The beginnings of Parasition

Hello! I am Olle, the founder and CEO. I thought it would be a good idea to wrap up 2024 by sharing the story of Parasition and how it all began. It's a longer read, but I believe many of you will appreciate learning more about Parasition and the team behind it. At the end, I will look toward the future and discuss the goals and events planned for 2025.

Parasition was founded + backstory:

We first need to delve into some backstory. Hugo, my co-founder and best friend, and I have worked with social media and organic content for many years. We began by building social media accounts that reached millions of people weekly and consulted for many companies across the Nordics on how to grow on social media. Hugo even worked with MrBeast, where he wrote some of the internet's most viral videos.

Having spent recent years focusing on growing social media accounts, we realized one very important thing: the majority of content we saw on TikTok, Instagram, etc., was not from big influencers but rather from people who simply enjoyed creating content without having large followings. Then it hit us: someone's follower count does not matter nearly as much as it used to. Today, ANYONE can create content that goes viral if the content is good enough!

We thought, what if we helped many people create great content? That's when the vision of Parasition began to take shape: we would develop a way to advertise organically through creators on a large scale. We aimed to democratize advertising!

Here is what we would do!

• We would build a community of millions of people who all enjoyed creating content.

• Build a platform where companies could create campaigns similar to how they would in Meta or TikTok ads.

• Coach all our creators and help them create the best content.

• Come up with smart ways for our community to learn from each other, ex. once one video goes viral share it to everyone else.

• Set up a model where creators are paid for performance (# of views) so it becomes scalable.

• Combine tech such as AI that we would train, with humans in scalable ways.

It would be incredibly difficult, take many years, and most likely fail. However, if we succeeded, it would mean a future where everyone could earn money from social media, regardless of their follower count or brand. To us, this was a beautiful future, so we decided it was worth pursuing.

We decided on a name we had in our minds for many years, Parasition, which is a combination of Paradigm and Transition, and thus Parasition was born!

We signed Universal Music, our first campaign (#1 on Spotify):

We thought the music industry would be a good place to start, so I spent the first few days cold-calling everyone at Universal Music—before we had any creators or anything else, for that matter—and eventually got a hold of someone. I explained what we did and our concept (I lied and said we were already up and running) and told them about our background in social media. They liked what we were doing and decided to give it a try. We got our first campaign!

The deadline was was within 10 days, and we still did not even have a single creator 😅Now we had to get creators. We called up everyone we knew, stood in malls, and went to high schools. Wilma, who now works as a Creator Manager, became our first creator, and in total, we managed to get 25 people to agree to do a video.

We created the Discord server, prepared the brief, sent it out, and creators started making videos! Each video was carefully reviewed and optimized. The creators posted their videos, many of which went viral, and a trend was quickly established. It even became one of the biggest trends on TikTok and reached #1 on Spotify Sweden (song: Dizzy - Överallt).

We had proven that our concept and idea worked!

Scaling and building:

We continued to expand our creator base and signed a few more campaigns with Universal and other record labels, such as Warner Music. In the initial months, everything was quite scrappy; we did everything manually and didn’t have any real technology implemented. We explored other industries, such as film and television, but ultimately decided that it was still too early and that we should focus entirely on the music industry.

Since both Hugo and I were in high school until June, it was hard to focus and give Parasition the attention it deserved. But once we graduated, things started to speed up.

Some of our customers wanted us to send creators to concerts so we added that to our offering.

We brought a few more team members on board and hired additional a few more, which freed up our time to focus on building rather than getting caught up in day-to-day operations.

During the summer when the workload from campaigns was lighter, we built out a system that could handle a lot of the manual tasks, organized everything and made things more scalable.

We were now ready to expand beyond the Nordics into Europe and the US. We did extensive advertising towards creators, both with our own creators and using TikTok ads. After some time of optimizing we started receiving hundreds of applications weekly.

In October, we were accepted into Minc, a startup incubator, where we are now based and working from.

Our AI assistant Hugo (yes, the same name as Hugo, my co-founder 😃 ) was launched, and he sped up the process of onboarding creators significantly. Hugo is also able to help direct creators and guide them within Parasition.

In November we signed our first campaigns with European companies.

During December, we continued to scale and improve, and we also started building a platform for our clients to create campaigns.

Today and future:

This brings us to today, almost exactly one year from when we started. We now have many more creators, the biggest record labels in the world as customers, have grown the team to eight people, are profitable, and have much more footing and ground to stand on regarding every aspect of Parasition.

2025 will be our year! Some goals:

• We are soon launching our platform Parasition.love to customers.

• Build our own app for creators.

• Grow to 100k creators, hopefully a lot more.

• Take in 10 million USD in venture capital at a valuation of 100 million USD.

• Expand the team in all areas, primarily in tech, community and sales.

• Fully expand into the US and Europe.

• Create 5 meaningful partnerships with companies that would benefit our creators (ex. Starbucks).

Thank you for reading! I hope you are all as excited about the year to come and the things we can do together.Feel free to tell your friends about Parasition and encourage them to apply as well. Every person counts and helps us towards our vision to democratize advertising.

If you haven’t joined our Discord server yet, please do so to start creating content and earning money. Make sure you check messages from Hugo to get onboarded.

All the best, Olle.

Founder / CEO.