Title: THE RUG! Season 5 Funding Proposal
Authors: MW#0000 Liquidiot#5975 Frank America#0610, Apollo, BrianL, ZeroMass
Date Created: July 14, 2022
Date Posted: July 14, 2022
SUMMARY
Thanks to roaring support from the DAO and space at large, The Rug, the mostly credible news source in Web3, is poised to become the premier comedy outlet in crypto during this bear market. A successful “The Rug” is net positive for the DAO and the space at large.
In order to realize this vision on behalf of BanklessDAO, The Rug contributors, and funny folks across the space, The Rug is formally requesting 1.75M BANK for Season 5 to kickstart our road to profitability with the mindset that if we do things right, we will become self sustaining soon.
ABOUT THE RUG
The Rug is a crypto comedy journalism outfit shipping the best in satire news related to web3. A media property spun out of BanklessDAO and composed of BanklessDAO members. We exist to help the industry not take itself so seriously.
ACTIVITIES TO DATE:
- Thousands of people rugged so far
- Revenue to date:
- Over 10 ETH from distributions with 10% kicked back to the DAO
- 1 ETH from sponsorships from guild.xyz
- 90% of proceeds have been redistributed to contributors.
- Since launching ‘The Rug’ in 2021, over 20 different DAO members have contributed to bringing funny to web3
- We grew out the initial team via networking on community calls and opening an official application pinned to #the-rug-start-here, and since have grown out into our own Discord server supporting the activities of dozens of contributors.
- Together we shipped 6 newspaper-style NFTs on Mirror brimming with comedy from The Rug Writers and hilarious graphics from The Rug Designers (including favorites like MetaTheater showtimes). From the sale of these 6 NFTs, we contributed capital to the DAO and to date have not requested any funding from the DAO.
- Mirror spotlighted The Rug and blessed us with a custom domain
- On Twitter, we’ve carefully curated a brand voice that is always at the ready to give the news of the day a funny twist. To date we’ve amassed over 3K organic followers and a number of semi-viral tweets (Exhibit A & Exhibit B)
- At S4 kickoff, The Rug bookended the presentation via Lucas and David by shining big love on the team at the outset and end of the kickoff
- Multimedia: In the spirit of a news outlet, we’ve spread our talents to more than just the standard front page fare––we’ve expanded to multimedia mediums including:
- ‘Lil Ruggy’, the fully illustrated comic (forthcoming)
- ‘Under the Rug’, the podcast behind the jokes
- Motion ads (parodies of course).
SEASON 5 ROADMAP / GOALS
In Season 5, we plan to take The Rug to its full potential as a media org, and that means:
- Going vertical with all our existing media properties, in quantity and quality. This includes more jokes on our owned channels (twitter, telegram, instagram, fountain, etc), delightful extensions of the news including MetaTheater and Lil Ruggy, even hotter podcasts episodes, and specialized ads.
- Building out and shipping a badass website. Moving from Mirror NFTs to a full blown The Onion-style website. The existence of this property will provide the org with a proper home for all ouor content, long and short form. Here, every article has the opportunity to travel the web via a simple link, and thus, has the opportunity to rug many people. Additionally, a traditional website will provide us the opportunity to create an immersive ad strategy. (Think Meow Wolf type parodies mixed in with actual advertising we fire on from customers.)
- Making an inclusive, maximally funny team of contributors. Creating process around seasons to make familiarity around certain cadences regarding applications, advertising durations, Coordinape, etc. (Feature article writing applications are available during S5 as a way to show desire/commitment to be a part of the journey)
KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Execution of our roadmap, with special attention to our website which is a massive tree trunk for our org.
- Shipping a full blown website inclusive of all our content from our first 6 NFTs and advertising surface area. Our first milestone for the website is September 30, 2022.
- Cash positive business model. We don’t intend to use Bankless DAO funding in perpetuity, our major goal is to become self sustainable WHILE still supporting the DAO in our own right, namely through revenue.
- We anticipate we can earn at least 5E by EOY in advertising.
- Scale our process to be clear, concise, and actionable by any new member who is curious to join the org (requiring the necessary application and funny-vetting approval)
- Low turnover rate from season-to-season.
- Positive ROIs on our marketing and advertising campaigns.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
The total amount requested for The Rug for Season 5 is 1.75M BANK. We intend to use this capital to bootstrap the team in pursuit of building a cash positive business ASAP. Contributors are excited to contribute in a more professional manner.The breakdown is as follows, with table below for visual representation:
Salaried roles
- Leads
- 3x
- Each will have impactful individual responsibilities including podcast, website, business dev, and operations.
- Leads can also be PMs, Writers, Designers.
- Monthly hours per: 25
- Total: 75
- 3x
- PM
- 1x, not an isolated role, added on to writers or whoever
- Monthly hours per: 5
- Total: 5
- Writers
- 8x - 12x
- Monthly hours per: 10
- Total: 80 - 120
- Designers
- 2x - 4x
- Monthly hours per: 10
- Total: 20 - 40
- Total Role Funding:
- 2000 BANK per hour
- ~ 240 hours per month
- 480,000 BANK per month
- 1,440,000 BANK per quarter
Other quarterly budgeted costs (~ 250K BANK):
- Hosting, wix subscription, etc (50K BANK)
- Paid advertising and marketing budgets (60K BANK)
- R+D (50K BANK)
- Buffer / misc (150K BANK)
RUG SOCIALS
https://twitter.com/therugnews
https://instagram.com/therugnews
“UNDER THE RUG” PODCAST
RUG NFTS
Rug Mag - Issue 01 - To The Moon https://rarible.com/token/0xab7e9a979b34ab96d01f753820f79e5af97c06a0:39991838870821994522241900217603015146272388716746140058719502084104932818945
The Rug OG Web3 Comedy Collection_v1 The Rug | News Catalogue {Vol.1} — The Rug
Rug Issue 0 - The Rug | Issue #0 — The Rug
Rug Issue 1 - The Rug | Issue #1 — The Rug
Rug Issue 2 - The Rug | Issue #2 — The Rug
Rug Issue 3 - The Rug | Issue #3 — The Rug
Rug Issue 4 - The Rug | Issue #4 — The Rug
Rug Issue 5 - The Rug | Issue #5 — The Rug
- Yes
- No
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