Everyone knows Maisie Williams as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, which aired its eighth and final season this Spring.
What fewer people know is that Williams is the co-founder of Daisie – an online platform that connects creative individuals, making it easier for them to showcase their work and collaborate on projects.
The English actress partnered with film producer Dom Santry, with whom she became friends on the set of iBoy. Together, they founded Daisie (Dom + Maisie) in February 2017 while Williams was shooting the final season of Game of Thrones. The duo officially launched out of beta in early May of this year, blasting out a massive marketing campaign in London, where the startup is based. Today, the app boasts about 120,000 users, according to the co-founders.
“We managed to really hit a sweet spot of these creative people who feel like complete outcasts and weirdos,” says Williams. She certainly has a point. The Hollywood establishment prides itself on telling actors, screenwriters, directors, and so on whether they will make it or not in the industry. What Daisie is striving to provide is a more open and transparent career path that encourages creative collaborations.
In a post-Weinstein era fuelled by movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, the app also creates a safe space for women – something Santry, Daisie’s CEO, emphasises. “Almost 70 per cent of our user base is female,” he says.
The Daisie team kept their heads down during the early stages, working hard on getting the right minimum viable product (MVP) to show investors that there is an eager community of creators out there willing to collaborate. Although Willliams’ 11.9 million Instagram followers certainly helped, the community has grown rather organically, say the co-founders, who drew from their own creative circles. They also brought on producer and photographer Ruben Selby to oversee marketing and communications early on. The 22-year-old Brit helped grow the app’s reach within the fashion and photography spaces before moving on to create a company of his own.
Since its inception, Daisie has raised a total of $2.9 million (£2.32m). Its latest seed round of $2.5m (£2m) was led by Founders Fund, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, 8VC and Shrug Capital. Williams and Santry travelled to San Francisco in mid-2018 to begin their first institutional fundraising. “We’d never done anything like this,” Williams says. “It was the most intense few weeks of my life."
But like auditioning, pitching VCs is an art one develops. Although Williams found Silicon Valley more ruthless than Hollywood, she was encouraged by how collaborative people are in the Bay Area – referring to their willingness to make introductions regardless of whether they participated in the funding round.
The startup has been getting some good traction since its official launch in May – but the team is treading lightly. “The most important thing for us is establishing exactly what Daisie is and what it offers,” says Santry. “And then expand into new territories.”
For now, the Daisie team says its community is strongest in London as the bulk of its marketing efforts have taken place in the startup’s home city. The startup now wants to grow its community in creative hubs like Los Angeles and New York City. “We’re iterating and building features now dependent on what the community is asking for,” says Santry. “We want to get the product perfect before taking it to the US to provide the best opportunities to our users.”
To further develop and scale the app, Daisie has been ramping up its tech hires, bringing on engineers from companies that include Microsoft, Deliveroo and Monzo. Today, the startup counts 15 employees. Although creatives can always turn to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with one another, Daisie takes it one step further. The startup wants to nurse artists throughout their career and support their project from concept to production.
The team is already working on helping its community by partnering with certain brands in the creative space so as to give its users more exposure. The co-founders declined to name what brands at this stage.
And how do agents fit into this scenario? “The way the world is going, middlemen are being cut out left, right and centre,” says Williams. “But I think there still will be a place for agents in terms of the guidance you can get from them, much like [the guidance you can get from] VCs. But the client is more in control in regard to the definitive ‘Yes or No’ about making it in the industry.”
“What we’re almost hoping is that our generation of creative people are the next big thing.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
