A Note on Onboarding Backlog & Creator Outreach

It’s asked a lot: “How long until I hear back on my Creator Coin Application?”.

Here’s words from Bremner Morris, one of Rally’s advisors who heads up marketing and creator success, to help answer that question and assure everyone that Rally is pressing forward to increase the rate and quality of creator onboarding:

Smoothing the onboarding process and addressing the massive backlog are definitely core priorities right now.

Some quick context - the project launched officially in October 2020. In the early days, there was a lot of experimentation to understand what made an effective creator economy. In those experiments, the intent was to figure out:

  • What categories of creators would be the best fits for creator coins;
  • What use-cases would drive coin adoption and coin transactions;
  • What marketing “lean-in” would a creator need to have in order to successfully launch their economy;
  • What level of crypto-fluency would a creator and their community need in order to be successful;

In those first few months, there were less than 10 creators onboarding per month and the systems and operations were built in a way to handle single digit onboarding.

Since then the market opportunity has opened up dramatically:

  • The creator market has woken up to the benefits of crypto… spurred in large part by the NFT craze over the past couple months;
  • The awareness of Rally has grown exponentially due to fantastic creator launches, press and media placements, outbound outreach from the creator partnerships team, establishing partnerships with talent agencies and other industry ambassadors, etc.

Based on the above, the desire for creator coins has risen dramatically and there are 1000s of applications per month that are coming via the inbound funnel.

This increase in demand happened almost overnight and the systems to handle that level of demand are currently playing catch-up. Those systems include both product experience and operational capacity to handle creator onboarding.

The teams are currently working through building the systems in the background while also increasing the number of creator launches from low single-digits per month to ~30 creator launches per month and things are just getting started. Some additional areas of focus are:

  • The Creator Partnerships team has grown from a team of 2 to now 7 people (most onboarding in the past couple weeks).
  • There is work being done to build an inbound funnel via the community’s engagements with marketing agencies alongside the product and engineering teams. This will help smooth the onboarding process and automate many of the manual tasks that are currently handled by the Creator Partnerships team today;
  • The use cases for creator coins are getting better defined so there is less need for customization and experimentation with every launch;
  • A CRM is being implemented to track creator applications and qualification;
  • A creator success team is being built to help manage creators on an ongoing basis so that the creator partnerships team can focus on prospective creator conversations;
  • Marketing campaigns will kick off in early Q3 to begin to drive further opportunities at the top of the funnel;
  • Additionally, @Nicklesdc’s proposal is a great idea and it is sparking a lot of discussion [in Discord] on how to also open up opportunities for creators to pre-vet themselves for onboarding. I’m excited to explore this further.

Finally, many of the folks that are not making it through the funnel today are being put on a standby list until there is the capacity to ensure a smooth and effective onboarding. It’s not a flat out rejection but rather a “not now but soon.”

All this to say, I agree that this is definitely a massive priority / challenge and lots going on to help address the issue and I’m glad that the discussion started above [in the Discord #discussion channel] and the proposal driven by @Nicklesdc is helping to identify other opportunities to scale creator onboarding!

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Follow-up Note from Bremner Regarding Creator Outreach and Onboarding:

Strategic creator outreach and onboarding is definitely in progress as we speak. Over the past two months, the Rally team has added a number of industry professionals in specific categories to the creator partnerships team and there has been outreach to 100s of strategic creators. Additionally, we have been prioritizing relationships and developing partnerships with all of the leading talent management agencies. Finally, we have added industry ambassadors who are highly networked within the creator industry to open up doors with some of the most influential personalities in the world.
All that to say that this effort is underway, just takes a long time to initiate these convos, consult with the talent and their teams to gain comfort in launching a whole new business initiative / economy and then onboard them successfully (including significant co-marketing, technical integration and development of use cases).