For creators, managing your business gets harder as you grow

When you're starting out as a creator, you don't have many options for making money and you're just focused on growing your audience. But pretty soon, there's a wide variety of monetization platforms you could use to build your business — which ones should you use?

You could take a guess, and choose the monetization platform that seems like the best fit for your audience. In the example below, this creator chose to link to Cameo in his TikTok bio.

But there's lots of choices, and no single platform captures all of the value from your followers who want to engage with you.

One link to every monetization platform

Beacons helps creators build "link in bio" websites designed to monetize their audiences. With a Beacons link, creators on TikTok and Instagram can connect their followers to all of the monetization platforms that they're on.

For example, the creator Hammy & Olivia (two talking corgis 🐶🐶) includes their Beacons link in both their Instagram and TikTok bios. In addition to connecting to their other platforms, Beacons helps this creator collect their followers' emails for future use.

Beacons: customize and promote all your stuff in one place

Creators can easily set up a website in less than 10 minutes with our easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website builder. The screenshot below shows the desktop experience; but 80% of our creators actually build their Beacons pages from their phones!

Beacons pages are fully customizable. Creators can embed videos and music, sell personalized content, and more — all on the free plan. 

18k daily active creators and1.8k new signups every day

We launched publicly in September 2020, and have grown at 16% week-over-week for the last 3 months. We're now getting over 1.5k new signups every day, with no waitlist and no paid marketing. 

Four months after launch, we've become the 5th most common bio link for TikTok creators with >1M followers, and still gaining market share quickly. This demonstrates that we're serving a real need for creators.

Our creators spread the word just by using Beacons — we are getting over 20M page views a month. The majority of our growth comes from "demonstration virality," where one creator sees another creator using Beacons and then signs up for a Beacons account.

Demographically and geographically diverse customer base

Beacons helps all kinds of creators from all over the world. Our creators span every category, from musicians to pets, makeup artists, and even clowns. More than half are women, and only 42% are in the US — we're helping creators all over the world create more economic opportunity for themselves.

Freemium SaaS model

Beacons offers two pricing tiers: a free Creator plan, and a $10/mo Entrepreneur plan.

Our strategy is to deliver tremendous value to creators through our free plan, and make it a no-brainer for every creator to be on Beacons. As creators grow, some of them develop more complex, SMB-like needs and will upgrade to use the features in our Entrepreneur plan.

With this freemium business model, we've increased MRR quickly since our public launch. MRR is at $3.9k today, and grew 128% in November, 254% in December, and 265% in January.

A $6B market that's growing fast

The creator economy is blowing up — 30% of kids now want to be content creators when they grow up. TikTok has democratized content creation with their content distribution algorithm, where anyone can make a video on their phone and go viral overnight.

We are already gaining traction in a $90M/year SOM of 750k professional creators on TikTok and Instagram. In the future, we will serve 50M creators across all content platforms in a $6B/year TAM that is still growing quickly.

The only easy-to-use, mobile-first platform with everything that creators need

80% of creators on Beacons build their websites from a mobile device. The creator economy is a mobile-first world that is poorly supported by incumbent platforms like Wix and Shopify.

Compared to other creator tools, Beacons contains much more functionality that creators need for building their businesses.

Our largest and most direct competitor is Linktree. By giving away our customization features for free, we've counter-positioned their business model in a way that will make it very hard for them to compete with us without destroying their existing business.

A single platform for creators to run their business

Since we sit upstream of the other platforms that creators use to generate revenue, we have first-party data that other platforms don't. This will be a strategic advantage as we execute on our product roadmap and continue building out revenue streams for creators on Beacons.

With new funding, we'll grow our team to accelerate product development — as we build out more functionality, we'll provide deeper value to our users and increase defensibility against competitors.

As we scale our platform, we aim to achieve $100K MRR by the end of 2021. Even with very conservative growth estimates we should hit this goal and be ready to raise a strong Series A.

Backed by Y Combinator

We've received investments totaling $750K thus far and are backed by notable investors such as Y Combinator.

A talented founding team with deep knowledge in ML

The four of us all met and became friends when we were grad students at Stanford — David, Jesse, and Neal all have PhDs in machine learning, and Greg has an MS in electrical engineering.

We currently live in the same apartment building in SF and work out of our own rooms, so we're a distributed — but not remote! — team. The "office" in the video above is David and Jesse's living room 😄