Data Scientist Isha Mehra is Co-Founder of App ‘F*** You Pay Me,’ a ‘Glassdoor’ for the Passion Economy
- Established this June, along with Lindsey Lee Lugrin, a social media creator and model, the app aims at pay equity for social media influencers and creators.
Former Facebook data scientist Isha Mehra, and Lindsey Lee Lugrin, a social media creator and model, have created an app for social media influencers and creators. The app – F*** You Pay Me (FYPM) — created this June — aims to have creators be paid more equitably.
“So excited about the work we do to help people get paid what they’re worth at FYPM — a ‘Glassdoor’ for the passion economy,” Mehra wrote on her LinkedIn page. She is the co-founder and CTO at FYPM.
On its website FYPM is described as Glassdoor, “but purpose-built for the needs of the influencer community.” It is a platform where influencers can anonymously share their experiences collaborating with different brands and search crowdsourced compensation data, making it easier to figure out what price to charge for their services.
Mehra worked as a data scientist with Facebook for two years, after which she was co-lead at Vote-by-Mail Initiative from July 2020 to December 2020. In that role, she helped build the third-largest Facebook ads campaign for the election (after Trump and Biden’s campaigns). She has a B.S. in Statistics and Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.
Lee Lugrin told The New York Times that “the in-your-face name was deliberate” and is “an ode to the frustration” she experienced “many times over as a creator.” “She said she “didn’t want there to be any doubt from the creator side of things who this is for.”
According to the Times, the Santa Monica, California-based FYPM “is one of several companies now aiming to bring pay transparency to influencers, whose field is one of the fastest-growing among small businesses in the United States.” As per the Times report, FYPM “is part of a shift where creators are increasingly trying to assert themselves in their business dealings with brands and gain a more level playing field.”
The Times report added that the app, “which is still being tested, allows users to filter brand deals by platforms such as Twitter, Clubhouse, Substack, Instagram, and OnlyFans. Creators can also sort by location, niche and brand category, such as travel or food and drink.”
So far, about 1,500 creators have posted more than 2,000 reviews of 1,300 brands on FYPM, said the Times report. “Lugrin and Mehra have raised a small amount of funding and plan to do more fund-raising,” the report added.