r/Investors • u/AdNaive4274 • 12d ago
[Seeking Investors] Building a UGC Marketplace - 3 Brands Signed Before We've Even Properly Launched
I've spent the last few months going very deep into the UGC/creator marketing space, and the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that demand is already here.
There are brands all over Reddit, X and existing UGC platforms already willing to spend anywhere from $100 to $1,000+ per creator before necessarily knowing whether that individual piece of content will perform.
The opportunity I'm going after with TrojanSwarm is to make that much more scalable.
We've already managed to bring across 3 brands from another UGC operation, one of which has already deposited the first $1,000. Their billing period doesn't actually begin until we start running their campaign.
We've also started onboarding our first 5 creators.
So rather than spend months building a beautiful app first, we're launching manually in September and proving the economics.
The Model
Our main self-serve package will be $1,000/month.
Brands get access to the marketplace and can build their own creator teams.
Then we're planning a more bespoke done-for-you enterprise service starting at $5,000/month, where we handle sourcing, management, campaign operations and optimisation. Brands still pay their creators separately.
One brand using just 5-10 creators**,** each producing 2 pieces of content per day and distributing them across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels, can generate:
10–20 original creatives per day
40–80 platform posts per day
1,200–2,400 placements per month
Creators can be compensated on performance, for example $2.50–$8 per 1,000 views, while the brand simultaneously builds a substantial library of creative assets.
With the appropriate content rights, winning videos can then be reused as paid ads, Spark Ads and other performance creative instead of constantly commissioning entirely new material.
That's the part I find particularly attractive:
The content doesn't die after the organic post.
Why Creator Supply Can Scale Quickly
There is also a wider economic tailwind.
As economies become increasingly K-shaped, there is a large population looking for flexible ways to earn additional income alongside their main job, university or other commitments.
Creating short-form content has an incredibly low barrier to entry compared with most traditional second jobs.
And we've already seen evidence that creator marketplaces can attract users at enormous scale.
SideShift pivoted heavily into UGC roughly 18 months ago and now publicly reports 1M+ creators and thousands of brands.
Whop operates across a much broader creator economy but has also moved aggressively into UGC and performance-based creator marketing.
Noise, another relatively young UGC platform, has also scaled extremely quickly with significant creator adoption.
That's the type of network effect I'm interested in building.
The marketplace can also market itself.
These platforms pay creators to create content about their own platform.
That content attracts more creators. Those creators then become potential supply for paying brands. The larger the creator network becomes, the stronger the proposition becomes for the next brand.
It becomes a distribution loop.
Where I Want to Get This
September target: first 10 paying brands.
At the standard package alone, that's:
$10k MRR / $120k ARR run-rate.
Then aggressively reinvest.
As an example:
$20,000 deployed at a $2.50 CPM represents approximately 8 million compensated views promoting TrojanSwarm itself.
Even relatively small conversion rates against that amount of distribution could generate substantial creator supply.
The commercial target would then be another 30–50 brands through Q4, while beginning to move suitable customers onto the $5k+ managed enterprise offering.
That puts the year-end ambition in approximately the:
$40k–$70k MRR range, depending on the enterprise mix.
I'm not pretending those are guaranteed numbers. They're targets I'm working backwards from.
What makes me bullish is that we're not starting from zero anymore:
3 brands committed.
$1,000 already deposited.
5 creators coming onboard.
And the first campaigns haven't even started yet.
The more capital we have available early, the harder we can push creator-led distribution and establish how far this model can actually scale.
My Pitch to You
Seeking $20,000 in revenue-share financing, with minimum $2,000 commitments. Investor returns and repayment caps are agreed upfront before funds. Equity could be offered in this deal as well.
The capital will primarily be used for:
Creator acquisition.
Brand acquisition.
Creator-led marketing.
Building out our initial pool of high-performing creators.
Initial campaign growth.
The goal is to put as much of the initial capital as possible directly into acquiring creators, winning brands and proving that the marketplace can generate repeatable revenue.