Background

There is an explosion of content being created. 300 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 95M photos are shared on Instagram every day. From brands creating marketing collateral to upload on their social media accounts to vloggers making daily videos to musicians creating bite-size sharable clips, creating content is now critical for any business. There are 34M creative businesses who rely on content like YouTubers, photographers, wedding planners, Instagrammers, musicians, bloggers and more.

Creating content is hard, time consuming and costly. Scouting locations, contacting owners, negotiating deals, making bookings, handling insurance and permits, confirming content rights, finding and booking specialists to help, renting equipment, catering and more all take up valuable time and resources. There is no single platform to power the content creation process and streamline the logistics of getting from idea to eyeball. 

Company Specifics

AVVAY’s vision is to bring this marketplace together on a single platform, enabling content creators to spend more time creating content (the work they love) and less on overhead and logistics. 

AVVAY is starting with locations, as it’s where everything comes together. Content creators can find and book locations where their content can come alive. AVVAY Pro allows content creators to find and book vendors like lighting specialists, photographers, sound engineers, caterers and more who have worked at a specific location. 

In addition to increased efficiency for content creators and more revenue for venues, AVVAY’s platform ensures content rights are secured for the creators, solving a critical issue in the industry. Airbnb on the other hand, does not ensure content rights belong to the creator and actively discourage using their locations for content creation. Many Airbnb hosts co-list onto AVVAY where they can make as much in an hour as they do in a night.

Content creators pay a 12% commission to AVVAY on the booking price, similar to Airbnb, and venues pay 8% of the booking price to AVVAY. This gives AVVAY a healthy 20% cut on the booking price. 

AVVAY is live and focused on three regions to start: Nashville, Portland and Dallas. They already have hundreds of bookings each month and thousands of users.

Jon Howard (CEO), Nick Dominguez (COO), Josh Colbert (CTO) and Nick de Partee (CMO) are all ex-professional musicians and know the content creation industry from years of first-hand experience. They’ve toured the world together and played some of the biggest stages in the world, including Madison Square Garden, Wembly and Red Rocks. While creating content on the road to engage with their fans, they continuously struggled to find and book locations, and to solve this problem AVVAY was born. 

Natty met the AVVAY team when they applied for the 2018 Techstars Boulder program through a top mentor referral. They were accepted into the program and Natty got to see their vision and drive first hand. You can see their demo day pitch here. We decided to invest based on the wave they are riding, the growing market opportunity, their connection to the problem/customer and the team's ability to execute at a high level.