Our story began back in 2021 when we started as “invest wise”, a small startup focused on financial education for individuals. While looking at how to acquire new users onto our platform via all marketing channels, we discovered the value of influencer marketing. In doing so, we instantly recognized smaller content creators would typically have private referral links in their bio for “friends & family” rather than professional links provided by the brands, which could offer them greater commissions and legal commercial usage.

Our idea started to pivot, we wanted to help these nano and micro-content creators find ways to monetize their passion and grow their community. With the support of the WHU Accelerator, we began our journey by speaking to several influencers, brands, and industry experts to validate our idea of connecting micro-influencers to brands through a platform and develop our new business model.

Fast forward to the Summer of 2022, the idea of cliqe was born. A personalized bio-link solution providing creators with access to numerous partner programs in our six verticals where they can earn more commissions in a simpler and legally compliant way.

Not only does our solution benefit content creators, but it also appeals to brands. We connect them to a mass of small and authentic creators without the hassle of intermediate parties and we help in reducing the risks and costs for them by enabling them to pay on a commission basis per successful campaign.

We initially started working on the solution ourselves, manually created all the bio-sites, onboarded over 250 brands, and conducted the reporting for every user, while developing an automated solution to allow content creators to select amongst all partners and create their own bio-site. In December 2022, we were accepted to the Startup Incubator Berlin, where we are currently based, making use of a dynamic and eccentric co-working space with other young startups giving us the opportunity to exchange ideas, gain inspiration and collaborate. Our lively work environment and community have helped nourish our three values in cliqe, collaboration, passion, and customer-centricity, with user satisfaction being our highest priority.

In March 2023, we launched our automated solution giving creators the opportunity to design and edit their own personal bio-links at any moment.

Our current team is made up of three individuals, Tiên, Kelvin, and Felippe. Our co-founder Tiên comes from a startup background in business with prior experiences in the B2C and B2B fintech and venture capital fund which have driven his entrepreneurial spirit. Felippe’s product and engineering background at fintech startups such as Wefox and Trade Republic has proven immensely valuable in constantly developing and upgrading our platform. Before cliqe, Felippe developed his own mobile App “Upto”, a community calendar app that successfully launched in the App Store and on Product Hunt. Kelvin is our founding partner and a content creator himself. With his channel @aktienfreunde and a background in finance with over 10 years of personal investment experience, Kelvin is one of the largest German-speaking finance influencers on TikTok with over 140K followers. His transparent investment insights and focus on building a community are crucial to our mission. Since the beginning of 2023, we have received additional support from four working students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) who further pushed our progress, especially in the areas of product development and marketing.

Our varying skills and areas of expertise have enabled us to create a harmonious team that can complement each other’s competencies to continue working on improving our platform and providing the best service to our users. We strongly believe in creating a solution from content creators for content creators in order to further strengthen our community.

With cliqe we help nano and micro-influencers create, connect, and collaborate.

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