Worth

Worth is raising a Crowd SAFE at a $6.5 million valuation with no discount ($5.5 million valuation for early bird investors). This price is somewhat reasonable. Worth has built proprietary technology that allows brands to generate content with real social media users, and that tech has intrinsic value. While the company’s revenues are low, quarter-over-quarter growth is strong. Therefore, Worth’s price rating is strong.

Worth has chosen to focus on restaurants as early customers on its platform, but theoretically any type of consumer business could benefit from user-generated content. Of course, many small businesses don’t have the cash to spend on content. Plus, for a business owner, interest in Worth likely requires a fairly high level of comfort with Facebook and Instagram. These constraints limit Worth’s obtainable market significantly.

Worth’s potential market is also dependent on the company’s ability to draw average social media users to the other side of its marketplace. Brands have no reason to spend money with Worth if the company only offers posts from a small network of users. Worth doesn’t address any plan to market to users, and the majority of people probably aren’t willing to post sponsored content for a few dollars. 

Worth’s addressable market is theoretically very large, but constraints on the amount of brands who would realistically spend for content and the amount of users who would post sponsored content limit that market significantly. Consequently, Worth’s market rating is moderate.

Worth was founded by Patrick Kim, a self-proclaimed “young entrepreneur” with a couple of past companies under his belt. Kim graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 with a BFA in Industrial and Product Design. In the years since, he seems to have bounced between a few short stints as a company founder or executive and staff product designer before founding Worth in 2018. Beyond Kim, Worth’s team includes a co-founder with venture capital experience in India, a CTO educated at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and several staff developers from India. 

User-generated content (UGC) is a new trend in marketing, and Worth offers a solution that meaningfully streamlines brands’ process of collecting content. The few companies that are savvy enough to leverage UGC are often doing so via expensive marketing agencies that solicit influencers for sponsored mentions, a time-consuming and manual process that is inefficient for both brands and posters. 

Worth offers a new solution. Brands can upload their own photos for users to post, allowing UGC to be created more spontaneously and with significantly less manual back-and-forth between companies, agencies, and posters. Few other companies are offering tech-enabled UGC platforms at this point. As a result, Worth’s differentiation rating is well above average. 

Worth doesn’t share a large quantity of performance data for investors to evaluate. However, what is available seems promising. After launching in July 2020, Worth generated $15,000 in Q3. Revenues in Q4 grew significantly to $78,000. That strong quarter-over-quarter growth indicates that Worth is on the verge of finding product-market fit and accelerating sales. 

Based on the limited data available, Worth seems to have performed well in its first six months in business. Therefore, the company’s performance rating is high. 

Worth offers a promising product for brands looking to spend advertising dollars effectively without tons of manual effort from marketers or agencies. However, for all the company’s promise, execution seems to be mediocre. The company’s raise page is rather short and uninformative, and Worth’s website isn’t particularly compelling. Based on these impressions, prospects exploring Worth might be turned off by a product that doesn’t seem particularly professional. 

These missteps could be due to the relative inexperience of Worth’s founding team. No team members have meaningful business experience or domain expertise in marketing or advertising. While founder Patrick Kim has been involved in early-stage companies before, he doesn’t seem to have held in-depth roles or founded companies that reached any measure of scale. 

In addition, it’s really too early to say whether Worth can continue to grow or not. With only six months of operations to evaluate — plus the clear lack of polish in the company’s presentation — investors could be rightly wary that Worth isn’t an overnight success.

Worth is still very young and has some work to do developing a brand that compels both businesses and social media posters. However, the company does offer an innovative solution in a trendy space in advertising. It’s extremely frustrating and expensive to work with bloated marketing agencies that bill thousands of dollars to connect a brand with a handful of influencers. Worth’s approach to scalable user-generated content could be an obvious win for a wide swath of businesses. 

Plus, the company’s significant quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in Q3 and Q4 of 2020 seem to signal that companies do indeed find the product compelling. It’s a promising sign that Worth is continuing to invest in technology and sales from the proceeds of this raise. An improved product and more aggressive sales strategy have the potential to grow revenue even further.

Worth offers a streamlined tech interface connecting brands with social media users to create user-generated content. The company grew rapidly within the six months after its launch to hit $78,000 in quarterly revenue, an early sign that companies believe that Worth’s product is a useful complement to their marketing and advertising strategies. 

On the other hand, Worth’s team is relatively inexperienced, and it shows with a lack of polish in the company’s marketing materials (rather important for a marketing-focused company). Worth needs to move quickly to expand the number of social media users/posters to offer brands a sizable pool of potential advertisers, and the company doesn’t address that objective in its raise materials. Therefore, Worth has been rated a Neutral Deal.

For questions regarding the KingsCrowd staff pick or ratings for this company, please reach out to support@kingscrowd.com.