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When Laura Wittig and Liza Moiseeva met as guests on a podcast about sustainable fashion, they jibed so well together that they began one of their own: Good Together. Their show’s goal was to provide listeners with a place to learn how to be eco-conscious consumers, but with baby steps.
Wittig thinks the non-judgmental environment (one that doesn’t knock on a consumer for not being zero-waste overnight) is the show’s biggest differentiator. “Then, people were emailing us and asking how they can be on our journey beyond being a listener,” Wittig said. Now, over a year after launching the show, the co-hosts are turning validation from listeners into the blueprint for a standalone business: Brightly.
Brightly is a curated platform that sells vetted eco-friendly goods and shares tips about conscious consumerism. While the startup is launching with more than 200 products from eco-friendly brands, such as Sheets & Giggles and Juice Beauty, the long-term vision is to start their own commerce brand of Brightly-branded products. The starting lineup will include two to four products in the home space.
To get those products out by the holiday season, Brightly tells TechCrunch that it has raised $1 million in venture funding from investors, including Tacoma Venture Fund, Keeler Investments, Odile Roujol (a FAB Ventures backer and former L’Oréal CEO) and Female Founder’s Alliance.
The funding caps off a busy 12 months for Brightly. The startup has gone through Snap’s Yellow accelerator, an in-house effort from the social media company that began in 2018. As part of the program Snap invests $150,000 in each Yellow startup for an equity stake. The company also did Ready Set Raise, an equity-free accelerator put on by Female Founders Alliance, in the fall.
With new funding, Brightly is seeking to take a Glossier-style approach to become the next big brand in commerce: gather a community by recommending great products, then turn the strategy on its head and make your superfans buy in-house products under the same brand.
“We have access to a community of women who are beating our door down to shop directly with us and have exclusive products made for them,” Wittig said.
Brightly wants to be more than a “boring storefront” one could quickly whip up on Shopify or Amazon, Wittig says.
The company’s curation process, which every product goes through before being listed on the platform, is extensive. The startup makes sure that every product is created with sustainable and ethical supply chain processes and sustainable material. The team also interviews every brand’s founders to understand the genesis of any product that lives on the Brightly platform. The co-founders also weigh the durability and longevity of products, adopting what Wittig sees as a “Wirecutter approach.”
“It’s more like, ‘why would we pick an ethically produced leather handbag over something that might be made not from leather but wouldn’t last too long necessarily,’ ” she said. “These are the conversations we have with our audience, because the term eco-friendly is very much our grayscale.”
Image Credits: Brightly
More than 250,000 people come to Brightly, either through their app or website, every day, according to Wittig. The startup monetizes largely through brand partnerships and getting those users in front of paid products.
Image Credits: Brightly
The monetization strategy is similar to what you might find a podcast use: affiliate links or product placement mid-episode. But while the co-founders are relying on this strategy right now, they see the opportunity to create their own e-commerce company as larger and more lucrative.
“The billion-dollar opportunity is not with that,” Wittig said. “The value will be going direct commerce and selling our picks of ethical sustainable goods.”
Marking the transition from podcasting about eco-friendly goods to creating them in-house is a strong pivot. The co-founders consider creating a distribution commerce channel to be a larger opportunity and likely more lucrative than the podcasting business.
Beyond creating a line of their own products, Brightly is thinking about how to partner with white-label sustainable products. Another option, Wittig said, is to partner with big corporations to get products on their shelves with colors and customization for Brightly. An example of an ideal partnership would be Reformation’s recent partnership with Blueland.
Wittig declined to share more details on how they plan to win, but likened the strategy to that of Goop or Glossier, two companies that started with content arms and drew their community into a commerce platform.
“It’s not going to be a Thrive Market where there are hundreds and thousands of sustainable goods on there. It’s going to be much more curated,” she said.
COVID-19 has helped the startup further validate the need for a platform that unites a conscious consumer community.
“We are all so aware of the purchasing power we have,” she said. “As consumers we go out and support small businesses by getting coffee on the go. But before, we did not think twice about getting everything from Amazon.”
The conversation with investors hasn’t been as simple, the co-founder said. Investors continue to be “hands off” about community-based platforms because they are unsure it will work. Wittig says that many bearish investors have placed bets on singular direct-to-consumer brands, such as Away or Blueland.
“Those investors know the rising costs of customer acquisition, and see what happens when you don’t have a community that surrounds our business,” she said.
Brightly is betting that the future of commerce brands has to start with a go-to-market, and then bring in the end-product, instead of the other way. The end goal here for Brightly is attracting, and generating excitement from, Gen Z and millennial shoppers. To do so, Wittig says that Brightly is experimenting with ways to implement socialization aspects into the shopping experience.
Leslie Feinzaig, the founder of Female Founders Alliance, said that what’s special about Brightly is that it “demonstrated demand before building for it.”
“I think a lot of people today could build software to connect people and sell things, but very few people could get thousands of fanatical followers to actually engage with each other and make that software useful,” Feinzaig said. “Brightly built that community with matchsticks and tape.”
Myanmar’s new military government has ordered local telecom operators, internet gateways, and other internet service providers to block Twitter and Instagram in the South Asian country days after imposing a similar blackout on Facebook service to ensure “stability” in the Southeast Asian nation.
Several users from Myanmar confirmed that they were unable to access Twitter. NetBlocks, which tracks global internet usage, further reported that multiple networks in the country had started to block the American social network.
The nation’s Transport and Communications alleged in its order, dated February 5, that Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram were being abused to spread propaganda and misinformation to the public and this posed threat to stability of the nation. The ministry offered the same explanation when it ordered to temporarily block Facebook until February 7th midnight earlier this week.
Friday’s order comes as thousands of Myanmar citizens joined Twitter this week to protest the new military government that seized power by detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected leaders of her National League for Democracy, which won by landslide last year.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Confirmed: Twitter is now being restricted in #Myanmar on multiple network providers; real-time network data show loss of service from ~10:00 p.m. local time with operators MPT, Mytel, Welink, 5BB and Frontiir
https://t.co/Jgc20OBk27 pic.twitter.com/jXUj6ONhmH
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) February 5, 2021
This is a developing story. More to follow…
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/myanmar-military-government-is-now-blocking-twitter/
BeGreatTV, an online education platform featuring Black and brown instructors, recently closed a $450K pre-seed round from Stand Together Ventures Lab, Arlan Hamilton, Tiffany Haddish and others.
The goal with BeGreatTV is to enable anyone to learn from talented Black and brown innovators and leaders, founder and CEO Cortney Woodruff told TechCrunch.
“When you think of being a Black or brown person or individual who wants to learn from a Black or brown person, there’s nothing that really exists that gives you a glossary of every business vertical and where you see representation at every level in a well put together way,” Woodruff said. “That alone makes our market a lot larger because there are just so many verticals where no one has really invested in or shown before.”
The courses are designed to teach folks how to execute and succeed in a particular industry, enable people to better understand the business aspect of industries while also teaching “you how to deal with the socioeconomic and racial injustices that come with being the only one in the room. Whether you are a Black man or woman who wants to get into the makeup industry, there will always be a lot of biases in the world.”
When BeGreatTV launches in a couple of months (the plan is to launch in April), the platform will feature at least 10 courses — each with around 15 episodes — focused on arts, entertainment, beauty and more. At launch, courses will be available from Sir John, a celebrity makeup artist for L’Oreal and Beyoncé’s personal makeup artist, BeGreatTV co-founder Cortez Bryant, who was also Lil Wayne and Drake’s manager, as well as Law Roach, Zendaya’s stylist.
Hamilton and Haddish will also teach their own respective courses on business and entertainment, Woodruff said. So far, BeGreatTV has produced more than 40 episodes that range anywhere from three to 15 minutes each.
Image Credits: BeGreatTV
Each course will cost $64.99, and the plan is to eventually offer an all-access subscription model once BeGreatTV beefs up its offerings a bit more. For instructors, BeGreatTV shares royalties with them.
“Ultimately, the platform can include a more diverse casting of instructors that aren’t just Black and brown,” Woodruff said. But for now, he said, the idea is to “reverse the course of ‘Now this is our first Black instructor’ but ‘now this is the first white instructor'” on the platform.
BeGreatTV’s team consists of just 15 people, but includes heavy hitters like Cortez and actor Jesse Williams. Currently, BeGreatTV is working on closing its seed round and anticipates a six-figure user base by the end the year.
MasterClass is perhaps BeGreatTV’s biggest competitor. With classes taught by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Shonda Rhimes and David Sedaris, it’s no wonder why MasterClass has become worth more than $800 million. The company’s $180 annual subscription fee accounts for all of its revenue.
“If you benchmark [BeGreatTV] to MasterClass, we are finding individuals that are not only the best at what they do in the world, but often times these individuals have broken barriers because often times they were the first to do it,” Woodruff said. “And do it without having people who look like them.”
Before he was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gaurav Gupta had his eye on Grafana Labs, the company that supports open-source analytics platform Grafana. But Raj Dutt, Grafana’s co-founder and CEO, played hard to get.
This week on Extra Crunch Live, the duo explained how they came together for Grafana’s Series A — and eventually, its Series B. They also walked us through Grafana’s original Series A pitch deck before Gupta shared the aspects that stood out to him and how he communicated those points to the broader partnership at Lightspeed.
Gupta and Dutt also offered feedback on pitch decks submitted by audience members and shared their thoughts about what makes a great founder presentation, pulling back the curtain on how VCs actually consume pitch decks.
We’ve included highlights below as well as the full video of our conversation.
We record new episodes of Extra Crunch Live each Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. Check out the February schedule here.
Episode breakdown:
- How they met — 2:00
- Grafana’s early pitch deck — 12:00
- The enterprise ecosystem — 25:00
- The pitch deck teardown — 32:00
How they met
As soon as Gupta joined Lightspeed in June 2019, he began pursuing Dutt and Grafana Labs. He texted, called and emailed, but he got little to no response. Eventually, he made plans to go meet the team in Stockholm but, even then, Dutt wasn’t super responsive.
The pair told the story with smiles on their faces. Dutt said that not only was he disorganized and not entirely sure of his own travel plans to see his co-founder in Stockholm, Grafana wasn’t even raising. Still, Gupta persisted and eventually sent a stern email.
“At one point, I was like ‘Raj, forget it. This isn’t working’,” recalled Gupta. “And suddenly he woke up.” Gupta added that he got mad, which “usually does not work for VCs, by the way, but in this case, it kind of worked.”
When they finally met, they got along. Dutt said they were able to talk shop due to Gupta’s experience inside organizations like Splunk and Elastic. Gupta described the trip as a whirlwind, where time just flew by.
“One of the reasons that I liked Gaurav is that he was a new VC,” explained Dutt. “So to me, he seemed like one of the most non-VC VCs I’d ever met. And that was actually quite attractive.”
To this day, Gupta and Dutt don’t have weekly standing meetings. Instead, they speak several times a week, conversing organically about industry news, Grafana’s products and the company’s overall trajectory.
Grafana’s early pitch deck
Dutt shared Grafana’s pre-Series A pitch deck — which he actually sent to Gupta and Lightspeed before they met — with the Extra Crunch Live audience. But as we know now, it was the conversations that Dutt and Gupta had (eventually) that provided the spark for that deal.
When you are able to navigate a world that is designed for you, it’s easy to avoid thinking about how the world is designed for you. But it can be different if you are disabled.
At TechCrunch Sessions: Justice on March 3, we will examine the importance of ensuring accessible product design from the beginning. We’ll ask how the social and medical models of disability influence technological evolution. Integrating the expertise of disabled technologists, makers, investors, scientists, software engineers into the DNA of your company from the very beginning is vital to the pursuit of a functioning and equitable society. And could mean you don’t leave money on the table.
Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: Justice for a wide-ranging discussion as we attempt to answer these questions and further explore inclusive design with Cynthia Bennett, Mara Mills and Srin Madipalli.
Cynthia Bennett is a post-doc at Carengie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, as well as a researcher at Apple. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction, accessibility and Disability Studies, and, she says on her website, spans “the critique and development of HCI theory and methods to designing emergent accessible interactions with technology.” Her research includes Biographical Prototypes: Reimagining Recognition and Disability in Design and The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other.”
Mara Mills is the Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a co-founder and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Mills research focuses on sound studies, disability studies and history. (You can hear her discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and disability with Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and Sara Hendren, professor at Olin College of Engineering and author of the recently published What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World, on the TechCrunch Mixtape podcast here.)
Srin Madipalli is an investor and co-founder of Accomable, an online platform that helped users find accessible vacation properties, which he sold to Airbnb. His advocacy work focuses on disability inclusion iBe sure to snag your tickets here for just $5 here.n the workplace, as well as advising tech companies on accessibility.
Make sure you can join us for this conversation and more at TC Sessions: Justice on March 3. Secure your seat now!
