Rocket DAO ecosystem: boosting your chances of becoming a unicorn

What Rocket DAO does

We are a service company for early-stage startups: we provide mentoring and assistance in raising money. Our high-level task is to help startups grow with the help of our expertise. When you work with us, your team does not just do something on its own but interacts with a community of professionals.

We have built an ecosystem from several directions that work together for this purpose:

1. Startup Jedi is a new wave media about the world of venture capital and technology, startups and investments, where we share the experience of founders, investors, experts, publish news and reviews on venture capital, and follow trends. It is important that information has practical roots and helps people better understand the startup world.

2. Founders Club is a platform for developing projects and raising investments, where we help founders adjust their business model, find a more promising niche, and, if necessary, improve the organization of work: find new people for their team, deal with legal subtleties, and much more.

Teams that want to join the Founders Club fill out a profile on the Rocket DAO platform. We can see straight away from a short questionnaire what exactly the team does (or wants to do), what competencies it has and how things are going.

Our partners provide their services to the most promising startups of the club for free. Those include video marketing, design, legal support, development services, and Amazon Web Services. We also hold strategic sessions for project teams that are members of the Founders Club, at which the CEO of the Rocket DAO team as well as experts and founders of other startups help them refine business ideas and solve problems.

Each startup is assigned a manager who monitors project traction and collects and analyzes its main metrics on a monthly basis. The dynamics of changes in figures in 2–4 months and project data, help us identify the startup’s weak and strong sides and further direction of development.

3. If a project shows an increase in key metrics, then its traction reports fall into InvestClub.vc, the early-stage investor community, which has more than 130 active members. Investors from our club know that if we recommend a project to them, then it is really worth looking at.

Over the year, we have helped ten projects to raise rounds, and the total amount of investments approached $1M. These numbers will increase when our venture fund, which will also become part of the Rocket DAO ecosystem, starts working. We are currently organizing its work and plan to launch it in about a year.

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Who is Rocket DAO for

We are glad to see founders and startups who are ready to make IT products for the global market. You already have an idea and MVP — great, we will help you refine and develop it, or just raise money. There is no team and product, but you have experience and desire to start a startup? Excellent too — we’ll help you crystallize an idea, assemble a team, find a market niche and launch a business.

We are ready to cooperate with teams from any field, but we can be the most useful where we have the greatest expertise, namely in Entertainment, Education, Influence Marketing, Messengers & Communities, Bots, Blockchain, Gaming, and Mental Health. We are also more comfortable working in the b2c or b2b2c segment.

Want to join our community? Register your startup now!

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Rocket DAO Team

My business partner, Gabil Tagiyev, and I have gained sufficient experience in technological entrepreneurship to be able to help others with our expertise.

Gabil has set up a successful game studio Eva Studio and a marketing research constructor AGELON. He’s also adviced and invested in a dozen digital businesses. I also invest in interesting projects, have taken part in the launch of several online platforms, and previously was involved in organizing large-scale events, including Startup Europe Week and CryptoFactory.

We work with an excellent team of managers, experts and journalists and are actively developing the ecosystem, helping motivated founders achieve results.

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Founders speaking

We asked two founders of startups that have already raised rounds using the Rocket DAO ecosystem to share their experiences.

Friends from the startup community-recommended Rocket DAO. I met with Gabil and Sasha, we got on well straight away and started our cooperation. Gabil had a good experience in dating and social networks — so we identified a niche where it made sense to develop, and formalized the idea.

When we developed the MVP, Rocket DAO showed our project to investors from InvestClub.vc and then I pitched it to “warm” contacts, who then became our first investors. It is much easier to attract new investors when someone has already invested in you — and we raised the next round quite quickly. Our first investors invited their colleagues, and we found one ourselves.

Rocket DAO helped us go through the process of creating and registering a company: they shared their experience and expertise with us, and showed solutions and pitfalls we couldn’t see. After becoming a part of the Rocket DAO ecosystem, I started conducting master-mind sessions for the Founders Club, where we worked together to finalize project ideas — this is how I met almost all the teams from the ecosystem. It is both very cool and productive as everyone is charged with business, shares their successes and helps each other avoid mistakes.

In general, the ecosystem makes a startup way more likely to succeed: you can always turn to experienced experts for help, get a boost of energy and determination from other startups, which stimulates you to work more confidently. You don’t have to think about many pressing issues at the start, and you can focus on your main task — developing a startup.

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Our team was one of the first to come to Rocket DAO. We just met Gabil at one of the events in 2019. We started by discussing what to do and how to bring our project to the next level.

At the start, we did not have a proper understanding of what a startup is and what an investment is. We just did what we were interested in and invested our own funds in it. We were looking at the market and business from a narrow-angle, which is why we did not see some of the promising development paths.

Gabil shared his vision and suggested making a gaming platform with many games instead of one game that we had already developed by then. We finalized this idea and everything went well.

Since we were one of the first startups in the Rocket DAO ecosystem, we basically saw it building and developing. And we grew up and learned how to make and grow a startup along with it.

The most useful thing for us is the possibility of constant communication with other teams: we discussed current affairs, exchanged our ideas and developed them. Such a community of founders allowed us to look at their developments and the world from different angles, hone the product vision and the startup growth strategy.

We are still in touch with other startups now, having weekly calls. We can already say that we are friends with projects: our teams communicate with each other, founders are constantly in touch — this helps a lot to grow and prevents burnout.

All the investments in the project that we’ve raised happened thanks to Rocket DAO. Gabil himself and several other investors from InvestClub.vc have invested in us. We were given “warm” contacts of investors, and it was much easier to raise a round using them than it would’ve been outside the ecosystem.