At PlugForward, we help creators, entertainers and celebrities monetise their audience by co-founding businesses with them. The businesses we launch with these creators include e-commerce business and digital products such as NFTs (Non-fungible tokens).
We fund these businesses, manage set up and ongoing operations so that the creator can focus on their craft whilst selling products they truly believe in to their audience, benefiting from the financial upside.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
The concept for PlugForward came about when we realised the biggest challenge most online businesses face today is attracting customers. With so much noise online and traditional digital paid marketing campaigns becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to optimise many companies have started turning to creators to help market their products.
This form of creator-led marketing generated over $60bn in sales in 2020 and is likely to increase going forward. However, rather than traditional brand partnerships our concept is to launch new businesses co-founded with these creators in categories they are interested in. This allows them to market products to their customers they genuinely believe, have involvement in any projects from day one and effectively become an entrepreneur rather than working for a brand partnership deal.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
We worked in stealth during 2021 and launched officially at the start of the year. The main impact we have already seen from the COVID-19 pandemic is that many creators, celebrities and entertainers are now looking for alternative ways to earn income. For example, many musicians were not able to tour during lockdown and brand partnerships dried up as companies went through financial hardship.
As such, the demand for our services has been strong and we are developing a strong pipeline with a number of high profile creators from grammy award winning musicians to beauty influencers.
What can we hope to see from PlugForward in the future?
Our plan for the next 18 months is to launch numerous quality businesses for a number of creators. We also intend to raise another round which will support our plans to increase our headcount in the UK and US, plus scale our existing businesses.
