3 Things: DAO CRM, Stonks for Hiring, Peloton for Stretching
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
DAO CRM
Stonks for Hiring
Peloton for Stretching
1. DAO CRM
Every week, I hear about at least a dozen new DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). The space is exploding at such a rapid clip that tooling and data isn’t able to keep up. A lot of the groundswell is riding the wave of community-led as an ethos in general which is being applied to all areas of life and business. I also believe that the pandemic poured fuel on this fire as our physical communities got significantly smaller and needed to be replaced by digital communities centered around work or any interest/affinity group. While there are quite a few challenges to managing a DAO right now, some of the greatest pain is experienced around the people recruitment and management pieces. How do you find and attract the right participants for your DAO? And once the DAO is formed and operating, how do you create a unified view of each member’s activity across contributions, voting, community participation, and behavior that is specific to each type of DAO such as $$ invested, NFTs owned, etc?
There are numerous companies building out various building blocks to run successful DAOs such as treasury management (ex: Gnosis, Juicebox, Llama), voting and governance (ex: Snapshot, Tally, Everest), contribution rewards (ex: Gitcoin, SourceCred), payroll/compensation (ex: Superfluid, Sablier, Utopia) and much more. There are also platforms like Superdao which are building end-to-end toolkits to form and run DAOs that will integrate with many of these point solutions (full disclaimer that SignalFire is an investor in Superdao). This means that you now have a ton of different touchpoints for each member that are visible on a blockchain. Unlike in the Web2 world where data is either purchased or proprietary based off of prospect/user’s experience with each company, a Web3 company could leverage the openness of data to create a single pane of glass for DAO members. This could help filter, find, and attract the right people for your newly or about to be formed DAO, enabling you to do things like segment users and do airdrops or other forms of communication to a list of wallet addresses, as well as visualize and improve the health of your DAO based on individual member activity. This type of “Member Relationship Manager” or MRM could serve as the command center for all things member-related for the lifecycle of a DAO.
2. Stonks for Hiring
In 2017, a picture captioned “STONKS” that showed Meme Man in front of a list of stocks with an arrow pointing up and to the right went viral first on Facebook and then quickly on Reddit. It has come to be a meme that represents making poor financial decisions and if you hadn’t heard the term before, you probably came across it in 2021 with the whole meme stock craze around companies like GameStop, AMC, and BlackBerry. Recently, a company has co-opted the term to create a platform for what they call “YC Demo Day for everyone”. Essentially, they host live events where startups get to pitch on video to any investor who wants to watch and the investor can put money into the company right then and there through the platform. They are also starting to enable groups like the Xoogler Network (ex-Google employees) or TechStars to host their own virtual demo days on Stonks. Since launching only a few months ago, a few dozen startups have already raised millions of dollars.
What Stonks does well is that it removes a lot of the friction from a typically opaque and laborious process. Another area where there is a lot of friction between supply and demand is in the hiring process. With the “Great Resignation” and “War for Talent” upon startups large and small (though let’s face it, the small folks have it the hardest right now), trying to reduce friction and improve transparency in the hiring process could be a breath of fresh air. A platform could allow candidates to apply to pitch themselves live on video where recruiters, hiring managers, and talent acquisition teams could watch, and in real time, request an interview. Just as Stonks is trying to take a fundraising process down from months to hours or days, a hiring version could reduce a job search by similar proportions. It would also help remove resume bias which tends to be a huge gate and hurdle for underrepresented minorities or people who don’t come from the most pedigreed backgrounds. It would allow the candidates to tell their story and also define exactly what they are looking for in their next role which should make a recruiter’s job significantly easier (how frequently do you get LinkedIn recruiter messages that are SO far off what you’d ever consider doing 🤪). From a business model perspective, the hiring companies would pay a fee for each interview they request. Since they would be very targeted and already pre-screened, talent teams should be happy to pay for leads and not have to pay a percentage of first year salary if they hire someone from the platform. This also means the company doesn’t need to deal with downstream attribution and can focus on getting the right candidates and hiring companies together on the pitch days.
3. Peloton for Stretching
While Peloton has been absolutely clobbered in the public markets over the last few quarters, there is no denying that they have built an extraordinarily passionate user base and a very sticky product when it comes to physical fitness — a space notorious for lack of adherence. As of Q4 2021, Peloton had 5.9M subscribers which represents strong, continuous quarter-over-quarter growth from only 1.6M subscribers in Q4 2019. They reached a peak market cap of $49B in January 2021 and have 51 instructors who teach hundreds of live classes a week which also get posted as on-demand content for people to take whenever they wish. The pandemic has driven a massive shift from gym and studio-centric fitness to home-based exercise routines that feels unlikely to go back to the previous status quo.
Fitness hardware + software subscription companies have been all the rage over the last few years from Peloton for cycling (and running, yoga, and many other disciplines at this point), Tempo for weight lifting (also a SignalFire portfolio company), or Hydrow for rowing. The one area that is missing in the home fitness space is mobility training. In 2015, StretchLab launched a franchise model of physical locations that offer both 1:1 and group stretching classes and was acquired by TPG group under the Xponential Fitness brand. As of 2020 they are estimated to be bringing in $117M annually and are for the most part the sole player in this category. Flexibility and mobility have been shown to reduce injury, improve posture, decrease stress, and be incredibly important for healthy aging. A company could provide live and on-demand mobility training classes paired with light equipment like therabands, blocks, foam roller, and yoga ball which get shipped to the customer. Hire extremely attractive, high-energy trainers and target the older Millennial, GenX, and young Baby Boomers who are at the points in their lives where mobility is as important (if not more) than building strength or cardiovascular endurance. Focus on community and fun, just like Peloton has done, and gamify stretching and mobility to create an addictive subscription product.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine