🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

BrandLens

✍️ Notes from the Editors

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Authenticity matters—everyone loves to see a five-star review on a brand they want to try. BrandLens understands this and wants to help brands better harness the power of user-generated content.

A note from this week’s contributor Matthew Huo: Julyp is a low-code AI assistant that makes data analysis easy. You can chat with data, pull information from the web, and generate charts and dashboards simply by chatting. The team would love to hear your thoughts—reach out on LinkedIn!

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Engaging customers through user-generated content

BrandLens is a software platform that allows businesses to easily build templates for user-generated content that their customers can easily use. They support various video formats and interactive features like on-screen instructions, surveys, and branded elements to guide users in creating content that aligns with the brand's message. BrandLens allows businesses to also collect that user-generated content, manage it, and easily publish it online. 

Say a business is looking to show a montage of video testimonials from customers. That business could create a BrandLens video template to record its testimonial, including things like sound effects, a script/template to read off, and video filters. After customers make recordings with this template, the business can use BrandLens, which includes AI-enabled features, to curate, brand, and organize the content before editing and publishing that co-created content.

🔗 Check it out: brandlens.io

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💰 Business Model

BrandLens has five tiers of paid offerings that can be billed annually or monthly. These include a starter plan geared toward small teams, a plan for teams with typical video content needs, a professional plan for teams with considerable video content needs, and two customizable plans for enterprises and agencies. All of these include a two-week free trial, but are mainly differentiated by the number of active video campaigns allowed, total storage/video time allowed per month, and team members allowed.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Currently pre-seed and gearing up to raise venture capital

• Won the 2023 Glendale Tech Week pitch competition

• Over 40,000 videos have been created

• Had 15,000 videos created with a late 2023/early 2024 partnership with Hershey’s Southeast Asia, where Hershey’s customers could personalize Hershey’s kisses with videos,  and had another 15,000 videos created during a separate partnership with Ready Set

👫 Founders

• Vahag Karayan (CEO): Previously Co-Founder @ CogniCoder, Founder and CEO @ JAVI Sports, Head of Professional Services @ Entertainment Partners, Systems Engineer @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MBA, Embedded Systems MS and EE with CS BS @ UCLA

• Gugo Martikyan (CTO/COO): Previously Co-Founder @ CogniCoder, VP of Technology @ Entertainment Partners, Systems Engineer/Software Developer @ JPL, CSE @ UCLA

• Vahagn Khachikyan (CPO): Previously Senior Creative Engineer @ PicsArt, Founder @ D’efekt, Design Lead @ Bazillion Beings

📖 Founder Story

Vahag Karayan and Gugo Martikyan met at UCLA and worked together at a previous company, Entertainment Partners, where they were both in business roles. When they were trying to create content for social media marketing, they realized how influential user-generated content could be, but did not think there was an easy and efficient way of curating and distributing it. They also knew Vahag Khachikyan, who had experience in design and video/camera technology. Having experienced the problem firsthand, they were interested in seeing if there was a better solution for content collaboration and curation, so the three started BrandLens.

💼 Opportunities

Right now, there are no opportunities listed. However, after BrandLens finishes raising its upcoming round of fundraising, the team will be looking for folks in business development/marketing roles. So, stay tuned!

🔮 Our Analysis

All businesses are serving content of some form to better engage customers, or potential customers, from testimonials to reviews to social media posts. User-generated content (UGC) is particularly powerful for businesses, as it fosters greater trust and engagement. BrandLens seeks to become the leading platform for video collection, co-creation, and curation, similar to Canva’s role in graphic design.

Content curation and collaboration has many use cases, and authentic UGC outperforms other content. According to Nielsen, 84% of consumers trust peer recommendations and word-of-mouth more than other forms of advertising. If a business can get authentic content from its customers, from testimonials and reviews to support and engagement, that UGC can positively influence other consumers and in turn, improve either revenue, engagement, branding, or a combination of all three. Right now, there is no dominant UGC platform that businesses use for sourcing and co-creating content, meaning BrandLens can become that dominant player. BrandLens is currently looking to complete its first fundraising round. It has been cash-positive and efficient thus far while bootstrapped and has also built successful partnerships with companies like Hershey’s. Doing this so early is not only great traction, but also provides validation that there are real use cases for such a UGC curation platform. In addition, the founding team not only has expertise and experience in video and content curation and marketing. 

With the ubiquitous need for content, BrandLens is well-positioned to capitalize on multiple use cases, starting with UGC. It’s already seen momentum with use cases like personalized gift-giving content (Hershey’s), social media agencies, and traditional customer reviews. Meanwhile, it has also seen some initial use cases like employee engagement and interactive events. This strategic entry allows them to build on early success while remaining adaptable for future growth. If BrandLens can build off of its early momentum while expanding the various verticals and use cases for which it can create user-generated content, the company will be well-positioned to become the premiere solution for organizations to create and source content.

📚 Further reading

• 2023 Glendale Tech Week [Glendale News-Press]

• BrandLens YouTube Channel [YouTube]

• The Real Definition of UGC (Beyond Influencers and Creators) [BrandLens]

Written by Matthew Huo

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