Index Coop Growth Experimentation Council

This proposal seeks to present a framework for organizing and incentivizing ideation and execution of growth experiments.

The crux would be for Index Coop to elect a growth council for the purpose of streamlining and efficiently selecting and running experiments which seek to affect the growth of Index Coop in one or more of the following ways:

Increase AUM: Acquires new customers, retains and grows engagement for existing
Increase Awareness: Increases brand awareness and improves brand perception

The council could be chosen amongst Set and community members, and their role would be to evaluate and prioritize growth experiments over the next period.

Community members could be incentivized to submit (20% of total bounty if chosen) and execute (80% of total bounty) on the experiments that are prioritized/chosen by the council.

These experiments should typically be smaller in scale so that there is not too much of a sunk cost on any one large program, handicapping our ability to deploy resources towards others. This way the Coop can press on effective experiments and quickly discard ineffective ones.

The process for submitting a proposal is as follows:

Memo:

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

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:

-Unreviewed
-Backlog
-Queue
-Experiments
-Analysis
-Ongoing
-Discarded

Rewards

The growth council could ascribe a reward/bounty value to prioritized experiments, to be paid upon the execution of a given program. They could also spec out and set bounties for ideas generated from within the council itself.

While ideas are excellent, I believe rewarding execution of these ideas is paramount. I would propose an 80/20 split between executors and ideators for a given prioritized proposal.

If 20% is given to the ideator only upon execution of a prioritized proposal, it will incentivize the ideator to seek help with execution or do so themselves.

(split is open to debate, of course)

Growth Council 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

Next Steps:

-@dylan comment on can we fund this?

-Feedback/iteration on proposed composition

-Elect Council

-Set up dashboard

-Push to solicit proposals

In Favor of Council & Experimentation Process
  • YES
  • NO

0 voters

1 Like

Sounds interesting! Let’s see how the community votes here.
The Treasury Committee is here to serve the interests of the Coop so allocating funds to trial this seems reasonable.

4 Likes

Love the idea of a growth process. Brings to mind Brian Balfour’s The First Step To Building A Growth Machine :raised_hands:

A mere thought as I read this quickly: I wonder if the Coop already has enough pieces in place to test this and get it rolling.

Seems like putting in place the infrastructure (memo, dashboard, kanban, etc…) and using the Bounties Program & Rewards Program might work.

1 Like

Great stuff, although I’d nitpick on the implementation.

I think that there should just be a growth council that has the authority to do this (in addition to conducting larger experiments), rather than a distinct council for this

2 Likes

Agreed, part of the motivation of this proposal is to give more agency and ability to move swiftly to whomever this council is, so that tracks.

Yea, this could absolutely draw on much of the growth infra already built

could be useful reference ^ @LemonadeAlpha and @reganbozman for the broader conversation happening around this