Early stage startups rarely have the expertise and resources in place to realise their product vision. Runway and time to market are critical, yet building or securing those capabilities is time-consuming and expensive. Wouldn’t a jump start be great?
FKTRY CREATE delivers the expertise of industry leaders across Product, Brand, and Growth to startups on an equity for services basis to help with those critical needs.
Setting the fundamentals of brand in place to provide a grounding and guiding North Star for product, growth and culture.
Manifesting the product vision, how it works, looks, and feels. From product vision through to detailed platform execution.
Growth by design to put the fundamentals of brand and growth marketing in place as well as executing growth marketing plans.
FKTRY CREATE builds expert task forces to help get early stage startups to their 1.0. We also help later stage companies get to their 2.0 or 3.0. Teams are tailored specifically to the needs of each startup to deliver focused, high-impact value as well as to set the startup along the path to self sufficiency. This provides an invaluable jumpstart, better prepares them for scale and investment, and helps de-risk an already arduous journey.
Founders are always evaluating their options, navigating the road to product market fit with trade-offs, pragmatism and compromise. That builds product, technical and organizational debt. There is never a ‘right’ answer, just the solution chosen at the time. Early stage founders have a range of options when it comes to Product: favors, bootstrap, build internal teams, outsource to a consultancy or agency. Each avenue involves a trade-off and compromise. We believe bringing together the experts that have done this before for some of the world’s leading products and services presents a unique, optimal path to select startups.
FKTRY exists to support a new creative economy, one that benefits ALL. We believe that successful collaboration is grounded in the alignment of incentives of all parties, who share in the potential impact of the work. That is why we ask for equity. It is also how we are able to bring together these experts. This makes partners of all involved in a project and makes success shared success.
For early-stage startups the baseline ask for a FKTRY CREATE engagement is generally 5% of fully diluted equity. Depending on requirements and needs, and for later stage companies, the amount may increase.
We recognise equity is precious and that your company could one day be be worth millions. The point is that it’s value we’re going to create together. In the cold light of day it’s a Mexican standoff between the business value of the collective creative expertise of proven industry leaders versus a great idea in a high-risk, highly illiquid, investment category. The deal ensures alignment of interest and outcomes as we become partners and investors in select startups.
Equity is emotional, but at the end of the day it’s a matter of logic. The deal simply has to make sense: does the exchange create more value in your remaining stake than you have given up. Or 1/(1 - n) as YC Founder, Paul Graham puts it this way in his classic ‘Equity Equation’ piece.
We provide the startups we partner access to an unprecedented pool of talent. FKTRY consists of full-time Creative General Partners and an extended network of Creative Limited Partners who contribute project by project. All of them are respected leaders in their field. They are people who have built a lot of the products and services you know and love, people that you would find hard to recruit. You won’t find them in a consultancy and you are generally unlikely to bring under one roof. Crucially they are all ‘expert-practitioners’ meaning they still know how to practice their craft and execute.
Buying time is a crappy model for everyone and fundamentally misaligns incentives. With FKTRY PROJECTS you’re exchanging equity for a team’s collective expertise, not their time. That way, as investors, we’re perfectly incentivised to do the right job. Given we’re delivering in return for equity we’re going to be involved for precisely the time and depth required to make the impact and then get out of the way.
FKTRY CREATE is her to get you to a valuable 1.0 or 2.0 and ready for scale and investment. Ultimately YOU need to own your product and that means being self-sufficient as soon as possible. Seasoned investors aren’t going to be confident about investing in a startup whose product is outsourced. So it’s actually important for us to get out of your way. Consider us a jump start for the short to medium term, and a valuable, smart investor and partner beyond that.
Under the Creative Capital Studio model, the operations of the studio are funded. That allows us to pursue venture based deals of this nature rather than be slave to short term thinking and pressures.
That’s great! Whilst we love early stage, we are not focused on zero to one. If you’re truly dedicated to solving a problem then you’ll find a way to realize it in some way. With few exceptions we are more likely to work with startups that are under way, or with second time founders. We are of course happy to hear from you and to provide any advice that helps you along the path.
