Photo Credit: Rachael Shtifter
Jordan Greenfield is a man that has all of Boston buzzing thanks to hoo.be, the popular link-in-bio social media startup, that he founded. hoo.be is the first-ever invite-only link-in-bio platform that allows users with highly engaged audiences across multiple social platforms to bring their content, shops, profiles, charitable causes, and more together in one creatively customized hub. Think of it as a social media home page—a next-level “link in bio” platform that allows you to embed images, videos, music, podcasts and more—serving as a vibrant intersection of a creator’s entire digital world. Thus far, Greenfield has successfully onboarded some of the biggest names in the biz to his platform, including the Boston Celtics, Jeff Bezos, Meghan Trainor, Diplo, J. Balvin, and Tom Brady. We sat down with the Bostonian entrepreneur to discuss how his platform is helping content creators to monetize, connect with fans directly, and broker their own business partnerships without a third party.
Photo Credit: Rachael Shtifter
Your Boston-based social media startup hoo.be is growing rapidly. For people who are not familiar with the term “link in bio”, can you explain what that is and how hoo.be is maximizing this tool for content creators, brands, and public figures?
All major social platforms whether it be Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. provide you one place to share an external link. That place is known as your link in bio. This link provides creators an opportunity to drive their audience to what is most important to them off-platform (another destination on the web). Whether it be a new youtube video, podcast, merch shop, or a collaboration with their favorite brand, you will often find creators on all platforms constantly changing this link and directing their audience back to it for a array of reasons. This is where hoo.be comes in as it provides creators and celebrities with a single link-it-and-leave-it solution to the link in bio problem. A place where audience members can refer back to find everything relevant to that creator in that moment across the entire web, not within the gated walls of a single platform like Instagram or TikTok.
You built this company in the midst of the 2020 pandemic lockdown. While most people were binge watching TV series, you were using the time to pursue a dream. What motivated you to do so?
The pandemic gave us insight into what’s next in terms of social – more content, more creators, more platforms. Just because the world shut down did not not mean our pursuit and motivation to leave our mark on the creator economy hindered in any way. If anything, we saw the pandemic as an opportunity to work tirelessly, free of any distractions, on achieving our goal.
Hoo.be is the first platform of its kind to operate on an invite-only business model and is dedicated to exclusively serving the content creator community. Why did you decide to make hoo.be exclusive to creators in this way?
JG: The invite-only approach is all about focus for us. When building this product, our goal was not to build a solution for everyone but rather for a core group of users, creators and celebrities, which has allowed us to hone in on their specific needs that we could build solutions around. The unique tools that hoo.be offers benefit creators and celebrities most because they typically have many different digital projects to share at one time. This is why we’re selective about who joins, so that it makes sense for what the platform is intended to do, which is sharing a wide variety of digital content in one exciting, easy to navigate place.
From a brand standpoint, people always want what they can’t have. We certainly took influence from Clubhouse which was the coolest kid on the block around the time we began building hoo.be. The invite-only model allows our members to be a reflection of the hoo.be brand, which is all about authentic expression and creativity, and also empowers our members to be the gatekeepers to the new members they want to join the community (since every member is allowed to invite others to join).
You invite a lot of business colleagues to Boston. What are your favorite places to take people that come to visit you in the city? What are your favorite restaurants and bars?
We take a lot of pride in being a Boston based startup as there are not many companies in the influencer and consumer tech space that come out of this area. Any opportunity we get to host our users in our city is something we cherish a great deal.
One of our biggest early believers and supporters is Big Night Entertainment Group based out of Boston. Big Night is home to the best restaurants and nightclub venues in all of New England and this is certainly a big part of the experience whenever hosting guests in Boston. This normally would include a dinner at either Mystique or Empire followed by a show at Big Night Live, The Grand, or Memoire. One of our other earliest users on hoo.be was the Boston Celtics, so when some of our biggest users are in town you can find them sitting courtside and cheering on the hometown team!
Photo Credit: Rachael Shtifter
You recently welcomed a son to the world—congrats!—and are clearly a very hands on dad. How are you balancing fatherhood and running a quickly growing startup?
It has truly been the biggest blessing of my life to welcome Noah James into this world. This has certainly given me a new perspective and a new sense of purpose to everything I am doing. As most entrepreneurs can relate, at this stage of building a company there is not a lot of balance that takes place. With that said, I do have the luxury of being able to work from home for the most part so whenever I have a second to sneak in some quality time with Noah it is always the highlight of my day. The true rockstar is my better half and Noah’s mother, Bianca, who has been a rockstar and the backbone of the family through this exciting yet hectic time.
Your startup has recently onboarded some very big, exciting names to the platform, such as Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady and Meghan Trainor. How does it feel to see something that started as an idea grow in such a big way? What was your secret to onboarding such big names?
It is honestly surreal to see something we began building less than 16 months ago already being used by the likes of Tom Brady, Jeff Bezos, Meghan Trainor, etc. It really does go to show you the power of manifestation and what can be accomplished if the right people are aligned around a common goal. From day one, our team talked about and believed that individuals like this would ultimately use our product, but no one else really believed us—even our own team at times thought our aspirations were too lofty. But here we are!
What is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned on the entrepreneur journey?
The biggest lesson I have learned is that relationships and the way you treat people really is everything. At the end of the day, people do business with people and if you invest properly into relationships along the way it will pay off in the long run.
What’s next for hoo.be?
Our first initiative was geared toward solving the “link in bio” problem. Apart from being a centralized location, hoo.be also acts as an audience migration tool where creators can direct their existing audiences toward a desired location on the web. Long-term we want to own part of the end destination, not just the tool that migrates people from destination A to B. Ultimately we want to create infrastructures for celebrities and creators to own their communities and the interactions with their audience members. Linking creators directly to their audiences with new and innovative ways to connect and explore is our ultimate mission and a concept we plan to continually level up.
