over the past 12 months over 110 brands like pepsico who put at least a dollar of ad revenue sort of through them looking to scale moving forward with a new platform called rainmaker Hey folks, my guest today is Vera Kopp. She's a female founder and CEO entrepreneur of Influencer Marketing Businesses.
She graduated from business management in California, AM, PM at Stanford at an incast.me and funcast.me along with Rainmaker is what she's focused on today. She's got global clients, including TikTok, Shopee, Amazon, Visa, Ubisoft, and many more. And if she looks familiar, that's because she was on the show back in 2018 when she had just passed 20 customers and $30,000 of MRR at the time.
We're excited to have her back on. Vera, are you ready to take us to the top? Incredible. I'm ready. And you're bringing the numbers from back in 2018. It's just so great to see how much we have accomplished so far. As I say, I can't wait to get caught up here. So for folks that missed that episode, what was that, four years ago at this point, who is InCast selling to?
What are the customers paying you for? They're buying strategic planning. We set the entire strategy with Incast. Majority of our clients are from China, U.S. Europe. So Shopee, Amazon, TikTok, we create a business plan for them, how to work with creators.
We identify the best creators for that particular brand, but identifying not only the creators, which is most important, is the audience, right? Who are the creators that have the best audience that will communicate and have this strategy? And a lot of times brands come up with you know, different KPIs.
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Chapter 2: Who is Vera Kopp and what is her background?
That's the top line GMV. I'm talking about like your take rate. Take rate, 400. 400. Okay. So you did about 2 million of volume across all your products and you kept about 400K take rate for yourself. Yes. And how much, this is a cool story here. How much did you pay out to creators? We usually pay out to creators 65, 75% of the budget. Okay, got it.
So if you're processing $2 million a year, we could assume that about 1.3, 1.4 of that is getting paid out to creators. Exactly. Interesting. So if the creators get 60% and you're getting 10 to 20%, who gets the other 10 to 20% that's left? It's strategic planning and add-ons that we put it into the creative side. So you guys keep that or the creators keep that? We keep that.
We invest in the strategic planning and operations. So not all the clients will get the strategic planning and the creative. A lot of times they come with the creative briefing already ready. And that's when we operate with 10 or 20% cuts. depending if it's micro-influencer or top creator, the higher the budget, the less of our fee, because it's hard to close
A deal, for example, Tony Hawk, right? He charged $100,000, $150,000 for a post. We take a cut of 10% because he has a management and he has another agency. So then it doesn't add up to the client so much. But if you go with micro-influencers, we're working with 50 or 100 micro-influencers. We need more people to manage. We increase our margin to 30%, 35%. I see.
So are you like Patrick Star, Tony Hawk, Jillian Michaels, Food God? Like, are you working with their agents at CAA to process this stuff? Or are you working directly with them? We work with agencies, CAA, UTA, and their managers as well to close. So they're taking a cut in between there too then? Yes. Yeah.
But you would say your strategy really is to put those big names up as posters on your website, but they're not where most of your volume goes. You actually use to focus on the micro influencers if you can. Correct. And there are a few strategies we did, especially with TikTok. We work in different verticals.
That's where we're able to keep all the channels and all the verticals, especially for clients too. So, you know, talking about paths, we worked with the top 100 paths Of the U S and there were micro-influencers back in the days. Now they grew, but we onboarded them into TikTok when TikTok was what was TikTok at the time.
It was very interesting to see them now with millions of followers, but at the time they were just, you know, micro-influencers, pets that we were migrating from different social media, from Instagram and YouTube. and taking them into a new platform. And it's fantastic to see the growth of our clients and also see how much we contributed to their growth, right?
Bringing- And Vera, when we last spoke, you were bootstrapped. Are you still bootstrapped today or did you raise capital? Is still bootstrapped, yes. Great, we love that. We love that.
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Chapter 3: What services does InCast provide to its clients?
Very cool. Well, hey, we're out of time here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? Jesus, How to Make Big Plans. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Ben from Ben Entertainment, Ricky Ray. Yep. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building in cast? Right now, our proprietary Rainmaker.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Six. Okay, that's good. And what's your situation? Married, single kids? Ah, God, you have to get to that question. Of course. You know it's coming. Separated. Not divorced yet, but getting there. Getting, okay, close. You're almost there. Hang tight. Any kids or no? No kids. Okay. And can I ask how old you are?
Chapter 4: How does InCast determine the right influencers for brands?
Ah, no. Oh, just give me a range. Give me a range. It's a secret. I am in the 4.0 era of confidence. Yeah. That's fair. I will say under way under 40. All right. Last question, Vera, something you wish you knew when you were 20. I wish I would have all the knowledge that I have today in my 20s and the confidence to. Guys, incast.me has done something special.
Marketplace model, they connect brands like PepsiCo to micro influencers all around the world, including dogs, pets, people, you name it, they connect it. They did over $2 million of sort of ad volume last year, of which their take rate is anywhere between 10 and 25%. Their take rate revenue is about $400,000 last year. They have a team of 35. building or sorry, 32 building the company.
They served over the past 12 months over 110 brands like PepsiCo, who put at least a dollar of ad revenue sort of through them looking to scale moving forward with a new platform called Rainmaker. Vera, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you so much for having me, Nathan.