For the Creators by the Creators: Our Investment in Laylo
Moment Ventures joins Eldridge in Laylo’s $3M seed round
Fresh out of college, I configured and deployed customer relationship management (CRM) tools, such as Siebel and Salesforce, at large pharmaceutical companies as part of my time at Accenture (more on my background here). While the systems were completely enterprise-grade, they were expensive, feature-heavy, and required substantial upkeep. Years later, during a YC Demo Day, when a “Salesforce for Creators” was pitched, my ears perked up.
We’ve all probably heard this by now, but the the creator economy is absolutely booming, with an estimated 50M creators globally, with 2M going at it full-time. The pandemic kept everyone in their houses, where hobbies turned into side projects which turned into full-blown careers. These creators are generating $8B annually, which is expected to double by 2022 (that’s next year!).
Surely the established tools out there are good enough for these creators to grow their business, right? Historically, and thinking back on my early days, the existing marketing, customer engagement, and messaging tools didn’t meet the needs of this new army of solo-entrepreneurs or hyper-small businesses. Slow, expensive, and outdated wasn’t going to cut it. Enter Laylo…
Laylo is a platform to engage fans and share details about upcoming “drops”, such as merchandise, or “merch”, content releases (new albums, singles, NFT’s), and events (concerts or live streams).
All creators have fans, but fans are busy and they forget. Creators are busy and aren’t customer engagement gurus. They miss out on opportunities to effectively engage and monetize their audiences. Creators are constantly, well, creating. However, they don’t have a place to send their fans because the thing often doesn’t exist yet. Not only does this problem exist for smaller creators just starting out, but larger creators feel the pain as well (and maybe more so), which is why the likes of Calvin Harris, Dillon Francis, and ODESZA are on the platform.
At its base layer, Laylo is an elegant, simple-to-use website that is purpose driven for specific drops. Individual pages are created for each drop (takes under 5 minutes to set one up). Fans know exactly what they are opting in-to and creators know, with an impressively high degree of sophistication, a lot about their fans. Creators are seeing 7x engagement over existing tools in the space.
Laylo isn’t trying to compete with the plethora of landing page or link directory startups out there. Instead, they are partnering with them to be the de-facto fan messaging and engagement tool for this generation of creators. This is only the beginning for Laylo and I can’t wait to be able to share more in the very near future.
At Moment Ventures, we love backing founders that were born in the industry that they are transforming. After meeting Alec Ellin and Sajan “Saj” Sanghvi, co-founders of Laylo, who both have deep experience in the music industry, I was hooked. Alec, CEO, has been building creator tool since high school (including a 50k reader music blog) and worked at Epic Records (record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment) in the A&R department. Saj, CTO, is not only a full-stack engineer but is also the producer of the band No Suits, with over 20M plays across social platforms. They created Laylo to solve problems they personally faced and are leveraging their backgrounds and relationships to spearhead the company’s growth.
Moment invests in early-stage companies from a specific lens, or thesis: The Future of Work. Now more than ever, the distinction between worker and business has never been fuzzier. As the economic landscape changes and evolves for generations to come, so to must the tools we build to support such businesses.
We are thrilled to be joining Laylo’s over-subscribed seed round and excited to work alongside some amazing investors, such as Eldridge, Y Combinator, and some incredible angels.
