We recently connected with Claudia Raupach and have shared our conversation below.

Claudia, appreciate you joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Me and my co founder founded SWAI one year ago. SWAI is a user generated content platform and creator ecosystem. We connect brands and user generated content creators in order to build powerful, authentic content campaigns. Having worked for almost a decade in different marketing agencies, we started SWAI with the intention of reshaping the idea of classical marketing. What happens in classical marketing processes is that the creative campaign idea is born and shaped by the creative team. What we at SWAI do differently is that we let our content creators develop the creative idea, the creative script and they will also shoot the final content. Of course, we brief them beforehand according to the brands ideas and needs. We believe that they are the ones who know best what works for their audiences. In that sense that we give the creative power to our content creators. And it works! Being almost 1 year on the market, our campaigns outperform classical campaigns, resulting in over average click through rates and conversion rates.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Of course! I have a background in social media and creator marketing. After years of working for different brands and agencies, I decided to get my own creator business started: SWAI. As the creator economy is growing and there a so many possibilities out there, me and my co founder decided to focus on user generated content creators as well as smaller influencers (nano and micro) when helping brands market their products and services. We put the smaller creators at the forefront of our campaigns because we believe those small(er) creators have better engagements, are more authentic and more relatable in telling a brands story.
In my experience, a lot of brands still struggle with how to engage with younger audiences on social media. They use heavily branded content and a lot of times simply recycle campaign footage on social media. We consult and help brands on how to authentically engage with those audience online by creating authentic and highly converting “social first” content.
What am I most proud of looking at our 1 year business journey so far? I’d say simply getting it started. ;-) Till now things are moving smoothly and our business is growing everyday which I am very thankful for. Our creator pool by now holds 2000+ creators from all around the world. While we are operating in an agency model for the time being, we are very excited for our creator platform that will launch soon. Creators and brands will be able to connect seamless to create authentic content campaigns soon on the platform. The goal is to simplify the process for brands to get authentic creator content as the demands are rising.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my co founder Olivia at my co working space. She asked me if I wanted to meet her for a coffee and we immediately connected over our love for great content and our shared interest into the creator economy. Olivia pitched me her idea for SWAI literally 30 minutes after we met for the first time and we started working on SWAI the day after. A first test website was built within one week. Of course we changed and adapted the business idea and concept in the beginning quite a lot, talked to a lot of creators about their needs and eventually started SWAI as a UGC platform and creator ecosystem.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the idea that you start your business with that one idea and it will turn out exactly like you imagined in the beginning. We adjusted our business idea over and over again in the beginning till we got eventually where we are now. It demands a lot of flexibility to start over and over again and to a certain extend it’s also letting go of control and indulge happily in the unknown of what comes next.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.swai.social
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swai.social/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/68774543/admin/dashboard/