Photos Courtesy of PARLR Brand Studio
Jordan Greenfield is the founder & CEO of hoo.be, the new invite-only, creator-first platform-which enables online influencers, artists, athletes, and businesses provide followers with a single place to access all official social media platforms.
hoo.be is changing the way users connect with their audience with a customized social home page where they can centralize all their content and social accounts, track engagement, and better understand their audience.
Launched during the 2020 pandemic, hoo.be is already gaining popularity amongst leading online influencers, artists, and athletes, including Tom Brady, 50 Cent, InTouch Weekly and Steve Aoki to name a few.
Here is what the tech entrepreneur had to say in our exclusive interview.
Q: What inspired you to create hoo.be?
hoo.be is really a culmination of years of research into the role that content creators play in the bigger ecosystem that is social media. We believe creators are a big piece of what makes these platforms so important, and we have always aimed to empower creators to connect with their audiences in the most effective way possible.
The pandemic presented a time where content creation and online interaction was at an all-time peak. With all this digital chaos scattered across various platforms, hoo.be was built for creators for them to have a centralized location where they can showcase everything, they are doing across the web in one interactive place.
The goal really comes down to giving creators the ability to own their relationship with their audience. By having this centralized location, or “link in bio tool,” gives creators the ability to leverage one audience to build another. For example, taking an Instagram follower and turning them into a TikTok follower, or a newsletter subscriber. We want creators to not be too reliant on any given platform to reach their audience but ultimately building towards a more “direct to audience” relationship.
Q: Can you tell us about hoo.be and how it is different in comparison to other social media platforms?
As it pertains to the other major social platforms, hoo.be is really designed to complement and to interact with all the other online communities. We are big believers that there will continue to be new social media networks for all different aspects of our lives, and we embrace that.
We are interested in how we can extract all the value that creators provide across all of these social platforms and turn that into a long-term relationship that is owned by the creators themselves as opposed to the networks.
You can almost look at hoo.be as a layer on the top of the social web that empowers creators to funnel their audiences to their desired location on the web.
Q: Was it difficult creating the platform during the 2020 pandemic lockdown?
The pandemic certainly presented many obstacles, but it also provided an incredible opportunity to be free of distraction and really focus on our craft. In my opinion, there was no better time in history for someone to build something from the ground up than during the pandemic.
The pandemic provided a unique opportunity to really step back and look at the world through a new lens and gave this strange feeling of everyone being on an equal playing field. While everyone was confined to their homes and the resources, they had with little certainty of what the future weeks and months had in store, it was the people who adjusted and utilized that time to be proactive that came out on top.
Q: Why is the invite-only model valuable?
From a brand perspective, the invite only model holds power in the sense that people always want what they can’t have. And that has certainly proven to be the case.
However, the real reason for the invite-only model is focus. By building for one core user group, creator & celebrity, this allows us the ability to focus on building the best product possible for their specific needs. Afterall, you can’t be everything to everyone.
Q: What are the requirements to join hoo.be?
Discretion plays a big role. Certainly, following count and engagement play a role but there are many other things that hold weight when deciding who we welcome into our community. Primarily, the question is, does this individual truly need hoo.be?
Currently the two ways for an individual to join hoo.be is to sign up through our waitlist or to be invited by an existing user. So, we do empower our existing community members to play a role in helping decide who else joins the platform.
Q: How is this platform helping its user’s standout in the digital world?
We look at a hoo.be link as almost a verification or blue check on other platforms. The hoo.be URL gives the sign off that this creator has been welcomed into our network whether it be by our team or by an existing member of the hoo.be community.
hoo.be provides the ability to bring together the fragmented pieces of a creator’s digital identity and really show their audience the full picture and what it is that makes that creator who they are across the social web.
Q: What is hoo.be’s digital creator series?
We launched two different content series that feature a diverse range of creators from the hoo.be network. Our first content series is called ‘Creator Stories’, which featured eight different creators ranging from Blogger Perez Hilton to Rapper Cousin Stizz, who sat down with the hoo.be team to tell their story and path to success. We felt it was important to not only help tell the story of who our users are but to provide them with a platform to share their journey and experiences with aspiring creators in their audience and ours. We’re currently releasing new episodes of our second content series called ‘hoo.be hive’, which is focused on providing the audience with more short format episodes to learn from the experience of each creator we feature. Episodes range from Music Video Director JakeTheShooter, who dives into how to create standout music videos that keep fans watching, to Tiktok superstar Anna Shumate, who talks about not taking life so seriously. We aim to continue to highlight the incredible creators within the hoo.be network as a way for outside audiences to find inspiration and valuable takeaways. This is just the start.
Q: Can you give us insight on hoo.be’s plans to introduce new monetization tools and lead a new era in the social influencer and content creator space?
For many of our users, social media is either their primary or secondary source of income. For us to be successful as a platform and our users to be successful as creators we must provide new and innovative ways for these individuals to monetize the influence and power they have across social media.
Over the last year, hoo.be has been adopted by some of the biggest names on social as their social home page on the web. The primary location to which they funnel traffic to regardless of the platform they are operating on.
The influx of traffic to this centralized location, which has really been built and designed for acting, provides a unique opportunity for monetization. It serves as a place for fans or followers to purchase products, engage with communities, and pay for deeper access and more meaningful ways of connecting with their favorite creators.
Essentially, hoo.be will become not only the centralized location for creators to drive traffic to their many projects and social accounts, but also to convert transactions that support their digital lifeline.
Q: How do you think hoo.be is transforming the digital media space?
hoo.be is putting the power in the hands of the creators. By empowering creators to own their relationship with their audience, their dependency on any given platform will be massively reduced. This will result in more accountability for these platforms to not view creators as a means to an end, but rather what they really are: their most valuable asset.
One of the most powerful things about hoo.be in its current state is how it can be used as an audience migration tool. If a creator is not satisfied with the way a given social platform is embracing or empowering their creators, they can easily pack up their audience and take them to another platform—without disrupting the core of their digital world: the hoo.be link that connects everything they do, from anywhere they want.
Q: Tom Brady and Jeff Bezos recently joined the hoo.be platform. How does it feel to see this idea you had growing in such a big way?
It is honestly surreal to see something we began building less than 16 months ago already being used by the likes of Tom Brady and Jeff Bezos. It really does go to show you the power of manifestation and what can be accomplished if the right people are aligned around a common goal. From day one, our team talked about and believed that individuals like this would ultimately use our product, but no one else really believed us—even our own team at times thought our aspirations were too lofty. But here we are!