Viffy is a premium creator content platform that bridges influences and retailer loyalty. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Viffy co-founder and CEO Sam Winslow.
Sam Winslow’s Background
Winslow studied economics and business at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts and during his time there, he discovered a passion for entrepreneurship.
“Following an apparel startup I launched in my early twenties, I began taking online classes for software development and filled my non-working hours doing anything I could to prepare for a career in technology. What followed over the following 5 years was a non-linear path all the way from bleeding-edge blockchain technology with The Ethereum Foundation, to supporting strategy development for a Global Executive at a Fortune 50 conglomerate,” said Winslow. “From the start of my career, I have focused on value add wherever, and however, I can. In 2017, this was offering my time to photograph technology events for Ethereum for free, to break into the blockchain world. Today, it looks like Viffy, bringing influencers and brick & mortar retail shops together!”
Formation Of Viffy
When Winslow closed down his startup in 2016, he sent a prototype to a prominent YouTuber who then unexpectedly featured it in a video.
“The outpouring of attention from his audience was astounding, as my phone was buzzing for weeks (worth noting he’d never even mentioned my name in his video). Two years ago, I revisited this domain of ‘Influencer Marketing’ and it had, unsurprisingly, gone parabolic,” Winslow noted. “I remember going to the grocery store that night and wondering “what if there were a way for these brick-and-mortar retailers to meaningfully leverage Creators for loyalty and sales?” From there, I was very fortunate to secure time from subject matter experts and professionals within retail loyalty, credit card network loyalty, and social media monetization who all validated my initial thinking – all of whom still play major roles around Viffy today.”
Favorite Memory Working For Viffy
What has been your favorite memory working for Viffy so far? “It’s much easier to identify a collection of moments, versus one specific moment. I’d say that my favorite moments to-date have been the lightbulb moments we’ve seen with advisors, my co-founders, our business partners, and Creator partners,” Winslow reflected. “When the dots connect for them, it’s always such a joy to see the concept “click” and for them to then show excitement and enthusiasm for what we’re doing. Many times, the lightbulb moment then enables them to provide more targeted challenger questions (this often happens with prospective venture partners) and it’s great to then use that energy to take the conversation deeper, as Viffy has many components to it that can be better observed after there’s a complete comprehension of the overall business model.”
Challenges Faced
What were some of the challenges Winslow faced building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate had any effect on the company?
“Viffy is a platform that has the potential to see a major inflection point and ‘critical mass adoption’ moment. We consider this more an ‘eventuality’ than anything. This sort of event has occurred several times over the past decade, and regardless of the overall value/strategy of the platform, it ultimately posed a serious risk to the success of those startups,” Winslow acknowledged. “When it comes to building a new software product, the goal is to take a minimally viable product to market. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a CTO who has poured immense sweat-equity into our solution so that we can launch our beta in a way that enables scaling and platform maturity within only a few months of go-live. With a background in economics, I’m certainly aware of the general impact that macro trends can have on markets. While the current macro trends provide Viffy with tailwinds, I believe that the venture firms who see and understand the magnitude of this opportunity will look to engage regardless of macro-forces. In other words, the macro investment climate outlook will have a neutral to positive impact on this opportunity.”
Core Products
What are Viffy’s core products and features? “Viffy’s core product is a combination of a social media content distribution platform, and a loyalty retailer affiliate network. Our focus for users is to simply be the rails on which their favorite Creators share supplemental, behind the scenes content, and engage on a more personal level with their followers. Beyond that, we simply want to make it clear to our users where they can shop in order to earn the subscription credits that unlock their Creator’s content,” Winslow explained. “When they shop with these places, they’ll know they’re supporting their favorite Creators in the process. Our initial retailer network consists mainly of digital offers, though we’re driving towards a goal of making it possible for our users to earn credits throughout their everyday lives: simply by getting fuel, groceries, etc.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Viffy’s most significant milestones? “Securing our seed funding was an incredible achievement. While we’ve benefitted to the tune of easily about $1 million to $2 million worth of sweat-equity across our co-founders and advisors over the past two years, launching Viffy still required capital. It’s difficult to understate the significance of seeing those commitments come in from Seed investors – It’s a tremendous honor to have their belief and confidence in us, and it is the most critical milestone we’ve achieved thus far,” Winslow noted.
Customer Success
When I asked Winslow about customer success, he pointed out that the initial Creator partners have seen greater conversion with one single Viffy promotion than they could reasonably expect from over a one year campaign of promoting a paid premium offering behind a traditional paywall.
Funding/Revenue
Upon checking with Winslow about funding and revenue, he replied: “Viffy is an affiliate publisher for our participating retailers. Whenever our users shop with them, we earn revenue in the form of affiliate commissions. This is then used to fund the Creator subscription credits. We’re fortunate to have an extremely lean operation due to the incredible up-front sweat equity provided by our CTO and other contributors, and with only $205,000 in capital raised we’ve taken a scalable product to market and established a two-year runway. We’re now aiming to raise more capital to scale the Viffy platform and secure our position as first-mover.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Viffy pursuing? “Viffy’s core targeted market is the ‘top 10%’ or so of Creator’s audiences on social media. This conservatively equates to over 20 million individuals in the USA, and the number grows every year as the newest generation values social media more than those previously,” Winslow replied. “Looking beyond ‘total users’ Viffy addresses a major segment of the consumer spending market: 84% of consumer spending still occurs within brick-and-mortar retail. The parabolic growth of Influencer Marketing has been confined to online sales (“link in description” model). There is immense value to be unlocked for each of Viffy’s stakeholders by enabling users to support their favorite Creators based on their brick-and-mortar spending.”
Future Company Goals
What are Viffy’s future company goals? “What’s most important for Viffy is keeping a major focus on enabling success for those who utilize our platform,” Winslow concluded “We’re only here today because of the amazing people who gave me a chance to share the vision (and then helped me to improve it!). I want to see them succeeding via Viffy, and then I want to accelerate and multiply that success for them. There are some amazing platform features that will help with this, and ultimately this prioritization of stakeholder-interests is what will drive success for Viffy.”
