BanklessDAO Product Support Center Season 3 Budget Proposal

Grants/Funding Season 3 Project Proposals
1

bDAO PRODUCT SUPPORT CENTER SEASON 3 BUDGET PROPOSAL

PROJECT CHAMPIONS

nonsensetwice#3475, Steff#7452, zrowgz#4358

PROGRAM NAME & MULTISIG ADDRESS

BanklessDAO Product Support Center
0x3625Ad553A38A647B0Dedb0b176c3b97a8dc2f8D

Read the Proposal in its Original Format on Dropbox Paper

I. Summary

II. Background

III. Mission & Aligned Values

IV. Specification

V. Revenue Opportunities

VI. Roles

VII. Financial Implications

VIII. Success Metrics

IX. Author Background

X. Relevant Links

SUMMARY

The BanklessDAO (hereafter “bDAO”) products are becoming powerful tools for supporting the growth of bDAO and other communities. These products are rapidly coming to market. Being live in numerous servers necessitates having a place where users can reach out and find help in using these new products, suggesting feedback, and helping others to create a community of people enthusiastic about the growth of the product.

The bDAO Product Support Center will be a place where users can come to get help with any bDAO product. This service would be made available to any project, product, or team within bDAO. This would allow for a less overwhelming experience than attempting to seek the support within the bDAO server and also take the strain off of the ever-increasing channel count in the bDAO server. The user-facing support documentation is currently being developed via GitBook with the purpose of creating a one-stop shop where all support documentation will be found.

BACKGROUND

This initially started as a side project of DEGEN, where instead of attempting to support users through DMs, or within the main bDAO server, the DEGEN Workgroup created a Product Support Center to fulfill the growing need to provide product support for DEGEN’s POAP feature set. This provided a more open and decentralized way to communicate support news and important updates with all users and teams. Additionally, this support included helping users get DEGEN up and running on their server, answering individual questions, educating on DEGEN’s functionality, gaining feedback, and checking the pulse on what additional features might be desired to inform product development.

With DEGEN now in 100 servers, this demand is likely to increase. The Product Support Center has been well received by DEGEN’s user community and has made it possible for the team to focus on feature development while achieving a high level of client satisfaction. Looking at bDAO’s vibrant ecosystem, we believe many projects will soon be in a similar situation where they’ll need to provide client support for their products and services, both internally and externally. DEGEN’s existing support center is situated to become a DAO-wide endeavor to provide a single point of contact for everything support-related and to ensure a unified and high quality customer experience across all bDAO products and services.

The bDAO Product Support Center has seen a significant growth in users over the latter half of Season 2, continuing on into early Season 3. With this single product, DEGEN, being live in a mere 100 servers, the average rate of new joiners has climbed to approximately 10-20 users per day, growing from 100 users at the beginning to currently just shy of 500. This growth has allowed for improved client interactions, and has allowed for greater engagement in the DEGEN user community. As the bDAO Product Support Center has evolved, we have seen the user community grow to engage with and support one another, over and above the support offered by bDAO and DEGEN staff.

The bDAO Product Support Center will be made available to any team or project that desires to have support offered for their product. This will help alleviate the congestion within the main bDAO server and offer participating teams and projects the opportunity to build communities around the support of their respective products.

As part of this endeavor, we have developed user guides for the products being created, which includes documentation with graphics & how-to videos demonstrating the operation of the product. There is significant growth opportunity in helping to replicate this for any of the bDAO products that are being developed and soon to be deployed.

With the rapid increase in users in the server, we have also begun developing strategies useful in access, moderation, and coordination. These services will also be available to bDAO at large if desired, in helping to establish the newest methods for preventing spam and malicious bots.

MISSION & ALIGNED VALUES

The mission of the bDAO Product Support Center is to improve the ease of access to the ecosystem of products being created within bDAO. In the long term, this is mission-aligned with the DAO’s goal of onboarding 1 billion people into crypto. The greater the ease in which external communities can utilize bDAO products and services, the more effort users can place in areas that will help continue to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies and related services.

The bDAO Product Support Center will be available to anyone wishing to utilize it, and will make this more accessible to external clients looking to get support on a product by having a location and support community readily available 24/7. This will also allow the teams and projects to maximize their productivity by having the support routed for them, with user errors and basic questions answered by the support team and surrounding community.

This will also promote equality and openness, as well as maximize the utilization of the bDAO resources:

  • Equality: available to any bDAO team, project, or product.
  • Openness: allows anyone to participate, gives a structured location where discussions can happen in public rather than back room chats for help requests, which can then benefit future users experiencing similar issues.
  • Maximize resource allocation and utilization: allows teams to have a shared location where basic support questions can be resolved without the intervention of more expensive dev teams; allows for the collection of common questions and issues to be readily added to the user guides; and builds a community of clients who are highly engaged with the product and can offer suggestions for improvements, which will enhance the value of bDAO’s products and services.

SPECIFICATION

This proposal advocates for the expansion of the bDAO Product Support Center to meet the anticipated demand for Season 3, such as:

  • further the growth and adoption of Bankless-related products hosting their support on the server,
  • working closely with mature bDAO projects, such as Bounty Board, to integrate product support solutions. This will include working closely with the project champion or assigned representative to help train and educate the bDAO Product Support Team on the products being integrated,
  • Work with projects to provide training and product demonstrations for both support staff and clients,
  • promote the bDAO Product Support Center for the purpose of creating a DAO-wide product support solution with a unified client experience, high quality client service, and high level of client satisfaction, and
  • encourage participant engagement by way of:
    • Hosting live demonstrations of each product.
    • Hosting AMA sessions where product promoters can answer any questions users may have and obtain feedback on their services.
    • Broadcasting weekly announcements for product updates.
    • Enabling tipping within the server so when other users provide assistance to one another, they can be rewarded.
    • Offering POAPs for attending scheduled events.

REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES

Given the current success of the bDAO Product Support Center, multiple protocols and their underlying communities have considered establishing their own support servers, requesting assistance from the bDAO Product Support Team. This suggests a market exists where this support model can be replicated, meaning the potential exists to offset bDAO Product Support Center costs with contributions from external communities in the future. This will be explored at length as the bDAO Product Support Center continues to evolve.

ROLES

To accomplish all the terms of the program, the proposed bDAO Product Support Center will consist of three salaried positions:

  1. Support Lead
  • The Support Lead will work to manage the support staff and provide direction for the entire support server. This position includes overseeing and assisting in the development of support material and content for the purpose of assisting internal & external organizations in the use of bDAO products and services. The Support Lead will also follow up with community managers and admins on their use of said products and services, collect and compile feedback, and maintain a direct line of communication with project managers and developers.
  1. Technical Investigator
  • The Technical Investigator will streamline the process between clients and product developers by utilizing logs and semi-technical options; review logs when users report issues; attempt to return functionality of the product without project developer intervention; manage the server and create access controls which include assigning bots for verification and spam filtering; streamline support server functionality based on the specifications defined by the Support Lead; and work to integrate the support needs of new products into the bDAO Product Support Center.
  1. bDAO Product Support Staff
  • The support personnel will serve to field questions, comments, and concerns; handle matters of education within the Product Support Center and work to guide conversations where the community at large can get involved; acquire and pass on those issues and inquiries containing a high level of technical depth to the project developers directly; and serve to make the bDAO product user experience as painless as possible.

Additionally, a pool of 60k BANK is being requested to pay out bounties to incentivize community participation, as well as for the creation of digital materials such as A/V products and commission POAP designs for support and education related events.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Role User Funding Allocation ( in BANK )
Support Lead Steff#7452 195,000
Technical Investigator/Support Staff zrowgz 130,000
Support Staff 91,000
Bounty Pool - 60,000
Total: 476,000

The total amount being requested for Season 3 is 476,000 BANK, with the flexibility to submit a proposal for remuneration for the weeks in excess of 13 weeks for Season 3 that extend beyond this limit. The salaries are loosely calculated using the old structure of 1000 BANK/hr with a sliding scale of 7 to 15 hours a week based on the level of responsibility, and the simple fact that as bDAO produces more offerings, the workload will naturally increase. Please consider : these amounts are based on hours that are negatively padded to compensate for the fact that the DAO is still working on a proper compensation structure, meaning that the support staff is putting in more hours than is reflected in this proposal.

SUCCESS METRICS

  • Product Growth:
    • The bDAO Product Support Center currently supports 2 bDAO products:
      • Internally, Mad Hatter, the discord bot used for poaps, coordinape, and other administrative tasks, and
      • Externally, DEGEN, which is used by 100 servers for POAP management and distribution.
    • With this funding, we would like to increase the number of bDAO products being supported. There are currently several products beginning to spread to other servers and onboarding them into the bDAO Product Support Center would be optimal.
  • Participant Growth:
    • Currently, the bDAO Product Support Center supports products in 100 servers with approximately 500 users in the support server, which amounts to approximately 5 users per server, on average. Of those 5, approximately 2 of them engage with the team for support.
    • We will grow the number of active participants in the bDAO Product Support Center per community that utilizes bDAO products, over and above working to increase the number of communities utilizing those products.
    • As part of the prior point, a marketing element is introduced by way of organic growth. As users engage with the support community and understand the various use cases of different bDAO products and services, there is a high likelihood that these products and services will naturally be picked up by community managers, moderators, and admins who recognize the benefit to their respective communities.
  • Product feedback:
    • User suggestions for improvement currently route to the specific team’s product through a ticketing service.
    • A weekly review of product feedback or new feature requests with the development team of each respective product will be performed to assess whether these requests are viable, what the time frame for execution would look like, and if there is a cost associated with that additional development. Communicate these updates to the requesting users to provide closed loop communications and ensure users feel heard.

AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Steff has a background in customer support and client management. She joined bDAO in Season 2 and due to her active involvement with the DEGEN Workgroup and support in the Knowledge Sessions, quickly acquired the status of a Level 1 member. As part of the DEGEN support staff, she helped the team administratively and assisted in the development of the bDAO Product Support Center. bDAO has positively impacted her professional experience to the extent that she went full time DAO in the short amount of time that she has been contributing.

ZrowGz is an active Level 2 Contributor of bDAO. In Season 0, he began as support staff for DEGEN and the Writers Guild, which earned him a position as the Project Ambassador in Season 1. During Season 1 as the DEGEN Ambassador, he interfaced with internal bDAO teams to collect feedback and offer support for projects and guilds interested in leveraging the work the DEGEN Workgroup was exploring. This developed into working relationships with many external communities in Season 2, where he created a coordination and communication system with server admins, moderators, and community managers throughout the DeFi ecosystem as part of an ongoing initiative to get them onboarded with DEGEN. In Season 2, he also worked closely with nonsensetwice and Steff to initiate the bDAO Product Support Center. ZrowGz currently spends his DAO time operating between his responsibilities as Project Ambassador for the DEGEN Workgroup and serving as Technical Investigator for the bDAO Product Support Center.

RELEVANT LINKS

Fund the BanklessDAO Product Support Center?
  • Approve!
  • Deny!

0 voters

4 Likes
2

Absolutely love this proposal but I can’t vote approve because of the funding mechanism. I fundamentally disagree with the treasury paying for project support like this, I believe the project should itself pay to have all incentives aligned correctly.

From what I understand, the product support center has been quite successful for DEGEN, so much so that Bounty Board and other projects are interested in using it, is there a way you could charge these individual projects enough to have the same amount of funding available?

I wholly support the effort and team! I’d love to have something like this at bDAO.

2 Likes
4

Hi links, thank you for your support! And I totally understand your concern. However, these projects aren’t making any revenue yet, and are still in fact getting funded by the treasury. So being funded by the projects would still mean being funded by the treasury. This is however our first season and the treasury funding is to get the project off the ground, and for that we need everybody’s help.

We are exploring revenue generation so that we do not have to ask funding from the treasury season by season. If you have read the revenue opportunities section, some protocols have already reached out expressing interest in the service so that would be one way to get the project not only independent from bDAO funding, but possibly generating revenue. Charging fees from bDAO projects that generate revenue is another possibility but we have not yet gone into much detail about that as we are just starting out.

I’d love for you to support us! So if there is anything else I can clarify more, or if you have any concerns, please let us know :slight_smile:

4 Likes
5

I can see how my reply was unclear on this point. Even if all the funds are coming from treasury, I still think products should include support work (like customer support and DevOps) as line items in their treasury requests. Doing so would encourage both the support team and project team to add value in appropriate places (ie support team must ensure that they are providing value to project to continue having them as a customer and project team ensures they are spending budget appropriately among all competing concerns).

In this proposal, there is inertia in the status quo for all stakeholders: support team could work exclusively on DEGEN without seeking revenue since they can expect to be funded by treasury, DEGEN can keep consuming support even if it’s not meeting all needs because it’s effectively free to them anyways, and treasury has pressure to keep funding support team because to not do so could derail a promising project.

The above is a worst case, and likely wouldn’t happen to that extreme, but why set up a system which encourages this?

I’d rather you made a deal with DEGEN and BountyBoard to fund your time, avoiding this whole proposal. From what I understand your team is well worth the BANK!

2 Likes
6

Great Proposal! I also come from a Client Services background and I was thinkin on how it would work if we had some kind of bDAO Help Desk a couple weeks ago before I knew about this proposal and I’ll add some thoughts. Super excited about this!

As we grow and scale Product Support is going to be crucial. Perhaps instead of treasury funding, each guild / project would fund the Support team and include that in their treasury requests? Initial funding may be required to get it off the ground.

My thoughts were born out of the question " If we are gonna build on the narrative of the future of work, then how can we create jobs for our people to earn bank? " rather than the above post that was born out of need for product support for Degen specifically

—We could possibly use Zendesk / Zendesk.com ? This could also be integrated with the mobile app! . great possibilities there.

–In addition to using Zendesk, It would be pretty easy to spin up a mini-call center and then pay rep’s in bank.

couple different ways I could see this play out

– Dao2Dao service?
–Dao to protocol service?
–Inter-dao service?
– DAO to normie / crypto curious service?
– dao to trad-fi / business service?

I currently work for a company called NRTC — https://www.nrtc.coop/ – We could fork over alot of the tooling and resources and apply it to bDAO for Product Support. I will be reaching out to go into more detail. Im in favor and would love to work closely with this project.

1 Like
7

working closely with mature bDAO projects, such as Bounty Board, to integrate product support solutions. This will include working closely with the project champion or assigned representative to help train and educate the bDAO Product Support Team on the products being integrated

The onus isn’t entirely on the Support team to support the products. Though the teams may not be contributing financially–as mentioned by Steff above, projects are currently not solvent–they can still contribute with training, client support, and community involvement.

I understand your desire to take the heat off the Treasury to fund this, but your commentary is largely shortsided. You say this is a great project, and that this team is doing work, but you don’t want to fund it and make the projects involved fund it, when the projects involved aren’t able to fund it currently. So … let’s fuck off with this proposal and all the work involved until the projects involved can support it?

3 Likes
8

That’s funny, as I was reading your comments I felt they were short-sighted. Great minds, eh?

My comments have to do with the DAO as an organization and the way we fund projects. Projects and teams come and go, the DAO remains (we hope).

I’ve been trying to articulate how we can set a project like this up for success: by using funding mechanisms to align all stakeholders. I think that’s pertinent for both THIS individual project discussion and the DAO-at-large.

It’s new information to me that the projects can’t fund this initiative. DEGEN and BountyBoard collectively account for 20% of project funding and 12.5% of total seasonal spending. I know BountyBoard has some bounty budget for this kind of work, and so does DEGEN. If the projects don’t find this valuable enough to fund, why should grants?

Not at all. Let’s have a discussion about how we can set this team and the DAO up for success. The proposal as written doesn’t do this IMO.

A cynical person might say that this is an attempt for DEGEN and BB to get additional funding from grants while flying below the radar. If we want to succeed, we need to have a full understanding of what work goes into projects so we can make the hard decisions with our eyes open.

9

Hey Links!

We’ve been building out a decent sized community of other leaders in the DAO ecosystem. Since the products have certain discord permissions requirements, we’ve brought in a large pool of individuals high up within numerous servers who have adequate permissions. This is a space where they’ve come to rely upon for help with DEGEN, and often come in search of other features for their communities that are already being created within Bankless DAO.

The goal is to help grow this and be able to offer solutions to all the communities participating by making it easy for them to access these other Bankless products and circle back to get support with the use, provide feedback on how to make it better; we get a significant amount of user engagement within the support server, which has led to many improvements. This is a positive feedback loops that helps build up all other projects at Bankless DAO and allow for easy access to large potential customer bases.

This isn’t about DEGEN or BB or any other individual project here. It’s about enhancing the reputation, reliability, and contact surface of Bankless DAO within the ecosystem. We have a really powerful name in DeFi.

In regards to the part about having other Bankless DAO teams paying for these services, that isn’t the goal. This would be set up as a Bankless DAO service, where any project could be represented. Rather than seeking to levy fees against our fellows in the DAO, we would want to free them up to utilize the funding they already required more efficiently. If fees were going to be collected, we would be looking to offer services outside of Bankless, generating revenue by offering support for other project services/products, although we wanted to ensure that we are maximizing the benefit to the Bankless community before we began taking external teams up on their requests to offer support for their products as well.

We are out there in a mere 100 server with a substantial number more waiting in line, representing the Bankless brand with a friendly and responsive place to contact when they are in urgent need. People haven’t been willing to plumb the depths of the Bankless server to seek out the correct location to get help. Having ready access to support has proven to be something that external communities are very grateful for!

Paying an outside product management service is something that would be helpful to each product, but that outside service wouldn’t be motivated to putting the DAO at the front of mind. When you need something to work, submitting a ticket and hoping to hear back at some point doesn’t fly. Being readily available and responsive is critical to enhancing Bankless DAO’s good name.

4 Likes
10

Great minds insofar as? Projects come and go? Except that the projects that have been funded as of Season 1 are still around, with new projects popping up with all kinds of potential. This is a terrible comment, as this suggests we’re already seeing churn in terms of projects that have been funded and have fallen apart. This is not the case. The projects that have come to the GC for funding remain in place and continue to operate and grow.

Is this really looking at setting up this project for success, by suggesting it shouldn’t be funded before projects that are yet to be solvent are capable of holding it up to the success you imagine? Please, elaborate. Steff presented an excellent arguement, stating that these projects are still beholden to the Grants Committee–and thus the Treasury–for funding, which means this project wouldn’t be supported without help from the Grants Committee. Explain how a project that seeks to support the DAO in its endeavors will succeed with zero funding up front. I’ll wait.

As far as “trying to articulate how we can set up a project like this for success,” it seems to me that you would do better to think about that articulation as opposed to being combative about the funding.

Bounties are set for work regarding development of the project. Perhaps these two projects should request bounty pools to the sum of over 1M BANK to provide funding for this endeavor?

Sounds like this is exactly what you’re suggesting. Perhaps you should take the time to review the proposals for these respective projects to understand the nuance underlying the work. You’re allegedly a part of the Bounty Board project, are you not? Seems like you’re missing much of the operations underlying the project.

1 Like
11

I wasn’t here when that happened. Can you elaborate a bit on how that would work?

12

Thanks for this clarification! It helps me understand the intent a bit better. Can you tell me which BanklessDAO products you’ve helped others adopt/which ones you’d like to add to your support server? One concern I had was that this initiative felt a bit early for most products at BanklessDAO, but if you have real experience on this it’d go a long way to alleviate my concern.

@nonsensetwice I’m going to try to cut to the heart of our disagreement on this proposal to state I do think the work these contributors are doing is valuable and should be funded (now, not later). I also think that the way we fund projects has a huge impact on that project’s priority and focus. We have to be careful when we centralize services like this, because once centralized, they are difficult to change or defund. As a core member of the bounty board team, I do have some understanding of the nuances around project funding, and STILL think this proposal could use work (despite the fact that Bounty Board stands to gain a lot from it).

How could one change the proposal to ensure incentives are aligned for all stakeholders while ensuring these contributors are remunerated for the valuable work they’re doing? One way would be to make this a one-time funding request with projects adding a line item for support on their next budget request. This would get the team the resources they need to act NOW while still ensuring they are providing value to the right people (just an example)

Dude…c’mon. The first thing you taught me when I came here was, “governance is everyone’s responsibility.” I’d have expected you to encourage people when they participate in governance, so I’m a bit surprised at this tack.

I’m perhaps not the best to answer this, but it’s in the background of the root post, isn’t it? They helped build an engaged user base for DEGEN in their server, who help each other out above and beyond the team’s help. Did I understand your question correctly?

13

My concern with this is that it seems to militate against the subDAO direction. The ideal flow is that a project gets funded, becomes profitable, and breaks out into its own ecosystem. Whatever overhead that product incurs is the responsibility of that supporting team. The described hand-off pattern of offloading support to another group disincentivizes teams to manage and mitigate their own technical debt. It’s what legacy IT companies have done in the past and the opposite pattern of what modern strategies encourage. Winning teams build, deploy, and maintain their own products. Funding a secondary group to support all evergreen products will obfuscate cost and ROI.

1 Like
15

I voted to approve.

I think product support center is a huge value add to projects.

I also think it will be a great place to onboard non-technical people into the DAO. They can add a tremendous amount of value as product support and community building.

As for who pays for it directly, I think it makes sense that the treasury would take it on as multiple projects will benefit from it.

I might sound like a broken record but this all comes back to project token-ization and what the treasury gets in return for funding.

I don’t think we can correctly answer any of these questions until we understand what the treasury gets in return for funding.

I think all projects should be tokenized from day 0.

In my model - venture / incubator, an entrepreneur comes to the DAO and asks themselves, why would I want to build here?

What services can the DAO give me in the incubation phase other than funding? Right now, the answer is pretty much funding and values alignment.

I would like to see a world where in return for project tokens, the DAO provides:

  • product support
  • legal
  • marketing
  • talent
  • devOps
    …

Contributors from the above service centers should receive BANK funding and project tokens.

I do understand that @links ’ point about projects paying directly in the future. If the projects using the service don’t have to put skin in the game, how can we properly quantify the value add?

I think the issue is that project’s have a very finite amount of BANK which is used as money.

If project’s were tokenized, they would be rich in project tokens that they could distribute to the treasury and the DAO service providers and contributors.

Right now, the game is sort of sloshing around and market selling finite BANK that has no intrinsic value and no one knows if it ever will.

I say we change the game to, adding value to entrepreneurs, increasing the price of the project tokens, and also increasing the price of BANK.

4 Likes
16

I’d +1 @links sentiment.
I love this idea, and the best way to test its viability and value to the Bankless community is by having projects fund it out of their own budgets. Even if it requires them to make an incremental budget request to the grants committee.
I’m not seeing the market failure that would justify funding this in a centralized way.
If the internal customers who are closest to the value that it’s meant to generate aren’t willing to fund it - that’s a very strong signal of its merit.

1 Like
17

Hey i voted yes, definitely we should seed some funding in this program. The ask is reasonable as well.

But can you help to give some visibility on the funding sources of Degen please? Maybe in another post.

I’m not trying to probe, just trying to understand. Because from my super limited understanding, the degen team is currently possibly funded by, NFT sales, Gitcoin grant, BanklessDAO grants, BanklessDAO dev guild and tips? Please correct me if i’m wrong.

18

Here’s the question to ruminate on. Does bDAO treasury pay to support DAOpunks or FlipperZone? If not, then why not? Whats the pattern we envision the DAO following. Let’s say the DAO funds and incubates another 10 product launches over the next two years. Are we thinking that all of those communities will be managed in bDAO? Does ycombinator run a support team for all the companies it accelerates? Absolutely not. Remaining small and modular with a cellular replication mindset is the way, not replicating the bloated, slow, and overhead-heavy enterprise org structures people are most familiar with. No offense or disrespect intended.

19

Thanks for everyone supporting this proposal

1 Like
21

Does the DAO intend to support all projects it funds in perpetuity? And to what extent? Seems like things can get lost in the mix this way. For instance, I’m just now finding out that we spend over $120 a month just to have our static site. That expense gets hidden when paid for by another entity.