The Problem We're Solving
Everyone connected to Georgia rugby is flying blind: parents, players, coaches, referees, club leaders. Tournament invites land last-minute. Events get word-of-mouth coverage if they get any at all. Coaches don't know what other clubs are running. Refs don't know which courses are coming up. The runway from U6 to college, club, or pro rugby exists, but newcomers don't know the path. The community is real, but it lives in fragmented WhatsApp groups, scattered Instagram accounts, and insider shorthand that quietly excludes new families.
This is the number one retention and recruitment problem rugby has in Georgia. It is not the sport. It is the comms.
The Rugby Radar fixes that.
What This Is
The Rugby Radar is a free weekly email newsletter covering all rugby in Georgia. Every club, every level, every age. Youth, high school, college, adult. Men's, women's, coed. USA Rugby sanctioned and not. There is no other product like this in the state.
Tagline: "A ball's eye view from the scrum." Voice: cheeky, knowing, insider, community-first. Cadence: weekly, Tuesday evening (biweekly is a workable fallback if the board prefers, though weekly directly maps to the parent-comms gap we're solving).
A Note on Lady Trydown
Lady Trydown writes the Radar's satirical column, "Whispers from the Touchline." She is intentionally tongue-in-cheek, written in a Bridgerton dispatcher voice ("Dearest Reader," "this Author"), and built to drive conversation by gently poking fun at the universal rugby sideline tropes every parent, coach, and player has lived through.
She never names specific clubs. Her targets are the recurring jokes of rugby culture, not real people. From Issue 1:
Lady Trydown, Issue 1 (excerpt)
"It has come to this Author's attention that a certain men's club in the greater Atlanta area has been seen practicing at three different parks in two weeks, each time telling players a different field was 'the new permanent home.' One suspects the term 'permanent' is doing rather a lot of heavy lifting."
I pulled the @rebelsrugbyga.com email and Rebels affiliation from her Instagram on Saturday so the character had clean separation while leadership decides what to do with her. Going forward, two paths work, board decides:
- Path A: Lady Trydown stays under Rebels as a column of the Radar. Rebels owns the IP.
- Path B: She remains separated as my personal IP. The newsletter publishes her column under a simple licensing arrangement.
Either is fine with me. What I'm not doing is debating it for weeks.
Why It Matters Beyond a Newsletter
- Rugby World Cup 2031 audience. US is hosting. Five-year runway to build the Georgia rugby list before national interest spikes. The club that owns the list converts curiosity into youth registrations.
- New revenue for Rebels. $100/year adult club listings (First TRY Discount through Dec 31). $250-$500 per-issue newsletter sponsorships. $50-$100 tournament features. Every dollar is net new.
- Sponsorship runway. Other clubs pay Rebels for visibility in front of every rugby parent and player in Georgia.
- Strategic positioning. Rebels becomes the connector across Georgia rugby, not just another club. Changes every conversation with sponsors, schools, and prospective families.
- Syndication play. Format duplicates state by state at $500-$1,000 per starter kit. @RugbyRadarGA secured. TX, NC, TN, FL handles next.
- New-player pipeline. People asking "what is rugby" land in our funnel.
- State-wide community events become viable. The Radar audience makes ambitious community events possible for the first time in Georgia. A GA Rugby Open House (full-day event with a tournament, touch rugby, drill sessions, every age, every club, all welcome, from Columbus to Helen and everywhere in between) goes from logistically impossible to obvious once we own the state-wide contact list. Event registration, sponsor activation, and vendor booths create a new revenue layer on top of the newsletter.
- Editorial neutrality moat. The Radar flies above club, college, and USA Rugby lines. Hard to replicate, which is why it has to be built first.
Why This Has to Launch Now
- Adult and senior club playoffs are happening RIGHT NOW. Parents, players, and rugby fans are searching for highlights and scores. There is no source. Every weekend we wait, we miss the moment.
- HotLanta 7s is the largest Rebels recruitment opportunity going into the 2026-27 season. A statewide audience IS the recruitment funnel. Every issue between now and HotLanta builds list, awareness, and the pipeline that fills our roster.
- First-mover position erodes weekly. Other clubs see the same gap. Whoever publishes Issue 1 first owns the audience, the sponsorship inventory, and the syndication rights. After that, Rebels is the second mover.
- Rugby World Cup 2031 runway is finite. Every week of audience-building between now and 2031 compounds. Starting in 2026 versus 2027 is a meaningful difference at peak interest.
How This Actually Works (Automated)
This is not a volunteer project that lives or dies on a free Thursday evening. It is an automated production pipeline with a human approval gate built in.
Built-in Board Approval
Every issue lands in the Rebels Board of Directors inbox before it ships. The review mechanism is built into the workflow: one-click approve, comment, or hold. No issue sends without board sign-off. The board controls the voice, the standards, and the publish button. Always.
- AI agents do the intel-gathering. Automated agents scour Georgia rugby across the week: club socials, schedules, results, tournament announcements, certification courses, college fixtures. Nothing slips through.
- AI agents draft the newsletter. Tuesday morning, agents assemble the full draft from the week's intel, formatted in the Radar voice and structure.
- Board reviews and approves. Tuesday morning the draft lands in the board inbox with a simple approval flow. Edits are easy. Sign-off is explicit.
- Tuesday evening, it ships. Delivery to the subscriber list, plus targeted sends to club presidents and parent WhatsApp groups.
- Subscriber list. Manual subscription tracking at launch. Once we hit 500 subscribers (the niche-newsletter product-market-fit threshold), the list moves to a proper CRM platform for scale and ongoing automation. We don't pay for tooling we haven't earned.
- Ops inbox. radar@rebelsrugbyga.com handles events, sponsors, listings, tips.
- Character inbox. LadyTrydown email pulled from the rebelsrugbyga.com domain Saturday to give the board clean breathing room. Final ownership (under Rebels or separated as Kim's IP) is the board's call. Either works.
- Instagram. @LadyTrydown is currently held independently. @RugbyRadarGA is available to register as an option to separate Radar audience traffic from the club's main @Rebels_Rugby_YouthGA handle: keeps the club feed focused on members and parents while the Radar builds its own statewide audience. That's a decision for later, not Monday.
- Content backlog. 100+ ideas catalogued. Recurring sections defined. Tournament calendar through March 2027.
- Production skill. Packaged, reproducible, hand-off-ready. The system survives me.
What This Would Cost to Build
If a club commissioned this from an agency or consultancy, here's what the build would actually cost. Real market rates, not theoretical.
| Component | Market Cost |
|---|
| Brand strategy + voice development | $5,000 - $10,000 |
| Newsletter design + email HTML template | $3,000 - $6,000 |
| Production playbook + content engine | $5,000 - $10,000 |
| AI agent intel-gathering automation | $8,000 - $15,000 |
| AI agent draft assembly automation | $8,000 - $15,000 |
| Lady Trydown character (concept, voice, IP) | $3,000 - $5,000 |
| Domain, handles, infrastructure setup | $500 - $1,000 |
| Launch setup + first 4 issues editorial | $5,000 - $10,000 |
| Total Setup (one-time) | $37,500 - $72,000 |
| Ongoing production (annual, outsourced) | $30,000 - $50,000/yr |
Delivered to Rebels at zero cost. Built and operated by Kim, leveraging AI agents and a packaged production skill that survives the founder. No other GA club will see this delivered to them.
5-Year Financial Outlook
Reality-based projections grounded in niche-newsletter benchmarks. Typical year-over-year subscriber growth for niche community newsletters: 2-3x in years 1-2, 1.5-2x in years 3-4, peak interest spike at industry events (Rugby World Cup 2031 = year 5 inflection). Conservative numbers, intentionally.
| Year | Subscribers | Annual Revenue | Drivers |
|---|
| 2026 (Y1) | 250 - 500 | $5K - $10K | Pilot pricing, GA-only |
| 2027 (Y2) | 750 - 1,500 | $15K - $30K | First syndication test (TX or NC) |
| 2028 (Y3) | 1,500 - 3,500 | $30K - $60K | 3-state syndication, premium sponsors |
| 2029 (Y4) | 3,500 - 7,000 | $60K - $120K | RWC buildup, USA Rugby partnership |
| 2030-31 (Y5, RWC) | 7,000 - 15,000+ | $120K - $250K+ | RWC peak, 5+ state syndication |
Revenue streams (priced today, scaling with audience): Adult club listings ($100/yr now → $250/yr at scale). Newsletter sponsorships ($250-$500/issue → $1K-$2K/issue). Tournament features ($50-$100 → $200-$500). Syndication starter kits ($500-$1K/state → $2K-$5K/state). Potential premium tier post-PMF.
If Rebels stays as publisher, this revenue (or a defined share, decided post-launch once patterns are clear) flows to Rebels Rugby GA. Funds youth scholarships, gear, field rentals, coaching certifications, the operational gaps the club has carried for years.
Launch Approach
Tuesday April 28 evening. Issue 1 ships via a personal cold email invitation from Kim's own network of Georgia rugby parents, club presidents, coaches, alumni, and community contacts. The invitation points readers to read Issue 1 on the web and subscribe to the weekly newsletter.
If Rebels stays as publisher, the same invitation also goes via the Rebels Rugby GA contact list, WhatsApp parent groups, and Instagram cross-posts. If Rebels steps back, it ships entirely via Kim's personal network and Lady Trydown's independent channels. Either way, it ships Tuesday.
Subscriber journey: Reader clicks subscribe in the invitation → fills a simple form → receives an in-voice welcome email confirming subscription → gets Issue 1 + weekly Tuesday issues thereafter. Tips, whispers, sponsor inquiries, and club listings each route to a dedicated inbox.
Week 2 onward: Issue 2 produced via the automated cadence. Paid adult-club listings begin to convert. CRM migration triggered when we cross 500 subscribers.
What Happened This Weekend
Saturday morning, sent Issue 1 to Josh. He asked to talk Monday. The plan was always to walk Josh through the entire system in that conversation: the strategy, the automation, the financials, the launch plan. The weekend logistics work was preparation FOR Monday, not an end-run around it. I needed to be able to show him a working system, not a slide deck. The next two weeks in my own businesses are tight, and the weekend was the only window.
Saturday evening, two clubs noticed the @LadyTrydown account and asked questions. The account had 0 followers 0 likes 0 comments 0 posts at the time. The reputational risk to Rebels was zero. The conversation generated was the entire point.
Two clubs reaching out within hours of an empty account is the proof of concept, not a problem. The senior leaders who pushed for a quick conversation are doing their job, and I appreciate the instinct. The honest read on the actual surface area, though, is that Saturday's reaction was a fire drill on an empty account. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I pulled the @rebelsrugbyga.com email from Lady Trydown Saturday to give the board clean separation while we sort the decision. The board now decides whether she stays under Rebels or remains separated as my IP. I'm fine either way. What I'm not doing is debating it for weeks.
What This Is NOT
- Not a Rebels propaganda channel. The Radar covers every GA club fairly. Rebels gets the same listing format as everyone else. Editorial neutrality is the moat.
- Not a tabloid. Lady Trydown is a clearly fictional Bridgerton-voiced character poking at universal rugby tropes. She names no clubs. Her column is lighter than half the WhatsApp threads parents are already in.
- Not unsupervised. The board approves every issue before send. The board controls the voice, the standards, and the publish button. Always.
- Not a Kim-disappears-and-it-dies project. The production system is documented, packaged, and reproducible. It survives me.
- Not a three-month strategy committee. It launches Tuesday. We adapt and refine after.
What I Need from You Monday
One Decision, by EOD Monday
The Rugby Radar launches Tuesday evening regardless. The decision is whether Rebels stays attached.
Option A • Recommended
Rebels stays as publisher
Issue 1 ships Tuesday evening with Rebels branding, sponsorship runway, and strategic positioning intact. Rebels owns the only state-wide GA rugby comms property as it scales toward World Cup 2031.
Option B • Workable
Rebels steps back
I remove all Rebels references from Issue 1 and the operating system. The Radar launches Tuesday as an independent property under my own ownership. Lady Trydown stays with me. The strategic asset and revenue go with the property.
To be clear: the Radar can be morphed and adjusted. Voice, sections, sponsor mix, cadence, all of that is workable. What it cannot be is delayed three months while alignment happens. If Rebels can't move at the speed this market window requires, I will launch this independently as a media business with my sons. Either is fine. The decision Monday is whether Rebels captures a strategic asset that's already built, paid for, and ready to ship.
