Legion M "Pin Plan" for Investors

In Round 5, Legion M created a new incentive program to drive investments — offering an exclusive enamel pin to anyone who invested in that round. The inaugural program was such a success that Legion M decided to continue having incentive programs for future rounds. Please check out the original proposal below.

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BACKGROUND
The Round 5 pins were an experiment. To consider whether or not we should offer pins in the future (and/or go back and produce pins for Rounds 1 - 4), we needed to look at some of the trade-offs involved.

  • Pins are a fun, cool incentive and a great way to get people excited about Legion M and our projects. But they also cost money — every dollar we spend on pins is a dollar less to spend on projects, talent, technology — all the things that help Legion M grow.

  • Exclusive pins (e.g. a pin that is ONLY available to an investor in a round) are cool, but they also exclude those that couldn't invest at a particular time. What if you've been here since day 1? What about those that find out about Legion M tomorrow? It doesn't seem right that someone from Round 1 can't get an investor pin at all right now, and it also doesn't make any financial sense to produce a pin that only benefits the 3,000 investors from Round 1.

Investor pins are awesome in that they are (a) way cool, (b) low cost, and (c) much easier to package, ship, and manage than other potential incentives like shirts. Also, by charging a nominal shipping fee we are saving the company money (to the tune of ~$40,000 for Round 5 alone!) and eliminating the waste of producing and shipping things to people that don't really care about them.


"ROUND PINS" PROPOSAL
After considering all the tradeoffs, we've arrived at the following #PINPLAN, which we submitted to the community for feedback:

Starting with Round 5, we will produce two versions of each INVESTOR PIN design:

  1. A free GOLD version EXCLUSIVELY for investors in the round

  2. A SILVER (or other) version of the same design that will be available for purchase in the Legion M store

If there is demand, we can go back and retroactively create pins for Rounds 1 through 4. The gold ones wouldn't be free (it just doesn't make financial sense to spend money on retroactive incentives), but we could potentially offer them at a discount to those who invested in the round, while offering the silver version at full price in the store.

 
 

CONCLUSION

We think this is the best possible solution in that it:

  • Gives investors from each round a cool, free exclusive that no one else can get (e.g. only someone who invested in round 5 will be able to get a GOLD round 5 pin)

  • Doesn't penalize those that didn't invest in a particular round (e.g. investors from earlier rounds can still get an investor pin today!)

  • Creates a new revenue stream that makes the whole pin program possible.

Bottom line: It gives the pin lovers among us the ability to choose from multiple "Legion M Investor" pins (or collect the whole set!) while providing ALL of our shareholders confidence that their investment is being well spent.

So that's our plan. If you've read this far, THANK YOU for taking the time to understand these issues. You can view the original votes and comments on our FB post here.

NOTE: for Rounds 7 and above we have a much more comprehensive set of rewards that do not include pins (but do have lots of other cool perks). However, because investor pins are AWESOME, we are continuing to make them, but there is a nominal charge if anyone wants to get one.

FAQ, Investor Info, MerchJeff Annison