Launching Dovetale: Influencer marketing tools you can trust.
Today, we’re excited to bring Dovetale out of beta and into the hands of more marketers and influencers. We’re also excited to announce our $500K Funding led by Expa and the launch of our image recognition product — Recommendations. For the past 7 months we’ve been quietly building Dovetale with around 50 different brands and an array of creators excited about the future of advertising. Dovetale began with the idea that influencer marketing is powerful and an important long term strategy for every brand in the world. This investment alongside the incredible team we have built will help us realize our vision for providing economic opportunity for every member of the creator economy.
Since Navied and I started Listn in 2012, we’ve been doing influencer marketing. At Listn we grew to 400,000 users with the help of up and comers like: Shawn Mendes, Trey Kennedy, Jon Piques, Christian DelGrosso, Jerry Purpadrank, Nampaikid, Jessica Vanessa and Austin Getter. When we sold the company to Beatport we started working with larger influencers like Dillion Francis, Diplo and Skrillex on emerging platforms like Twitch. To make our lives easier we used different platforms and agencies, but we always felt like our lives became harder. Timelines were stretched, negotiations went on and we often felt like there was no real transparency.
When we left Beatport, we wanted to bring the spirit and process of our campaigns with Listn to everyone. We set out to build tools that would help brands of any size do all the hard stuff, like finding the perfect influencers to measuring the performance of campaigns and eventually paying them. Our mission was set that day — to finally, provide a toolset that people can trust in this segment of marketing.
Influencer marketing is nothing new, but there are still so many people trying to figure it out and there seems to be a new player popping up every week. Naturally, we asked why that is the case. We believe it’s because you can’t scale something like marketplaces à la “Airbnb for influencers” or a database that has “250,000” influencers. The ad budgets are simply too high for someone to scale all of these (potential) relationships.
At Dovetale we think people driven advertising is changing buying behavior and the economy as a whole. More people are doing work with brands, but there still isn’t a proper standard for this type of worker. Today is day one and we couldn’t be where we are today without our early supporters, so from everyone at Dovetale — Thank you! If you want to be the first to know what we are up to next, sign up to our monthly product update.
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Mike Schmidt and Navied Shoushtarian
Co-Founders, Dovetale
