Brand partnerships seem, at the moment, to be one of the primary ways creators can monetize, given the pace of the creator economy. Other services in the form of link-in-bio applications including affiliate links and Pateron-like subscriptions prove to be secondary ways to increase the amount of money that creators can make. The biggest challenge remains that of matching brands with appropriate creators for collaboration, both for platforms and a startup.

Berlin-based startup Passionfroot is creating a toolkit and a marketplace for business, productivity, and thought leadership-focused creators for brand collaborations.

The company founded by Jen Phan has generated a seed funding of $3.8 million focused on early-stage investing. VC Supernode Global has led the way while other investors include Miro CEO Andrey Khusid's s16vc, Sequoia, Accel's Scout Fund, and Creandum also participating-in reality participated in raising the company's $3.4 million pre-seed round too. Joining the seed round were angels including former Zapier CMO Kieran Flanagan, ex-community and creator lead at Notion Ben Lang, Linktree CPO Jiaona Zhang, and Austin Lau, who manages Growth at Anthropic.

Before Passionfroot, Phan launched a tech newsletter in 2020 for tech professionals with immigration backgrounds. She has considered taking on the full-time role of doing the newsletter.

Amid this evolution, a new breed of business-focused creators emerged, making thought leadership content across platforms such as LinkedIn, newsletters, and podcasts. However, after speaking to dozens of creators, Phan realized that despite how appealing the creative freedom is, the business side, particularly brand partnershipswhich often serves as the primary revenue streamremains fragmented and inefficient, she told TechCrunch.

The decision to build Passionfroot was also driven by brands fighting through troubles of finding relevant creators, managing campaigns' schedules, and coordinating payouts, she added.
"One of the biggest challenges for creators is tracking pending payments from brands and partners," said Zain Khan, founder of AI-focused newsletter Superhuman.

"We had this one payment of $40k that didn't show up for months. We had to chase banks for ages to track and resolve the issue. We were paying salaries out of our personal savings and came very close to going out of business," he told TechCrunch in an email.

Passionfroot lets the creators build a storefront for the ad or brand partnership slots they have on their different channels, from newsletters, YouTube, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. Creators can add to their media kit a package of brand collaboration rates, engagement rates of all of their channels, and schedules. Creators can also share examples of previous sponsorships on their Passionfroot page.

It also enables brands to easily book a campaign with the creators, using automated scheduling. Creators can share their pages with brands just like they can share a link-in-bio page. Some of the brand partners that the startup has include Hubspot, Notion, and Freshbook.

On the other side of the marketplace, the startup has also built a network where brands can discover relevant creators on the platform. According to Phan, deals booked through the network are currently equivalent to deals booked through specific creators' storefronts.

Passionfroot gets to capture a 15% take rate on any brand partnership that comes out through its network, including the payment fees. If a brand books a partnership with a creator via their storefront, the company takes 5% in payment fees.

Apart from the new, refreshed website offering better creator search and matching functionality for marketers, the platform will also show a match score to marketers so that they can pick the best creator suited to a particular campaign. The startup will build a dashboard with campaign insights and better support for marketing teams rather than an individual to use Passionfroot in the coming months.

Sabina Wizander of Creandum believes Passionfroot has something special in its focus on the B2B segment.

"The company is starting with the B2B market both from creators and such companies. In this market, there's nothing called being 50% relevant. So the startup has the right product-market fit from the get-go," she said to TechCrunch over a call.

eMarketer report says influencer marketing spending will increase to about $7.14 billion in 2024, recording a year-on-year growth of 15.8%. It is an evident sign that marketers are constantly aiming at reaching the consumers through several channels.
Passionfroot is building its product at very good opportunity, said Supernode Global partner Gina King.

Passionfruit comes at an optimal time to leverage many market shifts at once. It doesn't ride one trend but is perfectly positioned to benefit from many simultaneous developments in the creator economy, B2B marketing, and technology, she said.
King also said 87% of Passionfruit's partners are organically, proving the network effect of the company.

For photographers, there's VSCO, for YouTubers, there's Agentio, and for licensable assets, there's Catch + Release. Even larger social networks like Instagram and YouTube, and most recently, TikTok, have experimented with building platforms around the match of brands and creators.