To the 850 of you

TL;DR After 2 years of sick football events in crypto & web3 we’re cashing in on the right to blast out 1 unsolicited email to the 850 of you — our earliest supporters. W3FC is now Nine98: a bigger badder football app for amateur players worldwide. And today we’re starting this newsletter, The Nine98, to share the best stories and insights in amateur football as we sprint towards our October beta launch. If this gets your attention, and you’re down to receive a second email — let us show you what we can do. App Waitlist is live at https://nine98.io/

There are 850 people on our old W3FC email list and if you’re getting this it means you were on it. It means you probably came to one of our events in New York, Paris, London, or Miami over the past couple years; you most likely played some football (soccer), and you hopefully had a good time. More likely than anything it means you believed in us to do something different with web3 & crypto events. Jordy, Julian, Josh, and I are incredibly thankful for that belief. It’s given us the delusional optimism we now share as co-founders, which is that we can take our lessons from W3FC and build something far more ambitious.

For those who are sticking around, you’ll learn that our more ambitious thing is Nine98. The numbers stand for the 99.8% of players who never make it pro but still play like everything’s on the line because, in some respects, it is. It’s the way you express yourself, it’s the way you connect with people, it’s the way you get better. The sport itself has all these elements the same way a car is enough to drive, a wallet is enough to trade, etc. but good aint equal to good enough.

Briefly speaking — you have 250 registered amateur players worldwide, a dozen apps that focus on game organization, hundreds of millions of dollars and just about 0 that focus on networking and community. We think amateur players deserve those things in their greatest form, so at the product level you can think of what we’re building as Strava meets LinkedIn for amateur footballers.

Truth is we’ve been trying to pivot away from “just events” for a while. In Paris this past February, we’d prepared a brand & vision document and titled it “Soccer is about getting better.” With some help from friends we produced some 300 W3FC trading cards with NFC chips that would redirect to the document. We felt really good about it. And then the link stopped working at the last minute, and then I forgot to hand out most of the cards, and that was that. You can read the February document here — or better yet, follow along this newsletter and we’ll show you our most recent ideas to make the amateur football experience 10x better for the typical player.

If you decide to stay for the newsletter, you can expect weekly content like:

1. Why amateur football is destined to go parabolic (and how to take advantage)

2. How to build a creator economy around amateur sports

3. The loneliness epidemic (and how football solves it)

4. A look inside our product features and how we plan to design viral, meaningful experiences (feat. our Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jordy)

5. Co-founder Josh Murphy yapping with pros and world cup winners (unfortunately not the 99.8%)

We plan to go hard on this newsletter up to and through our mid-October beta launch. One way we’re thinking about our beehiiv is that it should be a community for our best supporters. We want to share our best ideas with you, build in public for you, take your feedback, and entertain and reward.

In the meantime our waitlist is live at nine98.io and we’re ready for you there too.

One final ask: please consider sharing this newsletter with friends, especially those who play the beautiful game. Our goal is that by launch, our users immediately understand what we’re trying to do — have picked up some insane stories or insights along the way — and we’ve build a sizeable head start to do some serious damage to a what is a generally stagnant amateur football industry. Won’t be for long.