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Dillon Rosenblatt Of Autograph - Building The Future Of Fandom With Legendary Names And Iconic Brands, Plus: Uppercut Training Club NFT, And More…
NFTs have unlocked another way to engage in the digital space. Fandom spaces happen to have one of the most potent forms of engagement, online or otherwise. So, what does the future of fandom look like in the NFT space? Dillon Rosenblatt is the CEO & Co-Founder of Autograph. This NFT platform brings together the most iconic brands and legendary names in sports, entertainment, and culture to create unique digital collections and experiences. He joins hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to discuss what they’re doing to elevate the fan experience through NFTs while democratizing and decentralizing its use. Plus, tune in for our Hot Topics and learn how Uppercut Training Club NFT is giving storytellers a more accessible voice.
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Dillon Rosenblatt Of Autograph – Building The Future Of Fandom With Legendary Names And Iconic Brands, Plus: Uppercut Training Club NFT, And More…
NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out how our guest lives his company’s core values every day, why DeLorean might help our guest accomplish several of his personal goals, and how all our guests are democratizing NFT and IP ownership in unique ways. All this and more on this episode.
Don’t forget that we put a little soiree together called NFTLA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head on over to 2023.NFTLA.live to get on the whitelist for tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. See you there.
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This episode features Dillon Rosenblatt. He is the Cofounder and CEO of Autograph, an NFT platform that brings together the most iconic brands and legendary names in sports, entertainment, and culture to create unique digital collections and experiences to better connect fans to the things they love. At Autograph, Dillon has ideated on and built a groundbreaking NFT platform and a business solution for the sports and entertainment industries.
He has secured partnerships with titans of business, including DraftKings and Lionsgate, to bring his vision to life and spearhead negotiations with the world’s leading entertainers and athletes to sign them with Autograph. In addition to partnerships, Rosenblatt is scaling product, creative technology, and marketing functions in preparation for the company’s formal launch. Notable Autograph board members include Sam Bankman-Fried, The Weeknd, Peter Mattoon, and Michael Meldman. Dillon, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on.
Thank you, Eathan, Jeff, and Josh, for having me. It has been a long time coming.
Usually, it’s harder to meet in person, but we had you over at NFTLA. It took about a year to get you on the show. We’re pumped. We remember when you announced your vision of Autograph. We have been excited ever since then to see what you are cooking up. It’s an honor to have you on the show.
I appreciate it. More than anything, it’s an honor to be here. It has been a while since our first NFT drop. It has been a fun year. We have learned a lot. I couldn’t be more excited about what is next. I’m excited to be here and chat a little bit about where we have been and where we’re going.
Let’s talk a little bit about the where-you’ve-been part, in particular, where you were in founding this thing. Your vision is massive here. You are already making tremendous progress against that vision. What’s the origin story? How did this come about?
I was lucky enough to be surrounded by pretty incredible people. I was able to get this vision in front of early on in the NFT game. My personal journey has always been one of entrepreneurship. For me, it was my whole life wanting to start a business for my first company starting a tutoring app at 15 Dub, the Uber for tutors, to connect tutors with students on a mobile app. From there, it was a variety of different startup ideas, leading up to the ultimate idea, which was Autograph.io.
I’ll skip all the stuff in between. I was lucky to be able to bring together amazing people around me, namely Tom Brady as the cofounder of the company, and to have been able to share the vision of creating a safe and accessible destination in this brand new world for the world’s biggest icons to come in and engage their communities in brand new ways.
The first vertical we started was sports collectibles with utility attached but longer term. As the space develops and people get more comfortable both conceptually, and with the technology behind Web3, we’re going to get into much more interesting and deeper applications of that tech to give a new look to the fandom and its future.
If there’s any way to ever enable Tom Brady and Josh Kriger to shake hands, Josh would be indebted to you forever. I asked him if he could bring anybody to a deserted island. That’s all it could be there. There’s only one person that he ever responds with. That is Mr. Tom Brady. If you can make that happen, that would be life-changing.
It’s not off the table. Tom is truly one of the kindest and most compassionate people. Being able to found this company with him has been an amazing experience. It has been nothing but supportive here for the business and me. Hopefully, one day, he would hang with you, Josh.
I finished that ESPN series that Tom produced about his journey in football and how he got to where he is. I was fanboying the whole time. He lives his ethos and drinks his Kool-Aid in every way. It’s cool. We were in the food world too. I saw Tom get into that world. Jeff is a vegetarian. I’m so focused personally on performance and recovery with my health now that I’m in my 40s. It’s the full circle. Work hard, play hard, and create amazing things but take care of yourself because you only have one you.
It’s that a championship mentality with his brands like TB12 and others. He does live what he preaches about treating your body well, recovering right, and saving yourself up for the long-term.
When we end up on that desert island trying to play football, let’s make sure we pack the sunscreen and drink plenty of water.
Make sure that it’s a two-hand touch. Notably, in that documentary, we did a drop with Man in the Arena. It was ESPN’s first-ever NFT drop on DraftKings Marketplace, which was a lot of fun. The collectibles for that came out great. It was pretty exciting. We were able to give away some ESPN Plus subscriptions.
My girlfriend gave me that drop as one of my Hanukkah presents in 2021. My favorite Hanukkah present was that entity. I am HODLing.
Honestly, that’s pretty cool for me to hear that one of our updates was given as a gift. I’ve heard it a couple of times, but it never gets old.
This is perfect. We answered my next question, but maybe we can dive a little bit deeper. My question was this. Who is Autograph’s target customer? How are you serving them to make their lives easier other than providing their girlfriend a gift for them for Hanukkah and coming on their show?
If you look at what Autograph’s audience has been, it has been a combination of existing DraftKings users dropping the majority of our NFTs on their marketplace and the true super fans of an icon and traditional collectors that collect around our icons and the memorabilia space. Longer-term, our core audience, whether on DraftKings or new to Autograph, is that true fan and collector. It’s the person that holds a piece of memorabilia to feel one step closer to somebody who might be their hero or to a property that they only have a few opportunities to express their fandom and engage with other fans.
We want to give that person a brand new destination to belong to and a product to own and feel good about. The pride of ownership is a true thing. NFTs have unlocked a brand new way to engage. We use Tom in Tampa as an example. If you’re in another city and you walk into a bar in Tampa Bay, Jersey and see another fan, you’re much more likely to engage, interact, and form a relationship, even if it’s short-lived.
That NFT ownership has given people new permission to engage, form into communities, and be social. We have seen it across projects regardless of the success. Our target customer is somebody that’s looking for both that place to belong, engage, and get closer to their icon. It’s a lot of fun too. If you look at the opportunities online when I say belong, you look at Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram within this community, whether it be Discord or longer term on Autograph. The goal is to give a brand new look to engaging digitally with like-minded people.
NFTs have unlocked another way to engage. Click To Tweet
I had a flashback moment, Jeff, to one of the old ideas we were ideating on, which was this way for fans that were traveling out of town and are in a random bar to be able to find other fans of the same team of theirs to watch the game because you want to see the Celtics play with other Celtics fans. You want to see Tom break a new record with someone else that cares. This idea of creating that deeper connection not only to fans of the athletes and entertainers they love but to each other is powerful.
I think of that How I Met Your Mother episode where there’s the Vikings bar for Minnesota Vikings fans. A way to have that community feel and also the discoverability is an issue, but hopefully, when we go from icons to other properties and other things that have natural engagement around them, the community can form themselves and build those in-real-life connections.
Nothing is stronger too than sports teams. At the end of the day, that passion at whatever level, whether it’s pro, collegiate, or even in some cases local, is amazing and so powerful. It’s hard to find other communities like that.
It’s the longevity as well and the fact that it can be passed down for generations of Bucs fans for years. It’s pretty amazing.
I’ve been in LA for years. I’m just starting to come around to LA teams. It took a long time. That attachment to your favorite teams takes a little while to grow and cultivate. It doesn’t happen overnight. It lasts a very long time. Let’s talk a little bit about accessibility, too, because we know that mainstream adoption is the goal of many in the Web3 industry.
It’s important that everyone gets to benefit from the types of projects that are being built. Part of that is pricing it in the right way and setting up payment systems that make sense and that our mothers and grandmothers can use easily if they want to get into the mix. What are the types of measures that you’ve taken to make this more approachable for the masses?
It’s a combination of accessible price points and simple payment solutions. We sold our first-ever NFTs at $12. Some scaled to be on the higher price point, but the majority of our NFTs have been under $100, which we think is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people looking at the space that want to dip a toe in or collect in the physical world. The highest-end side of memorabilia is worth much more, but if you look into buying a pack of cards or a traditional trading card, they are accessibly priced.
For us, the price point meant a lot but also part of the decision to work with DraftKings Marketplace was that they were going to be credit card-first. Taking crypto and being in the Ethereum ecosystem, Polygon, or whatever it may be is a huge priority for us. When I sit back and think about it, their entire design discipline is created about making things as easy as possible for a user to either purchase or engage with your product.
For us, it was always looking at how many steps it takes for someone to learn about this new ecosystem. There are benefits to that as well because once you start to understand how that ecosystem works. You have the noncustodial wallet that you can take from application to application and see the magic of the ecosystem, you’re hooked for life. Still, I also think it’s hard for a lot of people that dedicate the time and energy to figure it out.
They have heard about the hacks, the scams, and all of the above. I do think there’s a strong place for both using traditional product design thinking to make it as simple as possible, namely signing up for a credit card and then taking advantage of the technology and all the benefits that come with decentralization. To sum it up, it’s setting things at an accessible price point the consumer can understand, collect, and enjoy and also making sure that there’s a simple option to purchase.
We had a kid on here from Egypt who is diving headfirst into crypto and NFTs. He’s talking about how he didn’t have a credit card and he didn’t even have PayPal, but he was generating his wealth through crypto directly there. You’ve got to think about those factors. When it’s kids’ collectibles, you could only make so much more on your lawn or something like that. You want them to be able to enjoy getting involved early and have the same experience people were able to have with collectible trading cards and things like that many years ago.
The way I think about it is it’s the application of technology. When you have custody of your wallet, you can go from platform to platform with the items you own, with that identity, and with that place in the market and the ecosystem. It’s incredibly powerful. I think it is still a bit complicated for the average person to adopt. There’s going to be a point when it becomes as simple as purchasing anything else online. That’s when the space explodes. I’m bullish on the technology and its applications 100%. The design aspect, whether it be credit card payments or making paying in cryptocurrency simpler, is where things need to head for this space to reach the billion people that can.
We think about core values a lot here with all of our projects. We’re not just doing the show. We’ve got NFTLA and larger organizations of tech things going on. A lot of things rise to the top. Co-creation is one of the things we always talk about and community and transparency. I would love to get your thoughts on core values, whether they’re encoded or things that pop into your head. How do you translate that into what you’re building?
The core value is for us to create something that everybody could purchase in a simple way and something they could genuinely own and enjoy. That led to telling a unique story about the icon that likely couldn’t be told in the physical world in the same way. In Tom’s collection, for example, we’re able to take digital representations of multiple items that told the story of him coming into the NFL, like the QB1 jersey and the stopwatch with 5.28 seconds. It’s not the most impressive 40-time. He has gotten his speed up.
It was us being able to tell those stories digitally and give something to fans. It’s a new look and a new form of memorabilia. That was exciting for us. When it comes to community values, we preach a place of respect and for people to get along in Autograph.io, both those running the project and each other. That’s important to have a positive environment over the long term. You called it our formal launch. I look at it as the next chapter since we have been around our community for quite a bit of time.
In this next chapter, I want the community to design the values for themselves because that’s who it’s for. The Autograph company principles can make it easy for you to get in the door and purchase, but I want them to have the autonomy and the ability to say, “This is what needs to matter to us. This is how we should behave with each other.” This is ultimately what we want to build through our interactions and behavior.
That’s special. You’re talking about core values and addressing this community and how you incorporate the community into your thinking, your planning, and your actions. What else can you tell us about that community? How’s it forming? How’s it going? How connected are you with them? What platforms do you use to drive them forward?
Personally, I’m very connected to the community. When I see the usernames chatting back and forth, I know them all by name. I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot in person. We have hosted quite a few community events at this point, whether it was as simple as a meetup in LA, all the way to the match in Las Vegas. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s the Tom Brady, Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Aaron Rodgers golf match hosted at the Wynn in Las.
We were able to have about 40 collectors out to come to hang out with each other, meet the team, and go to some fun dinners and top golf events. Meeting them in person was special. I wasn’t able to attend, but in Tampa, we had 21 or 22 collectors and their plus ones down for a VIP experience at Training Camp. There was a fun dinner hosted the night before with the Autograph team.
The Future Of Fandom: NFT ownership has given people new permission to engage and form communities and be social.
The next day, they were able to hang out with the family and friends around Training Camp in the special box area and then got a live meet-and-greet with Tom. For those that have been here for a while collecting, it was pretty amazing to have that experience go so smoothly. If you look at Twitter, people are excited about it. When we talk about our core values, we want to deliver something special for our collectors and something that you can’t get or is difficult to get without Autograph. It was special to see that mission come to life.
I’ve got to figure out the minimum number of NFTs to hold to be invited to the next one of those. I’m going to start buying.
All I need is a location. I can throw a rock at Tampa from here. I’m down at Sarasota. Give me a location. I’ll find a way.
You probably know the dinner spot there. The collecting is one aspect and the contributing is another. You looked at the community and you asked about my relationship. I know the people that are providing immense value to Autograph and Autograph Nation as we call it. There have been people that set up community games in partnership with our moderators that are full-time employees. They set up something for the community to engage in night after night. It was this survivor game they put on. It was pretty amazing. To see those collectors also be rewarded for their behaviors and positive contributions is something special. It’s something that I want to lean into more as this project and company develop.
That’s beautiful. We have this thing called fan shout-outs, where we give love to the folks in our community who have given love to us. It’s a simple fundamental human concept, but our society has gotten quite transactional in nature. At the end of the day, there are so many different ways to contribute value to society. There are so many different ways that the community can contribute value.
It doesn’t have to be collecting. It can be being involved on Discord or Twitter and adding value. That’s one of the beautiful components of Web3 that everyone can have a role in the community. On that note, this is about the democratization of value for creators, collectors, fans, and builders. I would love to get your perspective on what democratizing the NFT space means to you.
It’s setting up the right infrastructure as a company to create those opportunities. You look at the purest opportunity, for example, a Layer 1 blockchain like the Ethereum ecosystem where anybody can come in, use the technology, benefit from the liquidity, start their business, and build something amazing. For something like ours, it’s an application on top of Ethereum and Polygon. The goal is for us to design the systems for our community to be able to get involved and let their effort translate into something meaningful for them.
When Jeff was asking about the community, as we went through our chapter one on DraftKings, we built a strong audience and community, but we’re going to be doing our next series of drops on Autograph.io, which I couldn’t be more excited about. We’re going to be taking a credit card payment. The target consumer should be someone that collects, someone that’s looking for an awesome community to be a part of, or someone that’s a fan of all of our pretty amazing icons from Brady to Tiger, The Weeknd, and whoever it may be.
The concept of celebrating a historic moment in Rafael Nadal’s career with his community was a very good one. His 22 Grand Slam was an epic achievement. We were able to get 22 of those signed NFTs out the door, which people were pretty excited about. People were able to get physically signed rackets from him as well as the utility. We thought that was a special and unique offering on DK. If I could go back, I would have waited a bit of time and gone on a decentralized ecosystem or Autograph.io because the majority of his fan base is in Spain and the broader territories around it.
The goal is to give a brand new look to engaging digitally with like-minded people. Click To Tweet
It’s the Autograph.io platform. That’s what it is. We have an amazing in-house creative team that’s continuing to develop high-quality products for the actual NFT offerings. We have taken a few special steps to make our NFTs themselves stand out among the crowd. To talk about more of a traditional website, the Autograph.io platform for users to come in, engage and have that continuous fan experience gets me excited.
When we talk about the market being, in my opinion, semi-fragmented as it should be, and in some cases decentralized, how can we own more of that customer experience with the intention of providing a better one is on the docket for us. From the point of sale on Autograph.io to what you do once you own an Autograph NFT, that’s the next thing in development for us.
Let’s do it.
It’s Hot Wheels at the local toy store.
Thank you.
How are you?
That was awesome.
I want Big Papi from the Red Sox to be my sensei.
Thanks.
If you want to be bored, my Twitter is @DillonRose24 but if you want to follow the fun stuff, check out @Autograph on Twitter and @Autograph.io on Instagram. Our website is Autograph.io. You can sign up and mint your username on Polygon, which is pretty cool for employing it. It’s yours though. You can’t change it because it’s permanent, but you can make your username. Everyone is hanging out in the Autograph Discord. It’s not gated by the need to hold the token quite yet. Feel free to jump in, hang out, and get to know the community. This has been great. Thank you all for having me.
We’re trying. Thank you.
Important Links
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@UppercutNFT – Twitter
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@DillonRose24 – Twitter
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@Autograph – Twitter
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@Autograph.io – Instagram
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Discord – Autograph
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Spotify – Edge of NFT
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About Dillon Rosenblatt
Autograph is a first-of-its-kind, experience-driven NFT platform that brings together the most iconic brands and biggest names in sports, entertainment, fashion, and pop-culture to create unique digital collectibles. Experience, collect, and enjoy.