[Bankless Academy] S7 Budget Request

[Ornella]

Title: [Bankless Academy] S7 Budget Request

Project Champion: Tetranome #1965

Purpose: web3 Education / Public Good

Affiliation: the project was born from Education Guild, and Developers Guild, and now has members from Marketing Guild and Writer’s Guild. We do not work with any specific guild at the moment.

Authors: Tetranome #1965, DidierKrux.eth​:black_flag:#1559, iSpeakNerd.eth #6969, OrnellaWeb3 #1111, HiroKennellyᵍᵐ:black_flag:#0001

Date Created: 01/18/2023

Date Posted: 01/19/2023

Funds Requested: 1,340,000 BANK

Multi-sig: 0xf80Cd14ec747b2AdF7B1A9911b38c65a885dAeeA

1. PROJECT TEASER

Bankless Academy is a free-to-access education platform on a mission to provide the information and tools necessary to achieve financial self-sovereignty - by going Bankless.

2. SUMMARY

The Bankless Academy project would like to request funding for continuing its operations into Season 7, where the team will be focused on execution, growth, multi-language support, and partnerships/collaborations with external projects.

3. RETROSPECTIVE

SEASON 6 ACHIEVEMENTS & ACTIVITIES

Academy Badges reaches the 2K milestone

Our unique implementation of on-chain sybil-resistant knowledge credentials, powered by MintKudos, and protected by Gitcoin Passport, has been used to claim 2188 Badges to date. Check our Dune Analytics growth chart here.

Bankless Academy Badges

This effort has been recognized by Gitcoin Passport and a special USE CASE article will be written by their team. The Bankless Academy implementation, led by Didier Krux, will serve as an example and hopefully as an inspiration to existing and new projects in the web3 space.

New Lesson Launch: Layer 1 Blockchains

The penultimate lesson of the Essentials Curriculum has been launched. Layer 1 Blockchains gives the necessary background and theory behind the basics of blockchains. This is part of the pre-studies needed to move on to our upcoming Layer 2 lesson.

• The Blockchain Trilemma
• How varying levels of Scalability / Security / Decentralisation affect L1 ecosystems
• Ethereum’s innovative solution

Bankless Constitution Lesson

We’ve built the BanklessDAO Constitution lesson which aims to be part of the onboarding process for the community. It lives under its own website academy.bankless.community and it covers all the main aspects of the current Constitution with custom-made illustrations.

Digital collectibles were created to celebrate the launch of the initiative with 50% of the sales going back to BanklessDAO.

To date, we have 29 sales.

Total Amount Back to BanklessDAO = 29 x 90 MATIC * 0.875 / 2 = 1141.875 MATIC

New Content Format: The Explorer’s Handbook

A series of collectible articles hosted on Mirror.xyz to serve your #Bankless journey on the go. In our first edition, 15/100 have been collected so far at 0.01 ETH each. This new content format is helping us identify supporters and well as a possibility to create a new revenue source for the project, not only from collectors but from possible sponsors for articles.

IRL Education: Bankless Academy Lesson for The University of The Hague, Holland

We hosted an online Guest Lecture for the Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies Minor students at The Hague University, Holland Tetranome represented the squad and not only shared information on our latest lesson launch, but also shared the principles, mission, and values of the Bankless movement as a whole, including Bankless, BanklessDAO, and Bankless Academy.

Level Up Live Learning Sessions supported by Optimism

We hosted two editions of our Level Up Live Learning Sessions for Layer 2 Blockchains - supported by @optimismFND As Subject Matter Expert, we invited Patrick McCorry as Instructor. Around 20 Explorers participated in these intimate learning sessions with the focus to help us build the outline of our upcoming lesson, Layer 2 Blockchains.

Community Growth and Engagement

Twitter: From 2,927 to 3,239 Explorers, +11% growth

gm.xyz: From 944 to 1202 Explorers, +27% growth

User Personas Research Study

We conducted a User Personas research study with the guidance of Benjiming.eth, who interviewed 15 Explorers selected from a wide range of groups, ages, gender, professional background, studies, and more. The results from the study have given valuable insights and suggestions were made upon which direction the project could take to serve its audience best. …

Website and App Upgrades

Notifications Feature

Explorers can now sign up to get notified upon lesson releases, in order to be the first to claim their respective badges.

Mixpanel Statistics and Dashboard Implementation

Through the integration of Mixpanel into the Bankless Academy app, we are now able to have specific statistical information to support our strategic decisions and understand how Explorers navigate through the platform.

Bankless Academy Writers Cohort

We are expanding our community by providing spaces to showcase educational content. Participants will be able to create written articles based on their preferred topics, the best articles voted by the community, and the Editor’s Choice will publish through Bankless Academy’s Explorer’s Handbook.

Lesson Completions

To date, we’ve reached 16544 lesson completions. Compared to the same date of the funding request delivery during Season 5, we can see an increase of 1708 lessons taken, equivalent to a 180% growth. The product has been used twice as much as the previous season which had 992 lesson completions.

4. FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Salaried Roles

Lead Developer @ 20h/week
Lead Designer + Biz Dev @ 20h/week
Content Director @ 10h/week
Editorial @ 10h/week
Community Manager + Marketing @ 20h/week

Total Role Funding

80 hours/week x 13 weeks x 1000 BANK/hour = 1,040,000 BANK

Tools & Fixed Costs

Web Hosting (Vercel), database (Digital Ocean), Zoom, Tally, Descript, Grammarly, newsletter, Typefully, Mixpanel (stats), Sendgrid (emails)

90,000 BANK

BanklessDAO Native Team Building - Bountied Tasks

Illustration 100,000 BANK

Content Editing 110,000 BANK

Total Estimation for Season 7

1,340,000 BANK

5. SEASONAL KPIS

SEASON 7 PLANS AND SUCCESS METRICS

• 2x Lessons + 3x Articles
• 1x Lesson or Whitelabel Sale
• 500 Lesson Completions/mo (on average)

Our extended focus for Season 7 will be on the following:

• Lesson Creation, completion of the Essentials Curriculum
• Mobile App Release
• User-Driven Monetization via Premium Lesson NFTs
• Agreements through Business Development, supported also by DAOstewards.
• Collaborations and Partnerships (commercial and non-commercial)

Work in Progress and Upcoming Launches

• Bankless Africa Collaboration
• Lens Protocol Collaboration
• Layer 2 Blockchains Lesson Launch with Optimism
• Going Bankless Lesson

6. COMMITMENTS

Value-add to the Bankless brand as the official educational platform for beginners.
Update and maintenance of BanklessDAO Academy.
50% of the sales from the Bankless Constitution Digital Collectibles.

7. BRANDING

Bankless Academy is a BanklessDAO native project. We have incorporated the Bankless brand with the aim to be the educational extension of the Bankless movement, and thus we continue to extend the mission, vision, and values of a Bankless lifestyle. The topic will be available to our audience with more detail within the upcoming ‘Going Bankless’ lesson.

8. FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

Bankless Academy Notion Page
Bankless Academy Website
Bankless Academy Twitter Profile
Bankless Academy Explorer Community
BanklessDAO Academy

POLL

• Yes, I support this request
• No, I do not support this request

[Jengajojo]

Thank for the proposal @Ornella

According to the results of this poll Discord i urge you to resubmit the request with the new proposal template

[Ornella]

Thanks Jenga, I’ve updated the request according to the template

[senad.eth]

Hey Bankless Academy team!

I’m your Grants Reviewer. I like the progress and the fact that your core team is growing with the newest addition being @hirokennelly. A first-rounder !

I have the following questions:

• While I think you provide true value to the DAO by developing a systemic Education & Brand-Alignment with your courses, we shall not forget this comes with a cost. Further, the “learn-2-earn” niche is growing, rapidly, the competitor-landscape has changed in 2022. When did you last conduct a competitor analysis? I’m specifically curious to how you seek to position yourself compared to the “big players” with large bags, such as Binance- or Near-Academy? What’s your unique selling point and why should web3-curious folks choose you to get onboarded to web3?
• Further, this is the 5th grants request from Bankless Academy and the project has now been getting grants regularly from BanklessDAO (plus milestone-based bonuses) for over a year. Your current revenue streams include external grants and white-label clients. When can we expect Bankless Academy to, finally, be self-sovereign? What are concrete plans on this front and how can you make revenue a focus?

Thanks in advance for addressing my questions!

[links]

I support this request. But a question on KPIs: I feel like Academy has been chasing white label leads as a revenue source for 3-4 seasons. At this point couldn’t you consider this hypothesis invalidated (at least for now)?

Two other ideas around self-sovereignty KPI:

• # co-branded courses. Hypothesis: revenue via co-brand splits on courses developed by others. eg. PM Guild makes a credentialed web3 PM course on Academy’s platform. PM Guild markets it, gets paid students, and splits revenue 50/50? Bonus if you include payment platform as a service here.
• # paid students. Hypothesis: if you package your current web3 fundamentals courses into a single “degree” you can sell to people who want to learn web3. Market to laid off tech workers on LinkedIn, or other audiences with willingness and ability to pay

[senad.eth]

@links

Hypothesis: if you package your current web3 fundamentals courses into a single “degree” you can sell to people who want to learn web3. Market to laid off tech workers on LinkedIn, or other audiences with willingness and ability to pay

I love this & it makes hella sense. According to this article by Cointelegraph, around 100k tech-employees have been laid off by October 2022. This number is way bigger now and includes folks from Crypto Banks.

The FED is forcing a recession hence why this number is just going to increase. 2023 could offer Bankless Academy the opportunity to capture as much of this talent as possible and onboard them to web3.

[Sprinklesforwinners]

@OrnellaWeb3 I am wondering if Bankless Academy has ever considered offering the DAO use of Bankless Academy as an onboarding tool? This may mean some reorganization, but why not a public goods portion and also a for profit section?

[Tetranome]

Hi all, thanks for your comments, and patience - we had some miscommunications on our end.

@senad.eth, pleasure to have you as our reviewer! Let’s get right into it:

We are constantly watching those with a product offering close to ours to see how they’re acting and reacting in the space. We’ve seen platforms with token incentives build brands that primary attract degens and farmers, and have ourselves decided to focus on building an education journey that is a reward in itself. We’ve seen platforms grow their communities too fast, without the appropriate systems to manage that scale, and become communities filled with scammers and victims. We’ve also seen platforms focus purely on growth and marketing and release no actual product.
We’ve learned, from watching, to grow slowly and sustainably, and stay true to our values and platform vision. Over the past year we’ve attracted a growing community passionate about learning, providing feedback to refine existing/future content, and sharing the journey with their friends.

Our unique product offering is this sustainably growing (see stats above), authentic community, and hosting the best web3-interoperable learning infrastructure out there at the moment. No other platform rivals our site functionality, or packaging of writing/images/quests/discussion into 10 minute sessions. It is this product offering that continues to attract sponsorships from big players like 1inch and Optimism, and co-building with teams like Mintkudos and Gitcoin Passport.

Because a large part of our identity a the lack of centralised financial interests, we’re not in direct competition with VC-funded platforms - and how could we be? We also don’t consider ourselves “learn-to-earn” as this incentive structure changes the definition of the platform/community. Bankless Academy is a public good (free) education platform, funded by a diverse range of grants, sponsorships, and public donations.
We’re steadily working towards self-sovereignty. Over the past two seasons, Bankless Academy operations have been ~85% self-funded. Seasonal costs are ~$54,000, with ~$9,000 funded by BanklessDAO. Currently we are experiencing bear market headwinds in our lesson sponsorship and whitelabel model, leading us to explore new revenue streams (more on these later). We plan to continue seeking partial funding from the DAO until we discover an array of all-weather revenue streams to keep us fully afloat.

Hi @links, thanks for your questions & thoughts.

In the history of our whitelabel offering we have one complete sale (humanDAO), and generally 1-2 feasible leads per season. As the Bankless Academy infrastructure becomes more developed, the deal becomes more attractive for potential leads, and fortunately it costs us nothing to keep this offering on the table so long as we don’t rely on it. That said, we are investigating new revenue streams.

We launched the bDAO Academy to make a space for paid, specialised courses like you’ve mentioned. PM Guild has been leading development on a course, though I’m not sure where it stands at the moment. We’re very open to exploring this specialised course/qualification model with various bDAO guilds/projects. The base infrastructure is built, the teams just need funding and to be ready to produce content. We’re more than willing to advise any teams willing to pursue this.

At the moment our badges are the qualification in themselves, but it could be interesting to experiment with a paid “master badge” that acts as more of a degree. We could consider some sort of exam before master badge distribution. But this relies on the depth of our content library - which is currently not large enough to give value to this offering. Investigating and validating this thesis would also require a lot of upfront work which is a risk. We will bookmark this and think about how we can pull it off.

I mentioned some possible new revenue streams that we are currently looking at and developing for. We’re investigating the monetization of our users via collectable lesson content (akin to the recent Bankless Genesis Collection which was a huge success). Because we have a passionate and stable userbase, and our initial experimenting with collectible articles has shown there is demand for these collectibles, we’ve begun designing and building the infrastructure/incentives necessary.
If we can execute on this well, we anticipate this will become a revenue stream that will retroactively fund lesson production, and provide passive income to our treasury via secondary collectible sales. We expect to have a live version of this running in around a month.

[Tetranome]

Hi Sprinkles, this was what we had in mind when we released the first lesson for bDAO Academy (https://academy.bankless.community/) - is this along the lines of what you’re thinking?

[Tetranome]

These are the kind of users we’d like to attract! Those with a genuine interest in the tech; future web3 community members, contributors and builders.

We will be considering how to channel some of this energy. Thanks!