- The digital-commerce startup SendOwl has raised a $9 million seed round.
- It has a platform where creators and businesses can sell digital products.
- SendOwl gave Insider exclusive access to the memo it used to pitch investors.
SendOwl, a tech startup that aims to provide infrastructure for creators and businesses where they can market and sell digital products and subscriptions online, has announced it's secured a $9 million seed round.
The announcement came shortly after the company launched an integration with the link-in-bio platform Linktree, which allows Linktree users to sell digital products and subscriptions directly from their pages on the site.
It also has integrations with Shopify and the payment platform Stripe that allow creators to sell directly from their profiles on those platforms.
SendOwl CEO Matt Plotke told Insider the company believed that integrations such as these would let "creators and businesses meet their buyers at the point of distribution."
The latest fundraising round, which the company secured over several months in 2022, was led by the venture-capital firm the General Partnership. Defy and Alumni Ventures, which were existing investors, also took part, as did a new backer, Authentic Ventures.
Plotke said the money would be used primarily to "grow faster without putting the operational efficiency and cash flow of the business at risk."
The strategy memo
Instead of a pitch deck, the company courted investors with a strategy memo, which it shared exclusively with Insider.
In the memo, the company says creators want "a presence across the entire internet" but that this forces them to rely on "multiple tools and services," which means a "poor user experience."
"There are 50M+ independent creators globally that want to monetize their passion, skills, expertise, and knowledge," it says, adding: "There is no unified platform that makes it easy for a creator to quickly get their businesses up and running, and allow them to scale up from there."
The memo goes on to say SendOwl is the "first mover in this space" and has "established a robust organic growth funnel."
Beneath the heading, "Why now," the memo says the creator economy is "massive and growing at its fastest rate ever."
The memo says no one has managed to become the place people go to establish a "creator-internet-business" in the same way Shopify became the go-to place for businesses selling physical products.
SendOwl plans to build "unified digital goods experience," the memo adds, that offers a central source for creators' "web presence, customer information, and goods, building relationships and engagement" and "lightning fast commerce."
The document goes on to outline a strategy to expand SendOwl's user base.
To grow in the short term, it says, the company recently introduced a free plan, under which SendOwl takes 5% of users' revenue, with a minimum order fee of $0.50, and sellers pay a fee to the payment processor they use.
This was in addition to pricing tiers of $15 and $40 a month. With these two options, sellers pay a fixed per-order management fee of $0.20 to $0.40 and a payment-processor fee but keep the rest of their revenue.
Read SendOwl's memo below:
Editor's note: Some confidential information was removed at SendOwl's request, including specific financial-performance numbers and descriptions of new products, features, and integrations that are not yet public. The memo is for exclusive use of Insider subscribers, not to be distributed publicly.