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Happs raises $4.7 million for a multicast livestream platform creator community
Happs, an app that lets creators stream live video simultaneously across social platforms, has raised $4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally began as a platform for independent journalists, but expanded its mission last year to offer tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network.
The funding was led by Bullpen Capital and Crosslink, Goodwater, Corazon, Rob Hayes of First Round Capital and Bangaly Kaba, previously at Instagram and Sequoia, also participated.
What sets Happs apart from some established competitors in the space is the team’s desire to not only build tools that help video creators produce professional-looking online streams, but to cultivate a kind of meta-community that brings people together from across other social media sites.
“We kind of view this as the essence of what the creator economy is all about,” Happs CEO Mark Goldman told TechCrunch. “The idea of locking creators into an individual platform is a very traditional way of thinking about content creation.”
Like Goldman, the other co-founders, David Neuman and Drew Shepard, come from the media world. Goldman was the founding COO of Current TV, an experimental TV channel that dabbled in user-generated content and eventually sold to Al Jazeera in 2013.
“The whole idea was to democratize media and open it up,” Goldman said of his time working on Current TV, which he connects directly to his interest in building Happs. “[We] loved the creativity unleashed by that.”
Online creators tend to be siloed within the app where they’ve built the biggest community, but Happs wants to empower them to reach as many followers as possible in a platform-agnostic way. For creators, the appeal with multistreaming is maximizing reach while making content efficiently. There’s a risk of alienating YouTube followers at the expense of your Twitch community if you don’t play your cards right, but some savvy content creators have turned toward the model to grow their audiences.
Happs connects people across platforms in a few ways. For one, Happs users can broadcast live to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch simultaneously. The app also collects live comments from all supported social media sites and beams them into its own interface where they appear in a continuous cross-platform stream.
The integrated comment feature is nice built-in option for anyone who’s straddled comments across multiple devices simultaneously while livestreaming, which is no easy feat. When you’re streaming live you can feature a comment so that followers can see it on the screen no matter what platform they’re watching on.
Other companies in the space like OBS, Streamlabs and Restream are focused on the tools part of the equation, offering power users a useful backend for pushing out multi-streamed live video. Streamyard also offers multistreaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms through a simple browser interface.
Unlike those services, Happs feels more like a social network, with familiar features like user profile photos, follower counts and a feed next to a “go live” button. Anyone can use the multi-streaming platform through its iOS or Android apps or a web interface, whether they’re a creator signing up for the tools or a fan looking to support the content they love.
Happs lacks some of its competitors’ bells and whistles, stuff like fancy customized graphics and lower-thirds, but has a few interesting tricks of its own. While streaming live on Happs, you can invite someone else on the app to join your feed for a real-time collaboration. The social networking elements are meant to encourage cross-platform creativity, so a YouTuber and a Twitch personality could hang out together and boost both of their reaches, all while streaming to a bunch of other apps.
Happs also offers users monetization tools from the get-go, with no requirements before they can start making money. That speaks to the app’s appeal for creators who might be less established or just starting out. Happs could be a much harder sell for a popular creator deeply invested in a platform like Twitch, which has rules against multi-streaming for most accounts that are allowed to monetize.
There are a few different ways to monetize. One lets anyone on Happs sponsor a broadcaster through regular monthly payments. The other is a one-off option that lets you chip in an award for any livestream, or to the VOD (video on demand) after the fact. The in-app currency is a virtual coin that users can buy or earn through doing stuff on the app. There are no plans for ads (yet, anyway).
The company will take 30% cut of subscription earnings, though according to Goldman they’ll be waiving those fees for an unspecified period of time to attract people to the platform.
“We raised this round to really build up product and tech team [and] to make the platform much more stable and reliable,” Goldman said. The company is looking forward to leveraging the new resources to “really go out now and get in front of creators so they know Happs exists.”
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Roofr just nailed down a second seed round to make new roofing sales a cinch to close
Roofer Pro. Roof Snap. Acculynx. There’s suddenly no shortage of companies offering software to make easier the lives of roofers and their customers. Among these is Roofr, a five-year-old, San Francisco-based, 31-person sales platform for roofing contractors that just raised $4.25 million in post-seed funding led by Bullpen Capital, with participation from Avidbank and previous backer Crosslink Capital.
Co-founder and CEO Rich Nelson is aware of the competition. But as a third-generation roofer by trade, he also knows well that the industry is far from overcoming its reputation as rife with sketchy, flaky contractors whose customers often question whether they need a new roof or suspect the estimates they are given are wildly inflated.
He also knows — as do his investors — how big a market opportunity Roofr and its rivals are chasing. “It’s a massive, massive market,” says Nelson. “On average, every year, roughly five million buildings in the U.S. have their roof replaced,” and they spend $50 billion toward that end, he says.
Right now, Roofr is focused exclusively on helping close that initial sale. It all starts with a picture of a roof that Roofr obtains from partner companies like Nearmap, whose planes cover cities at low altitude to take high-definition pictures, including of roofs. Roofr software then allows these contractors to draw their own roof measurement reports through these drone, blueprint and satellite images and produce a report, or they can pay Roofr $10 per report to measure the roof for them.
Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 made the software more attractive to both roofing contractors and customers who weren’t keen on being in close proximity during the pandemic. Offerings like Roofr’s made it possible to quickly and easily send a potential customer a quote without visiting the job site. The bet now is that growing awareness over the product will continue to fuel that momentum.
The company also has new offerings in the pipeline that may make it more compelling to both roofers and their clients. In addition to quickly providing roofers with measurement data, for example, roofers can now pay a monthly fee to have Roofr auto-populate an estimate based on a specific materials list, as well as the profit margin the roofer wants to incorporate; it also now provides and preserves digital contracts.
As for its current customer base, Nelson says that it includes the largest roofing contractors in North America, but that Roofr is even more interested in small businesses, which, while fragmented, represent a much bigger opportunity. He says that there are more than 100,000 registered roofing businesses in the U.S., and that the vast majority are comprised of five employees or fewer. (Roofr also sells its software to independent insurance adjusters.)
The new round brings Roofr’s total funding to $8.25 million. Crosslink led its initial seed round in early 2019. Roofr also raised money from Y Combinator when it passed through the accelerator program in 2017.
Pictured above from left to right: Roofr co-founders Kevin Redman and Rich Nelson. Redman is the company’s CTO; Nelson is its CEO.
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Creator monetization and CRM startup Pico raises $6.5M
Pico, a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data, announced today that it has launched an upgraded platform and raised $6.5 million in new funding.
In a statement, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Nick Chen said Pico helps creators with their two biggest problems — “how to make money more easily and how to get to know your audience better” — while also giving them control over their two most important assets, namely “your brand and the relationship to your audience.”
The company provides a long list of different tools, including landing pages, pop-ups to collect email addresses, paid newsletters, subscription paywalls, tiered membership programs, recurring and one-time donations and video revenue tools. With version 2.0, the company says it’s bringing all these features together with a unified data structure, so that customers can see “who is paying for what content and where they came from” in one dashboard.
Via email, co-founder and President Jason Bade (pictured above with Chen) pointed to “the power of our CRM to help creators understand their audience” as the most significant upgrade, suggesting that this “makes Pico the operating system for the creator economy.”
Image Credits: Pico
“A creator can’t scale a business without the proper tools,” Bade continued. “Take email capture, that is the first step in audience development. But what next? You need data and a CRM to handle it. 2.0 upgrades every part of Pico to rearchitect it for the scalability and extensibility that the creator economy demands.”
Pico also said it will be launching an API soon to support integrations with different parts of the platform.
Apparently, the company has seen its customer count increase nearly 5x in the past year, with customers including The Colorado Sun, Defector Media and The Generalist. And it recently recruited Rodolphe Ködderitzsch (who held a number of roles at YouTube, including global head of partner sales) as its chief revenue officer.
The new funding was led by Ann Lai at Bullpen Capital and brings Pico’s total funding to $10 million. Other investors include Precursor Ventures, Stripe, BloombergBeta and Village Global.
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Bullpen closes its third fund at $75 million to back post-seed stage startups
Bullpen Capital, a venture firm that specializes in post-seed stage deals, has closed its third fund at $75 million. The firm invests in companies that previously closed a seed round of investment, showed solid signs of traction, but have been dubbed too early for traditional VC’s anyway. Bullpen founder, Paul Martino, said “Our rounds get the CEOs real coverage. We put founders… Read More
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