July 14, 2021 - What does WINNING look like?

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Where we are

The past three month have seen incredible growth within Index Coop.

  • We launched two major products with instant market fit (@punia, @DarkForestCapital , @verto0912 )

  • We approved major working groups and formalized central aspects of the community (@LemonadeAlpha )

  • Significant progress has been made on exchange listings and legal opinions (@reganbozman )

  • We continue to attract major talent to every single part of our organization

  • Investor relations has begun major outreach efforts to investors (@Metfanmike , @fallow8 )

  • We are close to announcing several major partnerships (@Mringz )

  • Our Data and Analytics team is setting the bar within DeFi (@jdcook )

  • Our design team continues to improve our brand (@0x_Dev )

At the end of periods of tremendous growth, it is good to reflect on what has been accomplished. This last quarter from January to March will go down as the period when Index Coop first came together as a strong community and made major enterprise level strides.

The accomplishments listed above would not have been possible in November or December of last year. At that time we did not have a single funded working group, there were only three golden owls, and no full-time contributors. We have come a long way.

If you are reading this you likely played a major role in many of these accomplishments. We should feel very proud of the past three months.

The next question is…

What does winning look like three months from now?

We are at the end of the first quarter. This is a good time to look forward and lay out what we want to accomplish next. The next quarter ends around July 14th. When we get to July 14th, 2021 - where do we want to be and what does winning to look like?

Here are some ideas and goals that we can shoot for . These goals are suggestions, not hard guidance. This list is far from exhaustive, and I know everyone is far more in the weeds on their projects and working groups than me. Please add more and tell me what goals are most important to you!

These are the most ambitious goals I could think of. We may not reach all of them. However, we have one of the most talented and driven communities in DeFI and every single one of these goals is well within reach.

Product

  • Reach $300 Index Coop AUM

    • This is roughly 2x our current AUM. I believe this number is well within reach.

  • Reach $100 million $DPI liquidity

  • Reach $50 million $MVI liquidity

  • Launch two new Exchange Traded Products

    • Our ETP business (lead by $FLI) is a huge revenue generator
    • We need to be aggressive when it comes to releasing more of these products

  • Launch two new major indices

  • Incorporate intrinsic productivity into our indices

    • This has been a major theme over the past 6 months
    • If we do not make serious progress on this we will be left behind

Community

  • Reach 15 Golden Owls

    • We need more dedicated contributors to lead major projects
    • We also need to be selective and ensure that the best talent is given the most responsibility

  • Reach 25 Silver Owls

    • I view the Silver Owl community as the building block for the Coop
    • The stronger this community is the stronger we are

  • Create a process for on-boaridng new community members

    • We desperately need to improve how we on-board new community members and get them contributing to the Coop

  • Select a community manager to manage our discord and help guide new members

    • This relates to the above point - if you think you can do this role please reach out!

  • Recruit leading engineering talent

    • This effort needs to happen hand in hand with Set and with our investors
    • If we cannot recruit the best engineering talent our major projects will stall

Brand

  • Launch a new website

    • This needs to happen
    • The major blocker is lack of clear mandate and uncertainty around who will lead the re-design

  • Completed a major re-brand

    • This has been much spoken about, and I am excited to see what we come up with

  • Establish a regular creation / posting schedule for Index Coop related media

    • [Lemonade Alpha] has made major strides here and has almost singlehandedly driven a massive amount of content.

  • We need more people to step up and help drive our content production forward.

  • We need to augment the efforts already underway and significantly increase the amount of content we produce

  • 4x our Twitter account to 40k followers

  • Establish major presences on other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram

Investor Relations

  • Complete a major (>$5 million ) $DPI sale

    • This is well within reach and we are already very close to executing multiple deals of this size

  • Establish a reliable process for on-boarding new investors (esp with custody)

  • Identify and build a relationship with a major custodian

Exchange Listings

  • Complete listing on KuCoin

  • Get listed on a major Tier-1 exchange (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken)

    • We need to establish a partnership with a major exchange and streamline our process for launching our products on those exchanges

DeFi Partnerships

  • $DPI is listed as collateral on AAVE / Maker / Compound / Rune

  • Execute a major partnership leading to >$50 million TVL

I hope these goals can inspire you like they inspire me. I’m sure we will accomplish all of these and more. If you are new to the Coop and reading this for the first time - one of these goals might interest you. I promise you that someone is working hard on it and could use your help. We are only as good as our community members.

I am deeply committed to the goals listed in Investor Relations, Exchange Listings, and DeFi Partnerships. I will also do whatever it takes to help us reach $300 million AUM.

Our DAO continually levels up and progresses - we at the verge of another major level up. The next three months will see us reach levels that we could not have imagined in November or December.

Please share what you want to accomplish, what resonates with you, and where you want us to be over the next three months. And lets work together to make it happen!

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This is a great post, @BigSky7 - really important to take a step back and think about high-level goals for Index Coop. I think we should consider taking this a step farther and formalizing “long-term” goals/accountability into our organization.

We touched on this on today’s org call, but Index Coop does a very good job in terms of weekly context sharing with our weekly planning call. Working groups and other project teams have a good sense of their immediate goals and tasks and make good progress in addressing those. However, just as a result of being a decentralized organization, I think there is a bit of a gap in the Coop as to thinking about long term, Index Coop-wide goals (which you’ve been really good about addressing with this post and the points you’ve been bringing up on the community calls).

In line with what you’ve put together here, I think there is an opportunity to collect our biggest quarterly goals (each WG and other project lead addressing their top 1-3 issues and the Community thinking about cross-WG issues like the ones you’ve listed and any others), putting that on one spreadsheet or Notion board, and then at the end of the quarter we update those goals for the next quarter and dedicate one Org call session to review what progress we’ve made against those goals over the past quarter for accountability purposes.

By “cross-WG” issues, I’m thinking about things like our organizational structure / how we make decisions and vote / how we think about new products we onboard / retaining talent, etc.

I think this would help ensure that in addition to moving forward each of Index Coop’s individual pieces (e.g., BD, Treasury, specific new products, etc.), we make sure we are advancing our organization as a whole against our strategic goals.

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Amazing post Simon. We definitely need this and I believe we should summarize these goals and present them in the Org call. As a community I believe we should agree and commitment to working collectively to try and achieve these goals.

I agree with @cedrick I do believe we need to start having a working group or bi-weekly meeting that organizes around our group level strategy. Getting all the core-contributors and working group leaders to agree on the direction we should take as a DAO to set and achieve short, medium and long-term goals.

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Thanks @BigSky7 , it’s great to present things like this. The last three months have not just shown great results but also the great potential here in the Coop. Potential that, from what I can see, and from the people I meet, is building solidly - a fabulous reflection on the community already.

I’ll be working to expand the Coop’s reach, the distribution of it’s products, and enable people the best I can toward another incredible three months.

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Superb post @BigSky7. Highlights perfectly both the amazing achievements of everyone involved so far & the expanse of future opportunities and potential too. I’ll be working to expand the product visibility and awareness in Asia by creating content, building relevant relationships in region & playing an active role in the community. I look forward to us achieving 300m AUM & subsequently setting ourselves even greater goals.

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I really like this idea! Traditional companies do quarterly earnings calls - we have the opportunity to do something similar but significantly more interactive and dynamic. We need to start doing a better job of saying no to ideas and structuring our work around a few key strategic themes. This approach would be very helpful.

On my end I owe a BD strategy post by the end of next week which I think will be helpful in setting context.

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