GTM plan — grow the player base

Date: 2026-10-19 · Data snapshot: 2026-10-19 11:08 UTC Sources: suited.club/api/{stats,tournaments,leaderboard}, data/history.jsonl, data/rake-daily.json, data/creator-fees-daily.json, data/social.json, Discord scans. Scope: getting more players (people who sit and play hands), not more token holders. Holder growth is a separate track with different tactics.

TL;DR

Suited does not have an awareness problem. It has an empty-room problem.

399 wallets have played, 96,389 hands have been dealt, $1.98M has been wagered, and the people who play like the product. But this week 11 players played 304 hands, and right now the lobby has 0 seated, 0 live tables. Every dollar spent sending strangers to that lobby is wasted — they arrive, see nothing running, and leave.

The plan is therefore sequenced:

1. Concentrate demand into a fixed nightly window so a game is always running (weeks 1–2).
2. Reactivate the real players among the 399 wallets — the cheapest players Suited will ever get, once the Sybil accounts are filtered out.
3. Make tournaments the front door. A tournament solves cold-start coordination; a cash table does not. Tonight's freeroll has 0/80 entrants (minimum 24 to run) and the Oct 25 $2,000-added Major has 0/72 — and neither is linked from the landing page. Post-Sybil crackdown, these are real seats that have to be earned, not a bot queue.
4. Turn private rooms into the acquisition unit — a home game brings 6 players, not 1.
5. Only then paid/affiliate acquisition, which is structurally capped by a ~$50 lifetime rake per player.

The through-line: you already fund the prize pools. The bottleneck is promotion and packaging, not money.

1. Where Suited actually is

Two numbers define the company right now: $20K of poker rake vs. $116K of creator fees. Suited is currently a token with a poker room attached. The GTM job is to invert that ratio by making the poker room the reason people show up.

The collapse is recent and sharp

On Oct 4 the Discord update recorded freerolls hitting 80/80 in seconds and 25 players seated with $3,859 on the tables. Two weeks later the same freeroll has zero entrants. The Oct 4 player count is itself inflated by Sybils, so read the trend as directional and the level as an overstatement.

The team has since confirmed that much of the early tournament field was Sybil bot accounts farming the added prize. The crackdown is the right call, but it means the Oct 4 numbers were not an organic audience, and today's 0/80 is closer to the truth than the old 80/80 was. The honest read: Suited has a small, real player base — 11 people last week — and the GTM job is to grow it from real demand, not to recreate a bot-filled headline.

Sybil correction (team input, 2026-10-19)

This changes three things in the plan:

1. Baseline. Treat players: 399 as a gross number, not an addressable audience. The real base is likely low hundreds at most and 11 weekly. Plan from that.
2. Reactivation. Do not blast all 399. Filter first (prior hands, a deposit, Discord verification, funding-cluster overlaps) and only contact wallets that look human. A Sybil DM campaign burns credibility and sends prizes back to bots.
3. Tournament design. Free entry plus an added prize is exactly the shape that got farmed. Any re-launch needs entry gates and a prize that only a real player can extract (see §6a).

2. Diagnosis: why the room is empty

1. No predictable time to show up. Poker is a coordination good. With 10–15 regulars spread across a day, nobody ever finds a game, so nobody comes back. The 30-day data already shows the answer: 17:00–21:00 UTC averages 8–10 seated, max 34. Demand is concentrated; the product is not.
2. Tournaments are invisible. The landing page has play now and buy on fomo — no tournament CTA. The tournament page exists and holds a $2,000-added Major on Oct 25. A first-time visitor cannot see the single most compelling offer on the platform.
3. The free-to-paid step is missing. Freerolls are the top of the funnel, but there is no designed path from "won a freeroll" to "sat at a cash table." The moment after the freeroll ends is where every new player is lost.
4. Mobile and deposit friction. Mobile shipped on Oct 7 and is now the main surface, so the old "desktop only" objection is gone — but verify the full flow still holds on a phone. Separately, a new user must acquire USDG on Robinhood Chain before they can play. If that takes more than ~2 minutes, it is the real conversion killer, not the lobby.
5. Recs get eaten. Last week's leaderboard: call played 195 hands and lost $275; sadd played 264 hands and won $241. A small player pool with two strong regs is a rec-retention problem. Losing players churn silently, and they are the majority of any real-money poker base — Sybil or not.
6. No reason to return on a Tuesday. The jackpot, rakeback and leaderboard are good, but none of them create an appointment. Tournaments do.

3. Positioning

Pick one line and use it everywhere. Three candidates, in order of preference:

1. "The poker room that pays its players back." Rake → stakers, jackpot, tournaments, buyback. This is true, on-chain, and different from every offshore room.
2. "Provably fair poker, settled in a block." Already the site's line. Strong for crypto natives, weaker for poker players who assume every site is rigged.
3. "The only real place to spend your Robinhood Chain gains." Ecosystem-native. Strong for the Pons/fomo/RH Chain audience, which is the warmest external audience Suited has.

Do not market the token price. The dev's builder-first culture is an asset; price talk attracts the launch-sniper cohort that already left. Market the room.

4. The 90-day plan

Phase 0 — this week (7 fixes, near-zero cost)

Phase 1 — weeks 1–2: fill the room (organic only)

Goal: 12–15 peak concurrent seated, 40 weekly players, 20 first-time depositors.

• Reactivation campaign on the filtered real-player list. Segment by hands played and last-seen date (see Appendix B), but first exclude obvious Sybils: wallets with no prior hands, identical funding sources, or bursts of micro-play around tournament dates. Personal outreach to the top 100 human wallets: "your seat's still here." Offer a $5 bankroll credit or a Major satellite ticket to anyone who plays 50 hands this week. Cost: ~$500. Expected: 20–35 returning players at ~$15–25 CAC.
• Daily freeroll at 21:00 UTC, not every other day. $50 added is already budgeted. Then run a "graduates table" immediately after: 1c/2c, $20 max buy-in, 60 minutes, for freeroll players only. The free→paid bridge must be a scheduled, social moment, not a link.
• Seat warmers. Pay 4–6 trusted regulars a small daily stipend ($5–10) to be seated at 1c/2c and 5c/10c during the session window. This is the standard cold-start fix and it is cheaper than any ad. Budget ~$50/day; fund it from the 20% tournament allocation.
• Micro-streamer table. 3–5 small poker/crypto streamers (1k–20k followers) play a nightly $50-bounty table. Cost ~$250/night all-in. Crypto-native audiences convert far better than paid social, and real-money poker is restricted on Meta/Google anyway.

Phase 2 — weeks 3–6: the Major is the anchor

Goal: fill the Oct 25 and Nov 1 Majors (72 seats, $2,000 added each), 30 peak seated.

• Make the Major a two-week campaign, not an event. Satellites every night → final on Sunday 22:00 UTC. Publish "seats claimed," never "0/72."
• Referral → ticket. Refer a friend who deposits $50+ and both get a Major seat. This converts the existing 10% referral rev-share into an acquisition engine with a concrete prize.
• Holder/staker seats. Allocate 10–20 Major seats to stakers by weight. 435M SUITED is staked; those wallets are the warmest audience Suited has and are currently doing nothing but earning yield. Give them a reason to open the app.
• Private rooms as the acquisition unit. Target home games and Discord poker groups: "bring your table — 6 seats, one link, rake-free first week." Each room is 6 users and a recurring social commitment. This is the single best retention mechanic on the platform and it is currently unmarketed.
• Ecosystem co-marketing. Pons, fomo, and RH Chain community channels. Suited is one of the few real applications on the chain; that is a story the ecosystem wants to tell. Ask for pinned posts, AMAs, and a featured slot. Cost: time.

Phase 3 — weeks 7–12: scale what converted

Goal: 60 peak seated, 300 weekly players, $900/day rake.

• Double the best channel by deposit-to-player conversion, not clicks. Kill the rest.
• A league, not one-offs. "Robinhood Chain Poker League": weekly leaderboard, $500 prize pool, season standings. Leagues create the Tuesday-night reason to return.
• Creator/affiliate program paid per depositing player ($15–25, capped), not per impression. Recruit poker content creators, not crypto shills.
• Content that compounds: the provably-fair explainer, "how to get USDG on Robinhood Chain in 2 minutes," hand-history clips, PnL share cards. Low volume, but it is the only channel that gets cheaper over time.
• Holder loop: quarterly holders-only freeroll with $SUITED prizes; staking-weight boost for active players. Turns 813 holders into a recruiting pool.

5. Channel plan and unit economics

Lifetime rake ÷ lifetime players = ~$50 of rake per player. A player who deposits $100 and plays 500 hands at $1/$2 generates roughly $20–30 of rake. That sets the ceiling:

CAC must stay under ~$15 to be comfortably profitable. $25 is break-even at best.

This rules out broad paid acquisition and favours owned/affiliate channels.

Do not run paid social yet. Real-money poker is restricted on Meta/Google, the lobby is empty, and CAC would exceed LTV. Revisit at 40+ peak concurrent.

6. Product blockers that gate GTM

These are not marketing tasks, but the plan fails without them:

1. Mobile. Poker is played on phones. Verify the full flow on iOS Safari and Android Chrome, including the Rabby in-app browser. If mobile is not solid, pause paid spend.
2. USDG acquisition. Map every step from "I have no crypto" to "I have a bankroll." If it requires a bridge or a manual swap, add a guided on-ramp and a 2-minute video. Measure drop-off per step.
3. The empty lobby. Replace "no tables running yet" with the next scheduled game, a countdown, and a notify-me. Add a "someone is waiting" queue for 1c/2c.
4. Rec protection. Beginner-flagged tables, lower stakes, and a soft cap on regs per table. A rec who loses $275 in a week does not come back, and there are more recs than regs.
5. Fairness as marketing. The commitment/reveal receipts are a genuine differentiator. Put a "verify any hand" link in every share card.

6a. Sybil-resistant tournament design

Free entry + added prize is the exact shape that attracted the bot farms. If freerolls are the front door, the door needs a lock that a real player passes easily and a farm does not:

The 50-hand unlock is the important one: it turns the anti-Sybil measure into a liquidity measure. A bot leaves; a real player sits at a cash table to unlock their prize.

7. Metrics and targets

North star: weekly depositing players (WDP) and peak concurrent seated. Secondary: D7/D30 retention, rake per player, CAC, referral k-factor.

Targets assume the Phase 0 fixes land and are measured on human wallets, not gross counts.

Instrument the funnel before spending a dollar. The first useful chart is not players — it is deposit conversion by step.

8. Budget scenarios

Start at $2K. The prize budget already exists via the 20% tournament allocation from creator fees (~$20–40/day at current volume); redirect it to sessions that create liquidity rather than one-off overlays nobody sees.

9. What not to do

• Don't buy generic crypto shills. They brought the launch-sniper cohort that dumped 31% of supply in the first seconds. They will not sit at a table.
• Don't re-open a Sybil-friendly freeroll. Free entry, an added prize, and no verification is a bot magnet. It inflates the dashboard and empties the room. Use the gates in §6a.
• Don't market price or APR. It attracts mercenary stake that leaves on the next tick and poisons the builder culture the dev has deliberately maintained.
• Don't run a big-budget campaign into an empty lobby. Fix concurrency first; the lobby is the landing page that matters.
• Don't launch more tables/stakes. 12 configured tables and 0 live is a focus problem, not a supply problem. One busy 1c/2c table beats six empty ones.
• Don't promise a schedule you won't keep. The session window only works if it is reliable for 30 straight days.

Appendix A — copy templates

Session announcement (X / Discord, daily 17:30 UTC)

Suited Sessions are live at 19:00 UTC. 1c/2c and 5c/10c, six-max. Real chips, provable shuffles. Tables run until 23:00 UTC. Bring a friend or take an open seat. suited.club

Freeroll promo (Discord, 24h out)

Tonight 21:00 UTC: $50 added freeroll, 80 seats, free entry. Top 6 paid, 40% to the winner. Register: suited.club/tournaments — then stay for the 1c/2c graduates table.

Major promo (week of Oct 25)

Oct 25, 22:00 UTC. $50 buy-in. $2,000 added. 72 seats. $5 satellites every night this week — one seat per 10 entries. This is the biggest pot Suited has ever put on the table.

Reactivation DM (top 100 by hands)

Hey [name] — you've played [N] hands at Suited. The room's been quiet, so we're bringing everyone back at the same time: 19:00 UTC nightly. Your seat's still here. Play 50 hands this week and we'll put $5 in your bankroll. [link]

Private room pitch (home games / Discord groups)

Your home game, on-chain. Six seats, one link, chips settle in a block. No rake for the first week. Send the link, everyone's in.

Streamer outreach

$50 bounty on you, every night at 19:00 UTC, for a week. You play 1c/2c or 5c/10c, your viewers can sit at the same table. We cover the bounty and the buy-in. Provably fair — every shuffle is committed before the deal.

Appendix B — reactivation segmentation

Export from the player/leaderboard API and split by recency × volume. Filter Sybils first — drop wallets with 0 prior hands, identical funding sources, or a burst of micro-play that starts and stops around tournament dates. Only contact wallets that look like humans.

Target: 15% reactivation on the top 100 human wallets, 8% on the rest. Measure hands played, not clicks — a returning Sybil returns nothing.

Appendix C — data caveats

• suited.club/api/stats is live but players: 399 is lifetime and gross (includes Sybil accounts), not active and not a clean human count.
• Rake totals reconcile three ways (API $19,978 / Envio / chain scan $20,121); use one source, never sum rake + creator fees.
• The dashboard snapshot at 11:08 UTC is the freshest; market.price is null in the snapshot but dex.price is $0.0001435.
• Tournament 0 entrants is as of 11:08 UTC on Oct 19; re-check before publishing any count.
• Creator fees are token-volume fees, not poker revenue. Do not present them as room income.