Austin Riess was on stage at a conference when TikTok went dark for two days. Influencers came up to him in tears, unsure if they would need another job by the following week. That moment convinced him that creators needed to own their audience outright, not rent it from a platform that could disappear overnight.

Austin is the founder and CEO of Bump Connect, part of Bump Brands, a Minneapolis-based company he describes as a “connection platform” rather than a social network. He has spent his career moving between other people’s platforms and audiences. He built an all-natural peanut butter company, PB Crave, into a national and then European business before selling it, then moved into Web3 with the NFT project “Gutter Cat Gang,” then into athlete marketing at Paradigm Sports, where he worked on Conor McGregor’s digital initiatives.

“Our business model is completely backwards from every other major platform out there,” Austin says. “We give away free ads.” Brands and creators post and advertise on Bump at no cost. The company instead takes a small commission when something actually sells, a structure built for the users he targets most directly: creators and small brands who cannot compete with the ad budgets of a Nike or a Hershey.

The current version of Bump grew out of an earlier product. Live on iOS and Android with roughly 10,000 users, the app is preparing a desktop version for the end of August, built by a team of about 20. Austin says the company is roughly halfway through a funding round, looking for more partners and investors.

A Search Engine Became A Social Platform After TikTok’s Scare

Bump Brands was not originally a social app. Its first product, called “Bump Search,” focused on search rather than community, still built around the idea that users should control their own data.

The pivot came during the period when TikTok’s future in the U.S. was in doubt. “Literally yesterday, they were forecasted to make a quarter of a million dollars a year, and now they’re wondering if they should be filling out a McDonald’s application,” Austin says of the influencers he met that day. The team shut down Bump Search and rebuilt around social and creator monetization instead.

“So I said, ‘Okay, we need to change this and really kind of change how we want to do things,’” Austin says. That reasoning shapes the current product, which he compares most closely to WeChat rather than to Instagram or TikTok.

Bump Earns Only When Something Sells On The Platform

Bump does not charge for advertising. Brands and creators list products and post ads for free, and the company takes a 1%-10% affiliate commission on completed sales. “If you’re selling a T-shirt for $10, we would collect $0.10 to $1 of it,” Austin says.

He contrasts that with impression-based ad buying on Meta, YouTube, and TikTok, where a brand can spend thousands of dollars without generating a single sale. “What do impressions mean? Nothing,” he says, arguing that a small business with a limited budget can run an ad on Bump and lose nothing if it does not convert, since there is no upfront media cost.

Austin also pushes brands toward storytelling over direct-response ads. Citing photographer and YouTuber Peter McKinnon, Austin says he will watch an entire camera review despite having no plans to buy the product, because the content sells a story rather than a spec sheet. Bump does not accept political advertising in any form, though users can post their own political opinions.

Chat, Video, Community, Music, Commerce, and Ticketing in One Platform

Bump combines several features usually spread across separate apps: private messaging similar to Snapchat, communities similar to Discord, music similar to Spotify, long and short-form video, and a marketplace modeled on TikTok Shop and Facebook Marketplace. A ticketing tool lets any user, brand, or creator sell or give away tickets to an event and keep the proceeds.

A recurring competition feature called “BvB” asks users to submit content, such as a joke or a prank, for a community vote. “The winner receives what we call ‘Bump Stack O’ Cash,’” Austin says, describing boxes that can hold anywhere from $100 to $1 million.

A companion tool called Kollabzy, being folded into the desktop version, is meant to match brands and creators using shared interest data. Austin’s example: a photography-focused creator who also follows a specific camera brand could be matched directly with that brand for a collaboration, rather than relying on a generic sponsorship search.

Following Someone On Bump Means Seeing Everything They Post

Users choose their own algorithm settings rather than defaulting entirely to automated curation, according to Austin. A user can set the feed to show only content from people they follow, or blend in wider discovery, and can update those settings manually at any time.

Following an account also carries more weight than on other platforms. “Creators and brands on our platform will probably have 20% fewer followers than on any other platform,” Austin says, “but every one of the followers they have on our platform will be die-hard fans.” Users who follow a creator see every post from that account, rather than a version filtered by an engagement algorithm.

That model depends on a data exchange at the point of following. Basic information, such as demographic data and stated interests, is shared with an account once a user follows it, though phone numbers and emails are not shared by default, according to Austin.

A Bump Score Is Meant To Standardize What A Creator Is Worth

Austin argues that brands currently have no reliable way to price a creator partnership. “If I go on any creator matchmaking platform and I say, ‘Hey, I want a 30-second video, I’ll have one creator quote me $300 and another one $4,000,’” he says.

Bump’s answer is an internal ranking system, which the company calls a Bump score, that factors in a creator’s presence across other platforms, community size, and whether they run a paid community. Austin notes that members of paid communities convert into buyers at four to seven times the rate of a typical follower.

Bump’s Next Test Is Getting Brands And Users To Show Up

Austin expects brand marketing budgets to keep shifting toward what he calls founder-led “media houses,” pointing to Elon Musk and Tesla as an example of a founder’s personal brand driving a company’s marketing. He also predicts a resurgence in physical, in-person retail and events as AI-generated content saturates social feeds, reasoning that authenticity becomes scarcer, and therefore more valuable, as digital content becomes harder to distinguish from synthetic material.

For now, Bump’s growth depends on convincing brands, creators and everyday users to build a following on a ten-thousand-user app rather than an established platform. “We want users, we want brands, we want creators to come on,” Austin says, framing the company’s small scale as an invitation rather than a weakness.

“I want to be able to say that Bump made more millionaires in the world than real estate did,” he says.

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