This business connects music artists with fan-designed merch.

8 Apr 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:58

In a 60‑second founder pitch, Erin Singleton introduces SoftSide, a platform that turns fan‑created merchandise into officially licensed, artist‑approved products. Drawing on her experience in the live‑music industry, she highlights the problem of bootleg merch that deprives artists of revenue and puts fans at risk of IP infringement. SoftSide solves this by enabling fans to design merch, which is then approved by the artist through an in‑app licensing system that splits revenue between the artist and the fan. The company generated $20,000 in gross revenue in its first month while fully bootstrapped. Looking ahead, SoftSide plans to expand the platform to other intellectual‑property verticals, including content creators, brands, sports teams, and podcasts such as The Founder’s Journal.

Chapters

This founder has 60 seconds to pitch their business. Watch to the end to see how much I would invest. Hi, my name is Erin Singleton. I'm the founder of SoftSide. We facilitate fan-designed, artist-approved merch partnerships. I founded SoftSide after working in the live music business and often noticing fans in the crowds of our clients' concerts wearing t-shirts that were fan-made or bootleg merchandise. These fan-made pieces are problematic because the music artist is losing out on valuable merch sales, and the fan often has their shops pulled down due to IP infringement, causing a lose-lose situation. SoftSide creates a win-win solution by allowing fans to create merchandise that's completely approved by the music artist, set up with in-app licensing and a structured revenue sharing system between both the music artist and the fan. We generated $20K gross revenue in our first month of sales while fully bootstrapped, and now we're planning to do a platform expansion to include other IP verticals such as content creators, brands, sports, and even podcasts like The Founder's Journal.