GGWP Academy
- Type: Retail
- Total Round Size (min): AUD$350,040
- Total Round Size (max): AUD$1,200,000
- Price per share: AUD$60
GGWP Academy
GGWP is an e-learning platform that enables creators to build their following and start to monetise their content through brand sponsorships on our Influencer Marketplace.
- Fees Paid by Issuer: 6% of funds raise
- Cooling-Off Rights: 5 working days
- Minimum Parcel Size: $120
Offer Overview
Key Documents
Investor Rewards
For investments between: $250 - $499
- Limited edition bronze investor badge in-app
- 3 month membership for free
For investments between: $500 - $1,499
- Limited edition silver investor badge in-app
- 6 month membership for free
- A chance to go to E3 and represent our brand
For investments between: $1,500 - $2,499
- Limited edition gold investor badge
- 6 month membership for free
- Limited edition investor merchandise
- A chance to go to E3 and represent our brand
For investments above: $2,500
- Limited edition gold investor badge
- 6 month membership for free
- A chance to go to E3 and represent our brand
- Limited edition investor merchandise
- Tickets to an exclusive party at PAX Australia with all of our creator investors and brands
What is GGWP Academy?
In 2018, Jacqueline (Jax) Garrett founded GGWP Academy after her 9 year old son competed in three World Championships, made national TV, signed to two top tier esports teams and earned over $15K in brand deals in his first year as a content creator. Throughout this experience, Jax learned just how fragmented this industry was and that education, professionalism and structure were required to substantiate this wildly growing and lucrative space.
So in 2020, Jax (joined by co-founders John and Cassie) left their jobs to focus on their full-time mission to create the next evolution of the creator ecosystem. Since launching a few years ago, GGWP has taken off, winning contracts with global brands like Electronic Arts, Logitech, Casio and 2K (just to name a few) to power their businesses.
We are now commencing our expansion into the US, and preparations are underway to activate GGWP’s monetisation strategy, including the launch of GGWP’s automated Marketplace.
The Problem
86% of young Americans aged 16-28 want to become some sort of social media influencer. The lack of guidance and structure has led to over 95 million content creators struggling to make it in this industry, while the top 1% earn a majority of the money. This has led to many creators becoming demotivated and leaving the industry.
On the flip side, more and more brands are starting to invest into influencer marketing (the Influencer Marketing Industry is predicted to reach $16.4 billion in 2022 alone), but they still come across the following issues:
- Difficulties finding the right talent for their campaign
- Inability to accurately attribute results to their marketing efforts
- Difficulty managing multiple influencers
- Other tax and payment complexities
There’s a huge opportunity to address both sides of the market.
The Solution
Our two-sided Marketplace connects emerging creators with brands to redefine the meaning of “Influencer Marketing”. We focus on micro and macro-influencers who are currently not catered to on most popular streaming platforms, as well as the under-serviced quadrant of emerging creators and being able to incubate them into fully fledged creators.
To provide the perfect flywheel for both influencers and brands, our platform focuses on the following features:
- Vetted Training Curriculum
- Built in Creator Mentorship
- Proprietary Matchmaking Technology
- Automated Post-Campaign Reporting
The Opportunity
RISE OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY
Gaming influencers are fast becoming a significant part of the creator economy. With over 64% of people in the US playing some sort of game and two of the top five most watched videos on YouTube being gaming related, it’s not hard to see the intersection between gaming and content creation rising. Now, with over 95 million gaming channels worldwide, there’s a pressing need to unite the industry and create an ecosystem with a direct pathway to a full-time career in gaming.
DESIRE FOR INSIGHTS TO GROW
The vast majority of creators (46.7 million) consider themselves to be amateurs and are looking for a way to learn and grow their following and community (approximately 60% of our community has joined as a means to achieve growth). Instead they are met with scams, bad advice and a wild west of tutorials to sift through. Oftentimes this lack of structure and guidance leads to them becoming demotivated and leaving the industry for a more traditional career path. We seek to create the go-to source of tools, resources and information for the creator who wants to take their content creation seriously.
NEED FOR A MONETARY OUTLET
More than 60% of creators on Twitch are unrepresented, and are classified as “micro” and “macro” influencers. With the onset of the pandemic, this number has more than doubled, with new people entering the content creation market. Currently, creators are quite passive in the way that brands discover them. They are either approached or they are left to spam a brand with several messages. We want to create a marketplace where brands can easily connect, not just with pre-existing talent, but emerging talent as well. The shift in the market is towards more authentic experiences and part of that is being able to hone a creator from the start of their journey.
NEED FOR A PLATFORM TO SOURCE & ENGAGE INFLUENCERS
68% of brands cite difficulties sourcing the right creator for their marketing campaigns. Our platform will allow brands to search for creators based on persona, game, location, past results and more. Additionally, brands come across payment and contractual complexities. A majority of brands still work off of Google Doc contracts and spreadsheets to track and manage their marketing campaigns. Our platform will provide them with live performance results from their campaigns and a clear overview of the results from their campaign.
Our Products
GGWP offers two different services combined into a seamless experience for the user: an education component and a Marketplace. The amount of training that you do on the platform and your growth directly correlates to your Influencer Score. This score is how brands perceive you as emerging talent.
Training Curriculum
This is the entry point to the platform. Aimed at creators who have just started or are hitting their growth phase and looking for guidance and community from other creators on a similar journey, they are provided with a unique curriculum to guide their journey. In fact, 89% of our users immediately consume more content when they don’t have enough Influencer XP to apply for a gig. Some of these training topics include:
- Personal Branding
- Social Media Marketing
- Growth Strategies (for each social media channel)
- Accounting
Our product allows creators to access tried and true tips and tricks from other full-time creators. Uniquely though, it also provides automated cohort insights for the creator to use in their journey. By storing these metrics within the platform, we’re able to help the creator leverage off the greater knowledge of the cohort.
Brand Marketplace
As you progress through the training and start to grow as content creators, our platform will drip-feed you brand deals and sponsorships. You can either be hired directly from your profile (which acts as your media kit) or apply to a brand deal that a brand has uploaded on the platform. You can negotiate your own rates and deals and add them to your profile before you engage a brand. The platform will handle all the contracts and payments for the creator and brand, as well as create automated reports for the brand, making it easy to rehire or repeat successful campaigns.
The Future of Content Creation
- During onboarding, the user connects their social media channels to their profile. They’re able to see their future trajectory as a creator
- Automated features match brands with the right influencers by location, following size, engagement rate (for example)
- Money is held in escrow until the campaign is over and no digital or paper contracts ever exchange hands
- Post tracking technology automatically tracks performance and delivers it, in real-time, to a Brand Dashboard
Investment Highlights
- Proven Traction and Product Market Fit
Used by over 11,000 creators from all over the world. We’ve created a flywheel that sees 83% of our creators consuming more training in order to get more brand deals, offering low-cost acquisition channels for growth.
- Disruptive Technology That Revolutionises the Influencer Marketing Industry
Finding the right influencer has been cited as a challenge for 73% of brands. This is followed by attribution. Our matchmaking and reporting engine focuses on identifying the right influencers for each brand and accurately measuring the return on investment for each campaign.
- Boom in Gaming and Micro Influencer Marketing Categories (growing at 20% YoY)
The Gaming industry has seen a huge increase in creators since the Pandemic hit. The category saw growth of 30% in accounts made between the years of 2020-2021. With more creators entering into the market, the segment of micro-influencers grew to 91% of all content creators in the market and the opportunity to service the 77% of brands who want to work with micro-influencers opened up.
- Backed by leAD Sports Accelerator, Startmate and Austrade
We’re backed by leAD Sports Accelerator, backed by Adidas' founder Adi Dassler’s family and Startmate, one of Australia’s most successful Accelerator programs. This gives us a massive global reach and network.
- Generated $288K Revenue Within 3 Months of Launch
Whilst developing our proprietary technology, we have also been busy validating the commercial potential of our platform, generating revenue from global brands within just three months. We are now hitting approximately $60,000 in revenue per month.
- Used by Over 40 Global Brands (Logitech, Electronic Arts, Casio)
GGWP is used by over 40 endemic and non-endemic brands from all over the world - with 26% of those brands coming back for seconds.
Our Key Differentiators
Proprietary Education Formula
This is key to our positioning. We’ve developed a training formula that can guarantee creator success. We developed this by engaging several full-time creators who had “made-it” and adopting the common elements into our training system.
Long-term Partnerships With Brands to Supply Creators
Brand deals that act as the carrot on the platform. We have worked with over 50 global brands and have long-term partnerships with them to supply them with emerging creators.
Ability to Identify Emerging Creators
We have the unique ability to identify emerging creators from the platform. We’re able to plot the trajectory of creator’s and provide insights to other creators in order to speed up their growth. No other Marketplace can do this.
Distribution at Scale
With a module completion rate of 33% and growing, our Alumni cohort continues to grow. These successful creators are the ones that will come back and complete the cycle by sharing their journey’s with other creators and mentoring them.
Key Team Members
Second time founder, mum to gaming pro and coffee lover, Jax utilises her passion, tenacity, resilience, network and over 20 years experience to drive the team and execute on the wider vision. Jax’s experience covers a wide variety of industries from aviation to marketing, project management, high end jewellery design and leadership of teams up to 150 people strong.
Jax is highly driven by the vision that GGWP will improve the professionalism, structure and success of the industry that her son works in and produce jobs of the future in content creation and gaming. She wants to expand the gaming creator economy to include those at a grassroots level and help them monetise far earlier.
Jax’s background gives her a unique view of startups and the gaming industry overall. Over the past 5 years she has forged a global network that will facilitate the future growth of GGWP.
Previous Work: Jetstar, Indie
Favourite Games: Minecraft, Halo, CS:GO, Pokemon and Web3 based games
Experienced Senior Software Engineer with a Computer Science background, Keto has an exceptional track record of building amazing products. His love for technology has led him to venture off and create new products such as URStash, a book exchange platform back in his university days. Since then, he went on to work at Freelancer.com, the freelancing site as a software engineer in the matchmaking team and was responsible for managing, deploying, and improving the core engine responsible for matching employers and freelancers on the site. He then moved into a product management role for the API team which was responsible for powering Freelancer Enterprise as well as other core functionalities for the Freelancer.com apps. After his time at Freelancer.com, Keto went on to work at the Fintech startup, Spaceship and in the core investment engine team responsible for implementing and managing the investment strategy issued by the finance investment team.
Previous Work: Freelancer, Spaceship
Favourite Games: FIFA, occasionally COD and Halo
A T-shaped marketer with 7 years of experience across SEO, email, content marketing, performance marketing, and operations. Her first startup was a sustainable food service at her University, bringing awareness to sustainable eating and providing students with a stable income while learning. She met John Keto whilst at Freelancer.com, working in the content and acquisitions team, where she was responsible for executing their content marketing strategy to organically acquire new users, increasing traffic to their website by 20% within three months. She’s since moved into consulting with startups, particularly in the Fintech industry and has had the privilege of designing and executing go-to-market strategies for several clients. When away from the computer, you’ll find her reading interesting growth hacking case studies (what a nerd) or playing her Fire Mage in World of Warcraft. It’s this passion in gaming and marketing that first interested her in joining GGWP - the chance to put two passions together and build a product that really helps people (it’s a no brainer!).
Previous Work: Freelancer, Winning Group, Harvey Norman, GSK
Favourite Games: Halo, COD, World of Warcraft
Financial Information
Use of Funds
Key Risks
For more information please see Section 2.18 in the Offer Document.
The risk of losing one of the founding team or key hires.
Mitigation
This is mitigated by the 3 founders sharing information and responsibility across all facets of the business. From financial to technological. We also store our company centric information on a central Notion page that acts as our company intranet/wiki page to ensure that everyone has access to the right information when needed.
Failure to build new technology to prove assumptions about marketing ROI.
Mitigation
GGWP has a CTO that has previously done very in-depth matchmaking capabilities for large and successful startups like Freelancer. We have the right people at the right time. With the right funding, this is largely reduced.
Not having an in real life presence in the US, where a bulk of our users reside.
Mitigation
By hiring US based BDMs next, we increase our local footprint there. We also intend to have presence at all major gaming conventions and trade shows.
The Company is in the process of raising funds to achieve its strategic business objectives. Failure to raise capital for growth and achieve all its business objectives.
Mitigation
As a company, GGWP intends to be cash flow positive before December 2022 to reduce the risk of under-funding our startup.
Being a first mover in the market implies that, ultimately, we will have indirect and eventually direct competition.
Mitigation
Our marketing team performs a monthly SWOT analysis on any new startups in our industry to keep a finger on the pulse but ultimately, we are driven by the product dream and our USP not our potential competitors. We are very aware our our USP and have built technological moats around this to reduce chances of replication.
Failure to attract enough brands to fill the pipeline of the Marketplace.
Mitigation
GGWP is lucky, we have a very diverse customer list and we span many, many industries. We are not reliant on one industry and we service brands from gaming publishers to peripherals, telecommunications, fashion, sneakers, beauty, retail, travel and FMCGs.
Negative sentiment amongst our users tends to bleed into the public arena, ecosystem and community.
Mitigation
GGWP is built by gamers, for gamers and we understand inherently what they want from us. By always putting their careers at the top of our priority list and making the gaming industry a better place for all stakeholders, we great reduce this risk.
If the Company does not maintain consistent levels of quality and service in its offering, the Company’s brand and reputation could be damaged.
Mitigation
The major risk we anticipate here is in keeping the balance right on our platform. Making sure we have enough gigs and enough users in the right demographics and locations to service our brand’s needs. So far, we have done an exceptional job of balancing our two-sided marketplace and feel like we have mitigated this risk by testing within our market, speaking with our users and understanding our brand’s needs and acting upon that. We also know how to leverage one side to build the other side. This means that even if there is a slight imbalance, we can rectify very quickly and understand the mechanisms to make this happen.
Legislative and regulatory changes by government or by major streaming platforms we work with (e.g. Twitch or Facebook Gaming).
Mitigation
We stay up to date as a team and watch all major players in our industry closely. We also have a gaming and esports specific lawyer who has 10 years experience in this field.
Why Equity Crowdfunding?
Gaming is inherently social. We want to give creators the chance to impact their own future and a reason to help us build a better way for creators to make a living.
If you resonate with our mission and or our creators’ stories, become a co-owner and help us build the future of the creator economy. Here’s to Smarter Influence!