BantuBuzz: A startup promising to connect Influencers with brands.

A new startup has found its way on my desk and it’s an interesting one. If you have a significant following on social media platforms or you are looking to promote your brand this might be of interest to you. BantuBuzz, is a promising Zimbabwean platform that might have found a way to create earning opportunities for content creators. While also giving brands a platform to look for influencers who can promote their brands and products.

BantuBuzz calls itself “Africa’s premier creator-brand collaboration platform,” and behind it is Blessing Mokoena, a Zimbabwean entrepreneur. The idea is that creators from across multiple social media platforms, like X, TikTok and Instagram, can go on BantuBuzz and post their profiles, listing details like their follower count, how much they charge for a video promo, and what their niche is. Brands or people looking to collaborate can then pick whichever creator fits and work with them directly.

As for their business model it seems as if they charge both brands and creators to be on their platform.For the brand pricing model the prices vary from $0 to $399.Your plan affects the number of active campaigns, active collaborations and team members you can have.

The creator pricing model is more lenient. The plans start from $0 to $19, with limitations of how many “portfolio items” you can put, verified badge availability and priority search placement depending on the plan chosen.

This can be very helpful to creators when you realize that most people who get into content may not have the right information on how deals with brands are done. Let’s say a boy in Highfields starts making skits in his bedroom just for fun and he manages to get a significant number of followers from it. All of a sudden brands start reaching out. Even with a lousy offer he can end up making videos for said brand and ends up being taken advantage of without even noticing.

Being a marketplace means BantuBuzz naturally helps both creators and brands discover prices and each can see where they fit. A creator can simply observe what other creators of the same follower count range charge . While brands can see how much a certain type of creator is likely to charge without having to overpay.

It also gives niche creators a real shot at being discovered by brands. Usually, it’s social media algorithms doing the work of surfacing creators to brands, and that algorithm tends to favor whoever’s already popular. Feeds are also tuned to the tastes of whoever is viewing making the discovery of niche creators.

If you’re not showing up on people’s screens regularly, you barely get any offers, no matter how good your content actually is.

This can work against, say, someone who just opened a small hospitality business and wants to promote it. They likely don’t know which creator, out of thousands, is actually the right fit to push their brand. A platform like BantuBuzz, where creators list their niche and rates upfront, at least gives that business owner a place to go looking.

As always I had to visit their site to see what exactly they had going on for them. They have a good number of creators which is more than 80, some with followers in the hundreds of thousands. These include creators from different platforms like Facebook, X, Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube. This can provide variety for early brands who are trying to test out the platform. Hopefully BantuBuzz can keep increasing their creators, especially the ones with huge follower numbers to attract big brands.

The competition against BantuBuzz isn’t stiff, locally at least. In fact, my research shows that no one in Zimbabwe is doing quite what BantuBuzz does yet. But Bantu is not just targeting Zim. They are positioning themselves as the bridge between African content creators and brands.

On the continent, there is some competition. Kenyan platform Wowzi offers this and is already well ahead, having raised a few million dollars in funding and has worked with huge brands such as Netflix, Google and CocaCola. Even so, BantuBuzz still has an edge in the Zim market, since local brands are almost always going to look for local creators who resonate with their audience far better than an outsider would. Local might actually be their super power, as they plan to expand beyond. Indeed there are probably local brands looking to do regional promotions, as well as global brands that would love a single platform from which they can coordinate an Africa-wide campaign.

BantuBuzz has quite some potential. Their main focus now must be towards bringing bigger and more recognisable names to the platform. The problem they are solving is real and hopefully they are the one of the Zimbabwean startups that can make it big.

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