Former NFL Player Gerome Sapp On His Journey from Athlete to Tech Founder

As a former NFL athlete that played three years for the Baltimore Ravens, and two years for the Indianapolis Colts, Gerome Sapp was always inundated with endorsement deals from various brands. But he knew that he wasn’t the only one who had influence over what people bought.

“There are millions of individuals in the world that have a favorite brand and/or charity initiative but have no way to connect with that brand or initiative to prove how influential they can be to them,” says Sapp, 32, who started the company with money he saved from his NFL years. “Every day, people talk about a brand, wear a brand’s product and share social content around a brand but have no way to get recognized and rewarded by that brand for being ambassadors.”

To solve that problem Sapp created Fluencr, a marketplace that gives individuals the same access to their favorite brands and initiatives that athletes and celebrities have, and get rewarded for their influence.

Sapp spoke to Black Enterprise about what makes Fluencr unique, the challenges he faced starting the platform, and how he plans to profit off his innovative idea .

What does Fluencr allow users to do?

Fluencr is a user-facing, discovery-based platform that allows brands the ability to create social media campaigns, monitor the analytics and data around the campaign and its participants while tracking the influence of the ambassadors that are joined into that campaign. I also knew that with the powerful rise and impact of social media, everyone now has a platform to amplify a brand’s marketing message.

Who will benefit from it the most? How so?

Fluencr allows both brands and consumers the ability to equally benefit from the platform.

For consumers: It gives individuals the ability to connect with their favorite brands as social ambassadors, prove how socially influential they are to that brand, then get real recognition and rewards from that brand for their brand specific social influence.

For brands: They realize that influencer marketing is a powerful approach to getting their marketing initiatives out in a genuine, credible and often viral way. But

they are all looking for the individuals that are truly influential to their specific brand, not just brand agnostically socially popular. So we allow them the ability to create and monitor a social media campaign, allow anyone the ability to join into that campaign (or they can invite individuals into that campaign) to prove their influence. Fluencr then tracks, measures and scores the social impact or influence each campaign participant generated for that brand. This includes the ability to track sales generated from their campaign and identify the ambassador  responsible for generating those sales. We provide a brand’s true social media ROI (rate on investment) and a transparent look at the ambassadors that are driving that ROI.

There are platforms out that are similar to Fluencr. What makes Fluencr stand out?

We created a point solution model that tracks, measures and rewards action-based, brand-specific social influence across multiple social platforms. Though we have a truly unique model, we would consider Crowdtap and SocialChorus competitors. Both Klout and TweetReach are great in their own right but have several fundamental differences.

Klout takes a hypothetical, brand agnostic approach at measuring influence. Your Klout score isn’t reflective

of any social actions you took or were responsible for generating for a specific brand–and that brand’s specific social media campaign. TweetReach obviously deals only with Twitter and measures the impact a single tweet has. This is definitely important and valuable, but is still limited to one platform and one type of social communication tool. This platform also doesn’t allow brands the ability to create social media campaigns.

How does the technology behind Fluencr work?

Fluencr’s algorithm aggregates social actions taken or generated by an individual to a specific brand and that brand’s specific social media campaign. These actions are all weighted and scored according to the amplification value they deliver to a brand’s overall marketing initiative. This allows any brand the ability to now know which individuals proved to be influential to their brand’s social media marketing initiative. They don’t have to guess or try to predict anymore, we created an action-based model that measures and rewards brand-specific influence.

What has been your biggest challenge thus far in launching and growing the company?

Funding! When I originally presented the idea of Fluencr two years ago to investors, most of them looked at me

like I was kind of crazy! They couldn’t conceptualize the concept of a platform that democratized the concept of an endorsement deal down to the “average person” who could prove to be influential.

Now that I have a great team around me and the concept of Fluencr.com is built and has been validated by some of the biggest brands in the world, we are attempting to raise additional capital to grow the platform and take advantage of the market opportunity.

After I invested $80,000 plus into the company, I was able to secure an additional $35,000 from 3 different investors. We are currently raising an additional $600,000.

How will you make money from the platform?

Fluencr’s business model consists of three avenues of revenue.

Campaign Fee: We charge a campaign fee that brands pay to create a campaign. This fee is based on campaign participation and the amount of data we deliver the brand.

Data: Brands will be able to purchase non-identifying aggregate data around campaigns.

Affiliate Revenue: Fluencr will eventually collect a small percentage of purchases generated for a brand as a result of their Fluencr campaign.