Launching a Growth Working Group

Growth Working Group

Lemonade and myself are proposing the creation of a temporary Growth Working Group (GWG), responsible for driving usage of DPI (and any other Index Coop products that may arise). While we propose a temporary working group, we’re in favor of eventually transitioning it into a permanent growth committee.

The GWG will streamline current discussions around growth into a single forum and be responsible for approving, funding, and evaluating growth experiments. The overarching goal of the GWG is to increase AUM by increasing awareness of DPI, driving new customers to DPI, and retaining existing DPI customers.

Context

-The Set team is becoming a blocker for growth and BD initiatives to get done
-We’re currently defaulting to inaction and decision by consensus
-Leaders in the community do not feel enabled
-Need to encourage people taking the initiative and setting up meetings w/o needing the Set Team

Why a temporary committee?

-It lets us move quicker, knowing that nothing here is permanent. It will also make us more informed when we set up a permanent growth committee.
-The structure of the treasury committee, which will ultimately fund the growth committee, is still not finalized and so it seems premature to propose a permanent committee without a defined source of funding.

Details

Proposed budget: $100,000 (~20,000 INDEX)

Proposed timeline:

• First meeting: Jan 5
• Initial grants approved: Jan 12
• Final meeting: April 5

GWG Organization

The GWG will be managed by a council of three members, with one member coming from Set and two from the Index Coop community. The role of council members is to evaluate and prioritize growth experiments over the three months. There will be a council chair, elected by the members, who is responsible for running meetings, but otherwise has no special power.

The GWG will increase AUM by streamlining the process for driving growth initiatives The council will allocate resources to current growth initiatives and solicit new ones from the community.

The council will evaluate all proposals on the following criteria:

• Impact: What scale of impact could this experiment have?
• Confidence: How confident are we that the experiment will be effective?
• Effort: What amount of effort/resources will it take to run this experiment?
• Measurable: Are the impacts of this experiment measurable?

Every proposal must have a DRI (directly responsible individual) who submits it and takes responsibility for its execution. If the committee is not confident that the quarterback can execute the proposed experiment, they should reject it.

Submitting a proposal

Ideas should be submitted to the idea pipeline in the form of a memo which details the idea behind the experiment: hypothesis, resources, time to payoff, how to measure, what part of the funnel will this seek to impact, what level of confidence is there, etc?

Example Memo Template:

• Idea Name: CoinGecko Ads
• Hypothesis: Running ads on Coingecko could generate a high ROI in terms of DPI AUM + volume growth
• Idea Description: Contact Goingecko in order to understand rates for an introductory package. Gather creative, optimize targeting if possible. Run ads for set amount of time (2 weeks?). Gather data, evaluate.
• Metrics to be Measured: CTR (could we set up tracking analytics?), purchase rate, purchase stickiness vs non-ads buyers (longer term analysis), LTV analysis
• Use of funds: $2000 for A/B testing of paid ads, $500 for design help

Growth Dashboard

Memos will be added to a public Kanban board which organizes growth experiments into various phases based on the prioritization from the council including Unreviewed, Backlog, Queue, Experiments, Analysis, Ongoing, and Discarded.

GWG Operations

Every week, the growth council would meet and run through the following process:

Data analysis/Insight Gathering

• Review the past week’s experiments
• How do we impact our growth levers (growth equation)?

Idea Generation

• Solicit new memos on a rolling basis. Growth council reviews and prioritizes from kanban board weekly.

Experiment Prioritization

• The growth council will prioritize experiments based on an ICE Score:
  • Impact: What scale of impact could this experiment have
  • Confidence: How confident are we that the experiment will be effective
  • Effort: What amount of effort/resources will it take to run this experiment

Running Experiments

• Prioritized Experiments moved to queue
• Test Design: 99% confidence level, control always wins

Use of Funds

The committee is funded with the intention of passing those funds along to growth experiments, and so the vast majority of committee funding is set aside for experiments

• Each experiment will have a standard grant size of $2500 to simplify the distribution process. If experiments are showing initial progress and more resources, the committee can allocate up to an additional $7500.

• There is a $1000 reward for each community member that submits a proposal that is chosen. Committee members are not eligible for this reward, but are eligible for GWG grants.

• The committee is able to spend 10% of funds ($10,000) at its discretion to further its stated goals. All disbursements will be covered in the committee’s monthly report to the committee.

Committee members will not be compensated out of this initial grant. We believe that they should be paid out of the monthly rewards distribution.

Transparency Commitment

Each month the treasury will share a report with the community that provides updates including

• Summary of funds spent
• Updates on funded experiments

FAQ

• Will GWG committee members create and lead ideas?

The primary focus of committee members is on delegating and/or working with regular contributors to see the experiments through. However, they are not excluded from ideating/executing ideas.

• Do the leaders of the GWG need to be incentivized with a fixed income?

We believe that the committee members should be paid a fixed income out of the monthly rewards distribution.

• Should the GWG leaders have a role outside of vetting ideas and distributing capital? (I.E. operational, hosting meetings, etc.)

Yes - The GWG leaders are the quarterbacks here and are responsible for holding people to what they commit to.

Next Steps

If the community is supportive of the idea, we’ll solicit candidates from the community and organize voting such that the council will be ready for its first meeting on January 5th.

Vote