Contents
- Contents
- 00. Brief
- 01. Pitch Deck
- 02. Summary
- Mission
- Problem
- Solution
- 03. Analysis
- Weaknesses
- Questions to Resolve
- 04. Design a Roadmap to the Future
- šØDefine Company Purpose and Values
- šļøIdentify Business Model Architecture
- šBuild a GTM Strategy
- Purpose and Values
- Bringing the Brand to Life
- Business Model Architecture
- Brand Strategy
- 05. Implement Relevant Technology Tooling
- Website Copy+SEO
- Home Page
- 06. Leverage a Human Network
- Angels, VCs, Accelerators
- Partnerships & Community
- Founders, Influencers, Etc.
- 07. Marketplace, Competition & Inspiration
- Competition:
- Branding Ideas:
- Business Model Examples:
- Market Research:
- 08. Resources from the Infinity Road Library
- Meeting Notes - 08/30
00. Brief
Call Date(s) | June 21, 2022 / July 29, 2022 / Aug 9, 2022 / August 30, 2022 |
Attendees | Christina Fedor; Rangtiem Hookwap |
Background | Rangtiem was introduced to Christina through Alter New Media outreach on LinkedIn. To Christinaās knowledge, Rangtiem contracted with Alter New Media for the purpose of facilitating marketing and fundraising for the Company |
Company Information: | Sole proprietor; Seeking $40k funding through iFundWomen crowdfunding campaign; connects disadvantaged/disabled artists to an online exhibition where they can showcase their art and develop an audience
Website: https://www.globalgeniuses.art/ |
Who | B2C - Buyers are motivated to purchase niche art for emotional (social, cultural) needs
Goal Tasks:
Show great variety of artists
Present artists as āon brandā
Create conditions to nurture artistsā career success |
What (What is the primary signal?) | Goal is to communicate that the Company is committed to bringing the genius of artists who otherwise could not access channels of exposure to exhibit and sell art to a targeted audience of art buyers |
Reason to Believe (Why would someone believe this? What is your unique value proposition?) | Company is building network effects defensibility by committing to a targeted niche - underserved artists who typically fall into BIPOC categories, and buyers who want to align their purchase decisions with the awe of being āfirstā to discover gems hidden in the fringes/offline |
Key Outcomes: | Increasing Companyās touchpoints across networks; Telling the Companyās brand story; Raising a Pre-Seed round of investments from aligned investor operators in the NA market. |
Challenges | The company aspires to become a marketplace but the marketing sends asymmetric focus signals to the supply-side (artists). The brand and business model may need to be adjusted to signal value for the target buyer persona.
Pitch materials highlight the productās efficiency, but since the product is still seeking product/market fit, a better narrative could be framed around the community/intersection between hyper-specific core personas on the buyer and seller side
Right now Global Geniuses is hard to explain to multiple types of people - Rangtiemās vision is a marketplace network (a model that focuses value around long term relationships not just quick transactions) but the product as built is putting the cart before the horse - there is not a
Rangtiem envisions the platform as having a Web3 component, allowing artists to mint NFTs from their art, thus amplifying the audience for otherwise niche/hard to find visual art |
01. Pitch Deck
02. Summary
Mission
Global Geniuses offers a solution to the wealth and race gap in the visual arts by allowing underserved artists to access a wider network of art lovers, curators and investors, preventing geography from being a limiting factor for the survival of the arts, and ensuring artists have the tools they need to turn their passions into a lifestyle, regardless of where they live.
Problem
For Buyers: Where does one find emerging artists? Instagram (canāt easily buy and connect with artists), Curators, & Galleries
For Artists: Few economic means to take physical art pieces and bring them to online patrons
An art desert is a community that does not have the tools to support a fundamental need to become economically viable. One key feature of art deserts is that they include both urban and rural communities. It is well known that cultural disparities, especially around access, exist across the urban/rural divide, and the challenges of generating economic viability through art are very different depending on which kind of community someone resides in.
Solution
A subscription based digital art platform that helps struggling new and emerging artists gain exposure through live virtual exhibition and monetize their artworks using an NFT marketplace designed to sell exhibit artworks.
03. Analysis
Weaknesses
-How can GG ensure consistent access to the real estate amenities and physical tools necessary to produce and showcase digitally-native art?
-Who is going to manage the relationships with artists on the ground?
For example, can GG business model support collaborations with facilitiesā providers in locales where emerging artists live?
Arts + Literature Laboratory provides several artist studios for rent on a rolling basis. Studios are partially-subsidized with the intention of establishing permanently affordable space for artists to make new work in downtown Madison. As highly-visible members of ALLās community, studio artists benefit from significant cross-pollination with ALLās 200+ annual events and the more than 400 artists we work with each year across the contemporary arts. Accepted artists are also invited to join the Visual Arts Curatorial Team and participate in exhibitions jurying and other visual arts programmatic decisions.
Questions to Resolve
- Out of all the groups this is a problem for, who are you going after first? Why are you going after your specific target customer group? What does the customer persona look like?
- What is GG traction record over the course of the past 2 years?
- What communities does GG best serve and what is the GG community-building strategy?
04. Design a Roadmap to the Future
šØDefine Company Purpose and Values
šļøIdentify Business Model Architecture
šBuild a GTM Strategy
Purpose and Values
š Action Steps:
Purpose, Personality and Position: How is this company changing the world for the better?
- Purpose: āFor Global Geniuses, the world would be a better place if ___________ā
- Personality: If you met your company at a party, how would you describe him? List as many adjectives as you can and then pick the top three.
- Position: What makes you unique and different? Define: For (target customer), who {statement of need), Global Geniuses is a platform that (key benefit) unlike (competing alternative) Global Geniuses (statement of primary differentiation)
Bringing the Brand to Life
- Self-Discovery: What is the mind, body and soul of your brand?
- Embody the Brand: Implement a user feedback process
- Build Your Foundation: Map the brandās core values and mission
- Develop Empathy for the Customer Journey: Communicate the value proposition with an aligned visual identity and content hierarchy
Business Model Architecture
Product | Global Geniuses sells access, community, and cultural relevancy through art |
Customers | Businesses who seek culturally relevant art |
Transaction | What is the typical transaction and unit economics? [This is |
Partners | These are all entities that are directly involved with the value creation mechanism and customer touchpoints. These include channels, manufacturers, regulators, market influencers, system integrators, resellers, etc. that can help scale customer acquisition. |
Access | These are the methods used to reach, acquire, and maintain customers that define the objectives for marketing, and market positioning |
Marketplace Strategy: Verticalization through Aggregation ^[1]
The ācustomerā is the side that is most willing to pay (the demand side)(artists), so your product development is to do whatever it takes to attract the other side (art investors/buyers).
šPossible Action Steps:
- Identify the trends and/or fastest growing user segments within your core market
- Can people come to Global Geniuses to hire the artists for specific projects? (A niche industry take on Fiverr)
[1] Aggregation is normally thought of as a demand-side effect. However, in B2B2C there are two sides of customers, and by aggregating the less elastic side you get a lever of control to sell to the other.
- Durable Value Creation
-Competitive Advantages
-Technology
The pitch doesnāt clearly articulate how Global Geniuses is delivering value on dimensions [a large population of target] customers care about. From the pitch, it wasnāt clear that GlobalGenius has identified and refined the product to reflect demands from users.
šPossible Action Steps:
- Identify the feedback loops between Global Geniuses and its key, target user base more clearly.
- Are there stories that customers want to hear that havenāt been told yet on your platform (for example, there are millions of units of content on Youtube and cable networks with relevant engagement metrics that contain celebrity/influencer recommendations and stories about places)
Udit: We often think about the term āmaking a dentā in reference to artist practices that are more interventionist than sustained; something is created and it is a momentary statement, and then we move on. How do you as an artist move beyond an intervention to scale it up, so that it shifts towards something like a movement? This idea that Mai was talking about earlier, about positive viralityāhow do you make this more than you, more than the sort of echo chambers you were talking about earlier?
Sultana: Networks. I mean, there is no other way. We live in a really close world in some ways. India is a country of 1.8 billion people but I do believe that ten people can make a difference. It has been done and it is possible. Network is a large word; it contains so much underneath it. A network which has any power has something which is making them liveāa sort of food, a sort of mind sauce, a source that is active in all the nodes of the network at the same time, believing the same ideas, coordinating. In the case of mycelial networks, for example, there are many dead networks, but then something comes alive, and then that alive network dies, and then something else comes alive.
Brand Strategy
There are two key areas where asymmetry show up in the Global Geniuses presentation: growth strategy and visual identity. As Woody explained in his pitch, ChainRaise growth strategy is focused primarily in the enterprise space (e.g. auto and OTA partnerships), which establishes dependence on platforms (see SiriusXM as deploying similar strategy), but leaves a majority of B2C community driven, organic and sustainable growth opportunities on the table. For a product that sells directly to end users, the reason for this lack of symmetry in growth strategy is not yet clear. Additionally, the visual identity of ChainRaise renders a discernment problem. What is the brandās personality? How does this reflect the mission of Global Geniuses? What about the visual identity makes Global Geniuses memorable?
šPossible Action Steps:
https://www.shinyapplestudio.com/ - create partnerships with storefronts that already have a buyer base to get African designs in the hands of buyers
05. Implement Relevant Technology Tooling
Use Artsyās open source code
- Tech Stack
- https://flutterwave.com/us/grow
- Partnerships with Fintech companies - https://tala.co
- Human-First Ticketing: https://www.humanitix.com/us/live-shows
Website Copy+SEO
Home Page
Uncover hidden gems:
Discover the talents of emerging artists with other art lovers around the world
For Artists: āFocus on your work. We take care of the rest.ā
- Current search for āglobal geniuses artā leads you to http://www.globalgeniussociety.com/
Website should rank in the following searches:
āfind emerging artistsā
06. Leverage a Human Network
Angels, VCs, Accelerators
- Komorebi Collective
- Serena Ventures
- Overlooked VC
- Black Girl Ventures
- Visible Hands VC
- Reign Ventures
- The Community Fund
- Beyond Capital Markets, a fintech, and social impact firm that uses blockchain and cryptocurrency to help companies grow.
- she256 , a nonprofit that also aims to increase diversity in crypto, andĀ Kinjal Shah , a partner at VC Blockchain Capital
- https://www.umbadaima.com/team
- https://ouicapital.vc/
- Beth Turner - General Partner of SV Angel Team
- https://www.mybff.com/
Sydney is the Founder and General Partner of Impressionism Capital - a venture capital firm that invests in companies making life better for the 99%. The launch of her fund was recently covered by TechCrunch. She has focused on this thesis for the past 6 years and has created a distributed network invested in this space by founding a podcast where she profiles these companies, launching a newsletter where she writes about these companies, and hosting events where she organizes people who care deeply about the impact these companies can have on our society. She participates in several extracurricular activities to increase diversity in tech and level the playing field more broadly. She is on the strategy committee of BLCK VC, on the Board of Colorwave, and on the Advisory Board of Invanti ā a startup generator in the midwest. This work awarded her a Black VCās Making an Impact designation and an article in Marie Claire. She is deeply involved in her community in Oakland. In 2020, she was honored to receive the Champion of Justice Award from Esq. Apprentice, an Oakland-based nonprofit she supports that creates alternative pathways to a legal career. She was also appointed by the Mayor to serve as a Commissioner for the City of Oaklandās Public Safety and Services Commission. Sydney joined Precursor almost 6 years ago and built the software and systems that grew the firm from a Solo Operating GP with 10 investments to a 3-person team with 200+ investments. She grew from Assoc to Principal and now works there part-time as a Venture Partner. Before joining Precursor, Sydney gained experience working in technology startups in business development and product marketing. She has done everything from writing federal SBIR grants to managing customer success teams. Prior to her work in tech, she served in the Bloomberg Administration in NYC. Over the course of her tenure, she drafted federal legislation, negotiated a multi-million dollar contract, and received a full-ride scholarship to her business school of choice. Sydney graduated from Berkeley with her MBA and Duke with her BA.
Hema is an engineer, turned entrepreneur, turned investor. She is the founding GP at Five35 Ventures, a $30m Pan-African female-focused VC fund that will invest in early-stage (Seed & Series A) tech start-ups solving the most meaningful challenges in Africa. She is also the co-founder & CEO of WomHub, a boutique pan-African incubator and the first co-working space for female-founders in STEM in Africa. WomHub is a spin-out of her global, award-winning non-profit WomEng which provides interventions for girls and women at every stage of the engineering skills pipeline.
Partnerships & Community
Nonprofit Partnerships:
- Educational content partnership potential, backed by Steph Curry: https://ninetytozero.org/
- https://www.ashoka.org/en-us
Using Community to Power NFT Launches:
Making Web3 Accessible with User-Friendly UI: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10ISsqRaCjvxhLwON2IfwXpZk9xFlINiV/view
Video Stream Platform on Web3 to Help Creators Monetize Content: www.reelmood.com
Visual Arts Network of South Africa
Arts Collaboratory
More than 30 years ago, Schwab Foundation Awardee Tim Jones foundedĀ Artscape, a not-for-profit urban development organization that makes space for creativity and transforms communities.
Artscapes involves clustering creative people together in real-estate projects that serve the needs of the arts and cultural community and advance multiple public-policy objectives, private development interests, community and neighbourhood aspirations and philanthropic missions.
Founders, Influencers, Etc.
- Noble A. DraKoln, co-founder of BandNFT - doing for music what Global Geniuses does for visual artists - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drakoln/
- Check out his pitch here: https://youtu.be/VmyDAjv7RZo
- Albert Donald III - adonald@unioenterprise.net
- TavoniaĀ Evans, creator ofĀ Guap Coin
- Nathan Dillard, founder and CEO of National Black Business Directory (NBBD), a business solutions platform, partnered with Evans last year to bring blockchain to his platform. NBBD is integrating $GUAPās blockchain technology into its business directory software, and business owners on the platform will accept $GUAP alongside traditional currency for products and services of equal value
- Black Women in Crypto: https://bwbc.io/
- Olayinka Odeniran Ā founded theĀ Black Women Blockchain Council (BWBC) Ā in 2018 after attending the North American Bitcoin ConferenceĀ in Miami that year.
- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/14/iris-nevins-launched-business-umba-daima-to-uplift-black-nft-artists.html
- Manasi Vora , founder of WiB
- Daylighted.com - Company was venture backed and eventually got bought out then dissolved but the folks on the founding team would be a great resource for potential investors, advisors and/or colleagues:
- Simona Pop - Advisor, Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition, Head of Community at Status https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonalpop/
- Alban Dumouilla, Betty Bigas, Guillaume Bargain, Matt Fisher, Dannick Montanede, The founder Institute, The Refiners Program, KIMA ventures, Parisoma, Didier Perrot, Bob Zeidman, Jean-Louis Bories, MAPEJ Invest, Eric Bonjour, Geoffroy Martin,Ā Elisabeth Mouchy,Ā Alex Cammarano
- Ari Fararooy - a video creator in LA who produces stylized work for brands, events and celebrities - he might not be the perfect fit, but the idea here is to find a successful BIPOC creative who can join as an artist liaison and advocate
- And one San Francisco startup,Ā Chipper Cash, hit a $2.2 billion valuation in just three years by helping Africans transfer money cheaply and easily. Founded by Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, entrepreneurs from Uganda and Ghana, Chipper also lets consumers pay bills and invest in crypto and U.S. stocks. App that lets customers in five African countries, the U.S. and the U.K. pay bills, make cross-border money transfers and buy bitcoin. It earns revenue through foreign-exchange fees and crypto brokerage commissions. Chipper grew from roughly two million registered users in 2020 to more than five million by the end 2021. One-third of its 350 employees are U.S.-based.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/marierokerjones/
07. Marketplace, Competition & Inspiration
Competition:
https://www.artsy.net
Branding Ideas:
Business Model Examples:
The utility of NFTs:
NFTs unlock incredibleĀ pathways of access,Ā NFTs are stories, and the technologyĀ unlocks interoperable bundlesĀ across traditionally walled gardens.
The insight: the dreamers are most definitely imagining a new future. And in many ways, the space is still the things of wild and surreal fantasy. But theories on bringing these dreams into waking reality haveĀ begun to take hold.
Market Research:
Auction houses say the art market is booming. But what lurks beneath these shiny numbers?: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/07/11/is-art-really-booming-reality-lurks-beneath-shiny-numbers
Track the Art Market Index: https://pi-ex.mybigcommerce.com/macro-reports/ (CEO Christine Bourron) - āLive day sales have done so well, this season, thanks to the whole online bidding process. The new trend weāve seen is that now, there are many more participants joining via online bidding during live day sales.ā
08. Resources from the Infinity Road Library
Meeting Notes - 08/30
- Artists arenāt underrepresented, they are underestimated
- People join the metaverse seeking a place to co-create values
- Create experiences that pull people back into it
- Healer of the World - South Africa - partnership
- Evolve Coaching, a nonprofit that represents neurodivergent artists
- cross promotion
- met for-profit
- artists collaborating with others - upwork
- visual artists
- writing
Artist Example:
-lives in Texas, single dad, has 1000 followers on FB which he paid for through a group that promoters
-physical disability, not employed
-Rangtiem asks: is he reaching the right audience?
-abstract painter
Global Geniuses a social network - helping artists realize their dreams.
a museum curator - designed to tie threads among
creating opportunities for people in Africa
September 25, 2022 - 9:30 AM PST - Next Live Exhibition - Christina to Join
