Black Female Founder Overcomes VC Resistance To Help Content Creators Monetize Their Work

The creator economy—content creators, curators, and community builders—use social media, blogs, podcasts, and video to influence culture and business. From sports to fitness to beauty, they are making money on their content.

One Black female founder, Tiffany Kelly, founder and CEO of Curastory, makes it easy for sports and fitness content creators to create video content and monetize it.

She’s got the skills and connections. Sports and math are her loves. As a tutor at Louisiana State University, she helped athletes learn statistics, math, and economics. No surprise that she went into sports analytics as a career—working at ESPN and the Miami Heat. “I was building metrics that calculated which teams would win games,” Kelly said of her experience at ESPN.

In 2017 and 2018, while at ESPN, “I noticed what the creator economy was doing to traditional media,” Kelly said. “It is completely uprooting it, making it more decentralized.” A lot of talent renegotiated contracts to be able to do their own content on the side. Many athletes stopped coming on-air as frequently because ESPN website pages no longer had big viewership numbers.

Kelly’s “aha” moment came after she left ESPN. In the summer of 2019, the NCAA announced that they were thinking of changing the 109-year-old rule that prohibited student-athletes from monetizing their name, image, and likeness. “The creator economy isn’t slowing down. It’s going to accelerate,” Kelly thought. “Media is going to get even more decentralized. And, with so many ways to consume content, audiences will become more fragmented and harder to reach.”

Her conversations with athletic directors and coaches in her network made Tiffany realized just how difficult it would be for student-athletes and others to create, edit, sell, and distribute their content. Curastory allows content creators, individuals, and small media companies to do what they do best—create content. Curastory takes care of the rest, including offering low-cost, high-quality camera, lighting, and microphone equipment for rent or purchase; free editing software; access to a music library; distribution on Instagram TV, YouTube, and Facebook; advertisers the ability to be matched with relevant content; and tracking metrics.

From the end of 2019 to the summer of 2020, Kelly fund raised. She raised $250,000 from friends and family and on Wefunder, an equity crowdfunding platform. The team started building its minimum viable product (MVP) in August 2020, launching in February of 2021. By March 2021, Curastory was generating revenue.

Advertisers like Beyond Meat and StockX told Curastory they didn’t have time to go through the videos to find the best content providers for their brand. They wanted to be automatically matched. By Q3, that functionality was added. Now brands enter their budget and audience-targeting criteria and Curastory matches them with content creators, Kelly explained. Brands can submit a script if they want the creators to film ads about their products.

VCs hold the purse strings. And people of color are not naturally in VC networks. In January 2021, Kelly took a fundraising class with Jason Yeh to better understand the process. Yeh was an associate at Greycroft Partners. He joined a startup and closed a round that included Greycroft and other top-tier firms. Then he founded a startup, raised money, and sold the firm. As a formal and informal advisor to startups, he’s helped companies raise over $100 million. His advice helped Kelly run an efficient fundraising process. Still, as a Black female founder, it was way more challenging than it is for others.

As a woman of color, she couldn’t find a lead investor for the seed round even with market traction. “I’m crushing it,” Kelly declared. She couldn’t raise the $5-7 million that well-connected founders raise without having revenue.

Kelly was referred to Mac Conwell. He would have led the round, but he hadn’t finished raising money for his RareBreed venture capital fund. Instead, as a scout for Lightspeed, the venture fund of Republic, an equity crowdfunding platform, he recommended that Lightspeed invest. They did.

“That was a huge proof of concept!” exclaimed Kelly. “They typically don’t invest until Series A.” With Lightspeed as an investor, Curastory raised $500,000 on Republic. Kelly paused fundraising. She had gotten into Techstars Sports and wanted to focus on the program. Her goal was to close the seed round shortly after Techstars Demo Day. She did that and then some, but she had to do it in a nontraditional way.

All investors in Curastory’s seed round came in at the same terms as Lightspeed. Kelly raised what is known as a party round, which means that she had no lead institutional investor. Venture capitalists look down on party rounds, but, in a sense, they leave diverse founders no choice but to raise party rounds and raise capital for a round in multiple tranches.

While she was fundraising for the second tranche of her seed round, Kelly lost her mom to cancer. “When you’re running a company and it’s not on its legs, you kind of need everything to go right,” said Kelly. “Things that happen personally just hit way harder because you don’t have the stability of a traditional corporation. I wanted to stop fundraising.” But she didn’t. 

Instead, she raised $1.6 million in the second tranche of her seed round. Her seed round included some impressive firms. In addition to Lightspeed and Techstars, other investors included Kli Capital, Link Ventures, Genius Guild Greenhouse Fund, and Mindspring Capital. 

Brilliant Friends, and The W Fund.

In the next three to six months, Kelly’s goal is to add beauty and culinary content then business.

How will you get investors to think outside the box and support your business?