Guest
Jacquelle Amankonah Horton
Jacquelle Amankonah Horton is Founder at Fave, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (2)
Jacquelle Amankonah Horton, founder of Fave, explains what superfans want beyond merch and why fan-to-fan commerce is the real fandom market.
Jacquelle Horton, founder of Fave, explains how the platform verifies superfan activity and gives artist teams data on their most engaged fans.
Questions these episodes answer
What do superfans actually want to spend money on beyond official merchandise?
Horton says demand isn't the problem, fans already have disposable income for fandom but too few things worth buying. Official merchandise works as a keepsake, but day to day fans wear subtle items built from community inside jokes: a bag carrying a phrase only fans recognize, hand fans for a hot venue queue, or a resold Letterman jacket.
How does Fave help artist teams work with fan creators?
Fave gives artist teams a way to spot the fans already driving activity in their community, then clear their ideas and IP questions so those fans can create and sell without guessing whether it is allowed. Horton says many fans hold back ideas out of fear it might not be permitted, so removing that uncertainty turns a fan's side project into something the artist team can support.
Why do fans hold back on turning their ideas into products or events?
Fans often do not know whether an idea uses the artist's IP in a way that is allowed, so many sit in doubt about whether it is a gray area or forbidden outright. Rather than risk it, they hold back, which means the artist loses the extended engagement that idea could have created and the fan misses out on what could have become a real business.
Is the fandom market bigger than the widely quoted figures suggest?
Horton says the commonly cited $4 billion fandom figure understates the real number. Fan-to-fan sales of items like resold Letterman jackets often match or beat official merchandise prices, and once you count fan-run product lines, experiences and events, the volume rivals premium official offerings and the market is significantly larger than the older estimate.
Where does Fave focus within the fandom market?
Horton splits the fandom market into three parts: artist-to-fan tools and communication, fan communities interacting with each other, and fans exchanging and selling to each other. She says the first two are already served by existing platforms, so Fave focuses on the third, fan-to-fan commerce, which she sees as the least understood and fastest growing.
Why did Jacquelle Horton leave Google to start Fave?
Horton says leaving her senior product role at Google, after nearly eight years there including five at YouTube, was a huge decision because she had nothing to fall back on if Fave failed. She left anyway because she kept meeting the same unsolved problem across her career: fans do enormous work for artists and get almost nothing in return.
What does Fave actually do for music fans?
Fave lets superfans document activity that goes beyond streaming and social posts, things like tattoos, collectibles, referring friends and going to shows, and turns that history into a verified profile. Fans use that profile to buy and sell things like resale tickets and merch with people they can trust, instead of guessing whether a stranger online is really a fan.
Why did Fave launch Fan Finder for labels and artist teams?
Horton says the industry kept asking who its most engaged fans actually are, since labels have told her that sometimes around 78% of an artist's revenue comes from about 6% of fans, without anyone knowing who that 6% is. Fan Finder gives labels and artist teams the same fan activity data that fans already see on Fave, so they can find and message their most engaged local fans directly.
How does being a parent affect Jacquelle Horton's work as a founder?
Horton says having young children while running Fave sharpens her focus rather than working against it, because a handful of usable hours a day forces her to cut anything that will not move the business forward. She rejects the idea that starting a company as a parent is a bad idea, arguing that skills parents build, like negotiating and cleaning up unexpected problems, transfer directly into running a startup.
How did Jacquelle Horton first validate the idea behind Fave?
Before formally launching, Horton spent time during the pandemic doing her own research directly with fans, running interview after interview to understand their real frustrations rather than relying on assumptions from her time in the industry. She later entered a startup competition on a podcast host's encouragement and won it, which she says built early momentum before Fave even existed as a company.