Our Story

In late 2013, we founded a bitcoin startup — one of few companies in the ecosystem at the time.

We needed to build awareness, so we hired a well known tech PR firm. They went to work pitching journalists but after 3 months of no results, we had nothing to show for it.

Unable to afford wasting any more money, we fired them and took matters into our own hands.

We realized we needed a different approach — spamming journalists to tell them how amazing we were just wasn’t going to work for a startup like us. That’s the exact same playbook everyone else was running.

So, we built our own playbook with one goal: establish ourselves as industry thought leaders. We believed doing so would help us increase awareness and build trust and credibility, two deadly problems we faced. Here’s how we did it.

Our thought leadership playbook:

We consistently wrote content under our founder’s name with a mission of educating the market and creating awareness for Bitcoin.

We became vocal industry evangelists – publicly defending the industry from criticism and naysayers. Like when we went on national TV in 2014 to tell the public to not worry about the latest crash

We produced a regular content series where we interviewed others in the industry — like when we interviewed the former COO of Skype.

We educated the market — clearing up misconceptions and making sure people who mattered understood the technology. Like when we registered to become one of the first federally registered lobbyists

The Impact of Our Thought Leadership

Within a few months, our thought leadership efforts put us on the radar. Everyone that mattered knew our name. We had investors, journalists, customers, and opportunities coming to us every day and we were able to get doors opened.

But there was one problem: we didn’t have product market fit. Despite all the awareness we generated, it wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that no one wanted what we were selling. Our company failed.

The day that Bloomberg announced our demise, founders began to reach out. They said, “Your company sucked, but you were really good at creating awareness for yourselves. Can we hire you to do that for us?” We said yes, and have been helping founders build and execute similar programs ever since.

Our Thought Leadership Programs are based on what we first learned for ourselves then mastered doing it for other founders.

What founders we work with achieved in 2022

$1.1

Billion Raised

5

Were Acquired

4

Became Unicorns

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