Happy New Year! Rocket DAO ecosystem in 2021

Happy New Year, everyone! We are very glad to have you among our readers who keep up with how the Rocket DAO ecosystem develops. In turn, we have prepared for you the final material of this year — the results of the work of our startup ecosystem. So let's get started!

Let's start with our beloved Startup Jedi media. For more than two years now, we have been writing about startups, investments, the venture market and product creation. Startup Jedi started out as a small blog on Medium, and has turned into a full-fledged website whose audience has grown 3 times in a year! Yes, we do mean that, here are the numbers: 

• Startup Jedi reached 20,000 readers at the beginning of December. Every day more and more people read us, and we are insanely happy about it!

• The number of our social network followers has also increased significantly. We have doubled our audience this year, with more than 20,000 followers at the moment. Thank you for being with us!

• In 2021, we have published articles by more than 20 authors from Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and Poland. We would like to say special thanks to each of them: Nadezhda Yushkevich, Alexander Ryabtsev, Anastasia Ryzhuk, Ekaterina Radyuk, Anastasia Bondarovich, Elena Sokolova, Vladislav Tsvirko, Valentin Mikhaltsov, Alina Selvesyuk, Grazhina Pavlovskaya, Alexander Litvin, Alina Minahoryan, Julia Barilo, Anna Scherer and many others!

• There are already over 650 publications on the website. In 2021, 230 articles have been published in two languages. All the articles are carefully translated into English by Maria Skorokhod, Dmytro Basok and Irina Radyuk. Thank you!

• This year we have also added a new "Video" section that contains 117 short videos on the most relevant topics, including research and reviews, pitches and case studies of startups, training videos with experts, a video cycle with key metrics and basic concepts for startups, and many others. Daria Grinevich and Nadezhda Venzhina helped us with editing and design.

• And of course, we have to mention those who are constantly working to make Startup Jedi better: editor-in-chief Alla Minko, CMO of the project Daria Skorokhod, production editor Nadezhda Yushkevich and our designer Maria Mozol. Thanks!

Next year, we plan to gain momentum and further develop our advertising and SEO to support organic media growth and attract new readers. We will also focus on partnerships as we want to cooperate with key market players and promising media. In turn, the Startup Jedi editors will continue to work on improving the content to keep delighting you with engaging and useful articles.

Do you want to share your opinion on Startup Jedi, write an article or talk about your startup? Then fill out our form or reach out to @darya_skd directly on Telegram. We’ll  be happy to hear from you!

Founders Club has changed a lot this year! From a club of entrepreneurs, where we helped teams understand and learn how to track their metrics, prepare traction reports and communicate with investors, we have turned into a full-fledged new wave start-up studio!

You can read more about what the studio is like now and its principles in our article, and now let's have a look at the highlights: 

• We have 6 discussion groups at the moment: Volunteering, Neural Squad, Rare.One (NFT/Blockchain), Social Games, Matrix Team and Gifted. Each group has its own theme that  will give birth to new startups or in-depth research materials very soon.

• As part of the Founders Club, we have held two productive and super-interesting offline meetings ( check out the link for the recordings in our Facebook group). CEOs of startups and members of our startup studio shared some insights that they researched and found there.

• We have set up our  MVP fund this year that has already become an integral part of the Founders Club. We give you the opportunity to receive up to $ 100,000 for the MVP of your startup! Thanks to the fund, we can minimize the time between finalizing the idea and the raising investment.

To become part of a closed community, where we discuss ideas, build projects and raise investments to test hypotheses, just fill out the form. Join us!

• Does it really work? Well, yes! One of the first Founders Club projects in Mental Health and awareness that originated in a discussion group was the Streem project aimed at combating increased anxiety among Gen Z representatives. This project went through all the stages of the discussion group in the Founders Club: from idea, building a team, preparing a pitch deck — before defending it and creating a startup.

In 2022, we will certainly delight you with new projects created and developed within our startup studio. Thanks to Inga Manzhulenko, Gabil Tagiev, Valeria Kozich and Alexander Shugaev for such fruitful work. Stay tuned for updates!

In conclusion, we’d like to say a few words about our projects that keep delighting us with updates.

EduDo

The startup has changed a lot over the year, turning what was originally an app with educational video content into a new platform for discussions in video format. This was mainly due to the pivot after the launch and analyzing key metrics. Yura Shlaganov has shared the details of his decision in the new interview with Startup Jedi.

The new launch did not go unnoticed from day one: they became the product of the day at Product Hunt, and this is just the beginning! In the New Year, we will definitely keep you posted on how the guys progress! And now we wish you every success in your undertakings!

waka

This year waka —  a wonderful anti-dating inside Telegram project — was born in the Founders Club. After the release of the alpha version of the product in March 2021, the startup raised $125,000 in April with an estimate of $1.5M, and attracted over 10,000 users.

In December, the guys already managed to please us with updates: the team released an NFT oath in the form of digital pendants that can be presented to best friends on the blockchain. There is still a lot ahead, but for now you can read more about the project here. Happy Holidays! 

GamePad

The gaming platform in messengers with social interaction GamePad also does not stand still. They have also made a pivot: in the new version of the project, you can interact with other people directly inside the games. The result was not long in coming — the number of gaming sessions increased more than 25 times! Such figures gave the project new opportunities that we’ll talk about in our articles next year!

EasyBloggers (HypeTrain)

The Easy Bloggers project from the Rocket DAO pipeline (you can read more about it here) has made great progress in terms of work on the project in 2021. They were originally an influence marketing platform but moved to managing influence marketing through a focused ERP system, which turnkey organizes all processes for the customer company, manages them, and also provides for team management. The startup also updated its name, now the project is called HypeTrain.

The product vision has also expanded significantly, which we will talk more about next year!