Area 31 interviewed Javier Yuste and Jesús San Román García, two of the four co-founders of Binfluencer: the meeting place of influencers and brands, where brands can connect with influencers to carry out marketing campaigns and create or increase brand awareness.  

Last April they became Venture Lab Finalists and they won two prices. At that point, they decided to start in Area 31 and they will probably try to extend our time here.They are 5 people, four co-founders, and the fifth one is their Advisor Jorge Schnura. Most of them met in a Hackathon organized by IBM at IE, and as a result of that they decided to form the team. At the moment they are looking for Interns to work as Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Influencers’ Relationship Manager, Community Manager, Influencers Hunter and Finance Manager.

The idea of Binfluencer started with a shoes business calledVonoshop, which Javier and Jesús started up. They had everything ready to launch when they faced the need to start creating brand awareness. They knew they did not want to follow the path that all firms were following these days to introduce their brand to the world through online ads on Facebook and Google; they wanted to do something different.

They were attracted by startups such as Pompeii or Hawkers, and the way in which they had done things differently. At that point they thought about backing up their branding campaigns with influencers, when they realized that finding the ideal influencer for each marketing campaign was not easy at all.

“Our problem was that we did not know how much to pay, or how to pay. We were wondering if we had to lend the influencers the pair of shoes and then have the pair returned;  or if we had to give the pair of shoes as a gift… We did not know how all this worked..”

So the main idea they got was to create a platform that would allow companies to identify and contact the perfect-fit influencer with their brand. The way Binfluencer operates is: Influencers sign up to the platform and then companies search for influencers in the platform to match them with their marketing campaigns.

«We have been adding new features and what we are aiming to develop is a platform that functions through automated programatic marketing for the influencers market. The idea is that a company will not only be able to access the influencers’ profiles, but rather that the algorithm will recognize which influencers are the perfect fit for the marketing campaign in hands.»

Therefore, the main feature that Binfluencer offers to businesses, is that the platform will automatically identify the right influencer, the cost of hiring him, and the deal with him/her. On the other hand, the platform will provide certain metrics that will permit the company to analyze the return on investment among other factors. For the time being, the platform enables companies to outsource the services of a person that manually picks the ideal influencers, until automation is ready. In terms of their business model, the platform charges commission for each transaction. They charge around a 30%, however this can be variable depending on the size of the camapign among other factors.

“One of the biggest lessons that we can take from this experience is that we should have had planned in a better way the web development part and the launch of the platform. The time to market is always crucial… We should’ve had more especifically designed the characteristics before. Everything seems rather easy until you start developing.”

“The most difficult part for us is to be able to fit the brands with the number of influencers. At the moment we have around 10 campaigns and more than 300 infleuncers. Our goal is to identify even those influencers which have not signed up to the platform, and that the platform automatically generates the contact with the influencer”.