Bankless Q4 sponsorship proposal

I am in favor of perhaps buying every other quarter. We dont want to be in a position where we are in the back of the line and have to wait.

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I agree with the majority opinion (so far) in this thread. I see diminishing returns and a very high cost. Lets skip this quarter.

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I agree with many of the points made here. The one thing I’d like to add is that we should be careful about assuming we’ll be able to secure Bankless ad slots in future quarters if we opt out this time. It took multiple quarters for a slot to become available to us, and it was only allowed because no competing liquid stalking service had a slot (an advantage we also enjoyed versus competitors in Q3).

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Simply put, I’d like to see a postmortem of the Q3 campaign first to determine what went right, what went wrong, what could be improved and then apply those findings to a potential new campaign (be it Q4 or later).

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I am against renewing for this period. I understand there is risk that we won’t get a slot in the future, but I think this is acceptable. We should explore other opportunities for those funds, such as more liquidity incentives or towards creating commercial partnerships with exchanges. An analysis of the benefit of the past campaign would be interesting.

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The argument for diminishing returns makes sense. While they have done great in Q3 it may be less effective in Q4.

I am not for this proposal but willing to consider alternatives.

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Every new node operator we onboard is worth at least 1.6 ETH of RPL (~$2400 USD). We should be targeting potential new node operators that would become solo stakers. I think if people are serious about operating an ETH node solo they are probably also bankless listeners. I’m not sure where else these guys would hang out - but it would be worth advertising there too.

I think one metric we should look at for marketing is $/new node operator. If $78k converts to ~30 new node operators per month, it is good very value spent for network growth. Having said that every 16 rETH created is also worth 1.6 ETH of RPL ($2400 USD).

Right now we have whales open with minipools, but after that is filled up with ETH from the deposit queue, the bottleneck again will be node operators - for network growth we need a continual stream of NOs.

For network growth, anyone can stake rETH - so the barrier to entry is small, while NO’s need >17.6 ETH along with the intent to stake solo but convert to rocketpool - that’s much harder to find.

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I agree with this, and I think we have it. We have a ton of whale pressure. I think we have a fair amount of folks that haven’t done minipools due to queue size. I expect institutions will want a slice (see eg https://twitter.com/marceaueth/status/1565847712586780673), and that last is near-infinite once bigger institutions play.

On top of that, we have LEBs. Going from 16+1.6 to 8+2.4 (LEB8s) is a 2.5x in rETH per NO investment. And that’s assuming everyone needs to swap ETH to RPL. If they already have it (and we know average collateral is around 67% currently), then it’s the full 3x in rETH per NO ETH. We have plans to go to LEB4s, that is a 4.5x and 7x for those numbers respectively.

I think rETH demand is likely to be our limiting factor.

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I agree with @genux . We should have objective measures in place to determine the effectiveness of a campain. These could include, but are not limited to, growths of NO, growths of rETH pool etc.

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I want to echo that I believe we should hold off on another Bankless ad investment. I feel like we are at a point of diminishing returns, although I don’t have any data to back that up… Where is the data?

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The only issue I have with not advertising with Bankless in Q4 is that we really should have some sort of advertising during the first full quarter post-Merge if we want to be capturing the maximum amount of new stakers for rETH. Incentives are a strong start, but where is the audience for the group that are more sophisticated than just the “stake with a CEX” folks but who aren’t trying to chase every bit of yield through DeFi protocols. To me that feels like who we were trying to go after with Bankless and I’d love an alternate way to reach them.

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I would vote to not renew. Incremental benefits are going to be low. Focus on core development and rEth liquidity incentives.

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It’s also my opinion that we should take a cooling off period from Bankless. My reasoning is rooted in much-too-many-years in the ad tech business- a $35 CPM is high but reasonable for targeted video, however, we can’t implement a frequency or recency cap, so we have a lot of repeat impressions. It’s my assumption that we’ve reached a majority of Bankless’s viewers at this point, and the best way to optimize the campaign would be to wait for their audience to churn a bit before reengaging with them.

I have no buyer’s remorse about the original sponsorship, I think it went very well. This stance is strictly about optimizing reach.

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I’m thinking that the Bankless target audience is already well familiar with rocketpool. I think we might be better served by reaching out to other pods and channels like Coindesk Breakdown Pod, Laura Shin, maybe an interview on realvision, even Odd Lots, or Macro Voices so we could expand the target audience and get our name in front of family offices and institutions… as we may be the newest “sovereign bond”. I’m not even saying that we shouldn’t advertise on bankless but we could probably set up some speaking arrangements to get a broader audience…

I’m not a marketing expert, but I think it could be effective to make rETH more exciting by anthropomorphizing it. Make a rETH character visual meme and use it to tell stories about how it is stronger and smarter than the other xxETH kids because of all its superpowers. If it was cuter and more powerful, who wouldn’t want to buy it? The rETH character could show up in lots of places, just like the panda.

No, please no. I don’t wanna draw in some 16 year old meme kid who doesn’t know about the risks and fucks up their finances.

If somebody doesn’t understand the benefits of rETH explained in text or normal grafics, they shouldn’t be our target audience.

We want to be a respected protocol, not some meme kid doge coin!

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Olympics or sports team mascots, or maybe GEICO’s gecko. Rocketpool’s orange rocket logo is great and easily recognizable and maybe it could be brought to life a little more to communicate rETH’s specific strengths relative to other LSDs in a fun and approachable way to newcomers (a bit more informative than just “we’re going up and to the right” as it currently implies). For review of mascots in marketing: 8 Ways A Mascot Can Help Your Marketing

There are many alternate options for advertising. Based on the replies here it sounds like

  1. There is a desire to keep advertising post-merge - I 100% agree on this for continued growth
  2. Not many are in favor of advertising with the same platform again due to the audience already being familiar with rocketpool, rETH, etc.

So it makes sense to me that we now need to have a conversation about other platforms.

We should probably pass on this imo. I think we needed to do it for Q3 and we can mark it off our list, but don’t see the marginal benefit being worth it for Q4. Time to take the next step with something else- most likely something to drive rETH demand.

I do think we should revisit doing this again around the time withdrawals are enabled and to push for solo NO’s switching over to RP.

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Hi Fam,

I see the “Bankless target audience is already well familiar with Rocket Pool” comments, and generally agree. I think the Q3 ad slot did a good job cementing Rocket Pool as an industry-approved way to stake ETH and also showed people that Rocket Pool is here to play with the biggest of players.

Broad Rocket Pool awareness is strong with the current cohort of crypto community members. There may be some new people brought in by the merge, but overall the churn of inbound net new members of the ecosystem is probably pretty low, and will likely stay that way until prices recover.

So if the balance is between Bankless advertising dollars, vs RPL liquidity incentives, I generally agree that juiced liquidity incentives are the interesting new thing.

Instead of a full podcast ad, there’s what we call a ‘media blitz’,

These are those 2-week ads that are the only ads that Ryan and I actually read out, and span both the podcast and newsletter. The idea is that use these to promote things more surgically.

So, instead of the 85.8k/mo for the podcast ad, the blitz’s are $50k total for the 2 weeks.

If the org wanted to promote the launch of the liquidity incentives, without having to sign up for the whole quarter, this would be good for that.

Want to make sure that this option is known to this forum, and overall want to see Rocket Pool keep a toe in the water :slight_smile:

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