You want to be a creator. You're ready to do the hard work and have already built a following. When and how do you start making money?
At the Creator Investor, we're focused on helping creators figure out the different ways they can monetize, the best tools they can use, and how they can do all this sustainably and seamlessly. When it comes to monetization, one of the critical areas in that creators can earn money is working with brands. Yet, working with brands is not an easy thing to execute.
Where do you start? How many followers do you need? Should you sign up on Swipehouse or LikeItToKnowIt? Will brands reach out to you, or should we reach out to them? These are just some questions you might start to have when you consider working with brands.
Collabstr might be an easy place to start by building a profile to let brands come to you. You might not get tons of brands reaching out to you from Collabstr, but even if you get a single brand a month or every few months, what's the harm? Here's our review of everything you need to know about Collabstr and why you might want to try it out.
Marketplace for Creators and Brands
Collabstr is a marketplace connecting brands and creators. Brands can use it to find creators based on a social platform, niche, and follower count. As a creator, brands can find you more quickly if you're on the forum. While the platform is free to sign up on, Collabstr takes 15% when you get paid by a brand.
You'll only get paid once the brand approves payment - although they've already paid Collabstr, they can't necessarily back out but have the final say if they approve the payment to creators.
Overview of how Collabstr worksBehind the Company: Collabstr's Backstory
Collabstr was founded in 2019, so it's a relatively young company still. The founders, Kyle Dulay and Clayton Rannard started the company, and the company still has just a few employees in 2022. The founders are Canadian, but the platform is not geographically limited, with creators worldwide using Collabstr.
According to Crunchbase, the company hasn't raised money, which in the context of creator economy start-ups raising billions of dollars over the last few years, definitely puts Collabstr in a unique bucket.
Good Fit For Creators Of All Platforms
As a marketplace, Collabstr sits between creators and brands. For brands, their offering is a self-service platform that influencer managers can browse through and easily contract different creators as they wish without ever talking to a natural person. On their site, they indicate that they are not an agency, and with a team of 4 people, they can't do so.
For creators, Collabstr works with creators that have a following across TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram. This is pretty standard but also ignores creators across Snapchat or even Twitch. However, they allow brands to look up creators across the platform and even contract creators to get user-generated content, regardless of your platform.
Collabstr is a neat way to browse and find thousands of creators for brands. Usually, this work would take a brand manager many hours of manual labor, or they would have to work with an agency that already has relationships with creators. This is great for creators as it makes it easier for brands to find them.
According to the company's site, over 60,000 creators across platforms use Collabstr. Likewise, the company's site gets over 160,000 monthly visitors.
Famous Creators on Collabstr
There are already tons of famous creators on Collabstr. This list includes:
- Allie Dunn
- Scarlett Wilson
- Laizesummer
- Droplets
- Shay Regis
- Chloe Holdredge
- Thomas Rossier
- Angela Brutyan
- Bad Chad
Why You Should Consider Collabstr
Collabstr is a straightforward platform for creators. The platform is safe, and even for payments, they leverage a highly trusted company like Stripe, so there's no worry about Collabstr being legit. The critical aspects of Collabstr that a creator should understand to decide if they want to join include the following.
- Public Profile with Rates
- Custom Link (Media Kit)
- Instant Chat
- No Upfront Cost
- Manage Collaborations
- Secure and Safe
Public Profile with Rates
As a creator, once you're approved to join Collabstr, you'll be able to get your profile page where you can list your rates.
On this page, you can list your rates for specific deliverables. For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, you can charge $5,000 for a 60-second shout-out. Meanwhile, if you only have 10,000 followers on Instagram and want to charge $1,000 for that, you can set the rates lower for Instagram. You'll only get notifications when a brand indicates an interest in working with you based on the speed you set.
Collabstr profile of the beauty influencer Cilibling based out of Toronto, CACustom Link (Media Kit)
Your Collabstr public profile allows you to set your rates. However, you also get a branded custom link such as collabstr.com/creatorinvestor. This will enable you to share this link on your social media handles or Link In Bio tools like Linktree or Beacons.
According to the company, over 50% of creators will share their custom links across their social accounts. In reality, the public profile and custom link can be an easy media kit for creators since your page has your quick bio and rates.
Collabstr's custom link overview pageInstant Chat
Collabstr allows brands to quickly and instantly communicate with creators, streamlining the process for creators and the brands that want to work with them. To join, you'll have to be vetted as a creator, so brands on Collabstr are more likely to message you and ultimately work with you.
No Upfront Cost
There's no cost to creators upfront. You will be charged 15% of the total brand deal fee if the real deal goes through. That means if a brand contracts you for a $2,000 brand deal, you'll earn that minus $300. The platform may also subtract Stripe's fees potentially, which is often around another 3%.
Manage Collaborations
If you're a popular creator with brands reaching out to collaborate, you know that it can be overwhelming to stay on top of deadlines, communication, and deliverables. Using a streamlined platform like Collabstr makes it easier for creators to see and manage all their brand deals in one place.
Collabstr makes this easy for creators. Of course, if you're getting other deals off the platform, you'll have to manage those separately. Yet, you're also not paying the 15% fee in those cases.
Secure and Safe
Collabstr is safe. By working with a reputable partner like Stripe, you can trust that the payment system behind Collabstr is legitimate. Likewise, because they have brands pay them in escrow, you know the brand will ultimately have to pay you once you deliver what they are asking for. However, because you're not getting paid immediately, the brand does have the power to hold payment until they are happy with your deliverables, which can be tricky.
However, most creators are probably used to this, as that's how many brand deals run. When you work with a brand, they might pay you on net 30 or even net 60. Hint: In those cases, you should check out our comparison of Lumanu vs. Willa, both of which can help you get paid immediately when working directly with a brand.
Brands On Collabstr
Collabstr's site mentions that over 20,000 different brands have used the platform over the company's lifetime. Even if we assume that the average brand works with just a handful of creators, Collabstr has facilitated many creator brand deals.
Even more exciting is that they list some of the top brands that have used Collabstr and this list includes brands like Hopper, ClickUp, and WealthSimple. These top, reputable brands have raised tens of millions of dollars in funding.
A few of the top brands on Collabstr out of more than 20,000 brandsCollabstr's Partnerships
While Collabstr is a relatively small company, they have built some partnerships already. This includes their collaboration with Koji, one of the top links in bio apps. This partnership allows you to connect your Collabstr profile to your Koji lin kin bio. If you input your Collabstr profile into your Koji account, it'll run natively through one of Koji's mini-app experiences.
Is it Worth 15%?
Free to start, but 15% of the deal amount that a brand agrees to pay you.
If you believe that for your 100,000 followers on Instagram, you should be able to earn $500 per post, then it might make sense to raise your prices by about 15% or even 20% so you'll get the right amount after Collabstr's fees.
Collabstr's Competitors
Collabstr is not unique in what it generally offers. There are other marketplaces for creators, like LTK or QuikPlace. Likewise, GRIN, IZEA, and CreatorIQ all have creator-facing aspects to their products.
However, Collabstr is one of the cleaners and more seamless experiences for creators. Collabstr gives creators a public profile, which GRIN, IZEA, and CreatorIQ do not.
Collabstr: Should You Use It?
Should you use Collabstr? Maybe another way to ask this same question is, will you get brands reaching out to you if you sign up for Collabstr? If you can get a single brand reaching out every month offering you a couple of hundred dollars in brand deals, that would be great, but will that happen if you sign up?
The answer to that likely depends on a ton of factors. For instance, if you're in a niche where brands spend heavily working with creators, for example, beauty or finance, you could have lots of inbound interest from brands on Collabstr. Likewise, setting your rates lower than what's standard for a creator of your size may lead to more brands reaching out to you on the platform. Or, if you're just a famous creator and get many brand deals already, you might start having brands reach out to you via Collabstr if they're looking to get in touch with you and find you on the platform.
Since you can say no to any deals if you're not interested, there's very little harm in signing up for Collabstr. It can be a way to augment whatever you're already doing. Maybe, you start using Collabstr and set your rates as low but then gradually increase them as you gain more followers and more brands reach out directly to you. There's very little harm in trying out the platform.
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