First of all congrats to @links and the Bankless Card team for their tremendous efforts and progress.
While the ask seems high (and certainly is compared to other grants) I think we have to look at the efforts that have already been put into this project (going back to season 3!). Besides that the team has already achieved impressive milestones (having 3 prospective card issuers and IRL marketing at ETH Barcelona and ETH Latam) and a clear path on how to continue the journey of Bankless Card going forward.
I don’t have any issues with this retroactive funding approach as we did that in the past and the DAO pays for work that has already been done.
So in my opinion we should definitely fund this project!
Thanks so much for the kind words and feedback @Steff and @paulDE
Nothing beyond the $1-2M we are trying to raise to get to launch. Grants will likely be a much smaller piece of that ($50-250k is my personal estimate)
gm links, yes let’s discuss in a bit more depth! I’d like to reflect using my experience to see if there’s something of value to share.
For workstream size and similar roles, I am referring to the Bankless Card product/design workstream. It also looks like the communications workstream has members with similar role descriptions.
Product/Design Workstream:
links | Product Strategist
NFThinker | Product Advisor
Jasu | Product Designer
Rascole | Product Manager
Israel Rex | Product UI/Visual Design
Cisco | Visual Design
Chameleon | Product/Visual Design
Fiyin | Brand/Visual Design
Eze | (Role description sounds like product in the above role outline?)
I see three problems with such a big product/design workstream at this phase of your product lifecycle, especially if people are tapping in/out to cover each other. People are more complicated than blockchain nodes and a solid inter-team dynamic is especially important in product/design, where consistency in the end-user experience is key.
Inconsistency in quality / style / design language.
Each designer has their own style and level of experience. If designers are set on siloed tasks - even with reference - and return to the group, they will have produced very different results, varying in quality, style and design language (what the viewer understands from use of colour, shape, etc.) At the production phase in the games industry, we solve this with periodic guidance via an Art Director, a style guide and brand guidelines - built by a small experienced team at the beginning of the project.
Design by committee
Without a small and nimble genesis design team, initial design decisions tend to become run by committee. This means that each designer on the team is having to compromise on their own strengths in order to reach group accordance. The end result of this process tends to be a mediocre product that lacks unique vision. This isn’t always the case, but the more people you add, the more people you need to please.
Additional coordination overhead
Design by committee leads to additional coordination overhead. In order to get everyone on the same page, teams need to go through periodic deep discussion to come to agreement, and to stay aligned. Additionally, as I’m sure everybody in the DAO knows, the more people you have on your team, the more likely somebody is to miss a session and need to be brought up to speed in the next meeting.
I wonder if symptoms of some of these issues are already appearing in your weekly syncs? If most/all contributors attending these daily syncs, the amount of inter-team co-ordination won’t scale as contributors begin to expect the compensation of a VC-backed project.
Current cost of 5x 30min sync meetings:
21 contributors x 1000 BANK/h = 10,500 BANK * 5 = 52,500 BANK per week
With VC funding: (I have used an average rate of $35/h in this example, which I think is a low estimate)
21 contributors x $35/h = ~$1850 per week in 30min sync meetings ($96,200 annual).
As you’ve mentioned, there are additional meetings on top for individual workstreams, which would add to the amount of funding going towards coordination.
Based on my experience, the product/design meetings and general design process must be expressing at least one of the issues I outlined above. Asana seems helpful but I’m not sure it solves these potential pitfalls.
At such an early point in development, I think the solution is to build a team dynamic that fosters core vision and remains agile in decision-making and the product build process, and works with the amount of funding available to a start-up.
Interested to hear your reply, please let me know if you think I’ve misconstrued your process / the information above. Happy to keep discussing!
The list of contributors for the product workstream is not entirely correct. I’m not sure why you have merged product and design into a single workstream, either - we have designers in product and communication workstreams, and we could use some in our other workstreams as well. For instance, Cisco and Chameleon worked on our pitch deck, IsraelRex and Fiyin on our mobile app, Fiyin and Jasu on our landing page, and Fiyin and another working on our brand identity.
Anyways, all this to say our team is fluid. And incomplete. We haven’t yet found THE design vision/visionary for our team. We’re all just doing our best to push the team closer to our goals. This funding may allow us to create a more consistent design as we go, and I’m very happy the level of design we’ve achieved without any funding so far.
Yeah, it’s hard to balance moving quickly with consistency across all fronts. Our pitch deck, product, social assets, and landing pages aren’t as uniform as we’d like. On the scale, I would say we are more on the “move quickly inconsistently” than the “design by committee consistently” side. We are less concerned with keeping everyone in the loop than we are with moving forward relentlessly.
We had a Brand workstream last season to try to create a cohesive design vision. We spent some time on it, but we don’t yet have our brand handbook. This funding may help us get there.
Our process is meant to produce something quickly, get feedback, and iterate. We also believe that decision-making should be decentralized, so ultimately the person championing each work item (i.e. mobile app, website, social, pitch deck) gets to decide whether or not they want to take this feedback. What this means is that even if we do have a brand handbook, it has to be GOOD - i.e. unify all of our contributors.
Ideally, an extremely strong visionary designer would emerge from the depths of web3 to be inspired by our card and spearhead a single design vision. We are prepared to iteratively improve our design until this happens (even if it never does). Execution is our current priority.
RE: the amount of funding going towards coordination.
It sounds like you are assuming that we are paying everyone a salary to stick around and keep contributing (i.e. pay people to attend meetings), and that isn’t true. Our budget calls for 5 roles: Project Champion and 4 coordinators at 5 hours a week (25 hrs/wk total). The rest of the budget goes towards producing things of value. Contributors will get paid for the value they create.
One of the advantages of DAOs is how quickly we can deploy human capital. That’s exactly what we are trying to harness. Allocating the entire budget into roles would work against that IMHO.
That’s exactly what we’ve done, so I’m glad you think that
We have achieved everything we have with close to zero up-front capital. Funding will help us move forward faster.
I think some of the confusion is coming from how you’ve structured your workstreams as compared to how I’ve seen it done in the past. That, and how Product/Design are both broad terms.
I merged these workstreams in my estimates because I couldn’t see a Design workstream, and there is a lot of crossover in Design/Product roles. Even still, I would say individually “that’s a lot of designers” or “that’s a big product team” for a start-up. But I understand that DAOs operate under different circumstances, and now know that your vision plans to improve on this.
Typically I’ve seen design as its own core workstream that creates design assets for use by other workstreams. This helps with design consistency across the project, because the same people are handling the different expressions of brand & style.
Gotcha, yes that is what I was thinking. If the route you are going is a salaried core team, and bounties for regular contributors, this will protect your budget to a larger degree. I hope that you can attract the right talent with this model.
I’m still concerned about team size, and would prefer to see a smaller group of people incentivised to allocate more time to the project to reduce inconsistencies/overhead - especially in design. I respect your philosophy of prioritising execution yet also understand that having the right team (dynamic) will make or break a start-up. Your experience in this field adds a lot of resilience to your team - but I can’t help but feel that issues inherent to the human design process are going to prove very difficult to “out-coordinate”.
That said, this proposal is about retroactive funding, and I believe your team has produced the necessary ~$40,000 in project value.
Its up to your team to take my (and our) support to attract/retain the right talent with the above structure and compensation model, while avoiding the design pitfalls that I have outlined.
