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Welcome to another edition of the BPC corporate showcase. My name is Jack Colreavy, Associate Director at Barclay Pearce Capital and today my guest is Steve Hancock, now Steve is the founder and CEO of a new tech startup called Gifted Social. Welcome Steve.

Hey Jack, how are you?

I'm well thanks. Thanks for your time.

How did the idea for gifted come about?

So there was a there was an evening of a dinner with an influencer friend um and in essence at the end of the meal, the phone or his phone came out when the bill came over and he said to the manager:" hey I'm an influencer could I get this meal for free? This is my account, this is my following ."

I'd have my head under the table if someone did that next to me.

Oh mate in in a very British way I wanted the ground to uh to swallow me up at that moment but uh you know the phone was taken off to the hostess desk and a few people sort of flipped through his content came back to the table and they said look we don't really know whether your followers or your audience is is relevant to our restaurant whether anyone's going to come down because you've posted, but we like your content, if you're prepared to do a story and and a post we can have 50% off the bill. Um to which he was really happy about um Uber on the way home, long story short, I said hey hey power two things, let's let's never do that in in my company again, but secondly and most importantly, it's 2022, that can't be how you live your life as an influencer and to which he said yes and me and tens of millions of others uh and that's what got the uh what got the brain ticking for for gifted social.

Give us the elevator pitch on the platform.

Yeah absolutely um so the opportunity I saw effectively was was to was to build a platform that primarily operates in sort of leisure, hospitality sector um allowing Brands to kind of have an alternative opportunity to working to an agency building a self- serve fully AI powered SAS platform where Brands can basically access influencers match to their own specific influencer criteria and have influencer content created in return for a gifted experience or a gifted brand so in essence you know removing all the ad hoc Madness of thousands of DMS sent by influencers in the hope that a brand might say yes but also only allowing Brands to be served with influencers that pre-match their criteria that's set in our platform so you know what's coming in as collaboration requests. Firstly they've been they've been matched by the system but secondly and most importantly the matches that are coming in resonate with what you want for your audience so really removing a lot of barriers um and putting in sort of structure.

Who are some of the brands that you've been able to attract so far and what's been the feedback?

So we acquired um a database sort of start of this year um and we crafted what we felt was a was a pretty powerful Outreach email um we sort of picked around about 3,000 brands from sort of West Coast America all the way down to you guys actually in Sydney um and and click Send but what resounded when we did the mail out is we were getting responses from Hilton from Dorchester collection from prep from Nobu from Virgin Atlantic from some huge, you know, huge Global businesses to say look we're really Keen with what your platform does and the system's a bit broken currently you know it's hard for agencies sorry hard for Brands to to Really track um meaningful metrics from a return on investment perspective.

Let's switch to the other side. How do you attract sort of who are the influencers you are trying to attract how do you attract them to the platform?

At the end of um last year end of 23 Instagram recognised 64 million of its users as influencers a huge Market but most interestingly for us 96% of that base has a million or less followers and as a rule of thumb um the vast majority are completely unrepresented by talent agencies so the opportunity is is is huge to be allowing an influencer to to live kind of a VIP incredible lifestyle um through gifted um build their follower build their coms with Brands and and really sort of grow their Journey as well and and with that sort of your first question of of how we attract we went on a traditional marketing campaign at the start of this year across you know plethora of of social platforms from from obviously the obvious of Instagram and and Tik Tok but also on Facebook on Twitch on YouTube to sort of give a little show wheel of of what's to come what we're building and and pre-launch we managed to a mass around about 16,000 signups of influencers and we sit today around about 25,000 we're roughly gaining sort of between 80 and 100 organic signups a day from influencers um and again it's it's we've got this lovely effect now that when a when a collaboration goes live we had an influence last week who did um two hotel stays across the door just collection a beautiful um S-Class mercades moving her around between all of the properties and at the end obviously you know she she obviously tags Us in in the post and and thanks us for the opportunity and and what our service does on the back of that we sort of got 19 signups of of her followers who are also influencers all on the same day so word of mouth's huge but again we're going to go back onto social platforms.

Do you want to just take us through you are raising um approximately 2 million pounds for this what's the use of proceeds, what do you intend to achieve um using this this investment?

Of course yeah um so yeah making it a bit more territorial for you guys sort of raising Circa 4 million Australian dollars and the primary use of funds is is to address a significant backlog we're not sort of coming to Market saying hey we need millions of dollars to build a platform it's built it's operational we're Revenue generative we're growing um there's a good sort of Buzz growing around us so yeah the the backlog of brand on boarding is is super important obviously um continue Improvement to automation um the vision for this this is a true self- serve platform it's a set of a gap and it doesn't need doesn't need much humans um so automation is key obviously AI and machine learning and deep learning capabilities are are a strong use of of proceeds on the back end of this to give you a bit further context platforms currently served in uh northern Europe uh the States and Canada and few reasons to that you know there's there's a commonality of language in its markets we know very well and that what made that's what made us feel that Australia was also a natural sort of next step and looking for the right Partners in the surrounding territories um to extend our services there is is is a complete given for us Australia currently rates as the as the fourth largest in the world in terms of influencer or activity and influence or engagement as well so it's high up our our wish list Staffing platform development and supporting existing territories and ultimately ability to embrace new such as Oceania is is primary applications of this fund raise.

So appreciative of your time.

Thanks a lot Jack.

And for more information on gifted social and to learn about the associated investment opportunities please subscribe to the Chairman's list in the link in the description.

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