Flipper.tool NFT project grant request

Frogmonkees questions are super valid.

A few more questions. Could you guys elaborate a on the timeline of the project, expected milestones? Do i understand correctly if you will mint the lifetime tokens before the tool i up and running? And elaborate on the reasoning behind why the DAO wont get 10% in the initial mint? Why will Hurday get full compensation before mint?

Thx!

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Hey! I will answer your questions:

  1. yea, the initial idea was from me to build a new NFT-based revenue stream for the DAO, the tool came as a second thing. You can check the chat history in #building-nft-tool and it started in brainstorm (I can find that post if you want).
  2. They are Developers we hired from the dev guild. The initial team are the 3 of us mentioned here and we are active DAO members. Then we pinged to dev guild to find developers and they were the best fit. I can say that I already love working with them.
  3. Not sure if they should be? Since they were not in the funding team and we hired them later?

I am sorry if you feel that way, let me know if my answers helped a bit. I personally feel that with the permanent secondary revenue, we could really help the DAO with its streams. This started as an idea to help the DAO as I love being a member and this is what we came with.

Hey I can answer that!

  1. What milestones do you want to know? Pre-mint or the future ones? We have big plans!
  2. No, the tool will be up and running and then we will start the minting.
  3. It wonā€™t get the percentage from the mint, because we need to be sure that we can run the project from the multisig whole year, we canā€™t disappoint the buyers/members. Also - it is meant as a revenue stream not as a one time investment. One time investment does not help the DAO in the longer, or do you think otherwise?
  4. The other team members wonā€™t get the money because they chose to - we want to keep the expenses as low as possible for this DAO grant. We are working for free now and devs are building for half the money. Hruday didnā€™t chose to get the money after mint. Itā€™s his choice.

Was this helpful? Let me know!

I actually found the post that started this project - Discord

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Thanks! This recent NFT bear market has been great for brainstorming and building. Our tool is a unique solution to a universal need of all NFT users: maximizing profit upon sale. From our market research a similar tool has not yet been developed.

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Hey there :wave:
Yeah, I guess some introductions are dueā€¦Iā€™m a big bDAO newbie myself

Iā€™m a Backend developer and Technical Product Manager with 5+ years of experience. Iā€™ve been all-in on crypto and web3 for 3 months now, since dropping out of my last job.
Iā€™ve been a Bankless subscriber since 2020, and somehow managed to miss the $BANK airdrop (I guess I can blame the firehose of crypto-twitter and having too many projects to keep track off :sweat_smile: )

Last month I stumbled upon BanklessDAO and decided to make this my main commitment. I was lucky enough to find @DavidBanklessā€™s post on #building-nft-tool while I was looking for my first dev guild assignment - I guess a week after buying my $BANK and joining the dev guild - and was pretty excited to join the team because I love building tools that were never done before (I came into the project with a bunch of my own ideas of stuff to try, as David can bear witness :grimacing: )

Iā€™m putting most of my time into this project rn, but am intent on getting into other dev guild projects, so Iā€™m staying in sync with weekly meetings and focused discussions, and also trying to bring value to some discussions on other parts of the DAO.

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Thanks for the honest feedback. I hope I can answer your questions and provide more context to our proposal and team:

  1. This is an internal project, put forth by several DAO members. We all entered the DAO at different times and have been individually looking to add value to the mission. Personally, Iā€™ve popped around the discord since joining in late July, but didnā€™t really find my place until the NFT Club opened. I met @DavidBankless and @Gecko007 in there. David and I seemed to bump into each other in every other NFT discord, notably those focused on tools. The NFT Club served as our think tank and eventually David propositioned to the group that we make our own tool as a way to contribute to the DAO. We created a subthread ā€œbuilding-nft-toolā€ and started market research and brainstorming.
  2. We contacted several DAO members to either A) work on the project or B) refer us to other devs who may be interested. We posted on the Dev Guild job board and I attended a dev guild meeting to discuss the project. We had many devs interested, and we interviewed several members. We ultimately selected the members listed on the proposal. Some are more recent DAO members than others, so this is why they do not have extensive chat histories in the discord.
  3. The devs are not listed on this proposal as founders as the initial team was @DavidBankless, @Gecko007 and me. Our initial draft proposal had a paragraph about our process for hiring devs and estimated costs for work. Opportunity waits for no man, so we have been working and building since inception.This proposal has been continuously updated as our project has evolved and now includes accurate numbers for dev compensation.

I can see why youā€™d have your immediate reaction, but this is not an external project nor a cash grab. Our financial structure is in place to create another revenue stream for the DAO, while also maintaining enough funds in our project multi-sig to support continued growth and innovation. Every time our passes are traded on secondary market, a percentage of sales goes back to the DAO, increasing value for DAO members and BANK holders. This continues even after the initial funding is paid back. As DAO members and BANK holders ourselves, we have a double incentive for this project to succeed.

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@DavidBankless @yacht_tea_Ed @volky

Thanks for your prompt replies. Will read again soon.

Thanks for the comment @Nicklas. Our timeline is ASAP. Our devs have been building and we have been continuously planning and executing our next steps. There are a lot of moving pieces, but once we have a viable product we will launch our mint. Regarding compensation, the majority of the team is working with the expectation of future earnings. This reduces the amount requested from the DAO significantly. Our proposal provides the numeric details of this plan. To move this project forward as quickly as possible, some of our contractors will be compensated in full once funding is secured.

When brainstorming the DAO revenue share we wanted to accomplish two things: 1) continued revenue stream for the DAO, 2) a well funded multi-sig to ā€œstand on our two feetā€. The ETH from the mint will be used to compensate team members, as well as act as a war chest for ongoing development. The NFT space will continue to grow and evolve and we plan to move with it. Rather than a quick payback to the DAO, we thought it was better to create a revenue stream in perpetuity.

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There isnā€™t enough credibility for me to vote yes. I see a spreadsheet, a google doc, and a bunch of promises. I need tangible validation.

  • How do I know the tool is actually useful - do you have a list of interested users?
  • How do I know you can actually build it - do you have any code written?

Honestly, the way youā€™ve structured your proposal raises some red flags for me. Even if you are sincere, I couldnā€™t accept this proposal given the lack of tangible validation.

This is a great tool that will have good product market fit. The ask for the project seems reasonable too.

Just that the amount that is returning back to the Bankless DAO seems little too low at 10%.

Perhaps you can take some reference from DAO Punks.

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Sorry I got a lot of questions :laughing:

  1. In the team salary part, what does ā€œafter mintā€ mean? It means for people who will get paid after mint, their salary will come from project multisig, rather than Bdao grants?

  2. It is good to know the idea was originated from several BDao members, but the way you are going to do is not like an internal project, but an external project with some financial connection to BDao. Since BDao is not a grant DAO, it is reasonable that you will give some return if BDao will give financial support at first. But 10% on the secondary market income is not a big number. How about 20% or even higher? To project multi-sig, it means you get 80% rather than 90%, little impact, but for BDao, that means double income and reducing a lot of risks. And why not 10-20% for BDAo from mint income as well, that makes more sense to me. If you need all 150 ETH from minting as whole year team cost, you could consider a) increasing revenue split percentage for BDao on secondary market sale b) make it to 550 and give 50 free NFT to BDao.

  3. Will you need to use BDao brand for promotion. I know you are not using BDao as project brand, but when you are doing bootstrap, a) BDaoā€™s community is going to help more or less b) you might want to tell the market that this project originated from BDao and got grants from BDao, which is also a usage of BDao brand. I donā€™t think this is a problem, as long as you guys are doing a good thing, that should be supported, but please be aware this is also a huge value-added from BDao and might be critical to your market success. Even more important than the BANK you are asking.

  4. Lack of project execution plan and financial prediction. Why do you think you will get 10ETH volume each day? Who will trade a members NFT each day. You will need a detailed plan(both development pland and Go-To-Market plan) to let people buy in your financial prediction.

Hey!

  1. Having a list of interested users is a little weird, but if you ask in the #nft-club channel, I belive a lot of them will respond to you with a positive answer. However, I donā€™t think a list of potential users is something we should be doing.
  2. Yes - we actually have code written already since we havenā€™t wasted any time and started building. I believe we can link you to our github if you DM us and our devs are ok with it.

I am sorry that you feel that way. but I believe we can answer most of the questions with satisfying answers!

Hey Angyts,

based on our calculations, we should be able to pay the initial grant back only from revenues in approximately 84 days. And after that, the DAO will still keep earning 10% of our revenues forever.

I donā€™t think thatā€™s not enough, but I would like to talk about this if you feel otherwise, the percentage is not set in stone and we can move it if there are good reasons.

Hey chao, no problem I am glad to answer them!

  1. Yes, after mint means that we wanted to ā€œask for less moneyā€ from the DAO and therefore some of our members decided to half or the whole salary after mint from project multisig. Keeping the DAO grant as low as possible.

2&4. So how do you exactly decide if thatā€™s an internal or external project? I would compare it to the fight club - initial funding from DAO, independent governance, taking feedback from the bDAO community, generating revenue for the DAO, etc. The only difference is that our tool is not for bDAO members only - which I think is crucial for it to be sustainable. I really think of this as an internal project which we were making for the DAO. About the 10% of secondary sales - I think we underestimate how much that is. Thatā€™s 0.1 ETH a day if the market isnā€™t stalling (right now due to low volume, it would be almost impossible to generate 10 ETH in revenue every day, but we are talking about average, in NFT bull market you are able to generate even 20+ every day). All the calculations about secondary revenue come from a similar project to ours and their revenues. For example, take FreshDrops tool, they are generating 10ETH volume a day in average, our product is on the paper better than their and we also have the support of Bankless community. However, those are surely valid points and we are still open to changing that number.

  1. I agree that the value BDAO gives us in its community is really big and I think we are giving a lot of that value back to our beloved DAO creating a revenue stream, the better the success - the more money the DAO gets in the revenue split. We donā€™t intend to use the BDAO brand in any way, we donā€™t want to promote this as: ā€œThis is tool from bdao, buyā€. We want to promote it using the features and providing data to the members.

You have a lot of valid points, but I think some of them are quite easily explainable. I hope we can chat about it and come to a point where you feel like the DAO is getting enough from us!

Definitely shouldnā€™t lose track that this ā€œbearā€ market is just a step on the road to mass adoption.
For us whoā€™ve been through the craze it may seem like the NFTs are in the past but we must remember we were barely a few hundred thousands people to have touched an NFT. Just seeing the amount of hate the Discord guys are getting on their post announcing integration of wallet connect and metamask shows how gamers and the public in general still have no understanding whatsoever what the tech is going to bring them (the gamers are being played but they could finally become the players). Anyways, itā€™ll become so many peopleā€™s daily life to need to check their NFTs value, performance, momentum, and thereā€™s no way they have the time to do it on their own and accumulate the data on all the different areas NFT will cover.

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I understand a lot of the concerns, but I think itā€™s a clear revenue proposal and we should help develop it to a state weā€™re good with. External developers are a non-issue for me, see it as onboarding new devs to the DAO.

However, I would like to see more DAO benefits, maybe a WL mint?

Also I think this is a great project to base payments on milestones, this would lover the risk for the DAO and payments would be made on completion of milestones. I think you could also clarify how the mint proceeds will be used since youā€™re not sharing them with the DAO.

@DavidBankless would you be open to a milestone based approach?

Iā€™m very much in favour of this project if we can base it on milestones!

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Hey tommy, I am glad we are on the same page here.

The devs actually arenā€™t external, we found them through the developers guild and they are all DAO members.

The WL for DAO members is something I am thinking about - itā€™s not that hard to implement, but it might be something that slows the initial growth. I am not really a fan of whitelists, because most of them is dumping it later on secondary - not saying this will be the case. If have any other benefits on mind, we would like to hear them!

Sure, we can do milestones, but we are approx. 2-3 weeks from rolling out the MVP and mint (we started building immediately) - I donā€™t feel like there are many milestones left before the MVP, but again if you feel otherwise and think that the milestone would help, then I am open to the idea!

We already have some significant milestones behind us from the dev perspective, I guess we should have shared them in the proposal.

I see a lot of concerns about the lack of tangible results, high risk for the DAO, and the expectation of a timeline and milestones. To put you at ease, hereā€™s an overview of the work done up until now and expectations for the following weeks:

Scope of the MVP:

Weā€™re set on the scope of the MVP: It will be an NFT sniping tool with the unique proposition of estimating the pricing of tokens based on rarity rank and past sales after the reveal and helping traders take action on it quickly to sweep underpriced NFTs and to sell their own at an appropriate value while thereā€™s enough volume and liquidity on the collection.

This is the concept mockup (Better UI over bellow, Iā€™m not a designer :joy:):

Price estimation:
The idea for the price estimation (purple line) is to do a regression based on the pricing of OpenSea sales of the collection and on a rarity score estimation of each token (weā€™ll be using the same methodology from rarity.tools, and will be able to estimate it before the official collection rarity reveal). This will allow traders to get a quick estimate of how much their tokens are worth, helping price them accordingly, and also to get an overview of existing listings and how much underpriced or overpriced they are.

Bulk orders
All the existing tools for NFT trading rely on interfaces that are not optimized to do a bunch of trades fast. A good deal of them provides a browser extension that layers some extra functionality on top of OpenSeaā€™s website, which is optimized to buy a single NFT at a time, while the others donā€™t even have any feature to facilitate orders, just taking the user to OS.

Weā€™ll have a bulk orders feature to streamline the buying, listing, and offering of NFTs without having to get out of our tool. The idea is to let the user pick a bunch of orders he wants to make using our price x rarity chart and then execute all those orders at once, signing the bunch of them at once.

  • Buying will be easy as the user can find good deals by looking for NFTs that are underpriced for their estimated rarity score, so he can pick the ones he wants (peeking over them by hovering, if heā€™s interested in the aesthetics) and select a bunch to buy.
  • Listing will also be optimal because the user can see the estimated price of each of his NFTs and quickly drag it to list for sale at an appropriate price, considering past sales and existing listings for NFTs of close rarity.
  • Finally, there will be the option to make bulk offers to try and grab NFTs at a lower price than the estimated one (like: offer 20% under predicted price for the top 5% rarer ones) which can be really effective because the offer will probably be over the floor price, and people without tooling for rarity and pricing estimation will see it as a good deal.

Current development status:
Weā€™ve made a bunch of Proof of Concepts for the many components of this solution and are now integrating all of them into a working prototype so we can figure out what works and what doesnā€™t (like exploring collections of different sizes and seeing how that fits on the chart, figuring out the regression methodology that gives the best fit with the data, and so on) and iterate on the design.

Stuff we already crossed off the list:

  • OS listing and sales scraping
  • price prediction with regression techniques
  • metadata scraping
  • rarity estimation
  • performant charting lib

Hereā€™s my current playground :sweat_smile: :

Also, we already have a designer working on making something beautiful out of my scribbles:


Yeah, our mascot is a dolphin :dolphin:

So weā€™re building this already, the release is planned for at most early December, and weā€™ve already hit the point of having most of the risks minimized (we know we can deliver this). Also, @DavidBankless, @Gecko007, and @yacht_tea_Ed are deeply involved with NFT trading communities and are active users of basically all of the existing tools, and can vouch for how ourā€™s have a unique feature set and how itā€™s incredibly valuable in this niche.

That being said, IMHO the risks for this grant are pretty minimal for the DAO, and far outweighed by the upside: Investment returned in 3 months, and then ongoing returns for the lifetime of the project. Also, this is based on a pretty conservative estimation of secondary returns.

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for anybody still having doubts about this project please check out @volky 's reply to this post.

We can make another post to make all of this more clear. As stated in the poll as well, this is our first such experience with BanklessDAO being on the side of makers/creators.

Also, please do give open feedback so we can improve and make this project a benefit and revenue stream for the dao.