Innovators Brief #160

Hey Jumpers,

Hope all is well.

The last Innovators Brief landed with a 54.3% open rate. As always, thanks for tuning in!

Before we dive in, one personal update worth leading with. My wife and I welcomed our second daughter into the world on November 13. We’ve got two under two in the house, so life is going 1000 MPH, 24/7, in the best way possible.

Here’s what’s in today’s brief:

Let’s jump in.

The last Innovators brief was sent in July. A lot has happened since!

In September, I partnered with Impact3 to service as Chief Strategy Officer and install the Jump Strategy OS to grow the agency.

If you’re not familiar with Impact3, it is a crypto native marketing agency.

Since joining in September, we’ve doubled headcount from 20+ to 40+ team members and doubled revenue in just five months.

From an annualized growth perspective, we’re pushing a 430% YOY growth rate.

So what drove the growth?

My primary focus from September through December was revamping the agency’s new business playbook from the ground up.

This revamp touched almost everything. Positioning. Packaging. Scoping. Pricing. Pitching and proposal. The entire way new client engagements move from discovery all the way through to signed agreements as totally revamped.

This brief could be 100% about that process, but I’ll save the full breakdown for another day.

The part I’m most excited about is what the playbook enabled. Which is our ability to:

Something I quickly realized when engaging new clients and thinking about how the agency’s current services could drive maximum impact was how vital our work is at shaping a brand’s narrative and discoverability within AI.

Which lead to the creation of our agentic marketing service. It’s the unifying operating system that wraps our services across strategy, PR, social, content, influencer, and website development into a single approach.

Here’s a slide from our new business deck.

Because all of our clients are in crypto, agentic marketing is probably more important than it is for almost any other industry.

Industries with a complex buying journey will, by default, need to be optimized across AI surfaces. People are using AI to help them make complex decisions. Web3, crypto, and blockchain tech is complex.

Crypto users are also early adopters. That means they use AI heavily and earlier than most other categories. When you combine early adopters with a complex industry, you get a category that is highly sensitive to how AI forms opinions, recommends options, and frames narratives.

One important clarification.

When I talk about agentic marketing, I’m not just talking about AEO or GEO. Those are only one piece of the puzzle.

Think of it this way:

Each of these contain entire ecosystems of strategies, channels, tactics and tools. Agentic marketing is no different.

Agentic marketing includes anything that shapes how a brand shows up inside AI-driven surfaces and workflows. How people discover the brand. How they learn about it. How they validate it. How narratives get formed and repeated. And how that ultimately translates into customer growth, investor confidence, and distribution.

This is a big reason why our agentic marketing service sits within the strategy team and isn’t separate group that operates like its own channel.

Below is Sharplink’s AI visibility against its key competitors.

Sharplink was founded by Joe Lubin, Ethereum’s co-founder. He hired us to run PR and social just days after Sharplink purchased $400 million in ETH to launch an ETH Treasury company.

If you’re familiar with Michael Saylor and what he did with MicroStrategy and Bitcoin, Sharplink is similar in concept, but for Ethereum.

Also worth noting. The CEO of Sharplink is Joseph Chalom, a former BlackRock executive involved in the launch of BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF.

These are titans of crypto and TradFi. Sharplink trades on Nasdaq under the ticker SBET with a market cap of $2.6 billion.

That said, they aren’t the largest player in their category. Driving Sharplink to the #1 slot in AI visibility within its competitive set is not an easy task.

Sharplink’s top competitor is Bitmine, with a market cap of $14.17 billion, and it holds significantly more ETH in its treasury.

Despite Sharplink being second in the category by ETH holdings and market cap, our PR and social strategy has driven Sharplink into a dominant position in how the brand shows up in AI conversations, especially when users ask about Ethereum, ETH treasuries, and investment-related topics.

Sky is our newest client.

They’re the third-largest stablecoin in the world, and they’re approaching $10 billion in total stablecoins issued.

If you’ve been around crypto and “Sky” doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because you likely knew the brand as MakerDAO and the stablecoin DAI.

About a year ago, MakerDAO rebranded to Sky.

But there’s a big problem.

The world doesn’t know about Sky, or that its USDS stablecoin supply is approaching $10 billion. The screenshot below shows that ChatGPT doesn’t know any of this, which is a huge problem for the brand.

Sky is an incredible protocol and business that is still under-recognized relative to its size.

In December, our first major assignment was helping write and produce Sky’s first earnings report. The business is doing $435 million in annual revenue.

That earnings report is just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to the work we’re doing for the brand.

We’re officially Sky’s Agency of Record.

Here’s what we’re doing across the account:

That’s the high-level view. Each line item is deeper and more complex than it looks on paper.

I’ll be sharing more about Sky in upcoming Innovator Briefs as we rollout these initiatives.

If you want to work with me, and you want to work on clients at the bleeding edge of technology and the frontier of marketing, we’re hiring across the teams below.

Email our People team and tell them which role you’re interested in. Please also CC me.

Strategy

Social media

Client Services

Public Relations

Creative, Product, and Website Development

2026 is shaping up to be a big year at the intersection of crypto and agentic marketing.

Stablecoins already settle trillions of dollars in value each year and are quietly becoming core financial infrastructure for payments and global dollar access.

Agentic marketing is also a new frontier that I’m excited to explore. Being able to combine the frontier and stablecoins and agentic marketing feels like living in the future.

I’ll be sharing updates on the work we’re doing for Sky, the third-largest stablecoin in the world with close to $10B in supply, as we build the brand into the powerhouse stablecoin provider that it already is.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon.

Jeff

P.S. If you enjoy reading the Innovators Brief, please forward this email to the smartest people you know. It’s the best way to show support and encourage me to write more :)