🚨 RIPPLEX FELLOWSHIP SPRING 2022 RECRUITMENT 🚨

The RippleX Fellowship program is now recruiting for the Spring 2022 cohort and there are only 7 days left to apply!

Join our community of fellow founders and aspiring venture capitalists, learning about the intricacies of company building and venture capital through hands-on workshops and discussions.

Learn more about the program here: https://bit.ly/3FizHNE
Apply here: https://bit.ly/367uyfp
Check out our testimonials here: https://bit.ly/3qOdnas

Applications are due April 8th EST.

🖼 Looking at the Big Picture

The golden question you’ll most likely get asked when pitching to an investor - how can you get to $100M ARR? This is because investors are looking to find billion-dollar outcomes.

The market has to be large enough in either # of customers, or revenue per customer to get to this scale. It’s what people mean when they say “venture-backable company”. They’re referring to venture-scale market size. This is where you can use these two following strategies to better analyze your market and the potential of your own company. Starting off with the bottoms-up analysis:

What is a bottoms-up analysis?

It’s showcasing the current or potential demand for a product like yours.
Looking at the number of potential end-users as an anchor, usage or purchase rates, and pricing as variables to the equation.

How do you calculate bottoms-up market sizes?

Start with the number of end-users that will want your product.
Figure out how often they will want your product (monthly SaaS fee or they will buy something from you two times a week).
Take your pricing structure and find the product of all the variables above.

Another approach is to analyze the mega-trend taking place in your market:

What is a mega-trend in a market?

Being in lock-step with a broad mega-trend is another way that investors get over a seemingly small market.
This means that the investor (consciously or not) believes that the mega-trend will either:
1. Drive massive market growth.
2. Drive the new company to have an unusually high market share.

The lesson doesn’t stop here, there’s much more to cover! Take a peek into our course accessible to anyone and everyone:

RippleX Fellowship

📝 Medium vs. Mirror

The value of certain elements in Web 3 is difficult to grasp fully right away. We believe that by comparing new Web 3 technology and features to ones in Web 2, we can draw better comparisons, and in turn understand the value proposition of the features people are building in the Web 3 space.

We’ll explore content creation platforms across Web 2 and Web 3, more specifically Medium vs Mirror.xyz. Our new “Web 2 vs Web 3” series is where the team at Ripple breaks down the similarities, differences, and impact of similar technologies across Web 2 and Web 3. Ever wondered how you can earn $$$ from the content you post immediately? Let’s talk about it.

What’s Medium?

When it comes to the gold standard of blogging and writing on the internet, Medium may just be sitting on the throne. The platform enables amateur and professional content creators to broadcast their stories and ideas to the world without any limitation to the content.

Medium sits at the top of content creation (blogging/publishing) accounting for 54 million users and well over 100 million visitors per month. Medium currently sits at a $600 million valuation including its last raise of $30 million in November 2021. Its growth had continued to incline over the years with seven notable acquisitions and a global online presence — climbing to monthly traffic of 182 million users between March to August 2021.

What’s Mirror.xyz?

Let’s pivot to web 3 and introduce Mirror.xyz. This decentralized platform can be considered as a spin-off of Medium, as it provides users with the tool kit to share stories or ideas with their audience. The interesting twist is that it places the creators at the center ensuring that they are the ones profiting from generating content.

This nontraditional business model starts off with the users joining the platform with a crypto wallet and opening the doors to:

Launch a crowdfund
Create NFTs and embed them into popular marketplaces
Split up proceeds with collaborators
Distribute tokens to their community

Comparing the two

At the core, it’s clear to recognize that the similarity between the two is their content creation platforms which both enable users to creatively write and share blogging content. However, this would be the limit to any further similarity.

Though both platforms provide the user with the ability to create content and build a community, there is a distinction between the two as Mirror.xyz has created several tools to allow users to launch their brand or ideas beyond the content alone.

Interested to learn more and possibly creating your own ENS? This was only a taste of the full article and it’s available here.

💡 Fellow Spotlight

Mylene Tu - Founder of Trailblaze Tribe

What is it like to build an Edtech company? Or perhaps a social enterprise that leverages Web3 and NFTs? Let us introduce you to someone that has taken on both challenges and continues to excel.

We are thrilled to introduce Mylene Tu, Founder of Trailblaze Tribe from cohort #8.

Trailblaze Tribe is a social enterprise that aims to empower women and girls in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) by supporting their education driven by NFTs. This innovative company seeks to provide holders with scholarship opportunities, research grants, and bootcamp programs while committing to educate and onboard women into Web3. An added bonus is that a portion of all proceeds is donated to organizations leading STEAM education or women's empowerment.

Previously, you may have also seen Mylene as the CEO & Co-founder at Lukami Labs. An Edtech startup that built end-to-end internship solutions for companies to bridge into early talent. This includes future-proof talent pipelines from recruitment to onboarding and of course, virtual internship management. This was undoubtedly recognized for various awards and programs, including a feature on FoundersBeta’s 20 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2021.

There’s much more left to Mylene’s story, but don’t worry - we’ve got you covered! Take a peek into her interview on Humans of RippleX to learn about her experiences building Lukami Labs or her various blogs where she takes you through her learnings.

See what Mylene said about her experience with the fellowship program 👇

“The RippleX fellowship is unlike any program I've participated in before! As a student founder, it gave me insight into venture capital that other programs often only cover at a high level. I'm thankful for my time in the fellowship as well as the amazing connections I've made.”

Interested in being featured? Looking to share exciting news? Please reach out to Turja at turja@rippleventures.com.

Authored by Turja Chowdhury (Cohort #9).

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