How Jonathan Eg Founder And CEO Of Partipost Raised $5.2M To Build The Fastest Growing Influencers Network In Asia?

Jonathan Eg is the Founder and CEO of Partipost. Partipost is a platform that allows brands to connect with influencers across all tiers, from your nano influencers aka everyday people to your macro-influencers, at scale and with speed. With the belief that everyone is an influencer in their own right, he wants to give the power back to the people, to share about the brands that they love. Since the launch of the Partipost platform at the beginning of 2018 till 2020, Partipost now has over 200,000 influencers and worked with more than 850 brands on over 2,500 marketing campaigns.

Before this, Jonathan worked at United Crest Healthcare, taking care of the product and operations. United Crest Healthcare is a telehealth platform that assists doctors to monitor patients, especially patients with chronic diseases. Before that, Jonathan was actively involved at United Crest Capital; a boutique private equity managing largely funds of private families.

Jonathan serves on the board of directors for United Crest Capital and United Crest Healthcare.
Jonathan has a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He enjoys reading, playing basketball, and watching TED Talks.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily ,Sari Jonathan Eg says:

Pursuing our company’s vision, working alongside my co-founders and colleagues, and knowing that their livelihoods depend on me keeps me motivated every single day.

• Be appreciative of what you have and at the same time, be ambitious and try to be a better version of yourself every day
• Sometimes there’s short term pain, but it’s necessary to achieve long term happiness or success
• Not a life lesson but I got your back

Read on to know more about Jonathan Eg and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background, and What motivated you to get started with your company?

Jonathan Eg: Along with my two co-founders, I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. I would say my parents and friends motivated me to become an entrepreneur. As entrepreneurs themselves, my parents made it seem normal for me to start a business. A lot of my friends also supported our idea initially and thought that the vision of Partipost – to allow anyone to be an influencer – was achievable in the near future.

What is your current main product, and can you share any previous product pivot story to the current product?

Jonathan Eg: Our current main product is the Partipost platform. Partipost has a mobile app for influencers and a web app for brands. Similar to many other marketplace platforms out there, the technology we built can allow brands to activate thousands of influencers, with the right target audience, in a short time, in a single campaign. Fortunately, we haven’t pivoted from our main product. Of course, there were a few tweaks here and there, but the core value of our main product is still the same as when we first started dreaming about the idea.

How much money have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round?

Jonathan Eg: Our current funding round is our series A with 3.5 M USD raised.

What were the internal decision processes in determining when to begin fundraising, and what were the logistics for this? And how many investors have you met so far, and how did you meet these investors and which channels worked best for you?

Jonathan Eg: Initially, we invested a bit of our own money and then realized we needed more money to develop our MVP, so we raised from a family and friends around. Once we had a solid MVP, we decided to raise from some institutions. Hard to put an exact number to how many investors we met, but maybe more than 50 investors in the last 3-4 years.

What are the biggest challenges and obstacles that you have faced in the process of fundraising? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Jonathan Eg: Some of the biggest challenges were probably getting over some of the rejections from the investors, understanding real feedback versus not from the investors was. If I had the knowledge, I had now and went back in time; it would be a lot faster to fundraise. I think having more confidence is something I would be doing differently.

What are your milestones for the next round? And what are your goals for the future?

Jonathan Eg: We hope to have over 1,000,000 influencers within the next 18 months.

How have you attracted users and with what strategy have you grown your company from the start to now?

Jonathan Eg: Most of the users that we have gotten are organic. At the start, we tried giving flyers out in public places and doing targeted offline activations in schools.

Which has been the best marketing software tool for the growth of your startup and why?

Jonathan Eg: Aside from Partipost, the best marketing software tool is probably Linkedin – for our sales team to reach out to brands.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing in general?

Jonathan Eg: Marketing is understanding your users at scale, and then communicating to them or the majority of them in the easiest-to-understand way possible, for them to get your product.

How do you plan to expand globally?

Jonathan Eg: Currently, we are in Singapore, Taiwan, and Indonesia. We have plans soon to expand to Malaysia and the Philippines. We expect to focus on Southeast Asia first before moving to other parts of the world.

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global expansion?

Jonathan Eg: Local knowledge and connections are important. The culture, habits, and behaviour of that country or region are very crucial in the development of the product.

How do you handle this COVID-19 outbreak situation for your company’s survival in the future?

Jonathan Eg: We doubled down on our core product which is a digital marketing and did our best to adapt to the new normal with many brands and businesses all going digital.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company?

Jonathan Eg: I think for startups in tech, one mistake that I made when I started was thinking that building an app takes 3-6 months, and we can scale our users exponentially after that.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Jonathan Eg: Understand the list of risks and the tests/experiments associated with each risk that is needed to be done. Understand with extreme clarity what the final goal is and what are the sequential steps it takes to get there.

What are the top-three books or movies (TV series) that changed your life and why?

Jonathan Eg: Two books I like are Andrew Grove’s High Output Management and Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling.

How do you keep yourself motivated every day?

Jonathan Eg: Pursuing our company’s vision, working alongside my co-founders and colleagues, and knowing that their livelihoods depend on me keeps me motivated every single day.

What are the top- three life lessons that you want your (future) sons and daughters to know?

Jonathan Eg:

• Be appreciative of what you have and at the same time, be ambitious and try to be a better version of yourself every day
• Sometimes there’s short term pain, but it’s necessary to achieve long term happiness or success
• Not a life lesson but I got your back

What would you like to be remembered for?

Jonathan Eg: I would like to be remembered by close friends, family, and colleagues as a person that did his best and cared about them.

You can follow Jonathan Eg here.

Are you looking to secure investment for your startup or a keen startup enthusiast, keep an eye on our interview section.

Follow Asia Tech Daily to know about the innovative startups and how they are revolutionizing the ecosystem.