Proposing a Growth Working Group (Pt. II)

Proposal: Growth Working Group II

Situation

I, Lemonade, along with @reganbozman, am proposing the funding of Growth Working Group II for 3 months, ending on June 15th, 2021.

What is the core problem(s) you want to solve?

GWG I was formed to address inefficiencies in small project funding for growth initiatives. While successes were had in the first iteration, we have identified a number of opportunities for improvement.

The core problem we want to tackle now is: the Coop is not guided by a holistic growth strategy

GWG I

What happened:
-Unincentivized AUM from $9m to $90m
-PoolTogether Program
-Analytics Infra
-Loopring Liquidity Mining
-Research/Content Arm
-AMAs with Exchanges
-Paid programs in motion
-User survey funded
-Bitmart listing

What we liked:
-Bias towards action, quick allocation of funds
-Attempts at reporting transparency
-Venue to get involved
-Growth of unincentivized AUM & supply was strong

What we didn’t like or could do better:
-Too focused on experiment solicitation, not holistically owning growth strategy
-Focused too much on top level metric out of our control (AUM > Impressions)
-Memo solicitation wrong model > needs to skew more top down
-Splitting payments w/ treasury
-More substantial updates from us

Why is this worth addressing today?

Growth is necessary for survival and success of the Coop. Growth means we are successfully continuing our mission of evangelizing and making our products available to customers who can benefit from them.

Without a clear growth strategy, it makes it hard to know what efforts to focus on.

How will you address it?

The GWG’s overarching goal will be:

• Executing the following growth strategy to guide the Coop through at least the end of Q2-21
  • Distilling our core value into the right message
  • Prioritizing channels to meet our customers where they congregate (en masse)
  • Making our products widely available when customers decide to buy
  • Maximizing productive opportunities to assist with retention

Activities the GWG will oversee:

• Product Launch marketing
• Awareness/Acquisition (Impressions):
  • Paid/Sponsorship
  • Content
  • Social
  • Viral (Referral, etc)
• Activation (Conversions)
• Exchange Listings // Wallet Integrations
• DeFi Partnerships

What impact will this project have?

• Impressions (across Twitter, Content, Paid/Sponsorship)
• Unincentivized Supply Growth // Unincentivized AUM
• Exchange Listings
• Productive Integrations
• Secondary KPIs:
  • CAC/LTV
  • Supply locked in secondary (non-LM) contracts
  • DEX Liquidity
  • CEX Availability
  • Retention
  • Unit Retention
  • Holders
  • Avg Holdings

Working Group Leader(s)

• Lemonade (Peter): @lemonadealpha
• Regan Bozman: @reganbozman

Request for funding

Proposed Budget:

$450k over 3 mos + $6,000/mo per Leader

Use of Funds:

Funds will be allocated toward contributor stipends and both known and unknown programs.

Estimates:

-Contributor Stipends ($100-150k)
-Contributor ad hoc rewards
-Zerion Partnership ($100k)
-Referral Program ($35k)
-Ad Programs ($60-90k)
-Impression Mining ($20-50k)
-PoolTogether ($25k)
-Exchange Listings ($100k)

Organization - How will it work?

The GWG will be managed by a council of four members, with two members coming from Set, and two from the Index Coop community. The role of council members is to prioritize and execute against growth programs which are sourced from members within.

The GWG leaders will have leeway to assign stipends for regular contributors—both full-time and part time—and will have discretionary funds to reward and incentivize activities (I.e. impression mining).

The GWG will continue to use an experiment-based approach with a key difference being that the generation of ideas will be sourced from regular contributors and leaders themselves. With GWG II, there will be little to no reward for idea submissions. Instead, the operating structure will have a heavy focus on rewarding execution of the prioritized initiatives.

GWG Leaders will meet weekly to discuss the progress of initiatives and strategize on how to allocate funds to best serve growth functions. New experiments will be sourced from each leader from conversations around the coop and individual brainstorming.

How will you interface with the community?

Weekly Reports. GWG will generate a weekly update on their progress and publish to the Index Coop governance forum. Reports will include:

• High Level Metrics per product (w/ trends): TVL, uTVL, Holder Count, Impressions
• New initiatives
• New Content Pieces
• GWG Financial position

Commitments

I am committed to Index Coop principles 4

I am committed to serving the entire Index Coop with my work.

I am committed to open, rapid communication: I know that clear, constant, public communication lifts up the entire Index Coop community. I am committed to this style of communication.

Shared learnings: I will share my progress, learnings with the entire community. I will ensure that anything I create is accessible beyond my own tenure for future generations of Indexers to access & build on.

Intellectual honesty: I am committed to growth and improvement. I am open to feedback and will use feedback to improve my work for the benefit of the entire Coop community.

I am committed to making Index Coop a welcoming, fun, and engaging community to work in!