How the Founder of Fave is Bridging the Gap Between Fans & Creators
After seven years at Google, Jacquelle Amankonah Horton knew there was a white space in social between fans and creators. She plans to fill that gap with Fave, for which she announced the close of a $2.2 million seed round led by Female Founders Fund, with participation from HYBE, Sony Music, Warner Music, Concord Music, Quality Control, Right Hand Management, Techstars Music and Betaworks. (credit: TechCrunch)
We are thrilled to back Jacquelle’s vision to give fans a place where they can “let their fan flag fly”, while giving artists a way to connect directly with fans. We recently spoke with Jacquelle about how her experience as a product leader inspired Fave, how she plans to empower “superfans”, her fundraising journey, the fandoms she belongs to herself, and more.
Jacquelle, can you share a bit about your experiences at YouTube, Google, and within the entertainment industry prior to founding Fave in 2020?
Yes, I’ve spent 13 years within entertainment technology. While in college studying entertainment business, I started working at both early-stage startups and major music companies where I learned a ton about the space from different angles. Then I started working full-time at Viacom to build mobile apps that extended their top TV shows with cool interactive experiences for the audience (my first bite into fan engagement). During this time I started becoming very keen about applying technology to the next phase of entertainment consumption beyond TV, particularly online video, and had my eye on the leader in the space: YouTube.
I started getting to know people in the space and charting my path toward working there. I was thrilled to receive recommendations into the company through the connections I made and that started my 7-year career at Google where I spent 5 years at YouTube driving the creator and fan engagement products as a Product Manager. While there, I saw very clearly that YouTube and other social sites were very good at enabling one-way conversations between creators and their audiences, but options were very limited for the audience to actually participate or engage with each other. Meanwhile, I would notice at live events like VidCon that fans often met their best friends there, as its full of fellow fans that are just as obsessed about the creators that they love, and fans can spark a conversation without it feeling forced. However, these events happen just once a year, and as soon as attendees leave, the ability to keep finding these connections serendipitously are lost in the sea of general social media where fans tell us its hard to find that specific niche group of people who just “get” you.
There seemed to be a clear white space and opportunity to allow people who share the same deep passions to come together in a dedicated platform to immerse in what they love together. That made a way for me to push forward Fave.
At Google you were the highest-ranking Black woman in tech in Europe, and products under your direct leadership amassed over 1 billion active users within the last 3 years alone. How have the skills you learned as a top product leader prepared you or influenced your thinking as a CEO and Founder?
There were absolutely a ton of learnings I had during my time at Google that I apply to my work as a CEO. The most applicable is learning to have conviction for your vision. One of my favorite managers and mentors taught me while there are many directions a project could go (that are all smart), in order to drive a particular vision forward, you need to have conviction for it willing to break bounds to make it happen. There will be many high-ranking people who will suggest different paths or question the moves you make, but you need to push forward with a clear vision ahead given the unique path you have found to develop a new innovation.
There’s a fine line here, however, as this does not mean you need to completely dismiss other smart opinions or ignore data that tells you something may be off, but it’s instead using those as collective inputs and not pure direction. Without conviction, it’s very hard to have others truly buy in to you as the driver, which is often most important, especially when it’s an area that’s grand and uncharted.
Why did you decide to start Fave — especially in the midst of a global pandemic? What is the problem you are looking to solve?
In addition to my previous mention about the difficulty in making real connections with people in your niche passion on today’s social media platforms, it seemed silly that there were these crazy passionate deeply crazed super fans who are willing to do so much to engage — but all they’re able to do is just like, heart, or a comment, which are such small microtransactions that completely underutilize the lengths at which these fans are willing to go. Fave is the platform that will finally allow fans to feel empowered to share the stories behind why they pressed ‘heart’ in the first place, connect with others doing the same, and get recognized and rewarded for that authenticity.
I also believe the pandemic had a lot to do with Fave’s opportunity being realized by many others, particularly because live events were gone and the problem of deep connection and reduced creator monetization were heightened. Personally, the quarantine also gave me the time to finally have space to think about my own passions, and felt there was no better time than now to start diving into what drives me forward. So with a combination of clear product opportunities and was the personal brainspace to make it happen, Fave was born.
How would you describe Fave? How does it work?
Fave is a social platform dedicated to superfans, elevating their voices to take center stage. We empower fans to create immersive video content, connect & bond with like-minded fans, compete in fun challenges, exchange both physical and virtual goods in a fan-driven marketplace, and rack up points throughout it all to prove their top fan status, gain recognition in the fandom, and earn exclusive rewards around the artists and creators they love. We also partner with the creators to finally allow them to monetize their fans’ activity directly.
It’s where fans are posting vulnerable content because they’re in a community of people who “get” them in a way their school friends and coworkers don’t. It’s where we see fans able to create and sell their own merch, like custom keychains, scrunchies, lamps, or sneakers, or sell the sweat rag that was thrown at them at a concert that they simply don’t have room for among their piles of other fan gear — which, not only will the fan get paid for, but the artist will finally also get paid from fan-to-fan commerce.
It’s also where a fan can earn a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to receive feedback on their song from their favorite artist who inspired them to start making music, and not only are they making a name or themselves across the entire fandom, but by the creator they love — the ultimate goal for many fans. It’s also where creators get a passive revenue stream from ads, marketplace transactions, and in future premium subscriptions, all based on their fans activity rather than purely their own, and unprecedented access to data and intelligence to communicate much more effectively with their fans.
We’re excited to introduce this platform to the world that combines the fan experiences of creation, connection, commerce, and recognition into one central destination.
Fave has a mission of empowering superfans. Where did you see a unique opportunity within this group? How are you thinking about harnessing their passion and power as a demographic?
Superfans in particular are the group within fans that are driven to actually mobilize to take action around the creators they love. It is not a reactive consumption — if it shows up in my feed I’ll watch it — or even simple proactive where they’ll go seek it out. Rather, being a superfan is an immersive obsession, where what they’re a fan of is a part of their identity, their discussions, the spaces in their room, and more. That’s extremely powerful, yet goes super nearly unused in digital, and the opportunity is clear and massive to mobilize these passions online.
In the times we’ve seen it, where BTS fans have made waves in politics or social movements by banning together, they’ve been groundbreaking. We need to enable these groups to come together in more frequent, deeper, and more powerful ways.
As a solo and first time founder, you caught the industry’s attention by raising $2.2M before the platform has even launched, in a round that was oversubscribed by 200%. Can you share a little about your fundraising experience?
Yes, heading into fundraising, I was prepared for the very tough road of 100 no’s for every 1 yes, pre-judgements based on the non-traditional face they saw when my camera turned on, or people jumping to conclusions and bucketing this into yet another creator-to-fan product. However, I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised at the strength of reception I received throughout fundraising — people not only quickly understood the vision and unique approach we have to execute it strongly like no one else is doing, they also fully trusted that I as a founder was the one to make that happen given my background in the space and personal past as a superfan myself. They could see my passion clearly, just like that passion that I am advocating for with these fans, and I was so glad to see that founder-product fit was a big key to unlocking funding. After FFF came in and provided stronger momentum, the rest of the round came together nicely and relatively quickly and yes, led to a well-oversubscribed round.
Throughout your fundraising journey you had many strategic investments from top music companies like Sony, Warner and Universal. How were you able to secure these investments?
Many of the introductions came from Techstars Music, a music accelerator I participated in, and advisors, but we all found that once I got in the room with them, they shared they were quickly compelled by my passion and vision. They also shared that better engaging superfans is an area their teams think about often, but didn’t quite know how to crack the code, and they felt Fave finally may just be it.
Other areas they were excited by were 1) data — being able to have a more specific understanding of the who, what, where, when, how, and why around their fan activity, 2) access — finally having direct contact with these fans, and 3) control, being able to empower fan activity and monetize it instead of distributing a bunch of take-down notices even though they know it’s just fans wanting to do what they love.
It was clear that after connecting with the industry’s key players, Fave is a win-win-win solution for all parties involved, and it’s amazing they felt the same strongly enough to take a rare move and invest in us before we even launched. We’re thrilled to be moving forward with them all in close partnership from our earliest days.
Any learnings you would like to share with other solo or first time founders who are fundraising pre-launch?
I have one key tip: ensure you have a clarity of vision and a crisp storyline to tell it. This is what I feel had separated our ability to raise funds from others who I noticed were struggling a bit more despite a great product. We had a very clear breakdown of what Fave is doing, why we’re doing it, who we’re doing it for, when we’re doing it, and how we’re doing it uniquely. This clarity often left investors with fewer questions and let us get straight to the conversations around working together. When they did have questions, it was in areas we had already thought thoroughly about already, which showed them that they can trust us to figure it out even if there are many challenges ahead of us. A clear narrative can be game-changing, and frankly make-or-break, during fundraising.
How are you thinking about transitioning your vision to launch? What is your short term vision for Fave?
Right now we’re in early beta with one key fandom, the Swifties, Taylor Swift’s amazing group of fans. From this beta, we’re learning a ton — like what Swifties love about the platform, what gets them excited about our future, and how we need to improve their experience while interacting with the platform.
What’s great is that fans clearly see the potential ahead, believe in our mission, and want to ride on this train with us as we grow. We’ve even partnered closely with a few top fans who are influencers in their fandoms to work closely with our team for continuous feedback and ideas on ways to engage the fandom. After seeing what works well with the Swifties and bringing this to a self-sustaining community, we’ll then duplicate that model, and launch about a half dozen more fandoms and key features by end of summer.
Which fandoms are you launching next?
We’re excited to launch other fandoms related to Taylor [Swift]’s where those fans overlap, like fans of Selena Gomez, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, etc. This will also allow us to test fandom-to-fandom dynamics. Another angle is testing fandoms that will give us completely different learnings, like niche bands with small yet diehard followings or YouTubers, who don’t have the power of a full team behind them yet have more direct relationships with their fans.
We’ve heard you’re a die-hard superfan yourself! On a personal level, which fandoms do you belong to?
As a kid, believe it or not, I was a humongous fan of Eminem. Yes, crazy lyrics as an innocent 12-year-old and all — I don’t know how I got away with that. Every day I was decked out in full gear of my own home-made merchandise, watched his movie 8 Mile multiple times a day (yes, I know every line, and probably even every deep breath he takes in this movie!), and I sometimes wouldn’t even let my family enter my room unless you said his name first. Yes, I was a superfan.
But, I always thought it wasn’t fair that just because I couldn’t afford to sit in the front row at a concert or buy expensive merch, I’m not flagged to his team as a superfan, even though I was sitting in my room completely obsessed. This also compelled me to add an important element of Fave that allows fans to earn their way, not just buy their way, toward exclusive prizes and access from their favorite creators, as the depth of your pockets does not at all correlate to the depth of your obsession, and shouldn’t.
Nowadays, I think I’d consider myself a superfan of the show Big Brother. I’ve been watching it religiously every season since I was 9 years old. Best show ever. If you know, you know… if you don’t, you’re missing out on life.
How do you see the future of creator platforms evolving in the next 5 years? What role do you see Fave playing in the growing landscape?
I’m very excited for a future where fans are not just people watching content but are active participants in the content, which they can personalize to immerse themselves within the stories they love. Imagine if we had music videos where a fan could become the costar alongside their favorite artist! Imagine if we could have fans really influence storylines within shows based on what gets them excited, or have support to create their own fan fiction into full blown productions. Imagine if fans can have full-time income off of being an influencer as a superfan. Imagine if fans had a greater seat at the table where creators truly turned to them for feedback, ideas, wish lists, and then rewarded them for being involved. I’m excited for a future where fans can walk into the shoes (figuratively and literally) of the strong power that they hold within the creator’s story.
How are you thinking about building out the team at Fave? Any positions you’re currently hiring for?
Yes! We are so excited to be empowered to grow our team with these funds.
We are hiring first for a strong Head of Engineering to help us grow our technical vision, a team of engineers, and the culture within the company’s lean yet powerful development process. This is a key hire as we transition to the next phase beyond MVP phase to lay the foundation for the rest of our technology. If you knows someone who could be a fit — if this could be you! — please come talk to us: email me directly at jacquelle@faveforfans.com.
Following this, we’re looking for strong folks in marketing, product, partnerships, and business development. Ideal candidates would have backgrounds in social, gaming, and/or entertainment, but just as importantly, they carry a passion of their own, whether it’s as a superfan themselves empathizing with our users’ mindset, or passionate about the domain of their career they’re in. We’re pushing forward a culture at Fave that allows everyone, not just the users, to immerse in what they love, and that includes our employees building out their career paths in the way that aligns them with their key goals professionally. Can’t wait to chat with those interested!