Hey Rally Community -
For those of you who I haven’t met yet, I’m Bremner Morris, and I was appointed by the community to build out Rally’s go-to-market (GTM) strategies. I currently run my own advisory business working to build GTM for creator platforms and, most recently, was at a company called Patreon and served as their Head of Go-To-Market and Revenue.
Over the past month of working with and on behalf of the Rally community, I have been auditing the current go-to-market (GTM) efforts and identifying opportunities to scale up successful initiatives and invest in additional GTM channels.
To set the stage, NOW is the time for the Rally community to invest heavily in GTM. We are in a unique position to drive Rally to be a ubiquitous name in the creator, fan and crypto communities for the following reasons:
- Our brand proposition resonates with creators and fans and the overall creator industry is looking for a trusted, independent and decentralized monetization capability. They just haven’t heard about us yet.
- The interest in crypto for creators and artists has never been higher with the massive uptick of social tokens and NFTs within the space and the explosion of the overall crypto market.
- We have spent the past three years building out the technology and infrastructure and it works for creators and their communities.
- We have a lot of interesting use-cases happening on the network already and we have the opportunity to scale out these use-cases for more and more creators
- We are building out a team to engage with artists and creators and we need to provide air cover for these teammates to help them open up doors with creators.
Finally, our community is well capitalized and recently closed $34.8 million in the community treasury and has the ability to invest these resources in driving up Rally’s awareness and creator adoption.
In partnership with the team and community, I have developed a high-level 2021 GTM plan and wanted to share here to give folks visibility into the plan and to initiate a discussion around a proposed budget to help fuel these plans. What follows is:
- The key wins across the network since January 2021
- An overview of the current gaps / opportunities for GTM strategy in 2021
- A budget request for the rest of 2021
- A proposal for ongoing community governance of GTM efforts and how to keep the community in the loop and provide opportunities for oversight and governance
Performance YTD
In Q1 alone, the Rally network had significant wins:
- 55 creator launches (targeted by end of March) including Grammy winners Portugal. The Man, GenG Esports, Clubhouse innovator Bomani X, hip hop legend Fab 5 Freddy and multi-platinum selling artist JVCKJ and streamers ViBe and Livibee
- We have processed $6M USD of sidechain volume since January 1st
- We’ve taken a dominant leadership position in the media. Between January 1, 2021 and March 16, 2021, Rally garnered 166 unique media placements. The estimated Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) cost of the 166 media placements is approximately valued at $7.1M.
- The total readership of placements across all publications combined (total potential reach) was 773 million people.
- Key wins include New York Times, Adweek, Vogue Business, CoinDesk, Stereogum, Forbes, multiple stories in Rolling Stone, as well as Business Insider that named Rally of the start-ups that “VCs say are poised to take off in 2021” alongside Clubhouse, Substack and others.
- A consistent drumbeat of events on Clubhouse where we can educate creators and fans on the benefits of a social token and recruit new potential creator coin holders
- Speaking opportunities for the Rally.io team and recently launched creators in a variety of areas including podcasts (Real Vision Crypto, Untold Stories with Charlie Shrem, Creator Lab), industry-specific panels (The Future of Music, Global Investor Summit) and bylines (NASDAQ, Rolling Stone, CoinDesk)
- Launching Rally’s Discord and demonstrating our commitment to the community and community governance through strong community management, regular community calls and a formal snapshot proposal process
- Established multiple lines of communication with key audiences via content development of our blog, wiki, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc.
Areas of Opportunity
Building off of the above successes, Rally has a number of opportunities to scale up our go-to-market efforts outlined below.
To level-set, we need to focus on building messaging and marketing programs that appeal to Rally’s three separate audiences: creators, consumers and crypto enthusiasts. Each of these audiences have distinct needs and specific marketing programs for engagement and education. The below initiatives line up to at least one if not all of those audiences.
Additionally, we need to focus on creator categories with large total addressable markets and creator and fan communities who are open to adopting new technologies for monetization and engagement. As such, the target categories are:
- Music
- Video
- Podcast
- Gaming
- Fine Art
- Entertainment
- Social Audio
- Sports
Over the course of 2021, we need to:
- Develop our brand message. A formal brand narrative and identity that is well articulated and approachable. We need to develop a brand that is inspiring, trustworthy and capable of standing alongside our creators’ amazing brands. Once developed, we need to invest resources to broadcast that brand narrative and drive reach and awareness for Rally within the creator, fan and crypto communities.
- Define the target creator profile. A clear understanding of our target creator segments so that we can prioritize our Creator Partnerships and Marketing efforts.
- Build a proactive creator outreach strategy. Developing a repeatable outreach motion to engage with creators and educate them on the benefits of launching a social token and ensuring that we have folks on the team who have relationships within our target creator communities.
- Develop an inbound funnel. Most of our creator interest is currently through direct relationships, outreach or creator referrals. We need to begin driving an inbound funnel through paid media, content, SEO & SEM.
- Produce content that educates and inspires core audiences. Written and video content that inspires and educates creators, fans and crypto enthusiasts and establishes Rally and our creators as thought leaders within the crypto industry.
- Build a self-service funnel. Launching on Rally currently requires a ton of hand-holding and direct engagement and there is currently no way for creators to self-service launch their own coin. This effort will enable Rally to ~10x increase the number of Creators that are able to launch their own coin from the current rate of ~10/week.
- Initiate product and network marketing. Launching communications and marketing initiatives around new product and economic network developments.
- Develop a steady stream of owned events. Despite some early wins with Clubhouse, we need to have a more formal event marketing motion with consistent events across a variety of platforms to get the message of Rally out in the world and to provide a platform for our creators to speak about their intentions in launching their own cryptocurrency.
- Participate in industry events. Establish strong presence at industry events where creators, fans and crypto enthusiasts attend to learn about new and innovative technologies.
- Invest in talent partnerships and ambassadorships. We also need to formalize our relationships with talent agencies, managers, labels and other industry gatekeepers. This will help us open doors for Rally within our target creator segments.
- Scale up our community engagement and education. We have done a great job so far in building a strong and engaged community but need to identify additional areas of engagement with the various segments of our community and build ways for scaled community engagement and education.
- Invest in our creator’s success. We need to create the capabilities for ongoing management and consultation with creators to ensure that they have the tools and information they need to continue to grow their economies.
- Expand our investment in PR & Media. Rally has had significant wins in the press through the great efforts of Kurt and Wachsman and we need to add fuel to the fire to continue to drive awareness.
- Launch internationally. In the second half of the year, the Rally network will be poised to expand awareness efforts and creator partnerships efforts internationally to recruit international creators and their audiences.
The above initiatives will put Rally on the path to become a household name within the creator, fan and crypto communities and also drive the number of creators launching on Rally into the 1000s of creator launches per month with high levels of participation and economic vibrancy within their creator coin communities.
Most importantly, these efforts must also help ensure that Rally’s network is accessible and approachable for creators from all backgrounds and that the Rally network continues to make creator coin available and appealing to creators and communities from underrepresented groups.
Where possible, partners that are engaged by the community to execute on these goals will share the specific attributable results of these investments. It’s important to call out that for many marketing activities, there might not be directly attributable ROI for our investments. In areas where there is no direct attribution, the actual campaigns will be shared to illustrate impact.
Budget Request
In order to invest in the above areas, a high-level budget request is outlined below to cover the rest of 2021, so that the Rally network can move fast and engage with outside partners to execute a majority of this work.
To give some context to the size of the proposed budget, organizations with Rally’s market opportunity, capitalization and product market fit would typically spend between 30 - 50% of their overall budget on sales and marketing. Given where Rally is currently positioned, comparable companies would likely spend between $10 to $15 million per year on sales and marketing.
Here, the total ask for the rest of 2021 is $9.0 million to be paid for in a combination of USD cash and tokens, both from the community partnerships allocation and from the community treasury. This spend will be spread across the following buckets of expense:
- Brand Marketing Foundation: $1.5 million
- Brand agency work
- Website update
- UX / UI updates
- Creator Partnerships collateral development
- Marketing Campaigns: $3.5 million
- Grow brand awareness through integrated campaigns across events, content, paid digital spend, etc.
- Content Marketing: $250,000
- Video content
- Blog content
- Wiki content
- Email newsletters
- Social media
- Sponsored content
- Event Marketing: $500,000
- Owned and operated events
- Event sponsorship (e.g. VidCon)
- Talent Agency and Ambassador Partnerships: $600,000
- PR & Media Relations: $600,000
- Tools & Infrastructure: $1,500,000
- CRM
- Marketing automation
- Website platform
- Self-serve funnel
- Other marketing activities as identified throughout the course of the year: $550,000
For certain large budget items (e.g. brand marketing agency work), Rally Inc. will take on the first 2 - 3 months of spend before converting it over to the community. For smaller, discreet line items and projects, partners will be paid directly from the community.
Community Governance
It is important to create mechanisms for community governance and oversight into the areas of GTM investment and the expected ROI.
As such, I propose the following structure:
- Quarterly report delivered to the community at the end of quarter (June 30, 2021 as the next opportunity for the quarterly report)
- Quarterly community calls following each report to review the report and discuss community feedback, shifts in strategy, understand spend and ROI
Additionally, where possible, the community should have the ability to exercise a 30 day notice to terminate a vendor contract or a specific area of spend following each quarterly report so that the community can determine if and where these expenditures might not be yielding the top results.
As part of my role for which I was originally appointed, I will act as the community’s agent for purposes of identifying and vetting partners and vendors, in coordination with community members, creators and key stakeholders, as well as overseeing and managing relationships with selected partners and vendors.
