How Charles Emeh is building an influencer marketing startup
Hey everyone I just did this interview with Charles Emeh for my website founderstacks.co
Check it out:
Company Name: Fansta
Industry: Creator Economy
Year Founded: 2022
Company Website:https://fansta.co
Company Overview: Fansta is a platform that allows businesses to partner with influencers and for influencers to partner with businesses.
Tell us about your company what does it do and what value does it provide to your customers?
Fansta is an influencer marketing website which allows users to search and find influencers, partner with influencers, partner with brands, earn money from partnerships, contact influencers for free and lots more.
What inspired you to start this business?
I was working on a different website called Socioex which was an idea to help people get targeted real followers for a price. I pivoted the moment I realized I wouldn’t use Socioex because “my followership could not be bought for a price”. There was customer demand on Socioex to promote their business in some other way, shape or form; combined with the already existing dishonest partnerships that was happening in the influencer world, Fansta was born to fill the need of more honest partnerships in the influencer world and for there to be “one place where you could partner with influencers”. There weren’t many apps or websites that filled these needs.
Can you describe the journey from the idea stage to the actual launch of your business?
Like I mentioned earlier, it was born out of this idea that there should be one place where you could just search and find your favorite creators or influencers and partner with them; After drawing some mockups on what the website should look like on a paper, I decided to start writing code and building the website or rather modifying the existing code on Socioex. It took maybe 1 week then I released it to the public, not sure I would call that a launch.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced while building your company?
A handful. From how to get users, to how to receive payments, to a lot of things you did not first anticipate. The main one would be sort of this unlearning of this silicon valley lean startup idea of you should launch an MVP as soon as possible and get your product out there and test with your first users. In my case, when users started to come in, they already thought we were an established company, so when some buttons weren’t working, they didn’t give us any feedback, they just stopped using it.
Can you talk about how you use some of the software tools/services to run your business? Which are the most vital?
Discovering Hotjar was a godsend. Previously we would ask for feedback on a form or on Facebook and users rarely gave any feedback. But the moment we switched to Hotjar, we could see where users had troubles and we could fix those right away. That’s a software tool that has really positively impacted our business. We use tools such as ChatGPT for software development and that has been very helpful too and Stripe for receiving payments all around the globe.
Were there any tools or services that didn’t work out for your business?
Yes. There’s this tool called Canny and another called Termly. Canny is for getting user feedback and termly for writing terms of service. They didn’t work out for us because users sort of had to “sign up again” to write feedback or be redirected to another domain to read our terms of service. We had to discontinue using these tools and build our own internally which we have now.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to start their own business?
Conventional wisdom might not be the right wisdom. Do what works for you.
Is there anything else you would like to add or any final thoughts you’d like to share?
Making mistakes is crucial in any endeavor. Emotional indifference to mistakes you make, while working to correct those mistakes is what I recommend.
Social Links/Contact Information:
You can contact me on my email:charles@fansta.co
Reach me on Facebook:facebook.com/realcharlesemeh
Twitter:twitter.com/realcharlesemeh
LinkedIn Profile: I created a LinkedIn but they ended up blocking it, so I’m not on LinkedIn.
Twitter Handle:https://twitter.com/realcharlesemeh
Other Social Media:fansta.co/realcharlesemeh
