Building upon the broader strategy Bremner presents above, below, please find the Rally.io product strategy- including vision, organizational strategy, roadmaps for key areas and how we will measure success.
Rally.io Product Strategy
The intent of this document is to outline the expanded vision and strategy for Rally.io’s product to reflect our expanded company vision as outlined in the Setting the Course for Rally.io for 2022 post. For context, the organizational strategy stack outlines this layer of the strategy as the “functional strategy” that then cascades into “roadmap” and from there “goals.”
Additionally, this is not where our product is today but rather the vision of where we want our product to be in one to two years. The roadmaps will detail how we get from where we are today to where we want to be in the future.
1. Rally.io Product Vision
Rally builds the tools and services that enable the creation, launch and growth of token-based communities. We ensure abundant utility and interoperability by building and partnering with the entire creative ecosystem.
This vision encompasses what we see the product doing now and over the next 2 to 3 years.
Build The Tools and Services
“Tools and services” is a statement that says “we maximize value to creators and community leaders.” Aligning towards a “tools focus” means we care more about the growth of the communities we support than the growth of the Rally brand. It also clarifies and focuses our customer - a statement you’ll see reflected throughout the priorities below. By emphasizing that we build creator and community leader tools, we are committing to:
- The belief that fungible tokens (aka “Creator Coins) and non-fungible tokens (aka “NFTs” or digital goods”) are core components of this toolbox
- Constantly expanding Rally’s toolbox with new forms of utility that put ownership in creator’s hands while protecting community participants from mistakes or bad actors
- Allowing communities to employ the tools they need and not attempting to force a monolithic suite (i.e. you can have “just an NFT strategy” or you can choose not to feature your economy on the Rally.io e-commerce site)
- Training and guiding our communities toward web3 and empowering them with innovative utility that expands their possibilities
Does this mean that we don’t have an opinion on how to structure your token-based community?
No, this statement means instead that we don’t force that opinion on participants. For example, we will create templates, structures, playbooks and other use cases that demonstrate potential paths for communities of various sizes but community leaders can choose to veer from these paths if they so choose.
Enable the Creation, Launch and Growth of Token-Based Communities
This is our core offering. Communities have dozens of places they can go for tools to communicate, collaborate or even pool resources. Web3 has created a unique opportunity for communities to lean into ownership, tokenization and transparency and use those tenants to make fundamentally new things.
Rally.io has learned tremendous lessons from executing on a more centralized version of the web3 ethos in the form of the Forte sidechain. We have taken to calling this web2.5 as it combines elements of both sides of the cryptocurrency revolution. As we expand our offerings, we believe there will remain a need for the improved and trusted UX of web2 and will look to bring options to our token-based communities that can range from centralized (sidechain or our web2.5 offering) to decentralized (native L1 or our fully web3 offering).
What is a token-based community?
A token-based community is a collaboration model that allows community members to participate in the creation and exchange of value within their own community. These communities create an economy composed of a variety of tokens that work together to facilitate the interactions between community members (e.g. rewards for contributions or enabling the purchase of collectibles or access). Additionally, this model enables communities to self-govern and self-fund. This model enables communities to “win together”, “exchange value between participants” and create “collective ownership” opportunities. See the post above for additional context.
By working with communities and enabling them to become token-based, we are:
- Enabling support for all kinds of communities (including both “creator led” and “headless communities”)
- Leaning into the link between “finances” and “community building” such as acknowledging and rewarding digital labor (like moderation, social support and community engagement) and supporting communities in raising funds
- Committing to an easy journey for community leaders to launch and manage tokens
- Ensuring our tools can adjust or scale to a wide variety of community types
- Providing tools to help communities understand their token performance and anticipate what the future will bring for them
- Enabling the future of community connection and creativity by returning ownership to the hands of Creators and their fans
Abundant Utility and Interoperability
We believe that web3 succeeds when it is able to solve real world problems. We think that ponzi-flation (or the idea that tokens should accumulate just for the purposes of bigger numbers) does not create long term value for companies, communities or employees. We also believe that interoperability is core to the DNA of web3 and that a decentralized and vibrant ecosystem can build more than we possibly can. This means that we are:
- Continually improving the capabilities offered by our fungible and non-fungible tokens
- Finding specific community pain points and creating new tools that solve for them using the best thinking in web3
- Bringing our offerings wherever communities want to build (chain agnosticism)
- Not building a marketplace or an exchange for social tokens and instead providing tools to help communities build things of value for themselves
- Not going to prioritize financially motivated actors unless they are also committed to deep community participation
Building and Partnering with the Entire Creative Ecosystem
We are devoted to making the world better for communities and creators and we will partner with anyone who feels the same way. This means our tools and capabilities must resist silos and operate in harmony with those of other participants in this broad ecosystem. To achieve this, we must:
- Enable anyone, not just a chosen few, to develop using our tools
- Open our capabilities to as many communities and as many interaction points as possible
- Always build with a focus on interoperability and the decentralization of future dev
- Make key partnerships with existing participants to allow communities to seamlessly integrate our new tools with their existing livelihoods and workstreams
A note about chain agnosticism:
To support and build for the most vibrant communities, we need to be where these creative and developer communities are building and thriving. Additionally, we need to be able to provide interoperable tools and services with the growing tooling that exists throughout the broad ecosystems that we participate in. This expands our total addressable market, reduces the burden of developing with us and increases the amount of developers able to build for our token-based communities. This does not mean that we need to divorce ourselves from our sidechain environment but rather that moving to a chain agnostic architecture includes sidechain and mainchain compatibility. The sidechain offers fertile ground for experimenting with token uses, especially incentivizing community-minded behavior. It also enables seamless fiat onramps and account security and recovery that are appealing to many communities new to web3. A pure web3 / mainchain offering will be paired with a clear, step-by-step process for migrating sidechain tokens to the mainchain. Communities will have three options for launching and growing their token-based communities: launch directly on the mainchain, launch on the sidechain and remain there, or launch on the sidechain and subsequently migrate over to the mainchain.
2. Product and Organizational Strategy
Our Current Feature Set
With this product strategy as a framework, we can articulate the value proposition of our current features in their appropriate contexts:
- Creating and launching token-based communities
- Growing those communities
- Building Utility into our core tokens
- Partnering with others to build Utility across the ecosystem
- Building the Infrastructure we need
Laying out the existing feature set like this helps to both articulate the individual PM portfolios using our current capabilities and serves to frame our understanding of Rally.io.
TOKEN LIFECYCLE
PM: Rajesh
-
Fungible Tokens
- Token Bonding Curves and Liquidity
- Low Cost / Zero Fees
- Sidechain Enabled “Admin Access”
- Launch customizations / Purchase controls
- Genesis Stakes and Vesting
-
NFTs
- Minting
- Distribution
- Wallet
COMMUNITY GROWTH:
PM: Alec
- Easy participant access to e-commerce style token purchases
- Value creation through the NFT marketplace
- Growth experiments
- Weekly rewards
TOKEN UTILITY
PM: Skot
- NFT Royalty Allocations
- Discord Bot
- Twitch Bot
PARTNERSHIP UTILITY
PM: Robert
- Community Tools (Rallybook)
- Distribution Tools (Bonfire)
- Integrations with Major Platforms (Shopify)
- Dev Community ($PLAY coin, early Kyro, etc)
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Web 2.5 and Web 2
PM: Caroline
- Embedded ERC-20 token ($RLY)
- Real Value / $RLY offramp
- Forte Sidechain
- Value Onramps (Bridge-in, Crypto-in, fiat)
- Value Offramps (Bridge Outs)
- Rally Network Backend (“RNB”) / sRLY and RLY backing and offramp
- Accounts / security and recovery
- Risk/Fraud
- Scaled KYC
3) Individual Roadmaps for Key Product Areas
Our Top Priorities
Over the course of 2022, we need to fund each of those verticals to an appropriate degree in order to be successful. There’s no utility without creation and certainly nothing stands without infrastructure. But we also need a razor to guide our investment decisions and understand where we believe the highest return on our dev investment can be achieved. These are our top priorities:
- Become native to an L1 (Chain Agnosticism)
- Grow our token-based communities (via both community growth experimentation and the improvement of Weekly Rewards)
- Drive novel utility from our existing feature set (includes both internal and partnership dev)
- Continue to progress on the individual roadmaps of each product area outlined above, particularly for mission critical Infrastructure
We want to be transparent with ourselves and with the community - we want to “build in public.” That means we’d like to lay out our first pass of things we are committing to for this year as well as a longer term roadmap for the following year. We are rebooting our product management processes as part of this effort - a big component of that reboot means that we will be empowering individual product managers to be agile, responsive and able to adapt to changing circumstances.
We offer these roadmaps to show what we intend right now and what we believe to be possible, but things will change! We will keep our community informed as our thinking on these priorities evolves. Finally, improvements in our engineering and project management capacity may accelerate some of our efforts and we are pushing on those areas as hard as we can.
TOKEN LIFECYCLE:
PM: Rajesh
Near Term (2022)
- Independence from RNB for Coin launches
- Easy and open access for social token launches
- Token Bonding Curve Migrations
- Automated vesting
Future (2023+)
- NFT-only token-based communities
- rUSD (Stable Coin) Acquisition
- Creator-focused tools site
- Launch pre-sales
COMMUNITY GROWTH:
PM: Alec
Near Term
- Weekly Rewards v2
- Links and Attribution
- Bulk Sends
Future
- Earn Mechanisms
- Productize the most promising growth experiments
TOKEN UTILITY
PM: Skot
Near Term:
- NFT Utility
- Community roles and delegation
- Campaigns v2
Future:
- rUSD (Stable Coin) Transactions
- Governance and Voting
PARTNERSHIP UTILITY
PM: Robert
Near Term:
Future:
- Improved 3P Account Creation
INFRASTRUCTURE:
Web3
Near Term:
- Solana Native Token Economies (will not be completed in 1H2022)
- Rulebook for token migrations from sidechain to mainchain
Web2.5
Near Term:
- Account Security
- Transaction Queuing
- Publishing sidechain stats for Rally.io performance
- Mobile App
Future:
USER EXPERIENCE
Owner: Katie
Near Term:
- On-going user experience improvements will occur to the site and the NFT marketplace
Measuring Success
The conclusion to Bremner’s post includes the below statement:
“Right now, the most meaningful metric we can move is Total Creator Coin Holders.”
This tells us at a high level whether we are growing and making progress on our goals. In addition, our UX and Research team will be partnering with Creator Success to measure sentiment from our community to enhance these growth measures with the community view of product quality.
The specific KPIs for each of the product areas will include:
CREATION and LAUNCH:
- Total Creators
- Total NFTs Launched
- Total Creator Coins Held ($USD Equivalent)
COMMUNITY GROWTH
- Total Rally.io Accounts (wallet with balance greater than zero RLY or creator coin)
- Total Creator Coin Holders
- Holders per Coin
UTILITY
- Total Amount of Community Transactions (i.e. fan to creator token sends)
- Economic Activity through Channel (Internal / External)
INFRASTRUCTURE: