[The Rug] Season 7 Funding Proposal

Grants/Funding
1

Project Champions: Frank America#0610, Liquidiot#5975, Perchy#8133
Purpose: For-profit
Affiliation: Writers Guild, AV Guild
Authors: Frank America#0610, Liquidiot#5975, Redemption Fox#3726
Date created: 1/13/2023
Date posted: 1/17/2023
Funds requested: 1,096,500 BANK
Project wallet(s): 0xA4C7Aca8D49226355c5543a28c3DE0573F66494a
Own subDAO/Discord server: The Rug

Table of Contents

  1. PROJECT TEASER
  2. SUMMARY
  3. RETROSPECTIVE
  4. FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
  5. SEASONAL KPI
  6. COMMITMENTS
  7. BRANDING
  8. FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

PROJECT TEASER

The Rug is a crypto comedy journalism outfit shipping the best in satire news related to web3. We’re a media property spun out of BanklessDAO and composed of (mostly) BanklessDAO members. We exist to help the industry not take itself so seriously.

S6 SUMMARY

Season 6 was more positive forward momentum for The Rug becoming a self-sustaining profit engine. We shipped 3+ funny tweets a week, 1 weekly satirical article on Mirror, 1 podcast and 1 newsletter a month, and 2 newspaper-style NFTs this season. Instead of selling our first NFT, we received a beta-launch greenlight from Mirror to offer a time-locked NFT on Ethereum mainchain that required subscribing in order to mint. We saw 189 wallet addresses mint Vol. II Issue #1 of The Rug NFT, and reached a total of 295 Mirror subs as a result, all of whom are now potential customers receiving emails when we publish.

We’ll be launching Vol II Issue #2 of The Rug NFT in January, and will be selling it for .02 ETH with a mint window of 1 week… Our weekly articles on Mirror, also minted on chain via Optimism, netted an additional 188 collected at .002 ETH per article (Currently $2-3), generating an earning of .376 ETH. We’ll distribute 10% of these earnings to BanklessVault.eth at End of S6. We only see our collector’s potential going northward from here.

S6 Stats: [The Rug] S6 Influencer Stats

S6 RETROSPECTIVE

  • Airdropped Lil Ruggy NFT to >250 Vol. 1 NFT Holders
  • Published 12 Hilarious Articles on Mirror
  • 188 NFTs Collected on Mirror via Optimism (Earned .376 ETH)
  • Deployed 6 Newsletters
  • Launched Vol 2 Issue 1 NFT (Netted 256 subscribers on Mirror, now a top-funnel for future NFT collectors) with Volume 2 Issue 2 publishing this month.
  • Recorded 3 ‘Under The Rug’ Podcasts
  • Reached just under 4K followers on Twitter

Past/preparatory activities

At the intersection of comedy and crypto we saw a vacuum. See Frank America’s appearance on the Quorum podcast for a detailed explanation.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Total Estimation for S7: 1,096,500 BANK = 1,316,500 (S7 budget) - 220,000 (carryover)

Project and Compensation Breakdown

See budget link here: [The Rug] S7 Budget

All assignments and payouts are tethered to action items submitted weekly and accounted for through DeWork.

SEASONAL 6 KPIs

  • Ship 12 articles on Mirror (100%)
  • Earned .376 ETH (N/A) - [Will distribute 10% back to BanklessVault.eth end of S6)
  • Reach 5K Twitter Followers (78.46%)

SEASONAL 7 KPIs

  • Earn 1.5 ETH via NFTs (Distribute 10% back to BanklessVault.eth)
  • Reach +300 articles collected on Optimism
  • Surpass 5K Followers on Twitter (Currently ~3,900+)

COMMITMENTS

Our commitment is that we’re building awareness around the cryptocurrency space through comedy and humor as a revenue-seeking entity, a for-profit brand and project spun up out of BanklessDAO that returns profits back to the Treasury. We were self-funded from S1-S4, and still returned 10% of profits on NFT sales back to the Treasury.

BRANDING

The Rug is a media property spun up out of BanklessDAO. An attribution and link to BanklessDAO’s bankless.community page is at the bottom of TheRugNews.com.

FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

For all project links (Newsletter, Mirror, Twitter, etc.):

  • Yes, I support this proposal
  • No, I do not support this proposal

0 voters

2 Likes
2

Humor is alive and well during the bear. Without humor or an attempt at it the bad news as well as the good news is a dark shade of vanilla. With humor, we tend to take ourselves less seriously and add flavor and sparkle to our experiment. This can help attract and retain folks as well as entertain and return profit to our treasury to help extend the runway which seems to be growing shorter. I know humor does not always transfer by culture and not everyone appreciates it but these contributors are doing good work. Let’s support it, laugh our asses off in 2023. It help us loose weight. Ok add weight to the treasury…experiment!

3 Likes
3

I’m for The Rug. I think you are doing something unique and remarkable.

That being said, it feels expensive compared to other projects. Bankless Publishing and Newsletter Team push out a lot more content to much bigger audiences with a similar budget.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the response links!

First, let’s get the audience thing out of the way. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe our Twitter audience is the largest of any project by far and the news and all of the newsletters basically combined to form that one large audience all under the same Substack.

Regardless, I would have to push back on the content for content as I don’t feel it is a fair comparison. Writing is hard. Writing funny day in and day out is extremely hard. We are talking about very different types of writing/content here imo. Also, we (the team) write tons, we just don’t push out a lot (word count) comparatively. We have, however, been putting fresh content 4+ days a week regularly for the last 2 seasons, even though a majority of what we write has not or will never see the light of day. Why? Because it is iterative and part of the process and back to the whole writing comedy is hard thing. Gotta shuck a lot of oysters as we said in the podcast. It is very much a team effort and has that writer’s room feel. Think tip of the iceberg. That being say, we are continually exploring ideas to get more of our content out there and better serve and build our audience.

Last, there is one final bit of food for thought that I want to pose to the forum:

Is it that we are asking for too much, or that other projects are not asking for enough?

Hope this shed some extra light on our end.

Thanks!

2 Likes
5

Could you provide more detail about the “Season 7 Completion Bonus” at 80,000 BANK?

I’m also intrigued by the 40,000 BANK per “NFT”. How is that BANK distributed?

Also fyi most of the column labels still say S6.

Many Thanks

1 Like
6

Thanks for mentioning the column labels. Fixed them.

The 40,000 BANK is per minted NFT with a goal of one per month. It is divided between those who coordinated to ship that particular NFT - designers, writers, editors and the backend work.

The completion bonus is our version of Coordinape, which we tried but were not feeling. It is an incentive. If you are an active contributor and you are completing your tasks week after week and adding value, you are eligible for the bonus at the end of the season. We use Dework and have a pretty detailed record of all tasks.

Hope this helped!

3 Likes
7

Thank you for the lovely clear response :slightly_smiling_face:

8

@Liquidiot is this the correct link? I was looking at it, as it references tlBANK, but it ends in a 404 page. Do you have updated information?

9

Sprinkles. Check out the # of owners on issue #1 in our collection, that will show you the 189 we are talking about: https://opensea.io/collection/the-rug-nft

10

Dang, I only own #2!! I thought I grabbed both! I was just referencing and noticed the link was missing :slight_smile:

11

You are correct. Not sure what happened with the link. Thanks @FrankAmerica for sharing the collection link. Doesn’t seem like I can update it in the proposal.