Women who lead: Gushcloud's Althea Lim on creating sustainable incomes for content creators

This April, MARKETING-INTERACTIVE is continuing its "Women who lead" podcast series, celebrating the powerful female leaders in the marketing and advertising industry across the region. 

In this episode, Althea Lim, CEO of Gushcloud International shares about her jump from studying biomedical science, to working in her uncle’s bakery, and starting up Barnett Group which would later become Gushcloud.  

Besides explaining how she and her co-founder caught on to influencer marketing from the blogging era, Lim also opens up about the sacrifices made to buy back Gushcloud. Additionally, she gives us a peak into Gushcloud’s current progress in Hollywood, Los Angeles, as well as the outlook of the content creator market. 

Don't miss: Women who lead: 'I'm in the business of serving clients," says Publicis Groupe’s Amrita Randhawa 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What led you down the path of influencer marketing and creator management, with Gushcloud?  

Lim: We created Barnett Group at that point in time, as one of Singapore’s first digital agencies. So a lot of our work then included building Facebook apps, websites, social media management. After running it for a year and a half, we sold it to an Australian agency called Farm Digital.  

Then we created Gushcloud. We registered the name in 2011 but we really only started working on it in 2012. At that time, 13 years ago, how we came to the conclusion that influencers were going to be a big force of nature in the marketing world, was when we saw that people were reading blogs more than they were reading magazines.  

In the past, blogs were about 1,000 words and how it really started was in communities and in schools. Where the popular kid in school is showcasing his or her diary to their friends, so the uptake of blogging sped up. We started noticing that the world in Silicon Valley was moving from long-form content to shorter captions at the birth of Instagram. And long-form written content was making a shift towards videos, like on YouTube. 

So, if blogging which celebrated writing, could turn into shorter formats like captions, photos and video formats, the barrier of entry will be easier for a lot more people. And so, the art of wanting to know what your friends are doing and wanting to see if you’re going to be featured by your friends, is still going to happen. Which means it’s the game of eyeballs, and the new phase of social media influencers will be the new publishers in town. 

Then we thought, why not approach the media buying houses which spend millions of dollars on magazines, and ask if they’d give us a shot.  

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: From blogs to short-form content, and then influencers. Will this space continue to evolve?  

Lim: Definitely. I think it would evolve with more entrepreneurs wanting to disrupt the space. Content is shifting to shorter formats, and TikTok has really disrupted video platforms such as YouTube. And the next question we’ll ask is, will there be a disruptor to TikTok?

A lot of technologies have been built on Web 2 technology, while Web 3 is an open source technology, it’s blockchain and it’s transparent. It means that everybody can see the same data, and everybody can be their own advertiser. I do think that’s going to happen.  

With Web 3, will come new formats of social media platforms, and it will keep evolving. At Gushcloud, our business is to discover the top content creators who are nimble enough to be able to engage a huge amount of fandom as well as eyeballs on multiple different platforms. And think about how we can come in to invest and manage their careers and be able to monetise and commercialise them more.  

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What's something that has kept you going in Gushcloud and your career? 

Lim: Two years ago, I met Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum and Cardano. I asked him, what made you want to co-found another product, after already co-founding Ethereum. He told me, that the right thing for entrepreneurs to talk about is compassion, not passion. 

As an entrepreneur, what are you truly compassionate about? He said, that he was compassionate about the lives of people who have very little access to banking, as it shouldn't be difficult for people to transfer money to their parents. Why should they have to pay a certain amount of money just to do that, when banks should be aiding them and not taking things away from them. 

So he flipped it back to me and asked me what I was truly compassionate about. I thought about it, and concluded that I was compassionate about figuring out how to create sustainable incomes for content creators. Because the age of content creators coming into the space is getting younger. Today, we see a 12 year-old and 15 year-olds getting monetized, and the amount is not small.

So the question is, how much longer can they monetize? What's going to happen to them at age 55 or 65?

How can we provide them with financial literacy? How can we partner with some of the best financial companies in the world to provide them financial education, so that in their later years they don't turn penniless or homeless. I think that's a very critical thing to think about. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What has been the biggest challenge for you, as the group CEO of Gushcloud International?  

Lim: Very few people remember this, but we sold our business in 2015, and we bought it back by 2021. And in that sense, we restarted our business in 2021. At the point in time, our main priority was to find out how we could capitalise the business, especially with fundraising efforts and investors.

However from 2022 up until 2024, the markets collapsed. There was the ongoing wars, geopolitical issues, interest rates were rising at a massive hike. When that happened, venture capitalists and private funding struggled to come through.  

So as a company, we were forced to confront the question of whether we could really survive three more months or six more months. This was a similar issue faced by tech-driven companies then. When that happened, we took a step back to ask ourselves what the main focus of the business was. Sometimes, the key challenge is figuring out how we can do lesser, go deeper, but achieve more. 

To catch to the rest of the conversation with Althea Lim, tune in to the Women who lead podcast series on Spotify, or listen on the go: 

Join us this coming 23 - 24 April for #Content360, a two-day extravaganza centered around three core thematic pillars: Challenging The Norm; Technology For Transformation; and Unlocking Imagination. Immerse yourself in learning to curate content with creativity, critical thinking, and confidence with us at Content360!

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