1stCollab
YC W23San Francisco, US · Founded 2022 · 11 employees · Hiring · 5 known investors
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Laura Buhlerunlockedknows Varun Bansal · together at McKinsey & Company (overlapped)
×3knows the team · via Stanford University
knows the team · via Pinterest
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1stCollab is an influencer marketing platform that connects creators with brand partnership opportunities. The platform handles campaign matching, contract management, and payment processing for creators and agencies seeking sponsorship deals.
AI & Machine LearningCreator EconomyEnterprise SoftwareMarketing TechArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningMarketingAdvertisingUnited States of AmericaAmerica / Canada
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W23)
1stCollab was founded in 2022 by Leon Lin, Varun Bansal, and Andrew Liu.
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Leon LininCo-Founder & CEOLeon Lin previously spent over nine years at Pinterest, where he served as Head of Discovery product overseeing Home, Search, and Pins teams, and earlier worked as a tech lead on the Recommendations team. He now leads 1stCollab, a platform facilitating influencer marketing collaborations between brands and creators.
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Varun BansalinCo-FounderHe previously worked as a product manager at Pinterest, focusing on homefeed recommendations, international growth, and creator engagement initiatives.
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Andrew LiuinCo-FounderAndrew Liu previously held a Tech Lead role at Coupang and Pinterest, where he focused on search and recommendations systems. He is now building a network platform connecting brands and creators for collaborative marketing campaigns.
Investors · 5
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The YC application· Winter 2023 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- Varun and Leon spent three years building creator products at Pinterest and, after speaking with many creators about monetization, focused on helping brands discover creators for campaigns. They were connected with Carina, who was working on a similar idea, and Andrew, a former Pinterest colleague of Varun and Leon, also joined to form the team.
- What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
- The founders are addressing a two-sided marketplace problem. For brands, existing influencer platforms cost over $30k per year and offer limited discovery; they cite Grin.co as not surfacing Instagram influencers. For creators, they note that 99% do not receive brand deals because there is no way to apply to relevant campaigns. The company plans to build a network of authenticated creators and discovery algorithms, plus an open platform where creators can apply to brand campaigns.
- What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
- The founders aim to simplify and automate influencer marketing, drawing on their experience that users engage more with sponsored creator content than organic ads. They want to expand the amount of ad spend directed to influencer marketing and, by extension, to creators, making full-time content creation viable for more people.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Competitors · 7
by search overlap
Modash178 shared keywordsModash provides a platform for influencer marketing teams to automatically track creator content and campaign performance across social media, with integrated Shopify sales attribution to measure ROI without manual data collection.
HypeAuditor177 shared keywordsHypeAuditor provides an influencer marketing platform for brands, offering automated tools to analyze, plan, track, and report on campaigns. Features include competitor campaign analysis, brand safety vetting of influencers, audience affinity analysis, brand-mention search, and influencer relationship management.
Clickanalytic158 shared keywordsClickAnalytic is an influencer marketing platform that helps brands and agencies discover creators and analyze audience quality, engagement, and brand fit. The platform uses data across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to enable evidence-based creator selection rather than follower-count-driven decisions.
Upfluence110 shared keywordsUpfluence provides a platform for influencer marketing that helps brands connect with content creators and manage campaigns. The platform serves brands and marketing teams across multiple geographies.
Hootsuite109 shared keywordsHootsuite is a social media management platform that helps organizations manage, analyze, and optimize their social media presence across multiple networks. The company serves businesses of all sizes, from small companies to enterprises, providing tools for social marketing, listening, employee advocacy, and customer service.
Sprout Social108 shared keywordsSprout Social offers a social media management platform with AI, automation, integrations and analytics tools for marketing teams. The product helps teams manage social content, customer interactions, workflows and performance reporting from a single platform.
GRIN88 shared keywordsGRIN is a creator marketing platform for brands, offering tools to discover influencers, manage relationships, handle payments and shipping, run affiliate programs, and track campaign performance. It also provides Gia, an AI assistant that automates creator marketing tasks such as prospect discovery and outreach.
Companies competing with 1stCollab for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does 1stCollab do?
- 1stCollab is an influencer marketing platform that connects creators with brand partnership opportunities. The platform handles campaign matching, contract management, and payment processing for creators and agencies seeking sponsorship deals.
- Who founded 1stCollab?
- 1stCollab was founded by Leon Lin, Varun Bansal, Andrew Liu in 2022.
- Who are 1stCollab's investors?
- 1stCollab's investors include Amino Capital, Brighter Capital, f7 Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Y Combinator.
- Where is 1stCollab headquartered?
- 1stCollab is headquartered in San Francisco, US.