Bring monetization, growth and financial tools to creators

We created Trendi to help Creators monetize on their own terms. Our platform is centered around giving creators the tools necessary to easily receive payments from all across Latin America from both its community and brand deals.

Since we enable them to handle local payments from one-time sales, subscriptions and brand deals. We start taking leverage from the existing platforms they are using on a day-to-day basis, such as emailing and community groups (Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp) so they can also monetize those spaces.

We’re focused on “value givers” creators such as fitness, business, and wellbeing creators who rarely monetize between $1 an $200 USD monthly and want to make a living from their creations.

We’re also just getting started. Alongside the platform, we launched the Trendi Creator’s Accelerator, a 3-weeks program to teach creators to become professionals. We’re working side-by-side with 20 Latin American creators, understanding deeper their problems, which will help us to significantly improve our product and iterate quickly.

Mexico City, Mexico / Buenos Aires, Argentina

We've known each other for 2 years. We met at Platzi's startup community. We met in person once in CDMX. We will be working together in person during April.

- Built an MVP which is in private beta
- 20 active creators in the private beta and accelerator program
- Announced our Creators Accelerator first cohort 3 weeks ago on social media (twitter, instagram, tiktok and facebook), we got 141 people on the waitlist.
- We are building our Team. Starting to look for community builders and developers.

We’ve been working full-time for almost 2 months, We’ve known each other for 2 years, reconnected on YC Co-Founder match platform.

20 creators

We're on a private beta. Mostly gathering feedback and fixing bugs

I pivoted. At the beginning of the year, I built a linktr.ee clone with no-code tools (bubble) and onboarded 15 users from Facebook groups to the platform. However, none of them continued using it as there was no value added in contrast to the existing tools. I wasn’t talking to users, just throwing them another tool.

After matching with Massimo in the YC Co-Founder platform we interviewed 50+ creators and found that the existing tools (Patreon, buymeacoffee) were seen just as tipping platforms and are not focused on Latin America creators. Also, there was a knowledge gap between amateur and professional creators.

Besides the user interviews, we did an industry research to developed a hypothesis from there:

Help creators who are in the 1 to N stage: They have a small audience (5k - 50k followers), monetize irregularly, can see themselves creating content full time and their content can be transferred into a digital good.

So, with Treni's platform we allow creators to sell digital goods and services, but we also teach them how to do it during our Creators Accelerator Program.

Yes. We were accepted in the next batch of Platanus Ventures starting on March 29. Other YC startups, such as: Fintoc, Cardda and Examedi went through Platanus Ventures program as well.

We both have been creating in different formats in the past: podcasting, writing, communities, etc.

However, we both ended giving up on that. As much as we like creating, we have to pay the bills and making a living from creating content is hard.

We believe, eventually, everybody will be in the Creator Economy. With Trendi we’ll enable a Creator middle class, today there are superstars creators or 0 revenue creators. That’s a huge problem since 68% of creators in LatAm make less than $200 USD per month. In a region with over 15 million creators. Even when Brasil, Mexico, and Colombia are among the top countries where people buy a product because a creator recommended it.

Also, we have a well-connected network of managers, creators agencies and community, who are constantly connecting us with new creators. Since we’ve been working as creators for years, we have a big network of friends who are amateur creators and are helping us to get early traction

We’re a Community-led growth platform, we’re enabling a whole new industry in Latin America, that can be made just with software. We need to educate, share success stories, connect people, to make “living from your creating” for everyone and not just for a few superstars.

That’s what we understand about our business that other companies in it just don't get. As we like to say, we are building the rails and the train to enable the Creator Economy in Latin America, and the community and Trendi Creator’s Accelerator is where we teach creators to best use that train.

We make money with a revenue share model, taking a 10% from every transaction a creator made through our platform. As our creators grows, we grow with them, and this remove upfront friction to use the product.

Trendi will initially focus on Latin America, which has more than 15 million creators, and this number is growing exponentially year by year. Also, Latin America has the top 3 countries where a person buys a product because a creator recommend it. If more than 50% of creators make at least $300 USD per month, this is a $22b/year industry.

LLC

Alan 50% and Massi 50%

We're both technical founders, and we both write code.
1. Massimo Di Berardino (https://www.linkedin.com/in/massimokris) - Experience as Software Engineer and Product Manager
2. Alan Arguello (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-arguello/) - Experience as Software Engineer

Connect Web2 and We3 communities, something like Eventbrite for Web3:
- Token-gated communities with NFTs and POAPs
- Wallet first RSVP
- Wallet first forms

I own 2 cats and I don't know why they tend to be stressed. As I normally hear different music while I'm working, some day I came across "music for cats". It's supposed to relax them.

I wasn't sure whether it was a joke or something like that, so I looked it up on Google and indeed some time of music can have calming effects on cats. I tried playing it and it seemed to work. Even I liked it.

We both worked previously at YC Startups such as Platzi and Beek.io, therefore we know the value of YC. We also got an email from Catheryn Li stating that our team was one of the top 5% of the Startup School.

YC Alumni