Althea Lim was in medical school when she became the most successful party promoter in Singapore. She hadn’t planned to make a serious job of it; she only wanted to bring in some extra cash, and promoting seemed easy to pick up. She paid clubs $6 per entry ticket, then turned around and sold them to Singapore’s thriving crowd of young partygoers for $25 apiece, netting a neat $19 profit for every person she got through the door.
But that was just it. She had to get people through the door. And doing that meant figuring out how to network. How to sell. How to find people who wanted what she had to offer, and were willing to pay for it. Well, Lim learned, and by the time she graduated with a biomedical degree, she was bringing in up to $40,000 a month from promoting.
“Not a lot of people know that,” Lim laughs after telling us this story.
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It makes sense, though. Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of Gushcloud, Asia’s largest talent representation, content distribution, and creator monetization company. Her company reps hundreds of creators globally, recently expanded to Abu Dhabi, and just launched a $20 million venture capital program specifically for creators seeking growth investment.
The social media, sales, and community-building skills she learned as a party promoter, plus the network of people she gathered along the way, became foundational for the next step in her career. “I was called in to help politicians understand the world of social media,” she explains. “Politicians and very wealthy businessmen were very intrigued by the space. I started introducing them to all these cool kids who were helping sell my party tickets, and I started seeing that young people in Singapore were becoming interested in the topics these people were talking about.
“That’s when I realized I could make this a career,” she says.
She launched Gushcloud in 2011, and in the company’s infancy planned to disrupt the magazine industry. She would go to major mags’ established advertising clients and ask if the magazines were giving them specific statistics to prove what ROIs they were seeing from placements.
“At that point in time, they weren’t,” she says. “So I said, ‘Well, if you give me half of that budget, or even one-tenth of that budget, we could spend it on bloggers and I can tell you exactly what the viewer analytics are.’ And that was how it started.”
It worked. Clients who shifted some of their budget to Gushcloud would start “increasing and increasing” upon seeing viewership statistics from the bloggers whose content ran alongside their ads, Lim says.
At the same time, she was interested in doing more with the bloggers–and other types of content creators springing up thanks to the success of platforms like YouTube and Instagram.
“In Singapore there were zero digital talent agencies,” she says. “So I went to America and had meetings with WME and UTA for the first time. And they would say, ‘We represent Brad Pitt exclusively.’ So I’d say, ‘Oh, you manage Brad Pitt?’ And they go, ‘No, no, no, we just represent him.’ I thought, What’s the difference? And they were able to explain that when you represent talent, you represent their business needs. You don’t necessarily have to manage them and develop their career. I liked that model.”
It’s the model she adopted for Gushcloud, which she sees as providing four areas of service to the content creators it represents.
First is representation, where Gushcloud sources brand deals, product endorsements, and NIL rights. Then content publishing and distribution, including content licensing, multiplatform optimization and distribution, and OTT and FAST channel development. Third is direct-to-consumer fan monetization, like subscriptions and merch. And fourth, Gushcloud gives creators capital injections. All of this is built on Gushcloud’s technology and data platform.
“We can study the data of the services that we provide to creators, and we can tell them that by doing this, you’ll be able to earn more income, because this is what you’re going to do for your fans, this is what you’re going to do for your content,” Lim says. Without Gushcloud’s tech/data side, she adds, “We wouldn’t have the confidence to be able to tell them, ‘Last year you made half a million dollars, this year you’re going to make $700,000. This is what we’re going to do for you.’ The data platform guides our decision-making when it comes to increasing creators’ income.”
Using those guiding projections, Gushcloud deploys capital to its creators in a royalty/advance model “similar to the music industry,” Lim says.
Gushcloud currently has offices covering 13 territories throughout Southeast Asia, China, Australia, and its latest, Abu Dhabi. Lim’s goal is to next break into the American market, then South America. She plans to do this while also kicking off a spate of acquisitions that will build Gushcloud’s stable of creator services.
“We’re obsessed with acquiring any company that has tools when it comes to content licensing or content distribution,” she says. “For example, if you have a tool that helps to distribute content faster in a more intelligent manner, that’s what we like. Or you might have a tool that edits faster than anyone else, and be able to understand different markets. We like that as well.”
Gushcloud’s actively seeking companies in the OTT/FAST spaces, direct-to-consumer subscription companies, merch companies, and brand incubators, she adds.
Ultimately, Lim says, “What we really want to be is our own ecosystem. We want to be able to represent 0.5% of our addressable market, which is $200 billion on an annual basis. We want to keep $1 billion annual revenue of creators we work with, and we want to keep their income sustainable. Our golden vision is to see if we can represent $1 billion of annual income for creators.”
