Creatives on the internet do not feel served by existing platforms.
Existing platforms are optimized to maximize end-user attention and advertising revenue. This comes at the cost of pushing discovery and attention via content feeds that serve end users shallow online personalities and cheap, emotionally evocative media optimized for the algorithm rather than meaningful creative content. End users, in turn, feel little loyalty to the content they consume via feeds, making it even harder for genuine relationships to form with creators.
As a result, while most existing platforms are optimized to help creators monetize at scale, they alienate the long tail of creators who are just beginning to build a new audience. Creators on X need to surpass 5m impressions during a 3 month period to qualify for ad revenue share, and on Instagram require at least 10,000 followers to be eligible for monetizable subscriptions. Creators starting from scratch cannot monetize their presence on the platform. Creators are farmed for the audience they build and the users they bring and retain to these networks.
Rodeo is a social network built to address these foundational pain points.
Rodeo is designed to serve the creator by...
Helping creators directly monetize their online presence
Enabling creators to build a highly aligned community of true fans
Empowering true fans to stand out amongst the crowd
Creating a place for true fans to meet, discover, and connect
Building deeper relationships between fans and their creators
Organically aligning interests between fans and their creators
A new type of fun and way to interact for both collectors and creators.
Built on crypto primitives, but delivered to users without its complexity.
Rodeo is a social network that aims to become the best place on the internet for a creator to post and get rewarded for their work and community. And the best place for a collector to not only discover new emerging creative talent, but also a place where they can become an owner with real skin in the game.
Rodeo aims to become a new social network that we’ve never seen before.
The origin story of Rodeo as a product
Before building Rodeo, the core team behind the product had primarily been recognized for creating the platform known as Foundation. Launched in August 2020, Foundation was initially founded as an experimental platform for limited edition digital objects. Early on, this included social tokens, memecoins, and other tokenized experiments. At the time, none of the tools were self-service. Instead, the team worked closely with creators to explore how tokens could empower them. The underlying belief was that creators would benefit from blockchain-native primitives, but how that would take shape was still unknown.
In these early days, many experiments encouraged creators to attach a physical item to the token, helping buyers rationalize its value on the demand side. This approach framed the token as a proxy for a physical good, tradable, tangible, and easier to price. The turning point came through a collaboration with artist Molly Soda. She pushed back against the expectation of tying her token to a physical object. For her, the digital file itself was the art and was valuable in its own right. That moment reframed Foundation’s trajectory.
By the end of 2020, Foundation had evolved into a digital art platform that allowed creators to sell their work as NFTs, placing digital files at the center, no longer needing a physical counterpart to justify their worth.
Foundation did not have first mover advantage.
There were already other similar platforms that had launched far earlier, such as Known Origin, which focused on editioned NFT art (February 2018), SuperRare with 1/1 art (April 2018), and Makersplace, which focused on bridging the existing art world to NFTs (July 2018). During 2020, when the Foundation first launched, a broader wave of experimentation was emerging with Async Art (interactive, multi-layered NFT art), Zora (digital assets centered on digital scarcity), Rarible (the first permissionless creator platform), and Nifty Gateway (focused on mainstream creators).
Despite entering a market with existing competitors, Foundation established itself as the fastest-growing platform, trailing closely behind SuperRare in terms of GMV. Despite being second in GMV, Foundation was the biggest cultural winner as a platform, onboarding more creators and collectors than any other platform during that time, with notable creators including Edward Snowden and Nyan Cat.
While other platforms focused entirely on art, Foundation was able to bring on a broader cast of digitally native creators. It was responsible for onboarding new genres of digital media unavailable on other platforms, such as AI art, Anime art, motion graphics, 3D art, and photography.
Foundation was able to achieve this through the following means:
Foundation placed great importance on great product design and user experience
Foundation’s go-to-market was outbound and creator-oriented
Foundation catered not only to digital artists but to digital creators more broadly
However, regardless of how well the Foundation executed on this opportunity, the fundamental growth of NFT GMV was built on a hyper-speculative bubble, not a durable PMF. In Oct 2021, GMV would peak and begin a slow decline, which has yet to stop nearly four years later.
A sober reality emerged.
NFT art collecting outside of speculation was not sticky.
The barrier to entry was high, with price points for collectors anchored during a peak period of financial mania and a period of peak global discretionary personal spend enabled by zero interest rates.
The user experience for collecting and creating remained incredibly high friction and required both parties to onboard into crypto to participate. And more importantly, without speculation, collecting became a low velocity experience that did not appeal to a general audience outside of the 0.1% of collectors.
Releasing work became burdensome and stressful for creators, with many feeling pressured to sell out to maintain floor prices. Paired with dwindling demand, creators stopped posting.
With expectations anchored by a speculative bubble that would not re-emerge, mass disengagement from both sides of the market followed.
As this reality became evident, the Foundation team began to architect the first early ideas of Rodeo as an anti-product to Foundation.
Hyper scarce fixed supply → Open editions
High price points → Low cost and accessible
Manually curated homepage → Bottoms up user curated feed
Financially consequential participation → High frequency daily collecting
A new social network for creatives
Rodeo is a new social network built around the core idea of ‘collecting’.
Rather than likes or reposts, end users have 24 hours to ‘collect’ an edition of a post by a creator for $0.25, which, after the 24 hour period is over, becomes digitally scarce and can be sold to other collectors.
Anyone can collect as many editions of a post as they want. These posts appear on a user-generated feed, which amplifies the post's reach. If other users collect and spend on posts surfaced by you as a collector, you earn ¼ of the value of that mint as a referral reward.
This core collecting behaviour pattern unlocks several opportunities:
Creators can monetize their posts immediately from their first post on the platform, unlike other existing social networks that require creators to reach scale first.
Creators can build a true fan base with real skin in the game and value alignment with the core creator. If the creator gains popularity, early editions of their posts accrue value due to scarcity and provenance as collectibles.
Fans can build a far more meaningful relationship by directly supporting the creator by collecting truly scarce digital goods, which serve as a digital equivalent to merchandise that fans would typically purchase out of appreciation and resonance with a creator. This contrasts with traditional social networks, where a fan would fade into the background through other traditional forms of interaction via likes, reposts, or retweets.
Collecting is a far more expressive interaction between a creator and a fan.
1 Collect > 1 Like
Rodeo is social media re-imagined with digital property rights from first principles. It aims to deliver the value of crypto without its baggage to users and today, there is no easier way to onboard people into crypto than Rodeo.
Where is Rodeo today?
Today, Rodeo is pre-PMF with early signs of resonance with a small niche user base.
Since launching a year ago, 35.1k unique collectors have collected over 6 million mints ($1.5m USD GMV), and 17.7k creators have posted 365k posts in aggregate. $567k in fees have been earned by the platform to date. Today, Rodeo averages 5,000 to 10,000 monthly unique active wallets (collecting or posting onchain), with 500-600 daily minting collectors and 600-700 daily active posters.
Since March, the product has been live on the iOS appstore with crypto completely abstracted from the user experience. While user numbers fluctuate, the primary dedicated user base for Rodeo is slowly undergoing recomposition from purely cryptonative creators to creators outside of crypto.
There are early signs of retention and stickiness, especially with AI generated art, which has become the app’s biggest category of posted content, closely followed by photography. Given the general disdain towards AI generated media by much of the current audience on Instagram, Rodeo in many ways is slowly emerging as a refuge and a new home for AI creators and their work. I can expect Rodeo to further lean into this category as a beachhead in the near term.
The product still needs a lot of work, but it’s been a promising first year, and as investors, we're taking the leap of faith in trusting that the team will eventually find their way to PMF through continued iteration.
Partnering with Rodeo
At 1kx, we’re proud to be supporters of Rodeo as a strategic investor, having recently contributed to a funding round that will enable the team to execute on their vision.
I believe that the team behind Rodeo, stewarded by Kayvon Tehranian, Matthew Vernon, Elpizo Choi and the Rodeo team stands out as one of the best consumer product teams in crypto.
They are pioneering the boundaries of what net new consumer experiences can be enabled with crypto. Not only have they shown a strong ability to win in emergent growing markets as demonstrated by Foundation in the past, but they have also shown incredible taste in executing on Rodeo.
They’ve been working away on the mission of solving creator monetization for over 5 years and remain incredibly dedicated to this mission. I strongly believe that the team here is truly special and have a real chance to realize the vision of collecting as a mass market behaviour.
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