Title: Bankless Mobile App Season 3 Budget Proposal
Authors: @0xNSHuman
Date Created: 2021-12-10
Date Posted: 2021-12-18
SUMMARY
After releasing the Beta version of Bankless Mobile App in Season 2 with the initial core feature set and variety of content produced across the DAO and HQ, we are going to focus on growth opportunities, including development of new features that are universal in DAO communications and operations, as well as promotion of the mobile solutions to other DAOs as part of the content platform.
However, there are important considerations that affect our budget request.
WE CUT OUR FUNDING REQUEST BY 50%. WHY?
In Season 2, we deliberately kept all the roles assigned to a single contributor, because we believe in the power and productivity of small and highly-specialized core teams at the earliest stage of development. We achieved everything we wanted, and I’m convinced that the value DAO received is worth the BANK spent.
In Season 3, we couldn’t be more inviting to have new contributors join and start executing on many of the roles using the newly built foundation. However, we just started looking for the first potential contributors and it will take more time to onboard people and start distributing the workload.
This presents a challenge for us, because one of our biggest goals in Season 3 is to achieve self-sustainability and marketability for the product, and we can’t just keep working on features 70 hours a week. Besides that, we need to allocate time for participation in the DAO and Dev Guild governance.
For these reasons, we’re seeing the need to manage expectations and risks until we have a clearer picture of what our new team is going to look like, how delegation of the scope will affect productivity (remember, bigger teams are often less productive, as counter-intuitive as it sounds), and what our market opportunities are.
With the intention to remain a long-term asset in the DAO, for optimally distributed pressure on the treasury, and for our own peace of mind, we’re asking for 50% of what our actual estimated budget is — 192,000 BANK.
We will focus on team growth and market orientation, and once we’ve onboarded more contributors and synchronized with them on the workflow and values — we will submit application for additional funding later in the season.
Total funding requested: 192,000 BANK.
SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 2
We began working on the mobile platform and user experience from scratch, and by the end of the season we managed to achieve the first stable version and rich user experience around the following use cases and products:
On-chain $BANK information (balance only in v1.0);
On-chain POAP tokens ownership;
BanklessDAO Newsletter, Weekly Guild Updates and other articles;
Bankless Podcast videos;
Bankless Academy.
Additionally, we have developed the mobile interface for Bounty Board hunters (users who claim and submit bounties to earn BANK), the release of which is planned after integration with the upcoming Bounty Board API is complete.
As of December 18, the app is in Beta testing mode, passed critical usability benchmarks and is going to gradually progress through Beta user base growth towards official AppStore release, most likely after the holidays.
The First Month of Season 2 was spent on creating a solid foundation for all the future features to be built on top of, giving a lot of attention to:
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Multi-form presentation, to make it possible to create iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV experiences without changing most of the code;
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Multi-language interface, to start offering native language experience along with the International Media Nodes content all over the world;
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Modular architecture that encourages contributors create new features by following the existing ones as examples.
The Second Month of Season 2 was spent on creating actual features you see on the screenshots above. It’s important to highlight how fast we can move now once we invested resources in the proper foundation.
The Third Month of Season 2 is being spent on addressing Beta user feedback, preparing for Release distribution, and planning our next priorities. The planning part is heavily relied on community governance, prioritizing features through poll voting.
SEASON 3 PLANS AND GOALS
How and Why
Our Season 3 strategy relies heavily on the research and analysis that we’ve done recently, including discussions with other product teams and guilds, polls on the forum and internal roadmap prioritization.
Content & User Experience - Season 3 Sentiment and Priorities
Click here to see our full research post.
Our priorities for the upcoming season are derived from the diagram above and split into three categories. This is a favour to ourselves, because it increases our awareness about the work that has to be done outside just adding features on top of features, and lets us leave room for other things in the bigger picture. These categories are:
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Implementations — well-researched features that address certain product needs and add value to the application and platform for mobile features.
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Research — mid-to-long-term product strategy goals to pursue more ambitious things in the future, as well as make the app more scalable and marketable.
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Growth — the things that push the project towards self-sustainability and opening new streams of revenue for the DAO, either through discovering market niches to sell to directly, of helping other products generate revenue indirectly.
Priorities
Implementations
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Governance Dashboard
- To make the app a truly useful DAO member tool - in addition to its appeal to content consumer - it would be great to start introducing interface for governance. Being aware of the latest proposals and ongoing votings and governance decisions looks like a good thing to begin with.
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Announcements Feed
- Show the announcements posted in our Discord in the app and combine them with notifications to increase engagement.
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Notifications
- Integrate a mechanism for push notifications for all the events to be shown on the device screen, and brining the user’s attention to the respective data/content in the app. We’re planning to start with the following notifications:
- BANK Transactions
- New Proposals and Voting Results in Snapshot
- Announcements
- Integrate a mechanism for push notifications for all the events to be shown on the device screen, and brining the user’s attention to the respective data/content in the app. We’re planning to start with the following notifications:
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ENS Support
- The mobile app relies on your public ETH address in order to display on-chain information such as your BANK tokens, POAP tokens, and a lot of other things in the future. In order to do this, you obviously need to provide your address to the app, and many of us would be happy to just enter an ENS address instead of the 42-symbol raw address string. We are going to add ENS recognition to fix that.
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HQ Content
- We made Bankless Podcast videos accessible in the app, and would love to add more content produced by the HQ.
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Sponsor Portals
- As mentioned in the Mobile App Proposal, mobile platforms are great user attention grabbers. This can be one of our biggest offers for sponsors. After talking to the Sponsorship workgroup briefly, we’re going to design a concept for sponsorship in the app and seek adding it to our Media Kit to begin the conversation about having our sponsors present on the platform.
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International Media Nodes Articles
- We have reached an agreement with some of the IMNs to introduce their translated content in Content Gateway, and link the translations to the original articles, as well as between each other, which makes it possible for the Mobile App to let users from all over the world consume Writers Guilds content in their native language without any extra effort, by just having it presented automatically in their default smartphone language. We are also looking to figure out ways to help IMNs promote themselves and possibly receive tips for their work from content consumers in the app.
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Multi-language Support
- In addition to the multi-language articles, of course, we’re looking to translate the user interface in the app itself. In order to do this, we’ll coordinate with Translators Guild and the IMNs themselves.
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Community Call Recordings
- This last minute idea came up recently during the short discussion on how we could recycle / monetize our community call recordings in a way that doesn’t turn active community members into a product, and leaves the experience of participation as exciting as it is now. We see an opportunity to integrate the recordings with the rest of the media content in the app, and potentially mix it with sponsorship initiative.
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Analytics Integration
- In order to have a better idea about the audience, user behaviour and effectiveness of our marketing and communication channels ourselves, as well as provide this information to our partners and clients, we are looking to integrate a sophisticated analytics system.
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Legal Foundation
- Our code is open-source and lets anyone copy our work to produce and distribute their own products. This is awesome in general, but creates problems with some application distribution platforms such Apple AppStore, because these platforms require a clearly defined legal entity to own the copyright for the product they are distributing. The problem is not really new and has a clear path to solve it, however it requires a bit of resources and coordination.
Research
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Web3 Wallet Integration
- Having fully functional wallet support in the app is just a question of time. Working on it in the very beginning of the project was considered risky and not strictly necessary compared to other features, but we’re seeing a demand for it on the horizon. And since crypto signatures is not something you want to rush your R&D with, this is one of the topics that we’re putting on the list.
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Monetization Strategy
- In the upcoming season, we’re making revenue generation strategy on of our big priorities. There are plenty of ways to make this product a productive asset.
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Platform For Other DAOs
- One of the big go-to-market ideas is to offer the mobile features to other DAOs in tandem with our Content Gateway tools, which makes it a nearly complete platform for content distribution. It’s our intention to explore the opportunities and outreach to outside organizations while we’re still early on the market.
Growth
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Contributor Onboarding and Support
- Now that the core and the framework for the app are in place, it’s much easier to establish coordination between multiple contributors, and we’d like to dedicate time to creating documentation, communication and collaboration tools and practices and the rest of the environment that makes our project a great place for talent to be.
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Sponsorship and Partnership Opportunities
- The current version of the app has plenty of use cases that are universal and applicable in most DAOs today. In combination with Content Gateway, this makes it possible for us to start marketing it as a platform for other organizations to maximize and multiply the value of the content they are producing, and reach agreements on the future functionality to deliver. This and the more trivial sponsorship opportunities are seen by us as a way to turn our own mobile app into a mobile platform serving users across many DAOs.
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User feedback
- The current app version is in Beta stage and it started receiving its first user feedback, which adds a lot of great improvements to the backlog. We anticipate having this feedback stream grow and drive some of the app’s roadmap.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
The assumed hourly rate is 1,000 BANK / hour.
The assumed delivery period is 12 weeks.
Project budget breakdown by role:
-
Platform Growth Dude
- Duties:
- Outreach to other teams and organizations to promote Mobile Platform concept that lets other DAOs have their own mobile app.
- Work on multi-org platform architecture and customer onboarding process.
- Work on sponsorship and monetization strategy and execution.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Project Manager
- Duties:
- Manage roadmap and resources to deliver it.
- Maintain weekly reporting to the DAO and represent the team.
- Organize meetings and coordinate discussions.
- Track compensation for contributors.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Product Designer
- Duties:
- Define the product features based on the strategic goals and seasonal priorities of the DAO.
- Design the experience and user interface.
- Produce collateral materials to facilitate the promotion and education.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: Contributor(s) to join @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Team Lead
- Duties:
- Maintain implementations aligned with the roadmap.
- Support other team members and eliminate blockers.
- Seek and onboard contributors.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Software Engineer (Mobile Platforms)
- Duties:
- Evaluate the designs, coordinate with the designer, provide estimates.
- Architect solutions and manage technical requirements.
- Implement the functionality.
- Integrate 3rd-party systems and products with the application.
- Hours per week: 16.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 192,000 BANK.
- Assignee: Contributor(s) to join or replace @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
Scope Total: 384,000 BANK.
Upfront ask: 50% of the Scope Total.
Total funding requested: 192,000 BANK.
SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS
The standard metrics for measuring the app’s growth are left mostly the same.
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App distribution and user retention metrics:
- Percent of users coming from the newly introduced channels.
- Percent of users staying engaged after 1, 7 and 30 days.
- Average time per session spent in the app.
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Member engagement metrics:
- Percent of users per every N-day streak of consuming the content.
- Percent of content consumption growth per every type of content / product.
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Other metrics:
- The field of potential metrics on mobile platforms is truly massive. Various macro and micro factors such as geography, timezones, network quality and many others can be factored in while respecting privacy.
POLL
Do you support funding the growth, development and marketing of Mobile App and Bankless Content Platform?
- SUPPORT
- DO NOT SUPPORT