Summary
Renew GWG Budget for additional 90 day period.
Background
In January the first GWG proposal was approved (Inverse Finance - Proposal Details) , allowing for a 90 day experiment in building the business development and marketing infrastructure necessary to assist Inverse in reaching our 2022 goal of 1 billion in DOLA circulation. Funding for this first phase of the GWG is nearly exhausted and the budget needs to be renewed now.
GWG Team Results for Q1 2022
- Led product planning, launch plan, and mktg launch execution of Inverse Plus, a flagship program for expanding available DOLA liquidity in the marketplace. Developed product roadmap, ran due diligence on new product concepts. Led process for adding new assets to Anchor.
- Drove listing of INV on Coinbase (our highest volume exchange today), Huobi, and Coinex, leading to ongoing discussions with other leading CEX’s, and two leading market makers. Secured new or updated INV and DOLA listings on Coingecko, Coinmarketcap.
- Launched new DOLA lending markets on Rari Fuse with Badger, 0xB1, and Harvest Finance. Met with dozens of other projects including notable ongoing collaborations with Concave, as well as continued L1 expansion/liquidity conversations with FTM Foundation and Avalanche.
- Closed the first DAO treasury diversification deal for DOLA (Floki), explored/exploring new D2D lending product concepts that are likely to expand DOLA as a must-have treasury stable in 2022.
- Developed marketing strategy for Inverse Plus launch including creation of new DeFi category “Positive Sum DeFi”, retained and managing outside agency for revised Inverse brand strategy/narrative/guide, ran DOLA logo contest,
- Launched Inverse impression mining program, began to formalize Inverse’s Twitter presence, launched first Twitter spaces event, continued management of Inverse Telegram presence,
- Recently launched Inverse content development program, published numerous Medium posts in support of product and partner launches, began build out of Inverse YouTube presence, managed cre8tor DAO for Inverse Plus launch, began outreach for new language ops to expand content development, continued publishing Inverse Starship newsletter.
- Implemented Jira project tracking, monthly contributor rewards processing,
- Recruited new contributors to the GWG, held regular community calls,
GWG contributors deserving of recognition for hard work, perseverance, and an awesome team spirit in Q1: @karm, @nakamomo, @akarin, @99donuts.
Our success in driving new lending via partners is still in its early stages, with good progress in Fuse Pool 6 and Scream and new wins with Fuse Pools 22, 127, and 24. Our pipeline of new lending deals is healthy but some are awaiting removal of blockers like a Chainlink feed for DOLA or sufficient DOLA available to deploy for lending markets with large minimum liquidity injection requirements. Our collaboration with Concave just launched but shows promise not only in seeing the first partner-driven DOLA bonds but in beta testing new Inverse products as well as creating a new lending market.
Our marketing effort in Q1 made huge strides from a near-nonexistent team to a growing group of part-time contributors who are now being joined by others. Our Inverse Plus launch was accelerated by three weeks but we still managed to support it with output from a one-month collaboration with Cre8tor DAO as well as using internal resources. We engaged an outside agency to assist us with certain brand strategy and narrative challenges and expect that work to be complete by mid-April.
Note that the GWG budget in Q1 was used for a number of non-GWG purposes. Out of a total budget of $150,000 (which also included $10,000 to cover expenses from Nov/Dec 2022), over $57,000 was used to pay contributors in Treasury, Risk, Analytics, Operations areas of the DAO that required payment and for which there was no easy payment vehicle. With an ending balance (unspent authorization) of $17,870, expenses in Q1 for actual GWG activities were $74,181 or just under $25,000 per month.
Proposal
I propose we extend the Growth Working Group’s charter for an additional 90 days with several noteworthy changes.
Team Members
Business Development
First, bring on two part-time/ad hoc BD resources. One is planned to lead efforts in an emerging DAO-to-DAO lending/treasury diversification initiative including payroll. A second resource will focus on new lending facilities for institutional lenders (e.g. Maple) but likely to include studying and qualifying other opportunities.
Marketing
Second, add new marketing resources to drive greater awareness of the DOLA and INV brands and also to assist us in taking advantage of a growing list of partner marketing resources and events.
One part of this effort will be to expand and optimize Inverse’s written content capabilities including growing our roster of written content contributors but also managing and migrating our existing blog on Medium to one that resides on inverse.finance in order to optimize for SEO, etc. Our written content is often the basis for other marketing deliverables (e.g. videos, twitter threads) and … we must do better starting with a part-time content operations lead.
Also - bring on a part-time marketing manager. This is needed for two reasons 1) to take advantage of the many partner marketing activities that are offered to us or that we can create with partners and 2) to better-manage Inverse’s social media presence. Social media, particularly Twitter, is a low cost means for expanding DOLA and Inverse awareness and new developments like our entrance into the Curve wars provide us with new opportunities to improve our results with social media. This resource will lead our impression mining program.
Design
The design function today is primarily in support of marketing and business development, therefore I propose continued GWG management of this function this until a dedicated design working group is formed. Our design needs for Q2 will span two distinct areas: marketing support and website design. Regarding the latter, we are overdue for a homepage redesign (originally intended to be part of the INV+ launch) but also overdue for a copy refresh. Our work with Tmasterflex is providing us with better narrative/storytelling in support of our website (and other) copy and the existing copy is growing stale.
Budget
I propose an authorization of 114,000 DOLA for the non-payroll portion of this proposal for the time period of April-June 2022. The 17,870 leftover from Q1 remains in the DAO treasury. Payroll compensation for new team members (not ad hoc) will be handled on a case-by-case basis and approved via governance or the TWG.
Specific non-payroll budget items are outlined here:
| Item | Description | April | May | June | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Development | |||||
| Deal Bounties/Ad Hoc Rewards/Protocol Ambassador Bounties | One-time bounties for especially significant deals that a protocol ambassador or other INV DAO member helps us identify and, in some cases, help us close | 5,000 | 5,000 | 5,000 | 15,000 |
| Marketing | |||||
| Brand Consulting | Narrative/brand work (Q1 deliverable to be paid) | 15,000 | 0 | 0 | 15,000 |
| Written Content Ad Hoc Rewards | Ad hoc rewards for written content including blog posts, twitter threads, newsletters, etc. | 2,500 | 7,500 | 10,000 | 20,000 |
| Foreign Language Written Content Ad Hoc Rewards | Test of language ops - Chinese, French written & video content | 1,000 | 2,000 | 3,000 | 6,000 |
| Design & Multimedia Content Ad Hoc Rewards | Animation, Video, Infographics, Other Graphics, POAP designs | 5,000 | 5,000 | 7,500 | 17,500 |
| Web design | Landing page redesign, other UI/UX consulting. | 10,000 | 10,000 | ||
| Impression Mining Rewards | Twitter, YouTube impression mining bounties | 1,000 | 7,500 | 10,000 | 18,500 |
| GWG Project Mgmt | Part-time resource to manage GWG syncs & Jira tasks | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 3,000 |
| Miscellaneous | Content Mgmt System, Jira, Discourse, Hype Fury Social Media Mgmt, Seshbot, Contest Awards, partner merch gifts, gas fees | 3,000 | 3,000 | 3,000 | 9,000 |
| Total (DOLA) | 114,000 |
Since the GWG budget requests a budget authorization that is then subject to a multisig requesting allocations on (usually) a monthly basis from that authorization, funds authorized but unused at the end of the period remain in the Treasury, as occurred with the first quarterly GWG budget.
This budget represents continued experimentation in building awareness and trial for Inverse and DOLA. In light of the recent price manipulation incident it is very important for Inverse to accelerate its awareness raising efforts if we are to reach 1 billion in DOLA circulation in 2022.
Organization
The GWG will be led by @patb (me) and should ideally include at least one additional co- leader. Participants in the GWG will have opportunities to propose new GWG projects and experiments, which the GWG can discuss and if necessary conduct internal votes before proceeding. For “major” projects a proposal can be vetted within the GWG and then moved up to a vote by the full DAO.