Everyone Is a Fan of Something – and That's a Business

01 /The Concept

"Making something people love?" asks Bemyfriends.

The answer follows immediately: "Then earn more from it." Naturally, with Bemyfriends' help.

Bemyfriends offers creative people who produce content that resonates a full suite of services for building a global fan business.

The core service is an online platform for creating and managing fan communities – expandable with interactive content, polls, contests, a merch store, and offline event organization like signing sessions.

Any online community needs promotion to attract new members. Bemyfriends provides a full-cycle advertising service – planning, budget management, placement, and performance analysis. The same specialists can run other marketing activities too, including collaborations with local influencers for better penetration into specific markets.

If a creator opens an online store on the Bemyfriends platform, the startup provides a turnkey solution – including not just store creation and management, but global logistics for worldwide order delivery.

Another notable service is handling all legal questions around registering and protecting a creator's intellectual property, as well as monetizing it – including licensing to third-party manufacturers. And the definition of IP here extends beyond trademark registration: through Bemyfriends, creators can register and manage rights to fictional characters, such as the heroes of videos they've produced.

Bemyfriends was founded in South Korea, so it naturally started with building global communities for K-pop artists. Today it works with athletes, content creators, and other creative personalities as well.

The platform launched in 2022, and was [covered previously](/review/platforma-kak-povod-dlja-uchastija-v-biznese) in 2023. Bemyfriends now works with nearly a thousand creators, powering their communities and fan monetization across 230 countries. Revenue has tripled year-over-year since launch.

The startup just raised a new $14.7M round, bringing total investment to $43.7M.

02 /Why It Matters

"Everyone is a fan of something or someone," Bemyfriends declares. Think about it – it's actually pretty true.

Which leads to an unexpected insight. If you hold a portfolio of diverse creators, you don't have to agonize over how to promote any specific one. You just need to match any given person with a creator they already are – or could easily become – a fan of.

That dramatically simplifies Bemyfriends' business model. The more creators of different types the startup adds to its portfolio, the easier and cheaper it becomes to operate. Because instead of finding audiences for creators, it's finding creators for audiences. In theory, it can reach any person through the cheapest available channel – and then figure out which creator in its roster to put in front of them.

Also worth noting is a meaningful strategic shift. In a recent article about the current funding round, the CEO said: "Our ultimate goal is to become the global infrastructure for IP owners who want to monetize their fan relationships."

This is a move from promoting content to building a business on intellectual property. Think licensed fictional characters – for film franchises, toy production, and beyond.

The Labubu toy craze comes to mind immediately. The character was created by a Hong Kong artist for an illustrated book series. In 2019, Chinese company Pop Mart licensed the character for toy production – which became popular domestically and across parts of Southeast Asia. Then in 2024, the toys suddenly went globally viral, and by summer, Pop Mart's owner had become wealthier than Peter Thiel. In other words, IP can generate more return than investing in startups.

Labubu isn't the only example. George Lucas famously negotiated a relatively modest director's fee for the original Star Wars – but insisted on retaining a share of merchandising rights. The studio agreed readily, not seeing much value in it. Lucas made billions.

In June, Chronicle ([related review](/review/zachem-tolkatsja-zhopami-na-starom-rynke-startapov)) raised $11.6M to invest in creators who've built viral social media content featuring original fictional characters – with the plan to sell rights to those characters to professional studios for franchise development. It functions as a venture fund for IP.

Bemyfriends isn't (yet?) interested in such high-risk bets as investing directly in IP. But it still plans to profit from IP through other means – while building a portfolio of creators large enough to simplify audience management and hedge against any single creator's rise and fall in popularity. Because even Pop Mart's owner saw his fortune shrink significantly by autumn as the Labubu hype cooled.

03 /Opportunities

The creator economy is already a massive market – estimated at $2–4.3 trillion globally depending on the source. The opportunity for anyone helping creators monetize is obvious.

But the important nuance is that the biggest money, as in every market, is made not in daily hustle but in building assets. Historically those assets were trademarks. Now they include IP rights – fictional characters in particular.

And there's a legal wrinkle worth knowing: in most legal systems, including the US, there's no standalone category for registering fictional characters. You can register a trademark associated with a product category, or file a copyright on the story in which the character appears. Whether a character constitutes protectable IP can only be determined by a court, relying on vaguely articulated precedents like "does the character have character?" and "is the character a story?" That makes registration and protection murky. But it also creates an opportunity for those who can navigate murky water.

The biggest trend: IP creation, protection, and monetization is becoming the most important component of the creator economy. Bemyfriends is building the "global infrastructure" for exactly that.

But the specific plays within this broad trend are enormously varied – from creating original fictional characters yourself, to building platforms and services that help others sell and protect their IP.

The AI Film Company ([related review](/review/hronika-revoljucij)), for instance, has tackled "IP protection in the AI era" with a focus on video. It developed a special format for storing and using video that automatically embeds information about who created each element – music, design, characters, and other objects included. The platform then monitors usage of videos in that format, collects fees automatically, and distributes them among rights holders according to preset rules.

The possibilities here are genuinely vast. Especially because as AI video platforms proliferate, the number of active creators in the market will expand by orders of magnitude – and each one represents someone to build a business around.

The real market extends well beyond video. In any creative category where fan communities form – music, sports, gaming, independent comics – the same IP creation and monetization infrastructure is needed and largely unbuilt. The sharpest entry is the intersection of high creator volume and low existing IP infrastructure: the more creators in a niche and the more primitive their current monetization tools, the larger the gap.