my baby is 1 year old 🥹

and I mean no disrespect to the parents of real human babies, but I'm really proud of this one. Not my first venture, but the most successful so far (by my heart standards, my music is the most successful but by entrepreneurship standars, this one by far ha)

 a few weeks ago at Eth Denver, on feb 27, I hosted our now kinda famous Founders & Investors Brunch ✨ in the same room that on the 27th of February exactly a year before, I hosted fractl’s first founders & investors brunch at Eth Denver. on our 1 year anniversary of fractl, we hosted our investors event number 25 🤯 started from the bottom now we... back at the same place but like bigger and better ha

I started fractl as a fractional CMO agency, but it very quickly became one of the top deal flow and lead gen events company in the web3 space. How it happened is a bit of a blur lolI because the first event, I hosted as pretty much an act of desperation 🥴 this is how it went... fractl, the genesis story!

So one year ago, I was doing sales, trying to p!mp these fractional CMOs, as I like to say affectionately, for my newly formed company fractl, with a headcount of 1. (1 + a few great CMOs willing to give me their time if I booked them contracts. Like a healthy p!mp/contractor relationship 🤝)

I got on alot of calls. but couldn't close anyone because they all needed funding. ‘We love the idea Rime, we’d love to have one of your CMOs but we need to close this round’ they all said. sooooo I need to help them get funding!! I thought.

Seeing my runway getting shorter, I figured I needed a quick way to help facilitate that so I decided to support someone in the space who needed help with the production of her founders and investors event at Eth Denver. I thought that would help get me in the room with a bunch of VCs and from there I could make intros.

So in this arrangement with this event organizer, I would handle the production, she would bring sponsors. So I stopped my p!imping and focussed solely on event production. It was my first time hosting this type of event so had alot to learn. But since I've produced International tours in my days owning a record label, I wasn't too phased by having to produce an event remotely but still it was a very different kind of event. So I poured all of my time into it, I wanted to be perfect. I needed ito make an impression.

but then just one week before the scheduled event, the event organizer, realizing we didn't have any sponsors, told me she wanted to cancel the event.

what.

no.

I had just stopped all my activities to focus on this, i NEEDED this event to happen. I was committed to making the event my ‘coming out party’ for fractl. I was gonna announce to everyone I knew in the space that hey, now I have this fractional CMO service, and it’s awesome, you should try it! And even if we only had 7 days, I NEEDED to make this work. I knew I could. I just knew it.

I didn’t. I ditn' know what I was doing. and I'm slightly delusional when it comes to what's possible in what timeline. and I was desperate. I had no client in the pipeline and no idea where to get them from. So it was a big mix of emotions. Her and I disagreed on how to move forward, so we decided that I would take it on by myself. We split the assets, and wished each other good luck in our future endeavours.

so there I was. 7 days before the event. No money, no sponsors, 2,000+ people registered that I needed to review, no help. Nothing but a whole lot of drive and optimism. and a again, a sprinkle of delusion. I called the venue I had found and said I would do it. I sent a few months of my runway as a deposit, and sat there. 7 days. 7 days to make it work. by myself. fak. i got scared ngl.

the adrenaline kicked in.

I started making calls. To everyone I knew in the space. I needed to close at least 10K in 2 days. so I got to typing. 60 something whatsapp and telegram messages later, and a few desperate calls trying to not sound desperate, I got 2 sponsors to say yes, on the Saturday, 4 days before the event. they sent USDC the same day. saved. yay I wouldn’t be homeless 💃🥹

shout out to WNDR.com and Armando Pantoja's Crypto Trends Podcast for being the first to see the vision

But that wasn’t it. I promised those sponsors (and myself) a room full of the top projects and VCs. Now I had 3 days to review 2,500+ registrations (they kept coming in 🥵). In the 3 days that were left until the event, I took every minute I had, on the way to the airport, on the flight, on the uber, at the hotel, at dinner to review all these registrants. Doing basically, due-diligence, reviewing every founder, the team, the decks, their social profiles… whatever I could gauge in the 3 minutes that I allotted to each entry… if you’re good at math, unlike me when I set the 3 minute standard, that would mean 60 hours of due diligence…. which I didn't have. Luckily some took less time to review because I recognized the project or the fund..

all in all I was able to put in about 30 hours, and made it through about 1200 records In 4 days.

So. that was done, I filtered. Now my next fear unlocked: would they show up? 🥺 until the morning of the event I had no idea. What if it’s just me in the room, with the sponsors? 👀 I didnt know what to expect, I had never hosted a side-event before.

210 people showed up.

for a room that can handle 190. We were over capacity and had to refuse people at the door. That day, I found myself in a vibrant room, full of incredible projects and all my VC friends asking me, who put this together? fractl? Rime, you work for fractl now?

Work for fractl??? I AM fractl, there is literally no one else 😂

I’m the one also cleaning up after this so please throw your stuff in the trash. And I hope you’re enjoying your breakfast burrito because I risked 2 weeks of runway on it 😭

 so that was the first one. with the grit of optimistic desperation, I pulled it together and people seemed REALLY impressed. 

It got me the brand exposure I was aiming for, and more. Got me to be top of mind for marketing services in the web3 space. And more importantly, it got me pumped to host the next ones.

(i may or may not be a dopamine junkie and these impossible situations fuel me... until I crash of course as one does)

I ran the next 4 events also by myself, Paris, Dubai, Nashville and Austin. Handling logistics, invites, curating the guest list, selling sponsorship, building partnerships, mc-ing the day of the event... until it became clear that I was onto something. the events were not just a way to get leads for my fractional CMO services, these highly curated events were needed in the space… and they WERE the service.

exactly one year ago I found a product market fit that I wasn’t looking for.

And I couldn’t be happier with the way fractl has evolved 🥰 I now have a team I love and have fun building with, we have 60+ investor events planned for 2025, beautiful countries to visit, and a reality/ docu-series in production to document it all (that’s right, I am an artist first and foremost ha)

happy birthday baby fractl, you’ve come a long way 💚

my team and I are super grateful for everyone who joined us along the way and for all the positive feedback

to the brands that keep trusting us with these experiences we curate, thank you for co-hosting these with us

to my team for powering through the ups and downs and showing up like the incredible professionals that they are, thank you for believing in the vision 🥹

my D’Rime team (see what I did there???

(you'd only get it if you know how to pronounce Rime, and you don’t pronounce it Rime 😶) back to my dream team:

💚 Danyal Atif COO (glorified intern), fun fact Dan was actually my first intern back when I had the record label, how far we've come 🥹

💚 Daniel Rubio -analyst and sales ops

💚 Shaima Al Yansuri, events manager

💚 Brianna Infante, social media manager

💚 Frank Fausto, marketing lead

💚 Serg, graphic designer

💚 Semo Eddini, video creator

💚 Sahira Mirza, customer care, and mommy by proxy 💕

to all our guests, thank you for being a part of this journey. fraclt is funding my dream, and I'm happy to be a part of funding yours ☺️✨

love you, bye

Rime (like 'dream')

🌸girl with the pink hair🌸