Hiip uses algorithms to match brands with the right social media influencers

Too rich for you: Kim Kardashian West (right) has 84.7 million Instagram followers, where she sometimes endorses brands. Photo credit: Eva Rinaldi.

Social media influencers are a staple of marketing campaigns. Often celebrities or personalities with a large follower base, they’re costly to hire – which makes it tough or almost impossible for many companies, especially smaller ones, to tap these people. Phi Nguyen says he co-founded Hiip to offer a different approach.

Hiip uses social data and algorithms to match brands and advertisers with the right influencers. It has all types of influencers – even “niche” ones, who have the same “long-tail” impact as the largely popular ones, he explains.

A brand can create a campaign brief on Hiip and the platform will analyze it and recommend suitable influencers. The influencers will circle back with a proposal and a quote and the parties agree on the terms. Hiip charges both sides a fee for every successful booking.

Phi says Hiip, based in Vietnam, has registered more than a thousand influencers, with its bookings growing 50 percent month-on-month since its launch in April.

Funding boost

“For a very long time, brands in Vietnam used to choose influencers based on subjective feelings. We want to change that,” says Phi.

He got the idea for the company while he was developing IMAS, a social media agency he co-founded in Vietnam.

“I was looking for new ways to accelerate growth and after talking to 20-plus people, I realized that small and medium enterprises were struggling to find the right influencers to work with. They encouraged me to do create it and promised to become our first customers if we launched the product,” he recalls.

Next came research and talking to over 50 influencers in the country to explore how a platform like Hiip could help them. “After validating my idea, we built our first MVP [minimum viable product] and spun it off as an independent company. The rest is history.”

Hiip last week raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Expara Ventures, an early-stage investment fund based in Singapore.

The startup graduated out of CLAS Expara Startup Accelerator, which the Singapore fund runs with Microsoft in Vietnam.

Other investors include Christian Schaefer, managing partner of law firm Asia Counsel, and Eric Rosenkranz, former CEO of Asia-Pacific and Latin America of Grey Global Group.

Phi and the team will use the money to further develop their product and expand to other markets, but the co-founder is keeping quiet on the details.