Crypto Sapiens Season 5 Proposal

Grants/Funding
1

Authors: Flowscience, Cisco, InfiniteHomie

Squad: Humpty, EurekaJohn, Flowscience, Jaris James, Ornella, InfiniteHomie, Liviu, Joe_King, Tobias W. Kaiser, Jenetics, RedCrystalDragon, VallentinaC, Yofi, jmluther, Cisco, Salmanneedsajob, Jaux, Studio07, Woon Tan, EriDAO and many more.

SUMMARY

Crypto Sapiens is a growing network of web3 podcasts recorded weekly and distributed across all major media platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Crypto Sapiens plays an essential role in supporting the Bankless mission by developing educational programming that expands people’s understanding of the web3 ecosystem including decentralized technologies and cryptocurrencies. We curate thoughtful and accessible discussions between crypto pioneers and crypto curious individuals with the aim of helping everyone gain the understanding they need to become crypto natives and find their niche within the space.

Season 5 Budget: 1,800,000 BANK

BACKGROUND

Crypto Sapiens was built to educate the next generation of humans. We host discussions with innovative builders with the aim of helping everyone learn more about web3. Crypto Sapiens differs from other media sources by unearthing quality conversations crafted from the personal stories from our guest’s journey into web3. Crypto Sapiens mission is to inspire our listeners to become contributors and builders in web3 through rich, meaningful conversations with the founders and core-contributors of innovative projects that are community-aligned, and share our values of decentralization. Our goal is to become a leader in web3 media to expand access to quality web3 educational content.

This proposal seeks funding to support the development of the Crypto Sapiens podcast network. Funds will be used to cover production costs of podcasts, workgroups, launching new series focused on important aspects of Web3, and launching our subDAO.

Autonomous “Workgroups”

Traditionally, companies specify a budget to cover the salaries of each employee from a top down approach as one central economy. In a centralized system there is a natural tendency towards bureaucracy and bottlenecks as projects grow. Over time, there becomes distance created from the original treasury (seed) of the organization to the withering branches at the outer edges of the organism.

In its infancy, Crypto Sapiens was sustainable with a centralized budget that used a traditional allocation of funds to each team member with their respective role. However, as the project grew there arose a need to create new ways of remunerating contributors. To quote Frogmonkee in the article “DAOs as Economic Engines” in the BanklessHQ Newsletter from October 13, 2021, “When autonomous working groups are given a pool of capital to use at their discretion, they will begin to standardize around rates for work to better budget and predict expenses, inevitably kick-starting an internal economy.” Since Season 3, Crypto Sapiens took a different approach to the budget in place of the traditional hierarchical approach.

With capital assigned to workgroups we saw the creation of workgroup-owned budgets and mini treasuries; the capital was spent more efficiently, with less cumbersome bureaucracy than it normally takes to have to go more than one step up a ladder to have costs approved. Each workgroup took on a life of its own and created its own micro-economy.

Over past seasons our workgroups formalized and expanded their content production workflows. This enabled them to be flexible in offering support to the production of new initiatives, such as topic-oriented series, while supporting ad-hoc work required to create deliverables for new grant initiatives and monetization opportunities.

Workgroup Leads

Each workgroup has a Workgroup Lead. At this moment in time, the workgroups are still relatively small, typically consisting of few contributors. However, beginning with this type of structure allows the program to scale upwards with less friction. A workgroup does not need to be a permanent group or team. Workgroup leads have access to edit our Notion workspace. They’re tasked with creating and maintaining documentation for workflows with the goal of enabling easy onboarding of contributors as demand scales. We implemented DeWork to enable all Workgroup Leads to issue bounties according to demand (within the scope of allocated budgets) and help keep track of contributions from our growing list of contributors.

Budget Hoarding

The next question one may ask is “What is to prevent the Working Group Lead from hoarding the budget completely to themselves?” Currently, the Crypto Sapiens podcast is still small enough to be able to clearly tell who would be spreading themselves too thin in order to keep the entire budget for themselves. However, as the podcast grows and as new contributors trickle in, metrics will be set up to determine when it would be appropriate to require delegation of budget and tasks within a Workgroup. We’re also striving for grants that allow Workgroups to operate with ample budget that would not possibly strain the productivity, creativity, and efficiency of each respective discipline.

Allowances

The distribution of funds from Workgroups is managed from the project’s multisig. Workgroup Leads are able to budget according to their group’s needs and submit payment, and remuneration expenses to the multisig for approval. An accumulation of gas costs for immediate expenses and bounty payouts can be budgeted in as an average estimate allowance or the recorded transaction hashes for later reimbursement. Each Workgroup Lead is responsible for keeping a ledger of all expenses and gas fees. At the end of the season, all delegation of the Workgroup budget would be reported to the Ops Workgroup to accumulate data, form KPIs, develop future goals, and guide budgeting.

How We Define WorkGroups

Overall, the main point of independently budgeted Workgroups is to accomplish the following:

  1. Empower each Workgroup Lead with ownership and confidence.
  2. Streamline operations with better attention to the needs of each department resulting in more efficient spending of the budget allocated.
  3. Provide relief, vacation time, and overall time to think which will lead to more efficient work when active.
  4. Allow Workgroup Leads the ability to delegate standard tasks to research novel approaches to their process.
  • [OPERATIONS]
    • Project Lead: Responsible for all aspects of a podcast’s production and delivery, responding to issues as needed, and managing the production schedule—short and long-term planning. Works with Workgroup Leads to define scope of work, relationships between internal and external contributors, and core responsibilities. Responsible for managing revenue streams—grants and sponsorships. Liaison between Bankless DAO Grants Committee, GSE, etc.
    • Host: Responsible for setting the editorial tone of the show. Storyteller, shaping the show through editorial decisions and personality. Develop briefing documents with producers and research team. Write and edit as needed. Review content edits prior to publishing.
    • Project Manager: Lead coordination across workgroups. Manages resources for internal and external contributors. Manages master calendar and weekly updates. Responsible for ensuring technology is prepared and ready for use weekly events such as Twitter Spaces, POAP, Craig and Degen bot.
  • [AV]
    • AV Lead: Oversee the success of the AV Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage AV Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO AV Guild.
    • Engineer: Responsible for good-quality audio on the back end. Create the soundscape for the show as determined by the host and executive producer. Audio-editing, finesse fades, generally creating a seamless listening experience consistent in tone and quality across all podcasts. Gives proper pauses to create an experience free of jarring transitions, sounds, or distractions. Compose and score the podcast as well.
    • Editor: Makes necessary adjustments to create coherent and interesting episodes. Ensures proper cadence and flow of a conversation, while keeping the show within reasonable time constraints. Upload preliminary edits for review and final edits for mastering using proper naming and storage conventions within the DAM system making the files accessible to the relevant parties.
  • [RESEARCH]
    • Researcher Lead: Oversee the success of the Research Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage Research Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO Research Guild.
    • Researcher(s): Help hosts with collecting data for recorded events. Oversee the development of story ideas and provide feedback on story frameworks. Coordinate with Project Manager to populate the master calendar. Ensure that there is consistency, cadence and flow between episodes. Identify speakers and projects, compile key contributions of the speaker, unique and innovative use cases of their protocol, meaningful details from the community, into briefing documents and scripts.
  • [MARKETING]
    • Marketing Lead: Oversee the success of the Marketing Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage Research Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO Marketing Guild.
    • Campaign Manager: Manage campaigns, content distribution calendar, workflows, budgets, coordination and implementation. Ensure all content is published on schedule (audio, text, video). Monitor analytics weekly.
    • Analytics: Generate formal monthly reports on listenership, distribution and engagement. Present insights and suggest recommendations.
    • Publishing: Schedule publication of mixed/mastered final content edit on Podbean. Use an AI transcription app to convert episode audio to text.
      • Convert MP3 to MP4. Publish video to YouTube. Assign timestamps to chapters based on key points, add end screen cards.
    • Social media: Distribute audio, format text & images for each platform, scheduling, announce post CTAs in groups/channels, like/share/retweet, like and reply to comments, monitor dm’s.
  • [DESIGN]
    • Design Lead: Oversee the success of the Design Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage Design Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO Design Guild.
    • Designer(s): Create graphics for events, social media, and podcast platforms, design relevant infographics from podcast content.
  • [WRITING]
    • Writing Lead: Oversee the success of the Writing Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage Writing Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO Writers Guild.
    • Writer(s): Create episode titles and descriptions. Make manual spelling and grammar edits to transcriptions. Chapter titles, search tags and description for YouTube episodes. Take notes during live sessions to capture key points and audience questions. Write monthly newsletter and publish episode transcriptions to Substack. Create weekly themes and write articles for premium newsletter.
  • [DEV]
    • Dev Lead: Oversee the success of the Dev Workgroup. Define processes, growth and manage Dev Workgroup. Coordinate async work, weekly working sessions with team, and weekly update at all-hands project meeting. Liaison between Bankless DAO Dev Guild.
    • Web Developer: Design the official website for Crypto Sapiens. To educate everyone about our mission, impact, and link to all of our episodes and social media platforms. Enable analytics platform to track success metrics, such as DAU, MAU, and episode downloads.
  • [GENERAL BOUNTIES]
    • For incentivizing general contributors outside the defined workgroups and roles established above.

New Series

In Season 4, we launched four exciting new series that touch on specific interest points in the Web3 space. And in Season 5, we hope to encourage existing series to provide financial ROI and continue to push efforts toward generating revenue for the project. Workgroups support the production of these series and we have standardized the ways in which we can streamline that support while maximizing impact and evergreen content as deliverables. After testing several rollout strategies, we implemented a process to package the first four episodes of launch into a mini-series that encapsulates its mission and scope. These mini-series will be packaged into playlists for YouTube using audiogram software and serve as the first deliverable produced by a new series with which to gauge success and provide a path to iterative improvement. Our proposed meta-governance structure is focused on creating a sustainable financial relationship between our project treasury and community initiatives.

  • Diversi-Tea is a series that explores diversity, equity and inclusion in web3. Hosts JENetics, RedCrystalDragon and Vallentina discuss the state of DE&I in web3 today and the opportunities we have to build more welcoming spaces for a global community.

  • Web3 Identity features discussions with key builders from Gitcoin, BrightID, DAOHaus, OrangeProtocol and more to demystify the emerging topic of self-sovereign identity. We explore the value of owning your digital identity across DeFi, public goods, and DAOs.

  • eXchange Points digs into the infrastructure of web3 and engages blockchain developers, and the founders of web3 infrastructure projects such as Filecoin, Storj, Polygon, Harmony, Chainlink, Arbitrum, Optimism and many more.

  • DeScientralized is exploring the social layer of decentralized science with “experiment” style panel discussions and “thesis” style deep-dives featuring guests from projects such as VitaDAO, Molecule, PsyDAO, DeSci World, Ocean Protocol, TalentDAO and more.

MISSION & VALUES ALIGNMENT

The Bankless DAO mission is to “help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.”

Crypto Sapiens supports this mission by facilitating meaningful discussions with web3 leaders, aimed to mobilize everyone to participate in Bankless money systems. It solves a fundamental challenge in crypto by connecting key technology builders with community members, involving them in thoughtful, educational discussions that supply them with the knowledge they need to become Bankless.

Crypto Sapiens supports the positioning of Bankless DAO as the foremost destination for media and education. Crypto Sapiens has mobilized many talented Bankless DAO members to contribute to the development of its media productions. Crypto Sapiens is developed in partnership with Bankless DAO. Crypto Sapiens includes content about Bankless DAO across its communication and promotional materials whenever possible.

SPECIFICATION

Crypto Sapiens has gone from a recorded series hosted in the Bankless DAO Discord to a media platform that supports discussions across a variety of important web3 topics.

The podcast is hosted by Humpty Calderon who has thought-provoking discussion with web3 leaders. Recent guests on the show include thought leaders from projects such as CultDAO, Wonderverse, DAOhaus, and SnapShot.

Production tasks as described in the background section are delegated to relevant departments to improve the development of this show, and to facilitate its distribution and sponsorship opportunities. The following departments are Operations, AV, Research, Marketing, Design, Writing, and Dev. These seven workgroups were created to maximize the impact of Crypto Sapiens and to ensure that the media is inclusive of many perspectives in the creation of educational web3 content.

Bounties are provided to new members to participate in the development of the project. Crypto Sapiens is an ideal onboarding experience for new contributors to earn their way into the DAO.

At Crypto Sapiens, we pride ourselves on being organized and efficient. We have developed our Notion to ensure there is transparency in our process and provides an accessible onramp to new members.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

In order to retain the amazing talent we have at Crypto Sapiens, we need a larger allocation of $BANK. The value of $BANK decreased significantly in Season 3 and even more so in S4, which was challenging to our contributors and limited their availability to help us grow. In the past we have been conservative with remuneration by maintaining a 500 BANK/hour standard rate. However, contributors recently voted to increase remuneration to 1500 BANK/hour in a close poll (8 voted for this option, 5 for the option to increase to 1000 BANK/hour). This prompted our ops team to more closely analyze the BANK-USD distributed over time by our project (shown below) to better project an appropriate remuneration rate given market conditions targeting a 5-10% annual adjustment in USD per contributor hour to account for inflation of living costs etc.

We currently have a runway of ~1 month at the recent increased pay rate and this proposal would provide an additional ~3 months at the recently increased pay rate. Ongoing efforts to secure additional outside funding will fund new growth. grants (e.g. Gitcoin and Panvala), partnerships (e.g. Polygon DAO and IRL events), one-off projects (workgroup services offerings) and an upcoming product design sprint in Season 5 focused on monetizing our existing content platform.

Crypto Sapiens intends to help people transition from DAO visitors to active DAO contributors. We see ourselves as a springboard for Bankless DAO members to become fulfilled, active members of the DAO. We have a long list of success stories from Crypto Sapiens contributors becoming L1 members of Bankless DAO because of their contributions to our project.

Total = 1,800,000 BANK

Season 5: August 8th - October 30th (12 weeks)

  • Cost Breakdown:
    • Operations: 350,000
    • AV: 300,000
    • Research: 200,000
    • Marketing: 300,000
    • Design: 150,000
    • Writing: 100,000
    • Dev: 100,000
    • New Concepts: 150,000
    • subDAO Advisory: 150,000


(click for interactive version)

BRAND USAGE

Crypto Sapiens leverages the Bankless DAO brand to represent its alignment to the mission of the DAO. Furthermore, the Bankless DAO brand is used to increase awareness, membership and participation in the DAO. Going forward, in Season 5, Crypto Sapiens will spread its wings to increase our brand awareness outside of Bankless DAO to build even broader support for Bankless DAO. For example, Bankless DAO has no visibility on Twitter Spaces. Crypto Sapiens has been very active on Twitter Spaces in Season 4 and intends to continually increase traffic in Season 5 by building on connections with influential projects like Gitcoin, DAOHaus, and Panvala. Hosting Twitter spaces with these projects and our growing list of amazing builders allows us to accelerate the impact of our work and validate the proposition of Bankless DAO.

SUCCESS METRICS & KPIs

Overall, our listener growth was slightly slowed over S4. However, we continued to expand the diversity of our listenership through increasing the number of platforms and geographies we’re reaching.

Listenership

Increasing Accessibility While Maintaining A Diverse Audience (1)

Total Countries Reached vs. Listener Distribution
(click charts for interactive versions)

Social Media

  • Twitter: 1,216 (over 300 followers since last season’s proposal)
  • Instagram: 32 posts, 134 followers (up 17 followers since last season’s proposal)
  • Facebook: 31 posts, 11 followers
  • YouTube: 33 videos, 46 subscribers (launched 2/1/22)
    • YouTube KPI exports show a high rate of translation software use as well as geographies not represented in the audience of our main RSS feed: YouTube - July 2022 - Google Drive
  • LinkTree: 874 views, 404 clicks = 46.22% CTR (up 295 views and 126 clicks since last season’s proposal)

Upcoming growth metrics:

  • Long awaited blog & newsletter (subscribers/open rates/CTR)
  • Website traffic (google analytics) & search performance (google search console)
  • Number of mini-segments/features of other Bankless DAO projects
  • DAO DASH and/or Statbot for Crypto Sapiens server KPIs

Recent Wins

  1. Accelerated and standardized the creation of new series
  1. Brand style guide :heart_eyes:
  2. Governance section on Notion
  1. Participated in Gitcoin GR14 and raised external funding!
  2. Polygon DAO partnership grant application in progress

Next Steps

  • Increase podcast downloads for Season 5
  • Expand partnerships outside of Bankless DAO (e.g. Panvala and Polygon DAO)
  • Mint NFT to align our membership (Governance and Tokenization plans in progress)
  • Launch our subDAO! (Governance and Tokenization plans in progress)
  • More Grants (Yearn Finance, Aave, Harmony, etc.)
  • Increase revenue streams to reduce dependency on grants
  • Publish episode transcriptions on Mirror
  • Bite-Size content for TikTok, Instagram Stories & YouTube Shorts
  • Improve working standards to facilitate coordination across contributors (e.g. vacation time, holiday leave, etc)

SQUAD BACKGROUND

Humpty Calderon: Longtime crypto enthusiast and community developer. He has contributed to the development of decentralized technologies including multichain validators, web3 wallets, AMMs, and decentralized identity and reputation protocols. He is presently focused on expanding the visibility and adoption of decentralized systems through fun, accessible media and events. Humpty hosts events on Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces and in meatspace. He created Crypto Sapiens soon after joining bDAO as a tool to engage members, add value to bDAO partnerships, and further advance the mission of helping the world go bankless. Crypto Sapiens is a public good that helps everyone learn about web3 via meaningful discussions with leaders in the space.

EurekaJohn: Crypto enthusiast, YouTuber, and overall content creator. Prior to blockchain-involved projects, John has run his own internet and FM based radio station in the Austin, TX.area. During the SXSW festival he was responsible for recording the New Media podcasts. He has also worked with an assortment of audio and visual equipment through his previous band that performed live at many local venues.

Flowscience: My approach to marketing is driven by a background in data science and guided by experiences working as a university instructor. I have a passion for communicating complex topics in simple ways and firmly believe anyone can learn anything they set their mind to. Beyond BanklessDAO, I serve as marketing and governance core contributor at DAOplanet, DAODenver, and DAO NYC; and founder of Cannabis Genome DAO.

Jaris James: A DeFi researcher that’s building relationships across the universe of DAOs. My intent is set on building strong relationships for the banklessDAO that can be leveraged for mutual benefit.

InfiniteHomie: Here for background support, research, and community building, because that’s what a true homie does :). Over a decade in TradFi and customer service, I’m here to help change lives where I can.

Ornella: Communications, marketing, design, sponsorships, and community growth define the areas that I can contribute most. I believe that by being a bridge, connecting stories, by sharing knowledge, and education I can help many people thrive in web3.

McGuyverWannabe: Aspiring web3 analyst - love analyzing projects/companies and writing reports/briefs in my free time. Always looking for alpha, though my portfolio could do much better. Product owner for an AI/ML platform in the public sector IRL

JENetics: Originally a traditional artist, JENetics physical sculpture art can be seen on the set of Discovery+ Monster Garage (episode4), and her TikTok channel. She is a founder of UltraSound Merch and POAPathon, and a Design Guild Coordinator in Bankless DAO. As a self-taught digital artist, she is passionate about empowering other artists to find their way into the digital spaces such as NFTs, and you can find her live streaming her art on several different DAOs around the metaverse.

RedCrystalDragon: Active AV Guild Governance and Community manager as well as active Design Guild and Marketing Guild contributor. Works with UltraSound Merch and Crypto Sapiens as a co-host for the Diversi-Tea podcast. NFT Artist, Comic Artist, Graphic Designer. Full Time B-DAO Contributor.

Vallentina: An Eclectic Artist and a Cosmic Creator with a penchant for Social Justice and Intersectionality, which she expresses mostly through Instagram and her Illustrations (available on Etsy). She has brought her professional translator skills and self-taught graphic designer ones to web3 through BanklessDAO, where she has taken on a variety of projects for Design and Marketing Guild, as well as being the Italian Translations Coordinator.

Cisco: Visual Artist, Designer, and Illustrator. S4 POAP Manager for the developer’s Guild, actively participating in Design, Marketing, Daolationships, Research and Education Guilds, also involved with projects such as USM and Bankless Africa. Currently Full time DAOing it!

Others: Meowshka, Blurpleflame, mitch, Joe_King, Tobias, Feems, Liv, Jaux

We welcome anyone interested in learning more about Crypto Sapiens to join us on our Discord.

Testimonials From Contributors

Jaris James: I’m thankful that Crypto Sapiens was the first project I contributed to in the BanklessDAO. I was recruited to be a part of the project within my first month of joining the bDAO at the very end of Season 2, and this is where I gained the knowledge of how to set up/host a proper AMA, which is the majority of my contribution to the BanklessDAO. Thanks to Crypto Sapiens, I will be a Level 1 Member within one season of contribution. This project is extremely organized, with clear incentives and deadlines. I’m excited to be a part of such a professional team with a focus of becoming a media powerhouse for BanklessDAO.

Flowscience: I’ve learned an incredible amount from this show. I often draw unexpected inspiration from the stories unfolded by builders during the live conversations. It’s an honor to support and contribute to furthering the mission of people-centered education in web3.

Brandon: Crypto Sapiens is a seriously impressive project. Humpty has done an excellent job of empowering individual contributors and that’s why the project has grown so much recently. There’s room to grow, learn and contribute which make Crypto Sapiens a fun and rewarding project to work on.

Ornella: Amazing team that serves its purpose with joy and professionalism, integrity, and commitment. The success of a project depends on its team, and CryptoSapiens has a top-notch one. Honored to be part of it. The leadership and empowerment that Humpty brings to the project, the purpose of the podcast towards communicating stories of web3 builders, and the seamless way things flow in CryptoSapiens, are reflected in its results and the growth of its audience and supporters. A proper BanklessDAO born project to be proud of.

Humpty Calderon: I am inspired every day by the thoughtfulness and care that Crypto Sapiens contributors bring to the project. Going from a single podcast hosted within the Bankless DAO Discord to a media platform hosting multiple discussions about crucial topics across many channels is not an easy task. It has only been possible because of the people that have joined and supported our mission from the beginning including Bankless DAO, its guilds, and the grants committee. As we set our eyes on our next chapter, we trust that we can achieve our very lofty goals because of the supportive community that has continued to energize and empower us.

Crypto Sapiens is democratizing web3 media to ensure that it is inclusive of the global community that is building this ecosystem.

Thank you for reading and for your support.

Do you support funding this proposal?
  • Yes.
  • No and I will leave a comment below explaining why.
0 voters
2 Likes
2

CS is pioneering podcasting in web3 and DAOs with many great people and leaders focused on taking this podcast network to the next level. Very well organised team with a great work environment and really delivering on its mission.

Looking forward to see how listener engagement grows with all the innovative approach of CS. Also excited to see how CS is onboarding more and more talent to work in the different work groups.

I’ll be personally helping out in the sponsorship side of CS and looking forward to more collaboration with Podcast Hatchery.

3 Likes
3

hello crypto sapiens team, this is a good proposal but i have some questions.

1.200.000 BANK were asked in S4,

The follower gains for the BANK spent seems quite low to me.
What are the numbers you are expecting for 1.800.000 BANK in S5?

Is there any plans on monetization of this project?

There is a 150.000 BANK asked for “SubDAO Advisory”, who is the advisor?

The team increased BANK/hour over the DAO standards, how do you measure the time spent by each role holder?

5 Likes
4

Hi @raybankless.eth
Thanks so much for your critical review of these key points. Each question you raised squarely identifies an issue we didn’t get a chance to fully explain in our grant application. Hopefully, I can address each of those questions sufficiently with documentation for all decisions.

  1. Followers: Social media followers is just one class of KPI among used to evaluate growth, impact and value created by our project. Throughout S4 we onboarded new marketing contributors and began tracking more granular KPIs across a variety of sources. We created processes to aggregate and analyze data for the flagship banner show as well as our new series. Although we did observe a decreased growth rate of our social media following and podcast downloads per month in S4 - those numbers don’t include/reflect the addition of multiple new channels for listenership and engagement. These new KPIs were not part of our total impact in past proposals and are therefore truly additive in that regard. New KPIs for S4 include YouTube, Twitter Spaces, our community Discord and Diversity KPIs for listenership (charts in S5 prop) and platform (number of speakers/projects and their countries of residence). We continue to refine, reflect, iterative and improve the impact of all KPIs to estimate pricing for our expanding Sponsorship Pricing Menu.

  2. Monetization: We’ve been building extensive marketing documentation through collaborative design processes over the past few seasons to support monetization initiatives as our content library expands and our production team improves workflows + upskilling. During S4, we categorized the diverse range of initiatives proposed into three income streams:

  • A) Grants and Donations: Crypto Sapiens successfully raised our first funding outside of BDAO during S4 by applying for and being approved to participate in Gitcoin GR14 (linked above). Since submitting this proposal we have listed Crypto Sapiens on Giveth.io (applying for verification for GIVback is in progress) and deployed our Safe community multi-sig contract on the Gnosis Chain EVM. During S4, we also established several points of connected between our community and Panvala (donations from the Panvala League act as a multiplier for both Gitcoin and Giveth).
  • B) Our Sponsorships and Client Services Pipeline leverages our unique relationships and skills in web3 to monetize the content we produce.
  • C) Products (token-gated experiences, merch, memberships, and more) to be rapidly prototyped during S5 via the design sprint linked in the S5 proposal with the aim of shipping our first income generating initiative.

  1. SubDAO: We have not assigned any specific contributor(s) a formal role in this regard. During S4 we created a Notion page for CS Governance Docs, including meeting notes/attendance, poll results, proposal drafts and research documents. We are currently working on a draft governance proposal that would create opportunities for our contributors to submit deliverables in the form of a retroactive funding proposal. This will further drive alignment between our treasury and allocating an appropriate remuneration based on value delivered, as opposed future predicted value.

  2. Remuneration rate: We calculate payouts based the combination of role holder allocation and bounties claimed. Fixed role holder allocations are listed in our main project budget spreadsheet and were determined by itemizing time spent on defined workflows by project contributors in previous seasons bounties with defined workflows that should itemize the approximate amount of time spent on tasks & verify this with the claimant upon completing the task Our understanding is that the 1000 BANK/hour rate was a suggested guideline to be evaluated by each project according to various impacts, instead of a fixed standard that should not be exceeded. Discussions regarding an increase beyond that figure were not limited to our project. We have continued to debate the results of the poll in which our contributors voted to increase BANK remuneration to 1500/hour by creating a spreadsheet to calculate projected budget needs by comparing trends in monthly payout amounts in BANK-USD against KPIs such as counts of contributors, deliverables, as well as percent change of these KPIs over time. We also created an accounting workflow tutorial video to streamline plotting monthly payouts from Gnosis Safe so we can make more rapidly make highly informed budgeting decisions in the future. These projections were used to calculate our remaining runway and total funding request for S5.

1 Like
5

CS model is huge and growing fast. one of the things that comes to mind is mission alignment with bDAO. With all the shows coming up, do they align with bDAO or take different directions.

I guess it might be reasonable to fund aspects that aligns with the DAOs mission and vision in the CS ecosystem.

Shows that divert from the DAOs mission can potentially partner with other DAOs that are aligned for potential funding imo.

1 Like
6

thank you very much for this extensive answer, great work.

a concern i have is, we have crypto sapiens becoming a podcast ecosystem and podcast hatchery is another. In total 2 podcast ecosystems.

Do you think bDAO should fund both of them?
Is there no way we can fund 1 podcast ecosystem and all podcasts come out of there?

I see 20 people here, and 10 people in podcast hatchery team. 30 people working on 2 different podcast ecosystem/incubator projects, 1 person working in both.

It seems to me some optimization can be done here.

2 Likes
7

Yes, great point. This was discussed on Discord during the season and more recently formalized in documentation. We have included a question specifically about alignment in our Request For Podcast (RFP) application form to address this concern. We’re also requiring new shows to demonstrate proof of Minimum Viable Podcast (MVP) by packaging their first four episodes as a mini-series and promoting that as evergreen content with the goal of rapid prototyping each new initiative toward monetization. This actually segue’s into Rey’s next question about hatchery…

8

We’ve been discussing the distinctions between Hatchery on the Crypto Sapiens server with members of both projects. It currently stands that both projects need to continue to define their scope and relationship to each other - but imo it does seem we are on somewhat different trajectories particularly with how each project is structured internally. I copied the main part of that still ongoing discussion into a Notion doc for easy viewing because it has happened across multiple channels. I think the subDAO proposal has the potential to create stronger alignment while also building a stronger distinction through clarifying the scope & intention of Crypto Sapiens long term.

Both projects can monetize content through sponsorships, but, Crypto Sapiens has two things going that I see distinguishing us so far.

  1. Because we do focus on projects & builders outside of BDAO we bridge the Bankless message to a wider community & drive awareness. We’re almost like a blend between Hatchery and DAOlationships. Empowering this extended community to take on a life of its own through a subDAO would close the loop in terms of BDAO cementing a big 'ol waving black flag out in the podcast metaverse while this project launches a path to sustainability via monetized membership (likely through profit sharing of what I describe below). Our current idea is to have a Nouns contract with a certain percent of Nouns going to BDAO.
  2. Our workgroups almost act like guilds, but they aren’t. Upskilling is part of making ourselves more effective, but it’s not the goal. Our goal is to ship the most awe-inspiring content we can. That enabled us to support the addition of new podcasts and other content workflows because we can define what support is needed from each WG in terms of time, skill and financial support. We can spin up or turn off workflows quickly - to handle things like performing client services (e.g. consulting and sponsors), external grant and donation campaigns (e.g. Giveth, Gitcoin, soon to be more), collaborations and partnerships (e.g. Onda, Panvala), as well as producing both digital (e.g. courses in collab with Academy) and physical products. @Humpty designed some dope hats and we have two artists from USM @JENetics and @RedCrystalDragon who have been crushing it as new hosts on the squad this season.
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In theory, that would be the same question needed for all of the shows, minus making bank i would presume. If the goal is to help people go bankless, the goal is pretty expansive, and could have different meanings when it to each podcast (how does sats and gwei align with bdao, how does bounty hunter, etc)

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I like this thought.

I have a thought, because I initially suggested that the hatchery grow to encompass all the shows across the two communities. I then wondered if that was the right move.

My thought ends up like this Should a media DAO fund different media projects that fall in the same category? I guess you could then say the same from the different news letters that come from BanklessDAO. Like Defi Download, Weekly Rollup, the Rug, Good Morning News, etc.

I think it ends up being a slippery slope on what BanklessDAO should fund.

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Has Sapiens generated any sponsorship revenue for S4? Any clear goals for S5 revenue?

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Apologies for the slow reply here. We’ve since onboarded a dedicated sponsorship workstream lead. We’ll also be launching a collection of our audio content in a monetized web3 native format during this season, with plans currently in the feedback phase. Lastly, stay tuned for an upcoming survey of podcast listeners that will satisfy questions potential sponsors have raised about the details of who is listening etc.

I expect we’ll be securing our first sponsorship(s) this season as well as creating our first source of passive recurring revenue from our growing library of content.