An inside look at solution Sales + membership marketing

This transcript has not been edited — please listen to the podcast to confirm any statements made by speakers. 

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Brian Shields, CEO & Co-Founder of Sprinter:

Everybody, welcome to the future at work Podcast. I'm Brian shields. I'm here with my partner and co founder Alex Ford-Carther. Hey, Alex, what are we gonna talk about today?

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Alex Ford-Carther, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Sprinter:

Hey, what's up, Brian, another day at the pod. So today we're gonna talk about sprinter as a permissionless agency.

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Shields:

Very cool. Yeah. So we've talked a lot about how we use sprinter or how sprinter uses smart contracts on the blockchain in a way that anyone can become a member of sprinter by purchasing a token by purchasing the Ron token or one of the NF T's right?

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Alex Ford-Carther:

Yeah, so that's the individual and agency, right? Correct. Exactly. So you

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Shields:

can purchase the individual membership, or you can purchase the agency owner membership, which when you purchase gives you a different user experience a different user interface, and allows you to interact with the platform in a different way, with the utility of that token, and then everyone's gonna be able to use the run token, which is, of course, the native, you know, token for payments and governance within the Sprinter platform. And so it's gonna be cool is that like, because anyone can choose to purchase it, anyone can purchase it and then become a member, then everyone who is a member is unable to have the exact same rights, okay, we want to make sure that anyone who can wants to, you know, be a member of the Sprinter network, and wants to help sprinter kind of, you know, continue to succeed and like build a platform upon all, which all of us can operate our businesses. That's a way that we can make sure that anyone can contribute. So like, just because you're not a product manager, you're not a designer, you're not a developer, or like, you know, or anything like that. You might be a salesperson, you might be a marketer, you might be a copywriter, you know, you might be a social media manager, you might be a video producer, a video editor. So how can we make sure that everyone has a way to contribute in a way that can help even if they themselves don't end up like running a project, or, or working on the project, that becomes the new business that comes into the spectra network, because we want to make sure that anybody can drive business to sprinter, but you don't necessarily need to be the one who can fulfill the you know, the obligation, but because of the smart contracts, you can rest assured that as the sales or marketing agent, you know that the contract that is signed with the person that you just brought in is going to be completed, because the way the smart contract works within the spiritual platform. So the idea of making sure that if you're like a copywriter, or like a social media content producer, like you can basically be driving traffic driving leads to sprinter, and then just because it doesn't, it doesn't need to be your team's you know, project or your agency's project, but you can still make sure that everyone can contribute. So the concept of sprinter is like a permissionless agencies that anybody can become a member of sprinter. Anyone can contribute to running projects, working on projects, or leading agencies within sprinter, no one can gatekeeper in or out, it's just an open agency structure. But then everyone's, you know, sharing this, you know, collaborative operating system upon which everyone's able to run their own, like white label businesses. And like, because of the solutions that are built into the Sprinter platform, everyone's able to contribute. And so by making sure that everyone can have kind of like the correct incentives in place, within the model, doesn't matter. If you're, you know, a business development person or a marketer or copywriter. If you can drive business to sprint, or even fulfilled by somebody else, everyone should be able to kind of like participate in that. And eventually getting to the point where they can all run through the smart contracts as they execute sprint by sprint should ultimately be the goal of the platform.

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Alex Ford-Carther: 

So break that down a little bit. So I'm a tech salesperson, right? And I think that I've got the skill set to add kind of a Rolodex to drive business to sprinter IO, right? And someone comes and they start and create a project, like, how does like how do I even go about a getting the content that I need or like to do that, but then be like, how do I then get compensated for that?

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Shields:

Well, first of all, there's like no shortage of content about sprinter in terms of like how it works and what the platform is, what the features are, what the use cases are, what solutions are provided by the members of the network, how the network is governed how the token works within the system, and how the smart contracts work within the platform. So this, this contents already exists, and people can share it. I do think, though, that if everyone is able to, you know, properly articulate in their own way, specific when you're talking to internationally where people might need to like localize content in certain languages, like these are complex topics. And so like, I think making sure that like, people can understand that is very helpful. Like we were just talking about our experience in Switzerland and like people, obviously come in and we're meeting with Italians and Germans and French people, you know, efforts were all over the world. We got the, you know, the Koreans and the Chinese and everyone everyone's working within the space but like, I don't know how to tell if I you know, if I have like somebody writes something that's localized in to Chinese if it's correct or not, like I'd have to have like three other people checking. That's how you know, communities can collaborate in a way that individuals and businesses can't necessarily do it as effectively. But the idea of like, I can't just sell cars for a dealership without working for the dealership, right or I can't sell agency services for publicists unless I'm hired by publicist but at the same time, like if I sent some Somebody to a big company, and then they became a client, like, why can't I get that? And so this kind of comes back to like, you know, again, it's like Klaus Schwab like, you know, Davos, man, you know, stuff, but it's like stakeholder capitalism, and like this is about, like, how are you making sure that everyone's equitably treated within the organization. So, you know, the, you know, the UN, you know, is gathering right now. And you see, these guys do the 36 year old from Chili's, like talking about like the, you know, the weight, new way of collaborating, I think a lot of this stuff is really going to be coming in the next few years, and making sure that, you know, if you're able to, you know, sell or market or, or whatever for solutions that you don't provide, but you're a member of the group that is providing them, I think that that's pretty interesting. And I think that making sure that everyone has that structure in place, where it's clear, and it's all you know, governed by a Dow and like everyone can adjust it. And in a way that is outside the control of any one company and any one group of individuals in terms of like a kind of like a top down hierarchy in a traditional corporate structure, kind of like we've talked about, like the conglomerate structure, as opposed to, you know, a dowel structure.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

So we've kicked around kind of, obviously been in the Midwest, State Farm is big here. So we've talked about kind of have that independence, like owner, salesperson, the independent agent of sprinter kind of selling the solutions and services kind of

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Shields:

well, it's like the whole idea of like, like sprinter is basically an organization of independent agents, right? Like everyone's running their own businesses, everyone's running their own p&l, everyone's writing their own balance sheet, like we're all just sharing a technology stack. Or we're sharing a technology stack that everyone can govern in a transparent fashion. And everyone can see how it operates. And like, no one group has more control of it than the other. And like, that's the way that it should be and making sure that it can be a sustainably built piece of technology that can grow and scale as its user base grows, and making sure that everyone's you know, able to contribute to the codebase. And everyone's able to attribute it to the designs of the platform, or if the features or whatever, I think it's just maintaining an open software development environment in the 21st century.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

I'm gonna talk to kind of if I wanted to be, obviously, part of that, what would that process be? You know, is there some training is there like, what kind of what would that look like? Yeah, I

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Shields:

mean, I, you know, a lot of the people that are contributing right now to kind of like, you know, building the foundation of sprinter, have talked about the kind of like putting together some sort of like sales training course, you know, like, I'm not professionally a salesperson, right, like, it's not my like, you know, core wheelhouse, like, but I do think that, you know, kind of, clearly defining what it means to be a, you know, to sell solutions for sprinter right, and making sure that everyone is agreed, because if I'm a design firm, and you're a design firm, we want to know that, as independent members of sprinter, the way that sprinter design solutions are being sold or marketed is in agreement with our collective voice of the brand voice and, you know, and how we want the solutions to be sold into what businesses and like what that, you know, the the messaging would be, and the ability to kind of like, you know, bring that together as a community to kind of continue to refine what that looks like, I think is really important. So, like you said, like that, you know, that, you know, oh, and you know, just because someone's a State Farm agent doesn't mean they own a State Farm franchise, it doesn't mean that they built State Farm Insurance Company, right. And so it's how can you do the structure in a way that again, like, is compliant with all regulatory environment that we operate in, you know, here in the US, but doing in a way where everyone's gonna have their own independent businesses or, you know, operate as their own independent members of this organization that runs on this collaborative, South collaborative software platform. So

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Alex Ford-Carther:

just kind of go a little, little step back. So you talked about the solutions that are on the sprint platform, so we offer, I think, eight different subsets of solutions. And then within that, there's obviously different skills and kind of let's kind of break those down, and kind of give people an idea of specifically, what solutions I can get through through the Sprinter network and the members. So I guess top of top of mine, I think, is user experience design. So if someone is in need of designing their mobile application, wireframing some sort of product idea that they have, potentially a new website or some, you know, internal system, like user experience designer, something that they could get through the sponsor network.

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Shields:

Yeah, and then branding identity design would be another one. So like, actually, like what's the look and feel of your business? You know, what is the branding? What is the what's the voice, you know, what's, you know, just, you know, your, your logos and your colors, but all of your design elements really like what's what's the actual, like visual identity

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Alex Ford-Carther:

brand brand guidelines, you know, anything that's, I guess, a design, you know, pitch decks, like kind of a little bit everything, anything you wouldn't actually need to, for a designer to actually visually complete I think that that's something that you can get through the platform. Software Engineering, that's obviously a big one. People are always looking for engineers kind of how does that work through through Spencer?

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Shields:

I mean, having run coder for years, like that was our bread and butter was just like, basically like software engineering services for how rocking a digital agency services. And so basically making sure that you know whether you need like front end Back End Web Development, if you're you know, whether you're looking for like solidity stuff, or like, JavaScript developers, or if you're just looking for people to do, you know, kind of like, you know, CMS work and stuff like that, making sure that it's, you know, getting the people that you need to gather through the software engineering solutions are pretty clean. So we've

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Alex Ford-Carther:

got, obviously, members that can build Mbps all the way up to like enterprise level software stacks, and kind of anywhere in between. So any startups or, you know, enterprise, fortune 500 companies, we've got, you know, if it's Microsoft, if it's Azure, if it's AWS, we don't really care about your textbook, I think

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Shields:

that we can work with your DevOps and, you know, whatever your your stack is,

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Alex Ford-Carther:

oh, what else? We

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Shields:

got product Product Management? Yeah, I mean, basically, once you start getting into software engineering, you need a product management team in place as well, especially if you're bringing in both design and engineering solutions. Obviously, we work with existing people, like if, if a spiritual team is engaging with a business as an existing product manager, they might be the client point of contact, like, that works fine. But for anything else, like you want to have a dedicated point of contact, you want to have like one person who is kind of leading the charge in terms of the entire team that you have in place, that's where the product management solution would really come in.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

Yeah, so within that, I think we can, we have capabilities to like, estimate and scope your projects and do full discoveries, and like business analysts, analysis of specific features that you might want, within your product. So I think

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Shields:

client reporting, you know, open communication, you know, making sure that all the stakeholders are kept aware of everything, obviously, that's gonna be easier if they're running everything through the central platform, because of the way that we build the data visualizations. But I do think that that actually kind of leads into one or the other solutions, which is data analytics. And so data analytics is like, you know, if we're working with businesses that are, you know, using like huge reams of data, they need to kind of break this down, they need to figure out ways to stop, you know, having like a, you know, manual procedures and stuff like that, and like they're all stuck in spreadsheets, and then to get this into, you know, more manageable datasets like that's where data analytics solution would come into place. But then on top of that, once you start getting to that, you might be talking about process automation, because a lot of times if you have like data datasets, or just any sort of manual process that is kind of slowing down a business's operation, it's causing too much friction. And it's kind of like slowing them down, they know that it's something worth investing into building a solution for that process automation would really come in.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

Yeah, so Process Automation is something where, you know, maybe we're conducting different API's, you know, we're setting up automation tools, or just automating away people and moving those resources, maybe to your sales team or something like that. What else we

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Shields:

have digital marketing

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Alex Ford-Carther:

is one of your favorites.

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Shields:

You know, content marketing, social media management, you know, what's the story? Right? What are you doing? What are you talking about? Why does it matter? And how does it work, like getting that all together, that all kind of comes into play in the digital marketing solution. But then beyond that, I think that, you know, we've just seen throughout our career, when you're working with bleeding edge technology, a lot of times, you just need to kind of get a team in there that can kind of just be your skunkworks and figure out like what the potential solutions really are. And that's where the kind of like innovation strategy comes into play, where like, you can work with members of the Sprinter team who are kind of like, you know, the the big brain blue ocean thinkers who can kind of work with you in a consulting capacity to figure out, you know, what, what the opportunities really are, once you know that you that you have the capabilities of the Sprinter network to, you know, help you execute on your goals.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

So I mean, if you're an agency that provides these services, if your individual that kind of fits somewhere in that gamut, you obviously can come become a member, but kind of circling back. If you're not, that's okay. And we're setting this up as a opportunity for you even if you love everything that sprinters doing, but maybe you're not an engineer, and you're not a technical marketer, and you know, but you still want to be involved, we're setting up in a way that is allowing you to, to engage sprinter and the community and you know, maybe get the resources, you want to maybe learn those one day, but potentially use it as opportunity to still grow your business and grow your, I guess your money back. Right. And

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Shields:

if you want to do the work, you can do the work. Right. Sure. So,

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Alex Ford-Carther:

you know, we're definitely set it up in a way that the community, you can be a part of the community without providing the solutions, because you can still provide those, your expertise for sprinter itself and the network.

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Shields:

Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot in terms of, you know, the solution sales side of things, but also, like, we've talked a little bit about, you know, kind of, you know, further building out content around like, just general membership marketing, because like, a lot of what we're trying to do is, you know, just education and engagement in terms of like, what we've been building and how it works and like how we want to roll this out in a way that is open and decentralized. And in the spirit of, you know, how we built it. And just the general, you know, the whole philosophy of everything, crypto and web three, right? It's like, we want to make sure that everyone who is engaged in this platform, everyone's an equal member of that community. So we want to make sure that everyone can basically help communicate what it means to be a member of sprinter and it's not just I bought A token, it's not just I hold the NFT, I got a badge, I got a helmet, but it really is like no, like, sprinter becomes like, Oh, I got a guy for that, right? Like at the idea of like, no, no, I got, like, I got a developer, like I've got a product manager, like, Oh, I've got this consultant, like, I got these guys in Romania, I got these guys, and I got these guys in Poland, these dudes in Brazil. And it's like, oh, I worked with the design team in Senegal, like and that idea of that permissionless agency, again, is like something that can be articulated, it can be articulated in different ways, in ways that I don't necessarily know how to do it, you don't necessarily know how to do it, like, we just know that we want it to be open, and we want people to be able to, you know, move in and out, if they don't want to use it anymore. They don't need to. And if they don't want to hold it anymore, they can sell it. But at the same time, everyone who's a member can actively contribute into the governance of the platform, and that everyone can contribute into how can we do what's best for the community, and make sure that we're best managing the platform. And so a lot of that is going to be how do we make sure that the membership of sprinter are the top tier talent and like the the agency owners that understand what's going on in the web three, and see where the future is going, and know how to operate within the space. And in terms of being better, you know, good actors and like, stuff like that. And so having kind of like a membership marketing materials put together, having kind of like educational, like, whether it's webinars or newsletter content, or ebooks, like, you know, we don't know what it's going to be, but we know that this is something that some of the other people contributing to the project are, like, you know, interested in working on. And so I think that, you know, as that kind of comes together, that's going to be more and more interesting. But again, making sure that everyone is engaged in, you know, the governance and management and engagement of the community, as well, as you know, the continued development and maintenance of the platform. And in a way that is, you know, incentivizing a continued engaged community, I think is gonna be really important. And I think that, as the community kind of further comes together and starts, you know, continuing to contribute. In that regard, I think it's gonna be really interesting to see what people can put together.

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Alex Ford-Carther:

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the collective membership group is going to push Brent there forward, and the success of, of the network and the membership and the platform is going to live within the membership and the member base, and if collectively, we can all push, push it up, I think, you know, everybody's going to reap the benefits of that, you know, there, there'll be

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Shields:

a bigger, more powerful platform. Yeah, our features

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Alex Ford-Carther:

a bigger audience, there'll be more customers that are coming into sprinter to use the services and the platform and engage the members through through the platform, and then network. And that's just going to, you know, we've talked about this, but if I'm a small team in Portugal, and I've made some connection with another team in France, and like, collectively, now, we're a little more powerful, and I might find another dev team from Ukraine, and I can, you know, slowly kind of build my my army together. And then at that point, I can go target larger business, larger customers, and larger projects. And so, you know, but all that what has to happen is sprint or has to become more more visible with within within the space, and if everybody can collectively make spreads or larger a larger entity, then you've got the ability to to capture new businesses from new markets that you might not have had access to before.

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Shields:

Yeah, and I think that, you know, like you said, it's like allowing smaller agencies to be able to be part of a bigger group that's gonna allow them to punch above their weight, but then also making sure that people are aware of like, what that membership actually means, right. And so that's where it's kind of like the membership marketing. It's not just about like membership, recruitment, and membership engagement and community development, and they kind of like all the things that you would expect, but it's also about just making sure other people know what what it is. And so it's kind of like, you know, it's like, you know, we if we came up with a game of baseball, and you and I are just hanging out playing baseball, and then or, you know, and then all of a sudden, now we've set up a got another team, and now someone else is playing baseball, too. And now it's like, Alright, now let's set up a league, you know, everyone's playing baseball. Now. It's like, okay, but now let's tell everyone what baseball is, right. And now all of a sudden, people care that you're on a baseball team. Like, that's the kind of thing that I think, you know, where, you know, the community becomes greater than the sum of its parts. And I think that that's something that truly does happen organically already. In the business community, I think all the people we've ever worked with were people we've built personal relationships with. And you know, we were friends with the people we do business with, and we do business with the people we're friends with. And I think that a lot of people operate that way and that people want to be able to operate in a trustless environment with people they can trust. Right. And so it's being able to, again, kind of, you know, focus on the goal of sprinter being the permissionless agency, where everyone can come attribute to maintaining an engaged and active membership. And educating the broader business community and technology community about what being a member of sprinter is, and what the power of the Sprinter platform can be, is going to be really important. So, you know, whether it's about, you know, making sure that people can, you know, promote the solutions offered by the Sprinter network, or promote the benefits of being a member of the spectrum network, or the features of the Sprinter platform, I think it's all about getting the message out there. And making sure that other people know that they too, can spread that message, they can become a member of sprinter, they can purchase the individual membership NFT, they can purchase the agency owner NFT, where they could purchase the Ron tokens, and then they're a member of the Sprinter network, and they're able to contribute to the community and follow the guidelines of the community. And I think that everyone being able to do that in a clear fashion, in terms of transparency of tokenized governance is gonna be a fascinating thing to watch. And I think that, you know, it's all in a really good place right now. And I think that as that comes together, it's gonna be really cool to see what types of groups we get joining the community, and more importantly, what type of solutions that can offer to the businesses out there. Anything else? No, I think I'm pretty good on that one. You know, we'll come back again, and talk a little bit more about that, probably with Vladimir a little bit more. And I think Sergio will be a good person and have a conversation with about kind of, you know, the membership community side of things. So we'll put that on the calendar for future podcasts. But I think that's good for today. So to wrap everything up, once again, I'm Brian shields. This is Alex Ford Carter. This is the future of work.

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