[Bankless Academy] S3 Retroactive Funding

Grants/Funding Season 3 Project Proposals
1

Title: [Bankless Academy] S3 Retroactive Funding

Authors: Tetranome :black_flag:, DidierKrux.eth :black_flag:, iSpeakNerd.eth :black_flag: (:busts_in_silhouette:, :handshake:), ivanpomidorov :black_flag:#3831

Date Created: 08/04/2022
Date Posted: 08/04/2022

SUMMARY

Following the restructuring of the Academy team and project, along with the public launch of Bankless Academy, our team would like to request retroactive realignment of the milestones required to unlock the remaining portions of our project’s allocated Season 3 Budget.

S3 RETROACTIVE FUNDING TOTAL:

595,920 BANK

SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 3

Bankless Academy has spent the past three months building and releasing its minimum viable product, overhauling its project management processes, hiring a capable & competitive core team, and laying the foundations for a competitive public service that executes on our product/market fit research.

SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 3

As a project, we understand that we have a responsibility to the Bankless Community to deliver on our ideas in efficient and measurable ways.

Here is a list of our most impressive S3 KPIs:

1. Product Release

a. Stable & successful launch of our ‘Bankless Academy MVP-II’ web interface during February 2022.

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b. Popular launch event marketing, with over 8,000 unique visits over 2 weeks, over 7,000 unique wallet connections and 6,400 POAP distributed (3,200 / lesson).

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c. To reduce project upkeep and increase efficiency/alignment in decision-making team was restructured from 20+ members to 4 core contributors.

d. Careful synthesis of Product/Market fit, and the analysis of the various platform monetization strategies at our fingertips.
Academy [Pubic Good Value Proposition]

2. Marketing

a. Hit 2,000+ followers on Twitter, with an average monthly growth rate of +30%.

b. Recognition and commendation by BanklessHQ - regarding mission, branding, and tech - as received via personal outreach plus a featuring in the ‘Bankless Weekly Rollup’ (timestamped below).

c. Selected as the #1 Highlight Project @ Gitcoin Grants + solid positive feedback from founder Kevin Owocki.

d. Finalisation of the Brand Consolidation process; a unification of target audience, team composition, visual art style, user interface, core personality traits & tone of voice, social media interaction, and user journey.
This process has resulted in the Bankless Academy: Branding Handbook.

3. Team

a. Creation and marketing of our jobs board, successfully filling the core roles of Content Director and Product Manager with highly aligned and experienced candidates. This has brought our core team from 2 → 4 members with long-term vision and commitment.
Bankless Academy - Jobs

b. Thoughtful planning and publication of the ‘Bankless Academy Roadmap’, outlining our planned journey for becoming the #1 Web3 Explorers Community.

4. Ecosystem

a. The project continues to provide valuable Project Management and Branding research for operating effectively within the decentralised BanklessDAO Ecosystem. Our experience and analysis has been made available through shared documentation, public discourse, knowledge-sharing with other BanklessDAO projects, and PLM data-capture.

SEASON 3 RETROACTIVE MILESTONES

To date, our project has received only 60% of allocated Season 3 funding.

The Academy is suggesting the revision of its Season 3 Milestones - based on retroactive analysis: reprioritising of product/market fit, hiring competitively, and optimising features. This work was done in lieu of the previously planned content package generation. We believe that this groundwork was necessary for the building of the high impact content that will onboard the next wave of Web3 Explorers.

Retroactive compensation will help us to rebuild the Academy’s treasury that was deployed to continue Season 3 operations. The treasury was built on funds received from past rounds of Gitcoin grants.

Our treasury protects our high-cost/high-impact project from unpredictable market conditions or other factors beyond project control. This runway also allows the project to maintain a higher level of predictable runway that creates the secure work environment necessary for building trust and long-term alignment for our team.

Original S3 Milestones & Unlocks

The following funding milestones were agreed upon by Academy and Grants Committee for Season 3:

  1. Unlock 60% - Ship Lesson #1 & #2 to Production (Public Release).
    <Status: Delivered>
  2. Unlock 20% - Ship Lesson #3 to Production.
    <Status: Locked>
  3. Unlock 20% - Ship Lesson #4 to Production.
    <Status: Locked>
  4. Bonus 20% - Ship Lesson #5 to Production.
    <Status: Locked>

Retroactive S3 Milestone Revisions

  1. Unlock 60% - Ship Lesson #1 & #2 to Production (Public Release)
    <Status: Delivered>
  2. Unlock 20% - Focused Project Restructuring + Brand Consolidation + Product/Market Research & Realignment
    <Status: Unlocked>
  3. Unlock 20% - Build Core Team w/ BanklessDAO-aligned talent + ‘Academy Roadmap’ publishing
    <Status: Unlocked>

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

The Academy project has undergone many transformations to build the streamlined processes it follows today. As a project, we believe that we have established a solid and sustainable foundation that now positions us to effectively execute on the Bankless Mission whilst aligning the incentives of all parties involved.

We believe that retroactive funding has already proven itself as a viable compensation method within the Web3 ecosystem - because impact is more clearly measured when looking back.

Total for S3 Retroactive Compensation:

= 595,920 BANK

Approve S3 Retroactive Funding
  • For
  • Needs Revision [will comment]

0 voters

3 Likes
2

So if I understand correctly, you lost Ap0ll0.eth who was your main writer, so you couldn’t release lessons 3-5? And this funding will go straight into your treasury because your contributors were already paid for the work they did?

The fact that you lost half your core team and replaced them is a big risk. The people who produced lessons 1 and 2 (which were awesome) are now longer around, I’d be more supportive of the retro funding if i saw what they could do. What’s stopping you from releasing lessons 3-5 now to claim that funding?

1 Like
3

Hey links,

Losing Ap0ll0 & Angel made things harder, but it wasn’t the reason we changed our priorities. Some content for the next few lessons was already written, it just needed some development and refinement. The more pressing issue was that our lessons needed things like artwork and tone of voice work, but these were dependent on areas of the project that hadn’t received enough focus: our brand identity, our product/market fit, and our platform vision.

We decided that we needed to pivot from content production into refining these underdeveloped foundations before building anything else on top. Our newly suggested budget unlock milestone revisions are based on the tasks that we saw as essential to long-term project success. We have pushed lesson production goals forward to Season 4.

I highly encourage the community to look through these pages and documents to see the product vision and planning we have since solidified.

Because of this work, we are now far more confident in quality of our lesson output abilities for Season 4.

Correct, funding would go straight to the treasury to replenish the project’s emergency fund deployed to compensate all of the highlighted work.

3 Likes
4

My personal preference would be to keep the milestones as-is, so you can unlock this funding during S4 and then adjust your S4 spec to not include your micro milestones (as I described in a comment there).

5

Hey links, I’ve just posted a reply to your comments on our S4 proposal. I hope it helps to show our thought process and why we believe these two separate proposals pair nicely with our stage in product development. Willing to further discuss!