Welcome to Who Are These Startups?

podcast shorts featuring founder interviews of Canadian startups.

It's a startup coach here and I'm down at Collision and I ran into my good friend Joseph from Mod.

How are you doing Joseph?

Good Craig, how's it going?

Doing great.

Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about Mod.

For sure.

My name is Joseph Penna.

I'm the CEO of Mod Merchand demand.

What we do is we help creators, communities and businesses within the creator economy to turn their fan ideas into dream merchandise.

So what that is is we enable the fans to upload their fan art directly to the creators.

Creators can approve of it, once approved.

It's now listed as official merchandise on the store.

A way to co-create, to sell and market with the fans, with the community.

What inspired you to start this company?

Originally we saw a huge issue with music artists, independent music artists and particularly and having troubles with getting their merchandise up and running.

So we started tackling the merch problem and we soon found out that fan art is a big thing in the world of entertainment with influencers, creators, artists.

But there's no way to actually go directly and get approval to sell your fan art.

Most of the sales are done online or done illegally.

So we worked on creating a system that legitimizes all of that.

Bridges the creator with their fans to now have those ideas actually come to life.

Can you give us an overview of your product now it works?

Yeah, so essentially we are B2B SaaS.

So we integrate into existing platforms like your own website, merch store or marketplace or we deploy a brand new one for you.

And built into that is our licensing system.

So where fans can upload their designs, it gets sent to creators as a license or a request.

Creators can review everything, approve or deny and actually work on revisions as well.

So it's a collaboration tool between the creators, the businesses and their fans and their community members.

And what's your funding situation?

We are pretty seed.

We haven't been funding, we've completed Bootstrap so far.

And what brings you to Collision?

Collision is just here to meet other companies, creators, startups that we can potentially work and partner with as well as just seeing what's out there in the Toronto tech world right now.

It's been really great just getting a sense of all this new buddy technology too, right?

Have you had any memorable experience or met any interesting people so far?

So far, mainly just a few of the talks I've been to were interesting and I've been able to meet with a few different startup founders, right, that have been really cool.

Who should reach out to you?

So if you are a business or a community leader, you know, or you are a creator of any level really and you are looking to now leverage merchandise, e-commerce, integrate that sort of thing that you are offering as well as potentially leverage the co-creation with the fans, right, then definitely reach out to us.

And where should people go to find out more?

So you can find us at modink.ca, m-o-d-i-n-c.ca or even mod-ink.ca.

That's our website.

You can reach out to me at joseph, j-o-s-e-p-h at modink.ca as well.

Thank you Joseph for taking the time out of Collision to speak to us.

Thanks so much Craig.

Thank you.

This has been Who Are These Startups?

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