As part of being the most transparent team in eSports/eRacing, we wanted to take some time to share our iRacing goals for 2021 Q4 and look at our Q3 results. To boost your confidence in developing your own team we want to show where things are going well and where things are not going so well.
iRacing Performance
As of Q4, the license statuses are as follows:
D.J. Fluck:
- Road: Class D
- Oval: Class D
- Dirt Road: Rookie
- Dirt Road: Rookie
Erik Richardson:
- Road: Class D
- Oval: Class D
- Dirt Road: Rookie
- Dirt Road: Rookie
As we mentioned previously, we’ll be avoiding dirt for now and focusing mostly on ovals and road courses. Erik purchased his racing wheel in early September and has been practicing and improving quite rapidly.
Q4 iRacing Goals
- Achieve C license for both Road and Oval (Both D.J./Erik)
- Participate in 10 ranked races, each
Web Traffic & Social Media
Our website and team were launched officially right at the end of June 2021, so July was our first full month online and definitely nobody knew who we were at the time.
Site Page Views
- July 2021 – 11,636
- August 2021 – 24,839
- September 2021 – 18,711
As you can see, we had some initial interest in August that tailed off a little bit in September. The August posts about driving with a PS4 Controller (Erik, D.J.) generated the most interest from Google and social media and therefore drove our traffic for August. Traffic still continues to be fairly regular with the post traffic being generated from our partner StadiumScene.TV. Seriously, if you are a sports blogger, podcaster, or video producer, you should join the community and network with others just like you. Full disclosure, D.J. is the co-founder of the service.
Social Media
Social media is a mixed bag of results for us. Services like Instagram have been great, while others like Facebook, and Twitter, not so much. Facebook is incredibly difficult to grow without spending a significant sum of money on advertising. Essentially the goal is to start with your family and friends and grow from there, but even that has limits.
Follow Count as of October 14th:
Because of the challenges of Facebook and the fact you need to make the heavy investments to properly grow, we’re not focusing much on time and resources. Most of our Facebook posts are primarily Instagram posts that get copied to Facebook and therefore we will not be spending much time trying to grow Facebook.
Clearly, our best performance is through Instagram. Between our racing picture posts, iRacing event posts, and videos like “Crash of the Week” and above all, our “Wednesday Night Dash” highlights are contributing to our quick start on the platform.
Q4 iRacing Goals
During the next quarter, we plan to continue to focus on growing Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube:
- Develop Regular Blog Posting Schedule and above all STICK TO IT
- Develop Regular Social Media Posting Schedule and above all STICK TO IT
- Promote weekly streams at least two days in advance
- Use SEO tools to identify underperforming posts after 30 days and modify posts accordingly
- Expand the brand by going on podcasts, YouTube and talk iRacing and F-R Racing
Streaming
As part of our streaming efforts, we have scheduled a weekly event called “Wednesday Night Dash” at 8 pm pacific time every Wednesday on our Twitch.TV channel. We take the format of the very popular “Dallara Dash” series on iRacing and expand it across different car platforms. The program currently is handled as a first-person stream by either D.J. or Erik, but eventually, we will evolve the stream into a full broadcast and invite people to participate and treat it as a full league.
Overall the streaming process has gone fairly well as we are using Twitch Studio to handle the streams while we learn the basics of streaming online. The external USB capture card has let us down with audio for a couple of weeks (sound driver crashing, defaulting to Mono sound), but we hope to be through those issues. If you missed the live broadcast, the feeds are automatically archived for 60 days on Twitch and also on our YouTube channel.
Q4 iRacing Goals
The key is to continue with reliable and entertaining streams on Twitch:
- 50 Twitch Followers
- Achieve Affiliate Status by Jan 1st
- Identify any streaming technical deficiencies and fix them
- Find a broadcaster partner to announce the races
- Continue to work on being entertaining and work on the banter between Erik and D.J. during the race
Sponsorships, Affiliate Marketing, and Merchandise
Currently, we have zero sponsors paying us regular endorsement revenue and we fully anticipated this. A company typically will not enter into a relationship with a new organization with limited to no brand following. As a result, we are using Affiliate Marketing techniques to partner with great companies and will be using the blog, streams, and promo codes to generate our initial revenue.
The F-R Racing merchandise store is open and selling a nice variety of great products, thanks to our printing partner, Printful. We sold a handful of stickers, a couple of shirts, and a hat during August and September, so that was a good start!
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F-R Stacked Logo Bubble-free stickers$3.00 – $4.00 -
Wednesday Night Dash Bubble-free stickers$3.00 – $3.50
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Pace Car Quote Sticker$3.00 – $3.50
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Stadium Scene Racing Structured Twill Cap$28.00
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F-R Racing logo adidas performance polo shirt$48.00 – $52.00
Q4 iRacing Goals
- Generate $50 in affiliate commissions (…you have to start somewhere)
- Sell $250 worth of merchandise
- Create Driver Shirt for Sale by end of November
- Develop an outline for a broadcast plan with our partner Stadium Scene TV
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, we are extremely happy with our progress during our first quarter as an organization. Slow and steady growth will lead to success. For instance, if we are able to achieve most of our Q4 iRacing goals, we will be in great shape to grow Wednesday Night Dash in 2022.
