Rapha Avellar Reveals The SURPRISING Truth About Influencer Marketing

In this episode of The Quest for Success Podcast, Brazilian entrepreneur and marketing visionary Rapha Avellar shares his inspiring journey—from a lower middle-class childhood to building a thriving career in the creator economy. Rapha opens up about his humble beginnings, his pivot from investment banking to entrepreneurship, and the mindset shifts that helped him scale success.
 
He dives deep into the evolving world of influencer marketing, the power of personal branding, and why authenticity is the currency of modern content creation. Rapha unpacks the rise of smaller creators, the democratisation of influence, and what the future of monetising attention looks like. Whether you're a brand builder, creator, or entrepreneur, this episode is packed with insights on business transformation, ROI, and finding balance between ambition and family.
 
 
Key Takeaways
✅ Success is the ability to materialise dreams
✅ Growing up in a lower middle-class family shaped his ambition
✅ Transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship can be life-changing
✅ Productising solutions is a game-changer for business growth
✅ Social media is a powerful tool for rapid expansion
✅ Personal branding and authenticity attract the right audience
✅ Smaller creators often deliver stronger ROI in influencer marketing
✅ Democratisation of influence is empowering more people to succeed
✅ Everyone has a story or skill to share—content creation is for all
✅ Balancing success and family life requires intention and tough choices
 
If you're passionate about building a brand, navigating the creator economy, or transforming your business, don’t miss this one.
 
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Connect with Rapha:
BrandLovers: https://www.brandlovers.ai/
Rapha's Insta: https://www.instagram.com/avellarrapha/
Rapha's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avellarrapha/

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Transcript

Dylan Pathirana (00:32.027)
All right, welcome back to the Quest for Success podcast. And thanks so much for tuning in once again. Today on the show, we are really excited because today we have with us Rafa Avella, who is a serial entrepreneur from Brazil. And he's really at the cutting edge, I'd say of building the democratized creator economy.

I had the privilege of meeting Rafa at Harvard Business School and he's one of my classmates. We spent three years, but I feel like I need to know you more. I don't think we had much time over last three years. So I think this is a great opportunity for us to get to know and especially for me to understand your story.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:24.504)
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. think talking about the creative economy is something that's really close to heart for me. And I think the transformation is larger than what people think it is. So I'd love to give some context, maybe some data that we have been running with and excited.

Dylan Pathirana (01:46.215)
Awesome. So Rafa, this, conversation is all about success, right? So we need to start with something quite fundamental and that is what does success actually mean to you?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:57.23)
Success for me is the ability to materialize in the world something that before only existed in your mind. I think that's my definition of it. It's the ability to think about something and then create it. I think that's my definition of success.

Dylan Pathirana (02:20.723)
So materializing your dreams really. Awesome.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (02:23.214)
Yeah. And it can be in any area of life that you can think of. It could be materializing the family you always dreamt of. It could be materializing the relationship with your son that you always dreamt of. It could be materializing a company, materializing friendships. It could be everywhere. But if you have that power to think about something and to dream about it,

Dylan Pathirana (02:34.846)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (02:52.46)
And if you have enough courage to speak about it and then go build it, I think that's what success looks like to me.

Dylan Pathirana (02:59.891)
And you've been able to materialize some of the dreams I'm sure you had when you were a younger boy. And I want to go back to that time. Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing, of your early family life and how you think that's impacted who you are today?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (03:15.01)
Yeah, and I think that's actually a huge portion of who I am. I grew up in a lower middle class family in Brazil. Public servants, militaries. I had no entrepreneurial background exposure and I don't think I even had ambitious people around me growing up. So I grew up living with, I was raised by a single mom. My dad left me when I was a kid.

My mom did not work so we lived with my grandparents. My grandfather was the man who paid for the things at the house. He was a vet so he was former military. I can't complain like I never went through hunger or major issues in life but it was a tight life.

I was always great at math and STEM. So when I was about to graduate from high school, like all the engineering, economics, all those disciplines engaged me. So I decided to study economics. And once I got into that, I ranked very high on the Brazilian SAT. So I went to a great school, top of my class. So when I went there,

I was brought into a new world. Like all the people who were studying with me wanted to go into private equity investment banking consulting, McKinsey Bain and so on and so forth. So I was exposed to that world. I ended up going into investment banking and that changed my life. So because when you're that young, when you have that like high level exposure to business thinking and to those kind of relationships and to that high performance environment, it just changes you forever.

you see people working sixteen hours a day eighteen hours a day and and bitches as fuck anything wow if i want to make it out there like i really have to step up my game and and growing up i had none of that so that's her it was miss started the first experience that sort of changed me and i think also when you grow up like seeing a lot of things that you want to have and that you want experience and and and you just can't it always like

Dylan Pathirana (05:25.215)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (05:33.31)
it builds some fire inside you to go get those things and I think that talks a lot about me and I think like not having a dad close to you when you were growing up it also puts a chip on your shoulder to prove to the world that you have worth that you have like value so I think a lot of that comes into who I am today and I think that's like the the the back version of my story Dylan

Dylan Pathirana (05:54.609)
And I think that's like the back.

And you might've not have had kind of that, the figures who had the drive and ambition that you mentioned, but do think there's anything that you took from those like close family figures other than that ambition? Like any other traits?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (06:16.654)
100%. My grandfather, who is one of the people that I most admire, and my mom are like the most ethical and value driven people that I have ever seen. And going into like banking, you see a lot of shit. You see a lot of discussions, like it's not often, but it happens. Like people,

Dylan Pathirana (06:37.951)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (06:46.776)
putting clients behind to make an extra buck and you see a lot of things happening and you know it's wrong and I think that value and moral compass is something that I really took like from my upbringing despite not having an example of ambition I saw a lot of wrong things being done around me Brazil is a corrupt country and and I've never ever like

even consider joining those things because like the moral compass was built in so strong inside me because of my upbringing and I think that's that that has a lot of value because some of the shortcuts might might slingshot you for a bit but if you fall from there you don't recover so I think having that long-term vision and building things the right way something that I definitely got from my upbringing

Dylan Pathirana (07:39.677)
And I imagine like once you graduated, a lot of your colleagues were getting these huge salaries from, as you said, these, the big four accounting firms. What, what led you into business and entrepreneurship in the end?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (07:53.592)
So it's a funny story. So I wanted to change the division inside the investment bank that I was working with. I wanted to go to the buy side, either private equity or listed equities. And because I had like six or nine months in the company, I couldn't change because of a policy. And I was mad at it. I got invitations from those buy side areas, like you want to work with us?

a lot of relationships inside the bank and I exposed my work. So people wanted to work with me, but my boss didn't let me, so I quit. And I went to work at a multinational company called Prexir. It was an industrial company. I went to work on their investment arm. So basically helping the CFO and the finance director model and decide upon large capital investments to build factories, to sell factories. So I went to work there.

And I was like a year inside the company and the CFO comes to me, he calls me at lunch and says, hey, I think you're too ambitious to work at this company. You would take 30 years to be a C-level here, a director. It's like that type of organization. I think you should do something else. And after those two experiences, I said, I don't think I'm built for corporate. So I need to build something myself. But I had no clue how to start. And by then my mom had remarried a guy.

who is my stepfather today. And he was a small time entrepreneur. He had a company that had six employees and I've been witnessing him run his engineering shop. was an engineering firm. His engineering shop for about a decade now. I had a lot of ideas of how to do things different, of how to expand the business. He was a genius on nuclear physics, which was the area in which he applied his engineering shop.

But he had no clue of how to run a business or how to build a business. So said, hey, what if I join him for a while, I understand about tax, understand about managing people, understand about running a company in Brazil. Despite the fact that he was not successful, the guy had been running that engineering shop for 34 years, so he knows something. Never went bankrupt, never went sideways. It was not a huge cash count for the family.

Dylan Pathirana (10:11.078)
Wow, yeah

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (10:20.504)
But it existed for three decades. Can a lot of people tell they run a business for three decades? So I said, maybe I can help him slash learn this thing. And then I go build something for myself. So I joined him and the company at that time did about like $400,000 in revenue a year, a nonprofit revenue. And in cutting a long story short, we took the company to,

ten to twelve independent year ten to twelve million dollars a year in revenue in four years so and and i was like a moment for for myself a moment for my family and i made my parents rich i made a i made a lot of a lot of money at that time and i and i read that business side by side my stepfather for about six years so that was sort of a second chapter in my life

Dylan Pathirana (10:49.881)
Wow.

Dylan Pathirana (11:10.99)
And what were the key levers that you pulled to create that transformation?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (11:17.23)
Two things, he ran that engineering shop basically as a dedicated consultancy. So for example, a large poop and paper firm or metals and mining or iron or oil and gas firm will say they had a problem measuring density level or temperature inside an industrial process. And he would come up with a once in a time solution like

customized for that application to measure that physical property. And when I joined the company, I analyzed like 34 years of data of what he built. And I understood a lot of patterns in the systems and I productized them. And on the back of productizing the solutions, you now can stop saying you're a consultancy to solve industrial processing and you can say, can help you better measure density in a wood digester.

and it's a lot easier to sell that and to market that so it was sort of productizing the customized solutions that enabled us to talk about it and then market it and that was the first lever the second thing was that the technology in which we measured industrial properties was nuclear technology so we use cesium 137 which is a radioactive isotype to do that

And we had a license that only five firms in Brazil had to manage radioactive material. So we built a whole service line on the back of that license, helping companies do logistics for radioactive material, dispose radioactive material and a lot of other things. So that was the second business that we started on the back of that license and that had just absolutely great margins. Nobody could do that. Like we had one competitor in Brazil.

and that also drove a lot of the growth.

Dylan Pathirana (13:17.559)
And so it, know, you, you're working in this kind of industrial space business, and then you go on to kind of start this like marketing kind of a company. What was that transition like?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (13:31.618)
Yeah, one the things that I talked about is that by understanding the patterns in the customized systems that he built, we productized it and were able to market it effectively to the buyers. What I didn't talk about is how we did it. It was on LinkedIn and this is 2014, so 10 years ago. And we had no money, the company didn't have money, so we basically

sought out the free avenue. basically Google SEO and a lot of LinkedIn and 10 years ago, LinkedIn was a fucking white space. This is true story. We would write a white paper on the back of the solution and we will publish that on LinkedIn and people would drop their cell phones on the comments. Like call me, call me, please call me now. Like these were the type of comments you'll get on LinkedIn. It had a

Dylan Pathirana (14:11.305)
Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (14:22.483)
Ha ha ha!

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (14:29.23)
it looks like forum for like technical people and a lot of the growth was done on the back of social media we started youtube channel friend industrial company ten years ago we started facebook pages like for industrial company ten years ago we started we were very heavy on linkedin ten years ago for a very technical company if companies are now wondering about like personal brand and the c o talking about like

the company and the solutions, I did that 10 years ago. So I turned my stepfather into a large influencer at that space. He has like a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn today and he had it for a decade now. And he talks about a very niche subject. So if everyone now is starting podcasts and working on personal branding, we were doing that 10 fucking years ago.

Dylan Pathirana (15:09.067)
Wow

Dylan Pathirana (15:22.591)
You

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (15:23.854)
And that drove a lot of the growth and that's how I got involved in marketing because 10 years ago, it just felt like magic. You would publish a fucking white paper on LinkedIn and you would sell half a million dollars and it was free to publish. Like what? So it was a land grab at that time. So I went very deep on that because it was obviously a lever that was working.

Dylan Pathirana (15:39.743)
Wow.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (15:50.766)
And despite all the success, all the things that were happening, the company had the very limited TAN. TAN, so total addressable market. You can imagine like using nuclear and radioactive materials to measure industrial processes is like your last option. You just choose that when nothing else works. So it has a very limited TAN. And my stepfather was making a lot of money and we had two

options to try to grow. One of them was we either verticalize so we integrate more portions of our value chain or we go horizontal and we integrate suppliers and not suppliers but different product offerings to the same customer. And my stepfather didn't want to do either. So he was fine taking three million dollars dividends a year.

he didn't want the the hassle of like expanding to think that he was not comfortable and he didn't stand out so the company story here plateau and we had a good executive team at that time i was ready not to work because we we assemble the good agree leadership team i was getting i was training for arman for six hours they get into the office at one p and i was like twenty twenty five twenty six

Dylan Pathirana (17:08.204)
Wow

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (17:12.686)
I was retired at 25, 26 and I did that for two years. I did a lot of Ironmans. I climbed like three out of the seven highest mountains in the world. I did a lot of fun stuff. But after two and a half years I said, dude, I'm fucking 26. I don't want to stop. I don't want to be an amateur athlete. I want to build companies. That's like where my intellectual challenges is sort of where my...

Dylan Pathirana (17:23.412)
Wow.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (17:40.856)
satisfaction comes from and not from from doing a lot of sports. So I started to do some consulting, marketing consultancy on the side because I had also started to produce a lot of content on the web. I started growing a following on Instagram, on Musical.ly, which turned into being TikTok. My YouTube channel was growing in Brazil. So I started doing some consultancy for large companies on personal brand and a lot of things.

And that consultancy in four years turned into a 20, $25 million agency. So that was like the second business I built. And 400 employees, 25 million in revenue more or less. And the company was a large cash cow. He made a lot of money. So I started acquiring a lot of companies. built a holding co, eight businesses.

Dylan Pathirana (18:21.141)
Wow

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (18:34.274)
from production from high-level production to netflix htl and a lot of like this this premium content channels to talent agency companies we the the company that i thought is the company that runs gabriel medina who's the the number one server in the world he the company runs his career which is a before i need the tops females getting the world we read their her career a lot of the name our contracts are are with us so it's a talent management company that i bought

different businesses and I ran that for about six years then I transitioned to a board role, established a professional management below it, I'm still the largest shareholder but not on the day to day and then we get to Brent Lovers for two years I was in a chairman position but again I got bored, I want to build stuff and I started Brent Lovers and we can talk about that in the next few minutes.

Dylan Pathirana (19:07.743)
Six years, then I transitioned to a board role, established some professional management below it. I'm the largest shareholder, but not on the day-to-day. And then we get to Brent Lover's. For two years, I was in a chairman position, but again, I got bored. want to build a

Dylan Pathirana (19:29.855)
Before we go to that, I'm really interested in how you came across LinkedIn and all these social media platforms at the time, because they weren't big, as you mentioned. Was it something you just stumbled upon, or was it like a strategic move by you?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (19:47.011)
I think...

It's very cocky to say it was a strategic move. I probably stumbled upon occasionally, but trying to add value to the people that are listening, I think one of the things that I've always done very, well in my life is that I'm extremely curious. I'm the most curious person you've ever seen. when 10 years ago, when those platforms started like hyping up,

Most people's reaction to an influencer was like, what the fuck is this? If you saw someone in the streets taking a selfie, you would judge her or him. You would say, this is a narcissist motherfucker. And you would judge him. Most people would. And I never judge shit. Like I look at it and I say, what is happening? Why is this person doing this?

What value is she taking from it? What's the platform she's using? have a funny story that materializes my curiosity. I was in the US, I was coming back from Aspen with my family about six years ago from a skiing trip. And I was at the airport and I saw a little girl, like 11, 12, 13 year old, like using the cell phone, using an app to watch videos that I did not know of.

Dylan Pathirana (21:13.151)
that I did not go well. And I was like behind the mirror, trying to spy on her phone, like what is she looking at? And then her dad comes to me and says, what are you doing?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (21:14.766)
and I was like behind the little girl trying to spy on her phone like what is she looking at? And then her dad comes to me and say what are you doing man? And I had to explain to no I work with digital and I was looking at the app, I don't know the app and the guy was mad at me for spying on the little girl's phone but I was trying to understand what was she using? What app is that? And that sort of tells a little bit of the story

And probably 10 years ago when those platforms started coming up, every B2B enterprise industrial company probably was having a conversation like YouTube is not the place for me. YouTube is for that. YouTube is for why I'm not going to produce con. Imagine an industrial CEO 10 years ago being asked to produce LinkedIn content on his personal brand. was an offense and I never judged it.

I always take a clean lens and very curious approach to stuff and try to think about it from a first principles perspective and I think that added a lot of value to me throughout life.

Dylan Pathirana (22:20.767)
So Rafa, you mentioned about personal branding. How important personal branding for a business?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (22:31.214)
I think it's massive and but let me say something else and I'll dive deep in a second and I'll try to break down some principles of why I think it's massive. But first, I think it's a choice. I think you don't have to do it, but I think it's a great strategy to do it. And if you choose not to do it,

You have to understand the trade off that someone else might do it and might win. That's it for me. It takes a lot of energy to work on a personal brand. It's stressful. It's intense. You can argue that it diverges your attention from core aspects of the business. It has a lot of derivatives, but it's a great strategy. And if you

actively choose not to do it, you have to be fine with the fact that someone else might do it and might win and might eat your lunch. And the reasons why I think it's a great strategy is for the following. Number one, people connect a lot more with personal stories than company messages. So if you're sharing the story about building your company, it will be 10x more interesting than your newest marketing campaign.

I can guarantee you that human beings are wired for being curious about other people. And there's a lot of things that come into play. Like the risk is this guy going to be successful? He's not, is he not, he's going to fail. Can I watch him fail? Can I gossip about it? Like there's a lot of human nature that drives that behavior, but people are just more interested. So you will get more reach, you will get more engagement.

Dylan Pathirana (24:10.303)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (24:24.428)
you get more people talking about you. The second thing is it scales, content scales time. And this is a principle that I think not a lot of people understand. Take someone that does not produce content. My example, for example, and I'll run you guys through it. Imagine if Hafa did not produce any content on social media. So for example, I'll go through my day to day, have

Dylan Pathirana (24:52.863)
I have 14 fucking legs.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (24:53.166)
14 fucking meetings. have like four to six meetings with customers and clients. And when I'm there, I'm engaging and I'm influencing those one or two people that are inside the meeting with me. And for an hour, I spent an hour and I influenced two people. Multiply it by four. Today, I will influence eight people with my speech, with my ideas, with the things that I'm pushing.

in the world. Now imagine a parallel reality if Hafa produces content and is successful at it, which is actually my case. have 400,000 followers across social media, LinkedIn, TikTok and so on and so forth.

Dylan Pathirana (25:33.554)
Wow

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (25:37.878)
While I'm inside those meetings, and we can actually take a look at the analytics, 70, 60, 80,000 hours of my content are being consumed. While I'm inside the meeting talking one-on-one with someone, there's 60,000 hours of my content being watched on YouTube, LinkedIn, Spotify.

Dylan Pathirana (25:56.235)
Amazing

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (26:07.406)
TikTok, Instagram. So when you think about a key executive's ability to influence his company, to influence the market, to influence customers, it's just an awesome strategy because while I'm talking inside that closed room with the CMO of Unilever, the CMO of N. Houser Bush might be watching a podcast that I did, might be watching a clip that I cut on TikTok.

Dylan Pathirana (26:32.574)
and that day this guy or girl has a meeting and will be with me in his talk with me and someone who mentioned influence and said, I know a guy and it just scales and the best way to think about this is a principle that I call engineered sensitivity. think a

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (26:33.198)
And that day, this guy or girl has a meeting and will be with me in his thoughts of mine and someone will mention influence and say, I know a guy. And it just scales. And the best way to think about this is a principle that I call engineered serendipity. I think a lot of success has to do with luck. But I think you can engineer luck. You can be more...

Dylan Pathirana (26:56.465)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (27:03.042)
put yourself in a position to be more lucky. And I think content plays a huge portion of this because people remember you more. And then if they remember you, if they call upon you and you deliver on your promise, it just builds up from there. So I think content scales time. I think content multiplies your ability to influence the agenda that you have. And I think it's a great strategy, but I don't think it's for everyone. And I think a lot of people

Dylan Pathirana (27:05.489)
Yep, I agree.

Dylan Pathirana (27:12.606)
Mm.

Dylan Pathirana (27:30.771)
Yeah.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (27:33.432)
can't handle the stress.

Dylan Pathirana (27:35.079)
Yeah, so I have a follow up question on that. So how do you stay authentic while also staying strategic with your content?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (27:45.42)
That's a good question. And I don't know if I'm the best person to answer that. Because I think I'm too authentic and I lose business because of it. But at the end of the day, of the things that I... One of the truths that I made piss with that I don't need 100 % of the market. And the trade-off for me of being less authentic

to capture those additional dollars, just not worth it. I prefer to be who I am and I prefer to do business with people that jam with me, people that like the way I talk, that like the way I expose my ideas, that are not offended by it, and so on and so forth. So I have never traded more dollars for the need to be less authentic.

And I think that's one of the things that drive that actually drive a lot of growth because people, we like to think that people are stupid and we can manipulate people. But I think that's far from the truth. People have a great bullshit raider. People can smell a bullshitter from afar. So if you're authentic, if you talk your own way, if, if, if people see that you're not like choosing a lot of the words, people.

see that you engage in topics that other people wouldn't. People vibe with it and people connect with it and I think long term it ends up bringing more business. I've never made that conscious decision to be less authentic, to be more polished and so on and so forth.

Dylan Pathirana (29:19.891)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Pathirana (29:31.231)
Just on that, before we move on, like you mentioned that, you know, while you're in a meeting, people are watching 80,000 hours of your content as more and more people get into the content game and there's more and more content out there. How do, how do you stand out? How do you stay relevant?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (29:59.65)
I think it's naive to think that it won't get harder because it will. I think what we live today, we like to think that the digital market is sort of mature, but it's fucking at its infancy. I think that 20, 30 years from now, we'll look back and say, wow, it was so easy back in 2025. It was, there was so little competition.

Dylan Pathirana (30:25.054)
hehe

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (30:28.59)
People were so unprofessional. There was so much room. I think we will look to this day with a lot of nostalgia. Because I think, I still think it's in its infancy. I think it's very easy to stand out if you do a good job. But 20 years from now, it will not. It will be hard as fuck. It will be like playing banner ads on Google.

today like so much competition. But anyway, I think if someone wants to stand out from competition, I think volume is a huge part of it. Strategies, if you have a great piece of content like podcasts, you should be thinking of how can you slice and dice this in a hundred different ways and spread out shorter videos on multiple platforms. think one of the things that a lot of people get wrong,

Dylan Pathirana (31:17.279)
in a hundred different ways and spread out shorter videos on multiple platforms. One of the things that a lot of people get wrong is that they treat their...

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (31:25.782)
is that they treat their content like this work of art and they review it like endlessly and they go through the 17th version before releasing it and 99.999 % of the successful people are just spitting out like 300 pieces of content a day and I think if you want to stand out you got to win the volume game and

Dylan Pathirana (31:43.199)
Yeah

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (31:52.206)
and the data game you gotta be passionate about looking at the data and understanding what drove this piece of content to to do better why this one didn't work just creating a playbook that you can that you can feed off

Dylan Pathirana (31:52.575)
and the data game. You gotta be passionate about looking at the data and understanding what drove this piece of content to do better.

And I suppose looking back on kind of the, the marketing journey that you've had like up until the point in time that we're discussing, do you think that's repeatable? Like in the sense that you got in early on LinkedIn and it was kind of a white space, as you said, and you will manage to scale there. Do you think for people starting now it's repeatable?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (32:28.238)
100%. People always judge the new platforms. And I can promise you, I can promise you that in 2025, a CEO will build a large company because he's doing live chats on Discord. And a CEO will build a large company because he hired a fucking video maker to follow him through the streets of Newark while he does meetings.

Dylan Pathirana (32:44.979)
Yeah.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (32:55.81)
Like people that are willing to do the things that others are not in this entertainment game are gonna be always one step ahead. And 10 years ago was exposing yourself with a personal brand on LinkedIn. And five years ago was being cocky enough to post a selfie of yourself and your kid and dismystified the idea that you're this suit and tie executive. And nowadays like the more,

The funny part is it gets edgier and it gets stranger. So people would need more courage to do it, but a hundred percent. There's a lot of new platforms coming in, new ways of using the platforms. I don't know a single Fortune 500 CEO that does an Instagram live every day to talk with his customers. I think that's a massive opportunity probably.

Dylan Pathirana (33:42.495)
single Fortune 500 CEO that does an Instagram live every day to talk with these customers. I think that's massive.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (33:54.706)
and no one's willing to do it. But probably some young girl or girl are going to do it and are going to build a large company, maybe sell to the Fortune 500 one that wasn't willing to take the risk at that time. And that's sort of the basic idea.

Dylan Pathirana (33:57.282)
Thank you.

Dylan Pathirana (34:09.777)
Don't go to where the football is, go to where the football is going. Think ahead.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (34:14.734)
100%. And the funny thing is you don't have to invent that shit. Like the content creators, the people that live off the entertainment are already doing it. It's just that the business folk are not. So if you look at the top players on Twitch, if you look at the top players on Instagram, they're not business oriented. If you look at what people are doing on TikTok, if you look at

Dylan Pathirana (34:37.854)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (34:42.318)
what people are doing on Spotify, people are doing on Quay, on Snap, on so on and so forth. Like if you're willing to do the same thing that the content creators are doing, you're probably gonna win.

Dylan Pathirana (34:55.251)
So I want to move on to brand lovers because it is something which I'm really keen to discuss. Can you, can you walk us through kind of how you got into brand lovers and it's kind of founding story.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (35:07.864)
Sure. So, Brandlovers is a marketplace that connects advertisers with content creators through two different technology platforms. Creators download for free on iOS and Android and app, where they find the brand use to work for. And on the other end, we built the first creator media platform in the world, backed by the top VCs in Latin.

And what we do is we created the Google AdWords for the creator economy. So it's a media buying platform that you can log in and you can easily purchase media from 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 content creators simultaneously with full end-to-end automation and AI driven processes.

And this is what we do. we're helping very large advertisers invest huge amounts of money on influencers, automating the process end to end. And the origin story is, it's basically me bumping into like these type of views throughout like five, six years running the agency and just understanding that it should have, we should have a better way of running those campaigns.

Like if you run a marketing campaign with influencers today, it looks like you're back into the stone ages from fighting the influencer, contacting the influencer, understanding how to price the influencer, negotiating the contract, understanding what to ask the influencer to do. And then like doing the pay, like it's a nightmare. You go from WhatsApp and messaging to a spreadsheet and then you need to ask for a print for the result. And it shouldn't be that way.

So we were running a lot of influencer driven campaigns in the agency and it was the worst operational issue we had. So at that time I hired two engineers on the side to start working on a way to automate that. And that's like how we started. And since then we raised more or less $10 million of venture capital in a little over a year.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (37:29.582)
and we're currently working with companies such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, the largest, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and some of the largest advertisers in the world.

Dylan Pathirana (37:43.084)
And to most companies, influencer marketing is still quite new. Do you have any statistics around the impact that it can have?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (37:53.518)
100%. So some of the data that is very interesting for people to understand is the following. If you're talking about younger cohorts, so people under 34, and it varies from country to country, so I'm talking Brazil. Over half of the purchases that people under 34 do in Brazil,

are originated from influencer driven endorsements. And Brazil ranks number one in the world in that category. And that's actually one of the reasons why I think Brazil can actually create the dominant platform worldwide. Because we lead on every social media statistic, we're the leader. So we are addicted to it. And there's a lot of reasons why that is. But one of the things is, if you're

Dylan Pathirana (38:24.459)
Wow.

Wow.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (38:47.862)
either a new brand trying to market to people under 40, it's the main source of how people today find, discover, and engage with new brands and products. So this is number one. So if you're trying to be known, if you're trying to get your product out, there are very few things that are as effective as influencer marketing. The second thing is because of tech, because of automation, nowadays it's easier than

ever to launch a brand. So currently there are thousands of makeup brands, thousands of athletic brands, thousands of apparel brands, thousands of, I don't know, mug brands. Like it's very easy to outsource that shit, create a brand, put it on Shopify and start your own e-commerce. So what ended up happening in the past 10 years is that

Dylan Pathirana (39:33.017)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (39:46.21)
the competition for attention is as fierce as ever. And in a world where there's more content out there that human beings are able to consume, influencers act as the curators of what you should pay attention on. So if you can understand 5,000 lipstick brands, you can choose from the four that this influencer talks about. So this is how people are changing their behavior. I don't have to research the 5,000.

Dylan Pathirana (39:49.311)
ever. And in a world where there's more content out there that human beings are able to consume, influencers act as the curators of what you should pay attention to. So if you can't understand 5,000 lipstick brands, you can choose from the four that these influencers talk to.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (40:16.47)
I trust that girl and she recommends me four, so my consumption list has been drawn down to those four. So I think that this is very important for people to understand what is happening in terms of behavior, especially in the younger cohorts. And the second thing that I'd say is that we run a very, very large research in Brazil yearly that is called

point of view and 57 % we just ran it. 57 % of the brands are expanding their budgets on influencer marketing. There's a highlight this year that the new CEO of Unilever which is the second largest advertiser in the world, he just got his position and his first statement and this made headlines all over the world as he said.

we're going to increase influencer marketing spend 20 fold, 20 fold. It's, it's not two fold. You guys can, you guys can Google that. So I think we're going through one of the largest transitions in terms of human behavior and demand generation strategies that we've ever seen. People were

Dylan Pathirana (41:17.43)
Wow 20

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (41:37.652)
literally looking for influencers to understand what restaurants to go, what trips to make, what clothes to wear, what lipstick to put on. And I think people just don't grasp it. And the younger brands that are more cash strapped, they don't have the ability to go on television, don't have the ability to go on these traditional media outlets, they go influencer first and they're winning massively.

Dylan Pathirana (42:04.611)
And the one thing that really stood out to me about your platform is the idea of democratization because you know, we've seen Mr. Beast, David Dobrik, all of these like big influencers getting paid millions, tens of millions of dollars for a brand deal. But to the average creator, that doesn't seem accessible.

So how does brand lovers make it easier for people?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (42:28.11)
The first thing, and just one comment before I answer that, I know both sides of the equation. So one of the companies that we had inside the holding company, it's a company called Adventures. And what Adventures does is that we use proprietary capital to co-invest in brands with large celebrities. So we're partners with the largest celebrities in Brazil. We have the Mr. Beasts of Brazil, the Beast Burgers of Brazil.

Dylan Pathirana (42:49.791)
you

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (42:57.902)
the feast of those of Brazil, do that in Brazil with a company called Adventures. And so I know that side of the story and it's a very interesting business. But as you said, it's for like, I think I would partner with 17, 15 creators in Brazil, no more than that. These are the largest. And what happens to the rest of them? So the democratization piece is something

Dylan Pathirana (43:01.404)
Awesome.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (43:25.802)
that really struck me and I'm being totally honest here. My first job was investment banking. came from finance. All of my business, like my goal was obviously to win and be successful, but I wanted to make money. So purpose and impact were not words that were in my vocabulary growing up. I just didn't know that side of the equation. Businesses for me was sort of competition. I like to win and to make money.

Dylan Pathirana (43:53.087)
and to make money. And when I started Brown Lover's, being 100 % honest, I started it because I thought it would be a massive business. It could be what I call my monolism. It's much larger than anything that I've ever done.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (43:54.252)
And when I started brand lovers, being a hundred percent honest, I started because I thought it could be a massive business. It could be what I call my Mona Lisa, much larger than anything that I've ever done. But on the first month of operating the company, we started receiving messages from like small time creators during the middle of Brazil that are in the Northeast of Brazil that are like small cities across the country saying,

that campaign helped me pay for for the school of my kid this month and I and I didn't know how I was going to do it that that campaign helped me buy medicine that I that I needed and I and I was cash strapped for and I started receiving that I get the goosebumps when I talk about this but I started receiving those messages and and something else struck me which was the impact portion of the business I had never been in contact with that in my life

And today I'd say it's a huge portion of what drives me. And the way we try to do that is the following. We discovered analyzing data that if you partner with smaller creators, you can get more reach for your buck. So for example, if you partner with larger creators, you can get a cost per view that is X and it changes country to country. If you partner with

creators, for example, that have 10 to 100,000 followers, you can get seven, eight times the reach for the same dollar invested. And what we're doing in Brazil is that we're shifting budgets from larger creator collaborations and even from TV and other media sources. And right now we're running campaigns that involve 3000, 5000, 7000, 12000 micro nano creators.

So brand lovers is free to download as an app. Every creator can do it. And once you log in, you connect your socials and you could have as low as a thousand followers, as low as $2,000. And we have campaign for that type of people. So we basically trying to help the long tail creator economy to monetize their influence by bringing the billion dollar budgets from large advertisers to invest with scale on that type of asset.

Dylan Pathirana (45:51.818)
So, Grandlovers is free to download as an app. Every creator can do it. And once you log in, you connect your socials, and you can have as low as $1,000, as low as $2,000. And we have campaigns for that type of people. So, we're basically trying to help the long-tail creator economy to monetize their influence by bringing the billion-dollar budgets from large advertisers.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (46:20.366)
So that's what we're doing. The app is free to download. Anyone can join. And once you join, you can start finding campaigns to monetize your influence with as low as 1,000 followers.

Dylan Pathirana (46:33.902)
And can you break that down for us? You said the ROI is a lot higher for smaller creators. How does that work? Is it something to do with the authenticity piece? Like connection, people feel connected to smaller creators.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (46:48.334)
I think there are two things here. One is price. There are two components, right? So whenever you're talking about ROI, you talk about like the objective you want to drive and the price you paid for it. There are two components on the equation. So let's go one by one. And the first is price. When you pay the wrong price for the right asset, you get the wrong result. When you pay the right price for the wrong asset,

Dylan Pathirana (47:14.356)
Yeah.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (47:17.974)
you get the wrong result. When you pay the right price for the right asset, you get the right result. So the first thing is price-wise,

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (47:31.072)
Smaller creators have a better reach for every dollar invested. So this is the first component. So you're paying a lower price for a larger reach. And that happened because the algorithms have changed in the past few years. It used to be a function of the size of your audience. And nowadays, every day that goes by, it has less to do with the size of your audience.

and it has more to do with the quality of your content. And TikTok started that and Instagram copied it because it works beautifully. And it basically makes the best content to be the most watched and increases average time spent on the platform, which is the KPI that these platforms are trying to operate on. So nowadays, literally an influencer with 3000 followers can have a million views.

Dylan Pathirana (48:26.268)
If he produces a great...

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (48:28.074)
if he produces a great piece of content. And right now, an influencer with 2 million followers can get 17,000 views. The algorithm has changed. So the price component is important because if you're paying for the size of the audience of the large creator, the reach you're going to get has nothing to do with that today. So...

Dylan Pathirana (48:54.128)
Mm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (48:55.854)
So this is the first component. The second thing is as you get larger, your audience disperses. So there are people who follow you because they're interested in your personal life. There are people that follow you because you're hot. There are people that follow you because yes, you give some great makeup tips. There's people that follow you because it's a Indian slash Asian slash Brazilian bot.

Dylan Pathirana (49:11.519)
Give some great tips. There's people that follow because it's an Indian slash Asian slash Brazilian bot.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (49:21.058)
that is like following people and selling likes and selling followers. So if you're large, there's a lot of these that follow you. So the larger you get, the more dispersed your base is. That people, despite you being from Brazil, there's people from the US that follow you if you're large enough. So the larger you get, you start to disperse the effectiveness of the segmentation.

And when you work with smaller creators, these people are usually very niche focused. So if you pay for a collaboration with a creator that has 20, 30, 50,000 followers, he or he's probably from the makeup niche, from the coffee niche, from the, I don't know, the Smurfs niche. I don't care.

Dylan Pathirana (49:50.143)
very niche focus.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (50:10.626)
they probably grew a following out of being very niche and very specific around what they produce. in contrast, an influencer talks about their life and it's much less niche focused. going back to your comment on authenticity, I think yes, there's a deeper connection. Smaller creators usually respond a lot more messages, they're engaging on the DMs with their followers, they have a closer connection.

but it's also a much better way to segment what you're doing because these people talk about a specific niche and the larger people talk about themselves and usually you usually don't have a lot of influence in terms of the specific niche that are trying to influence so it's a two factor equation you're paying a better price and you're getting better segmentation for your buck

Dylan Pathirana (50:41.951)
Mm.

Dylan Pathirana (51:01.93)
Yeah. And I read online and tell me if I've misquoted this, but you said everyone will monetize either their influence or their data. And I want to know what does the creator economy mean just for the regular person moving forward?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (51:19.182)
think if you project 20 years ahead,

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (51:25.71)
We will all be monetizing our data and the recommendations we make. I think we're all influencers. It's just that a lot of that experience hasn't been digitized yet. For example, you guys, when you finish up the podcast, like, Jam, I recommend to you, hey, I went to this great restaurant yesterday. You should check it on it. Like, he's driving demand for that restaurant. There's just no way to capture that today.

And I think that if we go 20 years from now, maybe with wearables, maybe other technologies, like we'll be able to capture that he made that recommendation and that you went to the restaurant and he might get some points on the restaurant, he might get a commission, I don't know. So I think we will be monetizing influence in a lot of different ways. And nowadays,

And I think marketing will change a lot. think influencers are just like the first step of this. And I think there's a lot of interesting things coming up with AI, wearables, and the automation of the process of measuring influence.

Dylan Pathirana (52:42.67)
So Rafa, great discussion and very fascinated about how this influential marketing is happening currently. So if someone starting up, someone young like Dylan, starting a business, what's the advice, one advice that you can give him?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (53:07.089)
find a way to start a business where you can trade your product or service for an influencer endorsement at scale and I'll give you an example of that. If you're a gym, you should be selling like every empty spot on the gym, trading for an influencer that will produce five to seven stories about working out in your gym and maybe a ruse once a week and you'll give

them a free membership and you should do that as much as you can. If you're starting a supplement company, would find a way to build a SKU that is very low cost but very high value in terms of perception so that you can send a thousand cases of this for free for influencers every month and it will cost maybe five thousand bucks a month and maybe twenty percent of them will post so you get

Dylan Pathirana (53:58.868)
Maybe.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (54:04.654)
200 influencer posts out of that. just engineering your business, the point is, engineering your business for the age of influence, I think it's massive. If you don't have a skill that you can send that is low cost and high value, you have a hard time getting influencers to talk about you. If you design your business in a way where you can't trade things

Dylan Pathirana (54:07.807)
And just engineering your business, the point is, engineering your business for the age of influence, I think it's massive. If you don't have a skew that you can send that is low cost and high value, you have a hard time getting influencers to talk about you. If you design your business in a way where you're

trade things with in-planters for exposure, you have a harder time getting the message out. So I think engineering your business at the early days when you're cash strapped and when you have to be very cost conscious for being able to make those trades with in-planters, you give the product or service and you get the exposure, I think it's massive. A lot of the business that I've seen skyrocket.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (54:32.674)
with influencers for exposure, you have a harder time getting the message out. So I think engineering your business at the early days when you're cash strapped and when you have to be very cost conscious for being able to make those trades with influencers, you give the product or service and you get the exposure, I think it's massive. A lot of the business that I've seen skyrocket,

were the business that stumbled into this, for example. There's a company in Brazil, it's a fucking tea company. They sell those tea things that you put on the hot water and it's supposedly, it makes you thinner, it makes your stomach work better, so there's those health claims. Dude, can you imagine how little it costs for you to create the fucking tea thing? It's fucking two cents, I don't know. These guys were sending.

Dylan Pathirana (55:01.711)
You

Dylan Pathirana (55:24.894)
Yeah.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (55:28.436)
like a hundred thousand cases to everyone in Brazil about the product and influencers liked it and they posted for free about it. And a company that was born without cash, like two young people, 18 year old, like in four or five years making half a billion in sales on the back of that strategy because they had something that was very high and the tea sold like very expensively at shops. So

Dylan Pathirana (55:49.249)
Wow

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (55:58.284)
despite costing like two cents to make, they would sell that shit for like 50 bucks. It was very expensive. So influencers posting about it were actually bragging, hey, I can afford the type of tea that expensive tea brand sends me shit. So it was good for the influencer to post about it. It fucking cost the company two cents to make that crap. And he would go on Instagram and he would have the perception that everyone in Brazil drank that fucking tea.

Dylan Pathirana (56:11.615)
that expensive ebrand sends me shit so it was good for the implants we talked about it fucking cost the company two cents and it would go on instagram and you'd have the perception that everyone in brazil drank the fucking tea and you'd try it out and i never did but it might be a thing so

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (56:27.788)
and you would try it out and I never did but it might be good tea so you stick with the product but it's just an unfair media distribution advantage that I think my tip would be engineering your business to the age of influence is one of the greatest things you can do.

Dylan Pathirana (56:39.101)
Yeah. One question I hear all the time from some of the people that I talk to. I don't have anything valuable to share online. What do you say to those people?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (57:04.29)
Get interesting. Be more interesting. I'm joking. I think the right answer here is to say, everyone has something interesting to share. Everyone's life story is interesting. I think that's right to a point. If you're willing to share that your sister is maniacal and that you have a very bad relation with your mom and you talk openly about that online, it's going to be a massive hit.

Dylan Pathirana (57:05.948)
You

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (57:33.784)
People love real life stuff. But on the other end, one of the things that I see is that, and I actually look down on it and I judge it, it's people that have not achieved anything significant in life that want to share lessons about how to be successful and how to do it. And I think that's just pathetic. And I think that the order here should be first,

you build something of value and then you can talk about it. And I see a lot of people that try to reverse that order and, and, and, and come and say, Hey, I'm not getting any traction. Of course you're not getting any traction. Your business make makes $10,000 a month in revenue or trying to talk about success. Of course nobody's going to listen. So I think everyone has something interesting to share, but being pragmatic.

A lot of that will take courage and a lot of personal exposure to be successful and you can do it. Most of the influencers that are successful, this is what they do. They go on fucking Instagram and they say, I just had a fight with my husband, he's an idiot. And people start commenting about it and this gets a lot of traction. So everyone has something very interesting to share, but it takes a lot of personal exposure. On the other end, I see a lot of people trying to share things that they

that they don't understand fully and I think it's one of the reasons they're not successful. So I think these are a couple different takes on the subjects. Jam.

Dylan Pathirana (59:13.968)
Yeah, I mean interesting right? Are we talking about quantity over quality? Because I've seen a lot of content you know it doesn't make sense absolutely rubbish and what I'm hearing it's important to have that quantity right? But how important to have that quality?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (59:34.286)
Let me ask you a question. What was a very bad piece of content that you watched last week?

Dylan Pathirana (59:45.279)
My niece playing cricket like he was trying to make some jokes but I didn't even get a clue what he was talking about.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (59:56.242)
you're ahead of 99 % of the people. Most people don't remember. I can't remember a bad piece of content that I watched because probably I skipped it. So the funny thing about the content distribution is when you're putting it out is the most important thing for yourself. But when people are watching it, if they don't like it in the first two seconds,

Dylan Pathirana (01:00:04.968)
Yeah, true.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:00:21.142)
It's not that they watched it fully and then thought about it and analyzed how dumb you are. They just skipped it. So nobody remembered the bad pieces of content. And because we went from an age where people consumed content on your feed, that had repercussions. So if you had a lot of bad content on your feed, someone is looking at your feed and saying, look at his content, look at it. Nobody does that anymore. People consume the content from the for you page.

Dylan Pathirana (01:00:30.206)
Yep.

Dylan Pathirana (01:00:47.412)
Mm-hmm.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:00:50.136)
from the explore page and they're not like analyzing and scrutinizing your personal feed. Nobody does that. So one of the things that people need to make peace with is that quantity is important. Number one, because you're not getting judged on the bad pieces of content you're gonna put out, but it really increases the data that you create to understand what works. And it also allows you to be more lucky with the algorithm and so on and so

Dylan Pathirana (01:01:14.495)
Hmm.

Dylan Pathirana (01:01:19.967)
Rafa I want to know. Yeah, true, true. Because probably remember, I have that relationship with this guy. Yeah. Rafa, I want to know what's next for you.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:01:20.248)
so forth.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:01:23.776)
No- nobody remembers that content.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:01:36.728)
Brand lovers, as I said, is my Mona Lisa. I want to see how big this business can be. It already blew every expectation that I have. Today, we manage 250,000 influencers with our app in Brazil. We're working with, as I said, Coca-Cola, Amazon, Unilever, and the largest brands in the world, despite the company being a little over a year old.

So it already blew my mind in terms of what we achieved. And I want to understand how far can I take this. I already made money. I have a couple of successful companies. I've invested in over 40 tech businesses in Brazil as an angel. So that portion is good. But I want to see how far I can take this. This was the company that I thought about every detail from the start.

from the team members, from the business model, from the go-to-market strategy. I have like a 28 page strategy document that I wrote of how I was going to do it. Of course I changed a lot about it, but I made a commitment to myself to not make the same mistakes again and the company has been growing tremendously. We have the best VC investors in the world in the cap table right now.

even jim william from our cohort is an investor in the company and and and and i want to see how far i can take this

Dylan Pathirana (01:03:11.03)
Yeah, Rafa, we're talking about Harvard, right? So connection in Harvard. I remember you mentioned apart from studying at Harvard, one of your business they use as a case study at Harvard. Can you give us a bit of a background to that, please?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:03:31.48)
Sure. Do you remember Boris Groisbech, the management teacher from the first cohort? So after the first year at Harvard, he invited me to lunch and he was very interested in the business that I was building, the Mr. Beast business, let's call it, adventures. So he's very interested in marketing and the reason why he was so interested is that

Dylan Pathirana (01:03:35.717)
Yes, yep, yep.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:03:59.33)
Those businesses are popping up left and right in the US. But no one has ever built a house of brands of those businesses. They are standalone companies. And the vision for Adventures is to be the unilever or L'Oreal of creator and influencer led businesses. So the business model and the idea is very simple, which is CPG companies spend from 20 to 30 % of their revenues on marketing.

to generate the revenue. And when you bring in a creator as your partner and the creator is constantly talking about the business on their videos, their social, they're constantly using it and endorsing it, like Mr. Beast does with Fistables and most people will understand that, it drives that marketing line to like two to 3%. So a company that would do

Dylan Pathirana (01:04:52.735)
Wow.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:04:54.766)
like 10 to 12, maybe 15 of EBITDA, all of a sudden starts doing 30 to 40 % EBITDA and starts printing fucking money. So, and also not only there's a huge business model advantage here, but also on the other hand, I think the Unilevers, the L'Oreal, the Procter & Gamers of the world, they're in a difficult spot because

I think if they don't find a way to collaborate with creators at scale, they're going to become irrelevant in the next 50 years. Irrelevant. Television created those companies and most of the companies that we understand as, this is a global brand. Those companies were created in the 50s to the 70s, which was when the television spread out throughout the world and they were the first movers and they leveraged that media channel.

Dylan Pathirana (01:05:36.658)
And most of the companies that we understand as, oh, this is a global brand. Those companies were created in the 50s to the 70s, which was when the television spread out throughout the world. And they were the first movers, and they leveraged that media channel to the scale that they have today. And right now we're going through...

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:05:52.494)
to the scale that they have today. And right now we're going through a transition that is as big or even larger than television. And those companies, they have to hustle to adapt to this new format to influence endorsements. And those native companies that are advertised and endorsed by influencers, they have an advantage here. Not only a business model advantage,

Dylan Pathirana (01:05:57.919)
a transition that is as big or even larger than television. And those companies, they have to hustle to adapt this new format to influencer endorsements. And those native companies that are advertised and endorsed by influencers, they have an advantage here. Not only a business model advantage,

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:06:21.55)
from what I explained, but also a distribution advantage. don't think... Let me rephrase that. Some of the competitive advantage in the past 50 years came from the fact that you could invest $2 billion into making a factory that produces a bar of soap. So you would build a factory close to a large city, you would get great distribution, low logistic costs,

Dylan Pathirana (01:06:26.995)
the

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:06:51.438)
You have the scale to drive down marginal costs and offer a good price to compete and that was a lot of where Competitive advantage was built cost and distribution Nowadays gem and Dylan You can get close to the same cost and in-house or bushing Bev has or Unilever has outsourcing the product you can get great logistic costs with like

tech companies that are driving improvements in logistics so if producing the product and distribute in distributing the product logistic wise it's not where competitive advantage comes from where does it come from and i think it will come from the ability to talk to the consumer at the lowest cost possible and mr b's has fucking four hundred million people that watch him and he talks for free with them every day so i think

marketing is the next very, very important and competitive advantage. And people who own those media channels will have a disproportionate run for the consumer buck. And that's what's the case about. So, Boyd went very deep with that. A lot of sessions talking about the business and he's been a great friend. Had dinner with him last year at his house when we went to the third cohort.

Dylan Pathirana (01:07:59.103)
Amazing.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:08:14.723)
He's close to the business, he's watching and this is sort of what the business case studies.

Dylan Pathirana (01:08:20.455)
Amazing, he's one of the best professors we had over the last three years. So Rafa, I think we spent a lot of time, it's so interesting, so fascinating, we could talk the whole night, whole morning for you. So how do you, I know you're a very very busy man and I know you also have a young family. How do you keep the balance?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:08:25.122)
He's amazing.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:08:46.478)
That's, I think balance is the wrong word. The word that I would use was, how do I make the choices? So going to James point, I've been, I'm 33, but I've been married for 10 years now with my wife, Mariana. And we have a kid, the two year old kid, and we have another one coming in May. So second child. We want to see how far we go. We want to have a lot of kids.

Dylan Pathirana (01:09:10.697)
Congratulations.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:09:16.278)
Anyway, I think family doesn't have to take away from your ambition or business. It just forces you to make very hard decisions on everything else. And what I mean by that is, I think most people get more Netflix than I do. I think most people get more dinners out with friends than I do. I think most people get more leisure time than I do.

And that's fine. But I made a conscious choice that my two priorities in life are my business, which I'm passionate about. I work fucking 14 hours a day. I work on weekends. I love working on my companies. And family, which I have an expanded view of. I don't have that traditional view of like, oh, these are my friends and this is my family.

I have a more narrow view of this, where I call family, which is me, my wife, my mom, my brother, and three to five friends and their families. And so that's sort of my definition of family. And I think I'm very close with those. And I don't think, as I said, business has to take away from that family space or that family time. It just forces me like, I don't watch Netflix.

I don't even have TVs at my place. And I have probably the last leisure personal time than most people. But I don't think my family suffers. I don't think my health suffers. I still do one hour of sports every day. Not the six hours I used to do when I was running Ironman and shit. But I get my one hour a day of exercise, keeping me healthy. This is a fucking marathon.

Dylan Pathirana (01:11:06.439)
Yeah.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:11:13.294)
makes no sense if you get to the end of it sick so I have my sports time in the morning I have my family time I always have breakfast with my family spend an hour with them at the beginning of the day and then I go to the office and I get back at 10pm and I'm exhausted and I go to sleep I don't watch Netflix I don't waste any time with that so that's the way I manage it I do very

Few things outside family and work.

Dylan Pathirana (01:11:45.415)
And Rafa, looking back on this incredible journey that we've just discussed, do you feel successful?

Dylan Pathirana (01:11:54.537)
So you feel like you're still yet to materialize the dream that you have.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:11:59.822)
a couple interesting things in being open hearted here

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:12:08.394)
I'm someone who has a very hard time celebrating success. We closed like a contract yesterday at Brandlovers. They basically reshaped our year because of its size.

no dinner i don't think i even told my wife by the way good point and and like no celebration like i have a very hard time celebrating shit i'm someone who's always wired for the next thing the next thing the next thing what's next what's not working and it's not that i'm negative i'm very optimistic i'm high energy it's not that i'm like that pessimistic motherfucker but like i don't celebrate stuff

And it's just a part of me. used to win championships when I was younger in sports and that Saturday I was like, okay, let's go to lunch. Like I don't celebrate things and I've been like that since in the early days. Like my mom would say, hey, do we want a birthday party? I don't want a fucking birthday party. It's like wired in me for some reason. And I don't know if I could change it, I would, but this is just who I am. If I could inject

half of celebrate more i think i would okay i think it's good for everyone around it's good for the team i think my team suffers a lot because of the way i operate i would change but that's just why i might also appreciate and the second thing is when europe when you're a young couple my wife is a doctor okay so i was making money my wife makes money and and and you you have like that

not only that cushion because you're successful and so on and so forth, but you don't have the responsibility for others. Like if everything that I built like just crumbles down, I know I can rebuild. I'm a hundred percent sure I can rebuild a lot of it very fast actually. But like when you start having kids and you have people who depend on you and my mom, for example, is getting to an older age, you just start

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:14:23.458)
being more careful and you're thinking like your number needs to be higher and higher and higher and higher because of that responsibility. So I think growing a family also changed like how I feel about what I need to get done to really set my family up for the next few generations. And that's, I think, a mixture of the things that make me not feel successful.

Dylan Pathirana (01:14:49.565)
And on that note, do you think you'll ever feel successful if that's the way you feel now? Well, Rafa, it has been honestly, probably one of my favorite conversations that we've had so far, so much to take away from it. But before we wrap up, want to throughout our discussion, I've been jotting down a few things, which I think are key ingredients that are building a life, which I think is pretty successful. So I'd like to share them with you. The first one is.

your drive and your hunger. Even from an early age, wanting to change the way things were done to now wanting to reshape a multi-billion dollar industry, you have this drive and innate hunger to want to change things. And I think that's really important because if you don't have that, you're never going to push the boundaries. You're never going to go and create something new. So I think that's number one. The second one is always seeking opportunities. I think that ties into the first one.

but you're always looking for doors to open, whether it's, as you said, you made money when you were young. You could have just sat back and relaxed, but you were always going and looking for those opportunities. And I think that stems from your, you mentioned your curiosity. You're always trying to learn and not just from the traditional sources either. You mentioned it. It could be learning from anyone, even a young girl at the airport.

whether it's from literature that you're reading, from the analytics, from the data, you're always trying to learn and push yourself so that you can find that next opportunity. And I think that's really critical. And the second one, the next one is a strategic thinker. And on that, think you're always trying to think one step ahead, be ahead of the curve, not just doing what people are doing today or what's worked in the past, you're always trying to look ahead. And as part of that, you're very data driven.

You're always looking at the numbers, always looking at the analytics, the trends to see where to go next, not where to go now. And then the last one is passion. Like it's, it's 11 o'clock at night here. And I'm fired up just from listening to you talk because you love what you do. And it really reflects in your personality. And honestly, I can't thank you enough for sharing that passion with us because it's been a joy, joy to chat.

Dylan Pathirana (01:17:12.911)
It's such a pleasure Rafa having this conversation. I feel like why didn't I talk to you earlier? Like you know it was so much I could learn from you but keep in touch. It's amazing what we learned today you know and thank you so much for your time.

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:17:29.592)
Thank you so much for the time Dylan and Jem. It's amazing to reconnect after Harvard. Thank you so much for the invitation. I learned so much from you throughout the course. And yes, I don't think we talked enough, but maybe now it's an opportunity for us to get closer. It's always fun to chat with smart people and I think, and actually I hope

that my genuine thoughts and non-obvious answers actually I hope it helps someone who's out there listening and is thinking about some of the stuff we debated. Always a pleasure and thank you so much for the time.

Dylan Pathirana (01:18:05.981)
Absolutely. And Rafa, if people listening want to follow you and see the work that you're doing, where can they find you?

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:18:12.334)
Sure, so all across social media, it's my name, Rafa Avelar. You can find me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, TikTok. I'm everywhere. Everywhere, every day, always.

Dylan Pathirana (01:18:27.679)
I love that. Rafa, thank you so much. And on that note, if you've found something insightful from this episode, please do us a favor and go and follow and subscribe to us on whichever platform you're listening to this on right now. And you can see all of our inspiring episodes over on our website, the quest for success podcast.com. And on that, we'll catch you guys in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Thanks Rafa. Hey, that's awesome. I want to take a picture.

Seriously, it's such a...

Rapha Avellar [Brandlovers] (01:18:58.776)
Thank you so