Fuego: Helping content creators start their own brand 

Social Media Influencers—individuals with a large number of dedicated social media followers—are creating the latest fad in marketing across the world. These influencers enjoy a strong rapport with their fans which makes influencer marketing work like a charm in creating brand awareness and achieving other marketing goals.

There are around 37.8 million social media influencers in the world, celebrities and other high profile public figures included. 

Social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Patreon, Upstack, etc. are brimming with content creators who have a huge fan-following and they need more streamlined ways to monetise their contents alongside advertising, sponsorships, paid partnerships and brand deals.

Most content creators want to be able to connect with their followers on a more personal level with products that resonate more with what their content is about.

Seeing a gap, brothers Syed Rafi Tanzim and Syed Rubab Redwan decided to tap into this market sector with a revamped idea of a retail marketplace called Fuego—a platform that bridges the gap between bottom-level producers and content creators.  

Speaking to The Business Standard, Rafi said, "Creators are the future of distribution. If Amazon can serve as a distribution channel to their 200 million prime subscribers, a thousand creators with a million followers each collectively have a larger distribution network than Amazon and Walmart combined. We wanted to take advantage of this growth and reinvent how retail is done traditionally."

What exactly is Fuego?  

The aim of Fuego is to help influencers launch their own brands with products from the suppliers. Any influencer with over 50,000 followers can sign up with Fuego. 

"We're trying to connect these two creators (social media influencers and bottom-level producers). We're a marketplace that connects suppliers across different product verticals with creators, which makes it very easy and brings everything under one platform," Rafi said. 

These products can be anything and everything ranging from food and beverages, apparel, home decoration, jewellery, cosmetics, pet care and everything in between. 

"Many platforms out there focus on single verticals but we wanted to build a horizontally integrated platform where suppliers from every category could connect with content creators. Making this connection happen is what Fuego is doing," Rafi elaborated. 

Rafi and his brother Rubab were born and raised in Rajshahi. Rafi, who is currently studying at the University of Toronto, founded Fuego with his brother in hopes of giving the bottom-level producers a platform that values their hard work. 

E-commerce, but dedicated to one cause

We asked Rafi how Fuego, as an independent marketplace, is any different from other streamlined marketplaces doing something similar. He answered, "We're trying to find suppliers with a unique story to tell so the creators can share it with their audience and ultimately white-label those products as their own, supporting these small businesses in the process."

Online content creators monetise their content with advertisements, sponsorships, brand deals, among others. So why would they opt to work with Fuego when they have access to more streamlined partnership methods with other platforms?

Rafi explained, "What we've noticed is these creators actually prefer to market their own branded products over other sources of monetisation. The reason behind this is that they have an emotional relationship with their followers and they want to be a bit more authentic in terms of the products they want to sell to them."

As per Rafi, what makes Fuego exceptionally attractive is that the entire journey of a product, from sourcing, designing, packaging and launching it to the followers happens on a single platform. 

Fuego also uses deep learning to gather data to make smart recommendations of what matches a particular influencer's audience and calculate engagement rates to analyse how many units of a certain product an influencer can market to their audience. These readings and statistics also act as a leverage to lure in more content creators. 

"Our job is to identify creators who have a very high engagement rate and have a chunk of devoted followers. This is where the data we collect comes into play. If, for example, an influencer has 80% male followers, these readings will tell us which products to push to him/her to effectively grab his/her fanbase," Rafi said. 

Rafi said he wishes to gamify the fanbases of every content creator partnered with Fuego by analyzing data. 

"Since we are mostly working with consumable products as of yet, the nature of purchase will be recurring. So, if a follower is repeatedly buying one product from a creator instead of sourcing it from traditional outlets, it means that this follower is loyal to the creator and one of the top fans," he added.

The gamification will also help Fuego to bring in loyalty and reward programs into the creator economy and help them reach a larger fanbase by rewarding their top fans and arranging more similar contests. 

The scope of Fuego

To find out what products creators are most interested in to white-label, Fuego carries out a survey and approaches different bottom-level wholesale marketplaces and seeks out suppliers who will agree to have their products white-labelled.

"The suppliers send us a quotation that states their minimum order requirements and customisation features. On top of that, the creators are subject to a huge markup as it is 'their brand' now and their followers will usually purchase the products without question as a way of showing support, making it easier for the creators to tag a hefty price," Rafi elaborated. 

As for the platform itself, Fuego is subjected to a 5% fee every time a transaction is made on the platform. 

Although Fuego will be launching exclusively in the US, Rafi hopes to eventually onboard some Bangladeshi suppliers onto the platform. 

"I hope to work with suppliers of locally produced tea from Sylhet and katha weavers from Rangpur soon so influencers can talk about Bangladeshi traditional merchandise on a global scale to millions of people," Rafi shared.

Till now, Fuego has obtained USD 300,000 in seed funding from American entrepreneur Lucy Guo.

Apart from operating Fuego, the brother-duo have also taken part in many different science olympiads at regional and national levels, which has landed Rafi a full-ride scholarship at the University of Toronto, where he is a part of the self-driving car team that won the GM/SAE International AutoDrive Challenge three years in row.

Rafi has also worked on simulation for autonomous vehicles at NVIDIA in Silicon Valley and spent a summer helping build voice commands on Photoshop at Adobe Research.