Powerspike
CO-FOUNDER, COO, VP OF PRODUCT
Class of 2018
Honored in Forbes 30 Under 30 2021
Co-founded and lead product at Powerspike, the AI-driven influencer marketing exchange built for the gaming space. First started in a dorm room, Powerspike has raised $5M+ in private VC, and was acquired by Live Current Media in 2022.
$5M+ Raised in VC Funding
80K+ Creators Use Powerspike
25 Team Members
415M+ Monthly Viewers Reached
Making Influencer Marketing Programmatic.
There are a myriad of tools that help brands work with creators. The typical influencer marketing platform provides brands with a set of discovery and communication tools to assist them with their existing influencer campaigns. But even with these tools, the process of running an influencer marketing campaign is still very manual and requires a lot of effort from the brand.
Our goal with Powerspike’s platform is to take the workload away from the brand almost entirely. We didn’t just want to build another influencer marketing tool. Instead, we set out to build an end-to-end service for brands that automates the entire process of running a campaign & working with creators. Over time, we built a platform that seamlessly allows brands or agencies to create a campaign, be matched with creators, and get results. Users can specify their marketing goals and criteria to find a match, and creators can apply directly to secure brand deals on a marketplace. Powerspike takes care of all talent sourcing, hiring, management of relationships, creation & compliance of authentic content, payments, measurement of ROI, and optimization of the campaign from there on. We also wanted to build an application that would be dead simple to use, so that anyone, even non-marketers could run a campaign. And all this, without the need to ever talk to a human. The goal is to challenge the status quo of traditional influencer marketing, which relies heavily on direct relationship building and non-standardized processes.
Where did I play a role in this?
Helping gaming content creators get access to paid sponsorship deals as a means to grow and earn revenue is a challenge that my roommate and I set out to solve when we were still in college. With a creative background and a degree in Communications & UX Design from Syracuse University, my role at Powerspike naturally evolved to managing the product. I took charge in creating and overlooking our product roadmap, working directly with UX designers and a team of engineers to design & build a web platform for brands, creators, as well as the admin backend from scratch. I worked with the rest of our executive team and key stakeholders to set product strategy, identify key platform metrics & KPI’s, and ultimately translate Powerspike’s business goals into a real, feasible product that served over 70,000 users in three different segments. I also connected closely with our users, conducting customer discovery through 1 on 1 interview calls and surveys. In the process, I got to learn a TON, both about how to build a product but also about building and managing a team.
Some of my responsibilities included:
Leading product discussion & strategy with key stakeholders cross-department.
Kicking off every product/feature, creating all scopes outlining feature purposes, goals, and technical design/development requirements.
Working directly with a UX Designer and team of 5 Developers on a daily basis.
Overseeing marketing content efforts, including all versions of our public facing marketing website to date (strategy, content, design, SEO)
Managing product using Agile Methodology, made up of daily Scrums and Bi-Weekly Sprints (used tools like Asana to manage this)
Setting and measuring KPI’s for the Product/platform (NPS Scores, Engagement Rates, Churn, etc.).
Conducting user research through on & off platform surveys, 1 on 1 interviews with both brands and creators, as well as persona development and competitive landscaping.
ROADMAP & BACKLOG MANAGEMENT
I used project management tools like Asana to create & maintain our quarterly roadmap of products and features.
PRODUCT ANALYTICS & USER INSIGHTS
I set up user flows with custom events & properties using tools like Mixpanel and Log Rocket to track platform usage and behavior. These funnels would allow us to identify key areas of churn on our platform, and helped us increase the conversion rate of campaigns being created on platform significantly over time.
UX FLOWS & SITEMAPS
When revamping our platform, I created full user flow charts & sitemaps to detail the customer journey start to finish.
Think, Make, Build.
Building out a programmatic solution for influencer marketing involved many moving parts. We had to build out three different dedicated applications, one for brands to create & run their campaigns, one for creators to apply to & manage sponsorship opportunities, and an entirely proprietary backend system for our internal operations team to manage each brand, campaign, creator, and sponsorship deal, tying everything together.
With that as our goal, I would create full-fledged product scopes for each feature set. We repeatedly went through the process of drafting feature specs, designing wireframes & mockups, developing prototypes, getting user feedback, and iterating from there. We went through quite a few different beta release versions before officializing a major launch.
CREATING USER FLOWS & SCOPES
Before working on any designs, we created various versions of user flow charts, as well as project scopes to propose ideal experiences for our brands and creators.
WIREFRAMING THE CAMPAIGN EXPERIENCE
We used sketches, wireframes, and low fidelity mockups to rapidly evaluate initial designs on our campaign tracker UX for both brands and creators.
INITIAL BETA VERSIONS OF POWERSPIKE
Early versions of the platform involved a basic sponsorships marketplace for creators & a campaign creation wizard for brands. We took in many learnings from testing early versions of Powerspike.
A NEW & BETTER EXPERIENCE
In the summer of 2021, we got to launch a total revamp of our applications for brands & creators. This version considered learnings from the past 3-4 years of case studies from our previous influencer campaigns.
POWERSPIKE HAS WORKED WITH:
Lets rewind for a second…
Early in high school, I grew a passion for creating things on the web. Like many others at my age, I liked playing video games... but I was interested in more than just playing them. Looking for ways to combine my interests, I started a YouTube channel. It was there that I experimented with creating content centered around the games I was playing, picking up skills in video editing, and graphic design. My channel started to grow a following, and I became fascinated with the ever-growing gaming and eSports industry. I volunteered to work for an eSports organizer, where I helped set up gaming tournaments streamed to thousands of viewers online.
That’s where I met AJ, my future business partner, who shared similar interests with me. We were both tasked with finding brands to sponsor the prize pools offered in gaming tournaments.. With no experience in networking, we painstakingly reached out to 100 different brands asking for a sponsor, and got only 2 responses -- both of them being rejection letters.
An idea is born.
It was from this failure that we recognized a problem worth solving. Content creators looking to make a living streaming games online rely on sponsorships as an essential source of revenue. At the time, it was nearly impossible for small creators to get brand deals. With that in mind, we decided to use the experience we gained to start our own venture with the goal to create the most compelling and streamlined destination for activating sponsorships within the gaming community.
With pure passion and excitement we bootstrapped Powerspike in our dorm room at Syracuse University, which AJ and I were attending, joined along the way by other friends with the same entrepreneurial desire to create something new.
SU gave us invaluable support. We were able to make use of the Blackstone LaunchPad, an innovation hub available at the university for students interested in entrepreneurship. Encouraged by the LaunchPad, we entered the Panasci Business Plan Competition. Unexpectedly, we won first place, and got $12,500 for our business. This was incredible for us, a team of 6 at the time, as it gave us conviction that it was worth pursuing our dream.
Time to build.
It was time to get to work. That summer we put together the initial platform for Powerspike, developing a marketplace where creators could apply directly to sponsorship campaigns created by brands with a click of a button. It was during these early efforts that I honed my skills in product management, UX Design, and effective user testing.
Soon, it became clear that the first couple versions of our platform had a lot of holes in it (who would have known, right?) The platform was buggy, not user friendly, and our business model didn’t serve the needs of our brands and creators. Expectations were set high and our team’s morale was starting to suffer.
Things got slow for a bit and it became clear we needed help. We applied to the Atlanta program of Techstars, one of the most prestigious seed accelerators. If we got accepted, we would receive a $100,000 investment and get to spend 3 months working with experienced mentors from companies like Coca Cola and COX Enterprises to help grow our startup. With an acceptance rate of less than 1%, our chances were slim.
Enter Techstars.
We got in! This was the turning point. Before we knew it, we were in Atlanta as a team of 9, with the opportunity to rebuild our product and learn from the experts.. Techstars gave us the validation our startup needed. For me personally, the program taught me an incredible amount about collaborating across businesses and teams, building a product at a very accelerated rate, and using the crucial tools to manage it.. We were able to recognize the core issues of our business model, and begin on a path to make the Powerspike platform more programmatic. This was crucial, because our service’s key flaw was that the process of sponsoring influencers was too time consuming, slow, and therefore it wouldn’t have been scalable.
Following up from Techstars, we were able to secure a $250,000 investment from the Philadelphia 76’ers innovation lab. Powerspike was becoming a real business. Before long, we were able to bring on the resources to help us reach a product market and start attracting deals with well known brands and game publishers.
Powerspike gets acquired.
Approaching the end of 2021, Powerspike raised roughly $5M to date in venture funding and the team grew to a size of 25 people full-time. My co-founders and I were honored in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list under the Games category, a major milestone for each of us. In 2022, Powerspike’s business model became profitable.
All throughout 2022, we received various acquisition offers for the business. After lots of consideration and exploring different opportunities, we decided to accept an acquisition deal from Live Current Media (OTC: LIVC), a publicly traded company that shares a strong vision similar to our own, in creating a platform that powers individual creators. Powerspike’s technology now lives in the suite of Live Current Media’s creator tools, giving us the opportunity to make an impact on the creator space greater than we could on our own.
In the last couple of years building Powerspike, I focused my efforts on revamping our user experience for brands and creators to streamline the process of running an influencer marketing campaign with gamers. We were able to cut down the average workload to execute a campaign as a brand from 150+ hours to merely 10 minutes on average or less for brands using our product, which felt like a major accomplishment. There's still room for improvement, and more goals to achieve. But after 6 and a half years building Powerspike, it was time to explore new challenges. Powerspike is at a stable position, and I expect it to continue achieving big things in the future under Live Current Media’s wing. It’s crazy to see how far the business has come, and that it all started in my Syracuse University dorm room.
