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Rewind to April 2021.

NFTs are hot, volumes are soaring — and every time you check any social feed, someone, somewhere has bought a picture of a random animal for an obscene amount of money.

From mid-2021 to April 2022, NFT volumes were in the billions of dollars, before collapsing dramatically between mid-2022 and mid-2023.

Just before the crazed run-up in volumes in the middle of 2021, in April of that year, Autograph, an NFT business co-founded by Tom Brady, was launched. It was launched to digitise real-life signatures and memorabilia, raising $30m to do so.

At the time, Dillon Rosenblatt, Co-Founder and CEO of Autograph said:

Fast forward to January 2022, Autograph raised an eye-watering $170m in fresh capital in a Series B round led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins. At the time of the raise, Autograph had launched NFT collections featuring Brady, Tiger Woods, Naomi Osaka, The Weeknd, Simone Biles, Tony Hawk and Darek Jeter.

At the end of 2022, following the FTX scandal and shutdown, Autograph laid off dozens of employees — predominantly in the marketing, HR and creative departments according to reporting at the time. Tom Brady was of course involved in FTX as a well-publicised investor, and disgraced former CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried had joined the Autograph board. Autograph cited market conditions as a reason for the reduction in workforce.

Six months later — in May 2023 — the business announced a further reduction in staff — this time laying off a third of their workforce.

Their rise and fall as a business mirrored the NFT market, which is likely why they have chosen to relaunch and pivot.

Autograph have pivoted their business to a sports fan super app.

Upon downloading the application users are asked to subscribe to teams and leagues they follow, curating stories, podcasts and content for those picked. When users engage with these content feeds, they are rewarded with coins. Collect enough coins, and you can enter special raffles and buy exclusive memorabilia. Fans are ranked in leaderboards and have their own ‘passport’ which tracks their activity and achievements on the application.

Autograph have tested this over the last 9 months with the University of Michigan’s football team, engaging ‘tens of thousands’ (according to reports) of Michigan fans in an attempt to prove this new model. In this model, the company doesn’t create any of its content (thus far) but instead aggregates content from blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts, with 3,800 sources in the beta so far. The aggregated sources are not paid, with the creators rewarded with distribution.

Rosenblatt talked to publications about the reason for their pivot, saying that they saw “the entire NFT market shift,”. He went on to say that they are “proud of the work we did in chapter one of the business. Today the mission is the same. Give fans a new way to engage and be rewarded for what they do.”

From a business model perspective, Autograph are not looking to rely on advertising, but rather tickets, memorabilia and collectibles (physical) via their new app.

Although the pivot has removed any semblance of blockchain from the new iteration of the product, Rosenblatt and Autograph say they can ‘“turn on” that aspect of the business and have said that some achievement trophies in the app will be onchain eventually, but capabilities were not built out in time for this launch.

In an interview with Fast Company, where many of this edition’s quotes are lifted from, Rosenblatt said “Once you own a collectible (referencing NFTs) you own it… how do you keep the party going to have this always-on thing for fans?”

The quote perfectly encompasses what many NFT-centric businesses realised slightly too late.

The NFT can’t be the product. For 99.99% of businesses that incorporate NFTs in some way, this will be the case.

This is especially true when you have overheads as large as Autograph will have had, with minimum guarantees with famous athletes likely chomping at their bottom line.

When you’re in that situation, as soon as sales dry up you are in a precarious situation. That’s what I can only presume has happened here with Autograph. Others in the industry have pivoted commercially, rather than with product, renegotiating deals with their key partners to ensure that they are more in line with market conditions. Autograph clearly felt that this wasn’t the right direction for them to go down, which is understandable. There’s still a risk even if those deals are negotiated to lower minimum guarantees.

The Autograph pivot in product is something I’m curious about, rather than convinced by.

On the one hand, there is a desire from sports fans to find a new home as we have seen X (formerly Twitter) wane, and Meta’s answer to that in ‘Threads’ struggle to take off. Reddit have also had a volatile time of late due to many AI LLMs using it to train themselves. Most fan apps, whichever sport you look to, are poor — especially those built by individual teams. And thus you do tend to end up with third parties creating huge userbases.

On the other hand, there has not been many great success stories from ‘superapps’ in the West, especially in sports, and although many fans are frustrated by the lack of a sophisticated ‘digital home’ — there is a broader trend of ‘niching down’ in fandom and consumer behaviours— rather than the far-reaching wide approach seeing success.

The lack of conviction I have in this pivot is less to do with the product, however, and more with the business model.

I’m unsure that selling memorabilia, exclusive items and tickets in app is going to drive enough revenue for an organisation — on top of the volatile advertising landscape — to sustain a business or, better yet help it thrive.

With the amount of capital raised ($200m to date) — does a proposition like this ever put Autograph in a position where their investors make a return? The likely answer is no — albeit this is not what will / will not dictate their success.

Where my lack of conviction again turns into curiosity is the mention of ‘Digital ID’ that Autograph continued to bang the drum on. It’s something we covered in our last edition discussing OneFootball Club, and it’s a trend that is continuing to be at the forefront of ‘what’s next’ for blockchain.

Fans want better digital experiences and sports brands want to know their global audience more intricately. Those who turn those two pain points into strengths, onchain or offchain, are going to be successful. If Autograph go down that route, it will be interesting to monitor.

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