Emily Steele is making strides in local marketing through Hummingbirds, a venture-backed SaaS platform that connects brands with hyper-local creators. Following the company’s recent funding round and demonstrated success, Hummingbirds’ community-driven approach to content creation is impacting how brands build local engagement.

From Local Agency to Scalable Platform

While running her local marketing agency in Des Moines, in the U.S. state of Iowa, Emily identified a consistent pattern among her clients: melding print, billboard, TV, and radio in a bid to reach younger consumers. This market need, combined with her background in content creation, sparked an idea for an innovative solution.

“I’ve been blogging since 2010 when I was in college. I would write my weekly Friday Fives, so I’ve always considered myself a content creator,” Emily shares. “I realized that with my social content and blog, I was driving friends, neighbors, my favorite baristas, and others to local spots and that others could use their own social presence to do the same in and around Des Moines.”

The idea quickly demonstrated its potential. “I built our community of local creators in Des Moines up to a few hundred creators,” Emily explains. “I was fostering a Facebook group of creators back in the day, connecting them to brands and helping them get better at content creation.” 

After proving success in Des Moines, she expanded to Omaha and Milwaukee. “I can do this from my house,” she recalls thinking. “I can DM people and ask them to join the community. They sign up. They see brands in their cities [that] are interested and create content.”

This initial success led to securing pre-seed capital for expansion into 10 additional cities, with Emily noting that the company’s “de-risked position” allowed it to build the “go-to local creator platform” for brands specifically needed to drive local behavior.

The platform’s effectiveness stems from its focus on local impact and genuine community connections. Emily emphasizes how this differs from traditional influencer marketing: “Many brands will build influencer platforms and say they have Kansas City influencers, but it’s an influencer with 50,000 followers who live in Kansas City. It’s not a Kansas City influencer.” 

“Most people who would call themselves local influencers probably would feel even a little shy to say ‘influencer’ because they’re someone who has a few thousand followers who are their actual friends,” Emily adds. “They play sand volleyball with them, attend church, monthly walks, and girls’ walk clubs.”

Creating Value in the Creator Economy

Hummingbirds distinguishes itself through its targeted approach to local creator partnerships. The platform’s success shows in its metrics: “We ended up having 350% growth as a company year over year,” Emily shares. “I would also say we have a highly engaged community of creators. We’re not churning and burning creators; they want to stick around.”

This growth captured significant investor attention at the crucial moment for growth. “Our board was excited. We were on track to 4x our revenue in the fall of 2024,” Emily explains, adding that some board members wanted to invest more money in the business. “Why don’t we just get this round done so you don’t have to go out and find new investors and money when we’re eager to reinvest since,” she states.

Building Community Beyond Transactions

Hummingbirds stands out through its dedication to community development. “Many of these influencer platforms say they have tens of thousands, millions of people in their community, but they don’t have a [real] community; they have users in their software,” Emily explains.

The Iowa entrepreneur adds that her company has been “intentional” about it from the beginning. “Yes, we had a piece of software you could use to engage with campaigns, but we started with a Facebook group where people got to know each other and created content together,” she adds.

The platform and its community tackle what Emily believes is a key challenge in the creator economy: isolation. “Being a creator can be a lonely experience. It’s you and your phone connecting with people via DMs,” she notes. “To focus on ways that bring people together… no one else is prioritizing that in a way that’s keeping users sticking the same way that we think we do best.”

Driving Local Impact Through Content Creation

Successful brand partnerships with companies like Olipop demonstrate Hummingbirds’ effectiveness. “Olipop is one of our customers, and they are launching a new product at Costco,” Emily shares. “They wanted to light up the cities where Costco is located where they could send hundreds of creators to pick up the product and share that in-store user-generated content with their local friends and followers.”

Credit: @phoenixngheim

Emily also points to The Honest Kitchen, a pet food brand, as an example of how local creator marketing serves multiple distribution channels. “They sell at Petco, which is national, all over the U.S., and they also distribute on Amazon like an e-commerce play. And they also sell their pet food through indie retailers that are very specific to each city,” she explains. “That means they’re going to work with different creators to drive the behavior they want for Amazon or Petco and then for these indie boutiques.”

Scaling for National Impact

The recent funding positions Hummingbirds for significant expansion. “We know we’re going to be national as a company,” Emily shares. “For us, we had so much clarity on what it takes to grow, run the playbook, open a new city, fill it up with awesome creators, and then bring in the customers that are excited to either expand their contract or go to Denver or Atlanta because we finally opened up that city.”

Looking ahead, Emily considers possibilities beyond traditional social media content. “I think about local commerce and how we can drive it through creators right now… what does community-driven commerce look like beyond sharing a post on Instagram?”

“A billboard can’t become your customer, but a creator can,” Emily concludes. “That’s what’s the most exciting about working with creators.”