Like a lot of ambitious college students, Michael Ivkov and Faisal Younus dreamed of starting their own business and becoming successful entrepreneurs.
So, the Harvard undergrads took action, and started taking inventory of what they knew and what they were passionate about – technology, sports, the emergence of the content creator model, and the information gap between the content creators and the brands that utilize them.
This led to their first business idea in 2019. A way to let college athletic stars monetize their community through blockchain tokens – something the NCAA hadn’t necessarily ruled out. They reached out to Harvard Law Professor Peter Carfagna, the top sports law professor on campus. He immediately shot down the idea.
The timing was premature, the founders recall him advising, as this was well before NCAA v. Alston. But Carfagna also told them to be patient. There was litigation working its way through the courts, which could ripen their idea. A favorable ruling on the Name, Image and Likeness phenomenon was, potentially, just around the corner. The founders agreed, and shifted their focus to content creators – specifically, an all-in-one store for them to secure brand deals & monetize their fanbase with digital commerce. True to form, NIL did arrive and the founders’ company, Pillar (www.pillar.io) is now ideally positioned to help creators/athletes better leverage their marketability.
To learn more, we spoke with Ivkov and Younus about their company, which is backed by top Venture Capitalists like Y Combinator, Jonathan Kraft of the Patriots, and the ownership behind the Sacramento Kings & Fenway Sports Group, and is soon to announce their first contract with a university. That announcement comes on the heels of over seventy-five thousand creators/athletes, who are already using the platform.
Our conversation centered around how Pillar helps pro and collegiate athletes, sports agencies, and teams.
The interview with the young men follows:
Question: How was Pillar born?
Answer: Pillar’s founding story is rooted in helping athletes and creators monetize their content.
We started building while undergrads at Harvard around 3 years ago. We didn’t know how the Supreme Court would rule re: NIL, but we knew one thing – the brand sponsorship experience for individual athletes and creators was a mess.
Since most athlete deals have a social media component, the sponsorship problems faced by athletes overlap with those faced by creators. At its core, NIL athletes are treated as content creators by brands. The distribution channel for promoting sponsored products is social media. The first thing brands look for when evaluating an NIL athlete is how big her reach is and whether or not her audience demographics align with the brand’s marketing goals. When it comes to modern digital marketing, there is effectively no difference between an NIL athlete and a content creator.
After interviewing dozens of pro athletes and content creators looking to monetize, we found three systemic issues.
First, data. Athletes don’t know what audience, engagement, and demographic metrics brands use to evaluate partnerships, or how to obtain them. Brands often won’t share evaluation criteria with them either, meaning they’re left in the dark while negotiating. They also often don’t obtain rights to sales and engagement data from deals after the fact, leaving them unaware of their advertising performance and at a further disadvantage in future negotiations.
Second, process. Given the recency of the NIL phenomenon, there is no playbook for scoring NIL deals. Because of this, each deal feels bespoke, requiring upfront labor to prepare pitch materials. Athletes and creators lack the time or know-how to put together compelling decks or spreadsheets highlighting their fit for the deal.
Third, discoverability. Athletes lack tools to identify and pursue suitable partnerships. Top athletes and creators often have teams to pitch them brand deals and sign the best ones. However, emerging athletes – especially in the NIL space – lack this support, forcing them to manually identify opportunities, pitch, and negotiate contracts.
Our toolkit gives college & pro athletes the same edge as the world’s most business content creators. With Pillar, they have everything they need to conduct brand deals end-to-end.
Q: Why should athletes/creators consider Pillar?
A: First, it helps them save time. Brands scrutinize an athlete’s social media following before deciding to sponsor them. These analytics, across all the athlete’s social media accounts, are a chore to collect. With Pillar, athletes don’t need to take screenshots of their social media accounts’ analytics (e.g. Instagram Top Locations) to send to potential partners anymore. Instead, they use Pillar’s Media Kit, a digital resume & portfolio that allows the athlete to display live social media analytics they’ve opted to share. Athletes can also embed rich case studies for brands to better understand their previous partnerships. It’s a magic link they can share in seconds that stays up-to-date automatically.
Second, it helps them build long-term business. After the sponsorship deal is done, Pillar can automatically pull the relevant post data to produce a custom-branded, rich report for the athlete/creator to send back to the brand. Campaign reports can include key campaign KPIs like engagement, clicks, reach as well as stats like demographic age/gender/location reach for the campaign. Athletes/creators (and their managers) who send a post-campaign report have a significantly higher chance of getting repeat business from the brand.
Third, it gives them a way to turn social media followers into customers. Pillar lets them launch a “link-in-bio” store without them needing to know how to code. Their store is primed to convert social media fans into paying customers. They can sell dozens of digital products like exclusive meet and greets, digital workout plans, PDF playbooks, autographs, and more. Pillar AI can help them write the marketing copy for all their digital products, and suggest improvements based on the analytics that come out the box. Fans can check out in one tap with Apple Pay.
There are a bunch of other reasons why folks should consider Pillar – we offer a 14-day free trial, so go check it out!
Q: How do you intersect with sports managers & agents?
A: Since launching earlier this year, almost 100 sports & digital talent agencies rely on Pillar for Managers/Agents for their internal workflows. It’s an all-in-one platform that helps them save time by automating the pitching process, but also helps them drive new revenue with mobile-optimized ecommerce “link-in-bio” stores for talent to sell digital products to their fanbase.
It gives them all the tools they need to effortlessly pitch their talent and drive more revenue for their roster.
Talent managers get one dashboard where they can access all the digital media kits for their athletes. They can also programmatically create rosters by sport/category or by metric (e.g. rank my athletes high → low on Instagram engagement).
Some of our customers include sports agencies like Rosenhaus Sports Representation, CAA Stellar, and Raymond Representation.
Q: What’s new that is coming on the horizon for the company?
A: We’ve spent the past year exploring ways to meaningfully accelerate our customers’ workflows using AI. Pillar AI can suggest digital product templates, write marketing copy, and even help you price offerings based on your content & audience. This upcoming year, we’re looking forward to giving users better funnel management tools, along with supporting their email & SMS marketing needs.
