**POLL CLOSED** Proposal: Growth and Marketing Working Group IV

Governance Proposal
1

Title: Proposing a Growth & Marketing Working Group IV (GMWG4)
Status: Proposed
Authors: @MrMadila, @Caf
Review and Input: @LemonadeAlpha, GWG3 Gang

Situation
We are proposing the fourth iteration and Q4 + ‘22 Q1 funding for the Growth & Marketing Working Group (GMWG) starting from the 1st Oct 2021 to March 31st 2022 with a commitment to a midterm review in early Jan 2022. Marketing has been added to bring some definition to a previously broad and general term.

Previous iteration proposals:
GWG1
GWG2
GWG3
Q3 updates

Core problems GMWG4 aims to solve and opportunities to harness
Ethereum has 1.6m Twitter followers, Uniswap 600k followers, Aave 300k.
Total Uniswap users to date = 2.7m, Aave = 76k.
IC has 28k followers and 25k users.

This demonstrates there are a lot of crypto and defi native users out there who potentially do not know about us, trust, or use our products. GMWG seeks to change this and drive organic adoption.

GMWG4 will exist to continue efforts in increasing our brand awareness through various marketing and content strategies. We will also continue to research and experiment with other more general growth initiatives. The ultimate goal of course is for more users to buy, hold and trade more of our products.

GMWG believes this is worth addressing today because:
Increasing our brand awareness, demonstrating our product value, continuous market engagement and education is key to increasing adoption, growing and maintaining market share and leading to maximum revenue.

GMWG will address this by:

  • Continued output and sponsorship of high quality, professional, engaging content
  • Deploying strategies to ensure our content is reaching our target audience
  • Tracking and optimizing conversions where possible
  • Experimenting, exploring, collaborating and sharing ideas with other WG’s

GMWG will continue to operate under the AAARRR principles:

  • Awareness: Maximise our brand visibility (Impression mining, paid ads, content, and events)
  • Acquisition: Optimize for maximum engagement (SEO, campaigns, competitions, analysing data)
  • Activation: Invigorate and energise users to make purchases (Effectively communicate our product value through high quality, consistent content, make purchasing as easy and efficient as possible)
  • Retention: Ensure users are fully satisfied with our products and services (Research and engage with users via interviews and surveys etc.)
  • Revenue: Capitalise on all potential revenue streams (Ensure products have appropriate fees and explore new, alternative and/or novel sources of income)
  • Referrals: Motivate our users to become brand ambassadors (Incentivise, create, and promote ways and venues for them to tell their story)

Impact of GMWG
KPI’s

  • Awareness:
    • Inputs:
      • Min. 2-3 Tweets pd from official account
      • 2 Editorial pieces pw
      • 1,000 New email addresses by end of q4
    • Desired Outputs:
      • Target 5m total impressions pm
      • Average 4-500 views per article @ 50 read rate
      • 2.5k Email conversations pq.
  • Acquisition:
    • Inputs:
      • Drive readers to our site (pending new site)
      • 1 tweet per week to incentivise following IC account.
    • Desired Outputs:
      • Average 10% increase in web hits and followers of official IC social media channels pm
  • Activation:
    • Inputs:
      • Promote distribution channels (Pending fiat to L2 ramps :eyes:, etc)
    • Desired Outputs:
      • Average 10% increase in N$Fpm, 20% increase in wallet address exposure over q4
  • Retention:
    • Inputs:
      • 1 mass market survey per product in Q4
      • 2 Whale interviews per month
    • Desired Outputs:
      • Maintain positive net cumulative N$F and wallet addresses
      • Research gross 100% redemption rate in order to understand users leaving
  • Revenue:
    • Inputs:
      • TBD
    • Desired Outputs:
      • TBD
  • Referrals:
    • Inputs:
      • 1 Article pm publishing users stories
      • 1 Twitter competition per month asking followers to share why they love our products
    • Desired Outputs:
      • 4-500 views @ 50% read rate
      • 100 Quote tweets per campaign

Roll call:

  • Lead Coordinator: @ MrMadila

    • Experience and skills:
      • 2007-08 GFC battle-hardened, 10-year tradfi survivor turned mutineer. Top tier investment bank, world’s largest custodian bank, 5 years at UK top 5 asset manager.
      • 7 - 8 Months “gold owl” level contributor
      • Original DPI documentor and related prominent social media accounts
      • 3 months co-leading GWG3
      • Spreadsheet monkey
    • Responsibilities:
      • Overall communications, coordination, support, strategy and data analysis
      • Community <> GMWG interface
      • Weekly WG calls
      • GMWG budget and financial management

  • Co-Lead: @ caf (75% time commitment)

    • Experience and skills:
      • Entrepreneur, start-up founder
      • Leading Augmented Reality Metaverse NFT project “PAC”
      • Sickest graphics in defi!
    • Responsibilities:
      • General support
      • Overseeing social media strategies and coordination
      • PR, press relations and events coordination

Core Contributors

  • @ lemonadealpha: IC & GWG OG, mentor and vision extraordinaire
  • @ doc: qualitative user insight and marketing campaign manager pro
  • @Static121 : design guru and social media expert
  • @0x_Dev : IC OG, CDWG lead, grandmaster sage of all things marketing, content and media strategies

Distinguished Contributors

  • @marshmellow : Medium-long form content specialist
  • @morgan: SEO wizard
  • @Alks4778 : Q3 star intern, social media trend + influencer analysis
  • @NFTZach : Impression mining processor, up and coming social accounts manager sensation
  • @TheYoungCrews : Incoming social media influencer/networking mastermind

Request for funding
Proposed Budget:

1888×1026 156 KB

  • GWG Msig. currently holds ~$240k, we therefore request only $21k for Q4 for costs*. (Equivalent at time of writing)*

*Edit as of Oct 11th: Minor correction due to error, see today’s response to Elliot for further details

Marketing vs Revenue
To put IC’s spend on marketing into some perspective:
Sources: sec.gov S-1’s

FinTech/ Crypto Start Up 1st Year Marketing / Sales 1st Year Revenue Ratio
Robinhood -125k 278k 0.45
Coinbase -24k 534k 0.05
Square (2012) -57k 203k 0.28
Lemonade (2018) -42m 22.5m 1.87
Monzo (2020) -16.8m (£) 35m (£) 0.48
Index Coop (to date) -0.56m (net) 1.65m 0.34

As we can see whilst we aren’t quite on Coinbase’s level (yet :eyes:) but we are coming in under many fintech startups marketing and sales budgets against revenue. It should be noted that in some cases above, salaries do not appear to be part of the marketing spend equation whereas the IC example includes some previous compensation for GWG contributors potentially lowering the ratio further.

Organization

GMWG operates using the following sub-verticals as seen in our notion board

  • Data: Analysis of all data. Impressions, engagement, N$F etc
  • Strategy: Campaigns, partnerships etc
  • Microcontent: Twitter etc
  • Product marketing: Qualitative user analysis
  • Content: Blogs, articles and SEO optimization
  • Conversions: Landing pages, SEO best practices,
  • Paid: Paid adverts (coingecko etc)
  • Press / PR / Earned: featured articles in media outlets etc

Interfacing with the community

  • Weekly Stand-up - Weekly open calls with slides providing high-level overview of GMWG activities.
  • GMWG Bi/Weekly Meetings - bi/weekly open meetings presenting GMWG activities in greater detail
  • GMWG Internal Weekly Calls - weekly planning and action calls with GMWG vertices
  • Growth and Social Media Discord: General communication channels
  • GMWG Notion Board: Open to all notion boards and trackers.
  • DM’s: All GMWG co-ordinators and contributors are available across discord

Commitments

We are committed to Index Coop principles

We are committed to serving the entire Index Coop with our work.

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

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

Intellectual honesty: We are committed to growth and improvement. We are open to feedback and will use feedback to improve our work for the benefit of the entire Coop community.

We are committed to making Index Coop a welcoming, fun, and engaging community to work in![poll type=regular results=always chartType=bar]

Approve Remit and Fund GMWG4
  • FOR - LG!
  • AGAINST - (Please provide feedback if possible)

0 voters

15 Likes
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As an involved Owl I am biased, but I am FOR this, and very interested to learn the market and sales investment vs revenue benchmarks - they make positive reading especially as we load our costs (more) fairly. Lemonade is an amazing business - see recents blogs on growth and costs - and had a worse ratio than us in Yr 1.

Thanks @LemonadeAlpha for driving us to here - @MrMadila I’m so excited to see where the WG goes from here.

:rocket:

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Is it worth doing market research to better understand what index products our customers want? I see a real risk that we build products that don’t maximize revenue, or worse, lack product-market fit. For example, do our retail customers want crypto-equivalents of TradFi index funds like total market indices and target date retirement funds? I imagine a ‘market needs assessment’ could be segmented by treasuries, institutions, and retails customers or however else we define our customer segments. I’d also be very interested to know if our management fees are set correctly. I have a sense we could be charging higher fees although I appreciate it’s product specific. I’m writing this as a methodologist who want to make sure we’re seizing the full opportunity in front of us and also using our limited engineering resources wisely.

6 Likes
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Appreciate, your comments.

Our product marketing function has been doing qualitative customer research via interviews and surveys and we are trying to bring that into the product discovery process - for example, our most recent survey indicated an NFT index was the most requested product.

I agree with the sentiment that the current and past product roadmap hasn’t been optimized around customer feedback.

Your point on fees is well taken as one of the key insights from the research is that our customers are fee insensitive - I believe we are thoroughly under-charging and I will continue to be an advocate for higher fees from the jump and lowering them if need be.

10 Likes
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GWGIV!! Hh!! Loving the pivot… and congrats to @caf for Co Lead… super stocked to see the two super stars (originally from DWG) now becoming Co Lead…

That actually reminds me… @0x_Dev you’ve actually churn out/groomed/incubated quite a few WGLs. Lol. @Static121 and Alica to name a few. Damnn!!

Could we see more stepping up in 2022… we shall see!! Hehe

Anyways I do have one question for @MrMadila. In regards to WGL stipends; how is the calculation split between yourself and Alica. Would love you’re insight on this.

Otherwise… super stocked for GWGIV and looking forward to how APWG can synergies with you guys in the quarters to come.

Hoot hoot.

3 Likes
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That’s great. Can you post a link to the survey results?

7

Thanks, @pujimak_in, good question that I should have detailed above. Lead & Co-lead in my eyes are typically the same rate. As @caf has other projects and also contributes towards DWG her time will be split and therefore we pro-rota’d the rate down by 25% to reflect this.

@JosephKnecht
Just to add to @LemonadeAlpha’s point, yes. This is something we will be concentrating much more on and feeding back to PWG. It should also be noted that BD and IBDWG will also be gathering this feedback.

4 Likes
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@MrMadila - to confirm, the “poll added” is the final poll per IIP-85, correct?

1 Like
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Brief table setting

  • I’m putting on my “Funding Council” hat to pose questions (See Q4 Working Group Guidance to learn more about Working Group proposals)
  • My intent is to ask the questions that ping in my mind with the hope that they help the entire Coop better understand the proposal and thinking behind it.
  • Questions are pretty much posed in the order the topic appears in the post.
  • If a question doesn’t make sense or is entirely off-base, do call it out :slightly_smiling_face:

As with others, continuing to note b/c it is a new thing based on comments/feedback here.

What sorts of content (whether via twitter or editorial) are you seeing perform best?

This caught my eye because its a new initiative.

How does the GWG expect to use that mailing list?

At a high level, how will having a new website change how growth/marketing operates? Will that have a meaningful impact?

[To clarify, I am not asking whether a new website is important/useful etc… I am curious how that impacts growth/marketing efforts.]

What is “N$F”?

On Paid Ads

How are these performing? Has any platform (i think there have been ads on Coingecko, Defiant…) proven to be more/most effective?

To confirm basic math and alignment…

My understanding then is the total request to cover both Q4-2021 & Q1-2022 is $450,975 (21,000 + 429,975) and that is all in INDEX (vs. USDC).

Am i getting that right?

[finally, as a note, it appears that $72,000 of the “costs” per month (all but paid ads) are contingent]

1 Like
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Hi Joseph, it’s DocHabanero - here’s a link to the survey results. This survey is roughly two months old now.

4 Likes
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Voted FOR! Excited to see our OG WG moving forward with a new set-up. Congrats to @MrMadila and @caf for taking over the lead and thank you tons @LemonadeAlpha for leading this amazing group for the past 9 months!

My only question on the budget is regarding what seems to be the biggest single spending (impression mining). Apologies if this has been asked before, but is this data public, like who gets how much in return for impressions? And is the budget based on previous spending, or does it include potentially rewarding “bigger influencers” as indicated in the awesome “Going (relatively) Viral” masterclass?

4 Likes
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Thanks @Lavi. The impression mining program is probably one of IC’s only 1:1 contingency programs. Our stretch target is for 5m impressions per month. @ $8 per 1,000 therefore the max spend would be $40k. We have been averaging ~2m impressions in Q3 so as you can see it is unlikely we would spend the full amount for some time yet.

As for “big influences” the impression mining program is open to all but so far big influences have not used it in the name of keeping their content “organic”. That said we are following up on this strategy and will likely tailor a different program. We are currently testing the waters here with small scale influencers.

The intention for unspent impression mining funds will be to roll them into future budgets or use them intra quarter for new initiatives where appropriate.

4 Likes
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^Good question. We have seen increasing engagement on tweets with the recent professionalisation of graphics in Q3. We have been working with a marketing data specialist in q3 and the results have just come in showing correlation and coefficients between product-specific Twitter account impressions (DocDPI etc), medium blogs and web hits co-inside with increases in unit supply. These results are preliminary and still being digested. There will be a much fuller breakdown coming in q4.

Emails:
This is not 100% a new initiative as our substack collects email addresses. Again we have plans to collect emails via landing pages etc when we have the new website. The use of email seems to vary widely (EU regs. is very tight on personal data etc. whereas the US is freer from what I understand). The use of email will be for things like newsletters and promoting our native blogs and content, further driving acquisition and conversion.

^We certainly hope so! A new much more professional website will allow us to track user behaviour and fine-tune the customer journey to optimise conversions. It will also allow us to host our own content that will then drive SEO traffic to our site. (SEO traffic is a major driver of acquisition.)

N$F stands for Net Dollar Flows. This is a new demand-side metric we have been using in q3 to determine the $ value of products sold over time. TVL does not allow this as it is subject to the price movements of the market. More info can be found on dune here

^Defer to @LemonadeAlpha.

^Correct.
*On the subject of USDC… I strongly, strongly urge all contributors and WGL’s to exercise restraint and avoid tapping the treasury for USDC as these are our RESERVE assets designed to be held to protect and sustain us through a downturn. We should be utilising our INDEX spending power as much as possible during the good times!

^Correct. I think the prudent thing to do here is again to roll any unspent allocations into the q1 budget at the midterm review.

3 Likes
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GWG team - great work to date and love what you are doing for the Coop! Thanks @LemonadeAlpha for running the group for the past 9 months and I look forward to seeing what @MrMadila and @caf can do to level up our growth initiatives.

Table setting

The below comments are purely from a financial perspective to seek clarity and understanding for myself and the wider community;

  • I am putting on my “Accountability” hat to pose the below questions
  • My intent is to post questions from a financial perspective to seek clarity behind the proposal
  • If any question or challenge seems unfair or off-base then please let me know.
  • Questions are posed in the order of the topic in the post

Without further ado

I love a good Revenue metric, when do you plan to have some KPI’s in relation to revenue growth?

Sticking with the theme of KPI’s I would love to see some regular posts/calls where we take a deep dive into the success’ and improvements to help reach our targets. A monthly one-pager would be great for this. It will also create sharable content to champion our growth success stories.

Cost analysis

In terms of lead and Co-lead stipends due to the combination of $Index and USDC stipends please can you specifically call out for yourself and @caf the amounts due to each individual in $Index and USDC per month - this will help for contributor rewards breakdowns going forward.

I have detailed below the budget vs actual review for Q3 GWG (One point to note is that September actuals for contributor spend are a duplicate of August since these rewards have not yet been finalized)

Key points

  • Total contributor rewards budgeted for Q3 was $166.5k with an actual spend of $131.6k. When reviewing your screenshot of costs I think there is a formula error and total $ Value of contributor rewards per Q including WGL and fixed stipends should be $187.35k, there is a casting error (and yes I am sat here like a classic accountant with my calculator out manually adding it up :sweat_smile:) So my question…what is the additional $55.8k of contributor spend ($187.35k less actual spend last Q $131.6k) going to be used for? Are we expecting a significant increase in headcount within GMWG?

  • There is $33k of expected costs for specialist contractors. What do we expect specialist contractors to do? Do we not have the talent within the Index to perform these tasks?

  • Impression mining costs for Q3 totaled $33.5k from a budget of $52.5k. Which is 35% less than budgeted. In this iteration, you have requested $120k for impression mining. What initiatives do you have in place to scale this up 3.5x and can you provide information on how successful impression mining has been to date? I understand that this is contingent however does the ceiling need to be this high?

  • Your budget details $60k per quarter for event sponsorship - do you have any key target events you want to hit for this quarter?

Just want to double-check on the above - $429k is per Quarter? Which is what your budget template suggests or if it is to cover both quarters which I think is what @anon10525910 is referring to above, pls Greg correct me if I am misinterpreting what you are asking?

Q3 Budget vs Actual Extract

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 12.40.19
Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 12.40.191920×449 122 KB

The total budget for GMWG when taking into account the casting error detailed above should total $448,350 per quarter.

Overall I am FOR this proposal and think you all do a great job, it would be good to get further clarity on the above points. :owl:

6 Likes
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The OG WG! Much respect for keeping focus while growing capabilities in so many areas. I’ve also really appreciated the insights that are now provided. Looking forward to working closely with the Growth and Marketing team over the next few months!

5 Likes
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While waiting for the OFFICIAL announcement… Congrats GMWG!! Hoot hoot!! Amazing~ ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

1 Like
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Hi @MrMadila and @caf,

GMWG is probably the hardest WG to create a budget for and since inception GWG has always demonstrated the ability to define a budget and prudently manage capital to come in under the expected spend. The $21K top up requested for Q4 is a testament to how well this WG’s finances have been managed relative to the requested budget. The trick here will be to monitor actual spend against the breakdown and continue to learn as we go. With many products in the pipeline, it is shaping up to be a rather large Q4.

Seconding @ElliottWatts here, it would be great to separate out each WGL stipends.
My rough calculations, which have a few assumptions built in, place the stipend and USD value slightly higher than IBWG when taking into consideration the resource loading.

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I was on Annual Leave last week so apologies for getting to this late :pray:… now putting my Funding Council hat on :tophat:

Whilst all WGLs are aligned around the operational burden our quarterly proposal cycle has created, we have not determined the specifics of what a midterm review would look like, and who would be eligible.

As such, could I request we move this proposal in line with other WG proposals and request a budget only for Q4.

In the interim, we will work to figure out what a quaterly review and rollover process would look like.

Excited and looking forward to seeing GMWG go into its 4 iterations!

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Ultimately revenue growth will be a function of the other growth metrics at the top of the funnel. Creating KPI’s for revenue, I believe, is a wider community conversation as it combines the efforts of other WG’s (I/BD etc). I am open to ideas and feedback here.

GMWG <> IC Comms: Agreed with the idea of more formal/regular posts and calls around our targets etc. We of course have our weekly calls which we have started to introduce our targets vs dashboards, as well as our monthly reports available on Notion (Defo scope to condense these into the one-pagers :+1: ). We have also been working with a specialist data consultant in q3 to work on the effectiveness of our actions that I am looking forward to sharing soon.

Lead Stipends:
I am requesting 100 Index p/m (based on a price of $35) + $7,500 of Index p/m via the usual 20dma standard. I am not requesting any USDC.

I am requesting 75 Index p/m + $5,625 of Index p/m. 0 USDC for @caf (Note caf’s time will be split ~25/75 between DWG/GMWG hence the difference.)

Budget detail clarification: Good spot, apologies for the error. Corrections below (Q1 removed):

image
image1296×946 124 KB

As you can see I have also separated out and clarified the leads and contributor totals etc. From your budget vs actuals spreadsheet, I’m not 100% sure what those numbers mean? It actually looks as if the forecast and actuals are overstating q3 as I was on significantly less and LA is on the FT program? I think it could be a question of accounting here as FT contracts don’t appear to be allocated against WG budgets but co/leads are hence the sudden increase. Also in short answer to your question, yes we are targeting an increase in headcount in q4 however I would not describe it as particularly significant (individual’s value adds briefed as per original post.)

Contractors: Typically GWG3 used contractors for very specific pieces of work over short time frames or where integrating someone into the community was not warranted or efficient. It should be noted that outside of engs/devs IC does not always pay competitively in some areas, therefore, onboarding specialist marketing talent etc is not possible and therefore contracting is the only way to achieve specific outcomes. Examples of this as SEO consultants, freelance content writers and complex marketing data analysts/strategists. So far this is actually proving to be an extremely efficient way of procuring expertise as and when we need it.

Impression Mining: As above our target is 5m impression p/m. In Q4 I am targeting this to be on top of the official account rather than including it. Initiatives to increase impressions in order to utilise this allocation include plans to bring more people into the program by publising and sharing the success stories of current successful accounts. (See (relatively) viral workshops etc.) There will be more public drives to recruit more Crypto texans ! :cowboy_hat_face:

Events: This is a very rough expectation made in the run-up to token2049 of which we now have a lot to learn, digest and reflect on overall value. As a premium brand, we look to target premier events such as t49. We are now in the process of building out event calendars in notion. It should be noted that this budget is available for all IC members, not just GMWG. That’s all I can offer at this time as it is very early on in our event sponsorship journey and will likely iterate significantly as it evolves.

Q4: $448,350 total per Q is correct. With $187,350 coming from FC and $~240,000 currently in the GMWG multi-sig the actual transfer needed to GMWG multi-sig is just $21k (This is obviously contingent on the price of $INDEX over Q4…)

Thankyou, GMWG will continue to strive to continue this throughout Q4.

Yes, it appears not every WG is using the same $35 Index assumption and IBD have come in with slightly lower figures after the GMWG proposal… I am acutely aware there is some ambiguity amongst WGL’s as to what stipends to request and I think this highlights the need for a framework for everyone to work off of. The proposal above is written with flexibility in mind in light of this should we need further alignment.

Agreed. Please consider this as confirmation GMWG is now officially only requesting remit and budget for Q4. Thanks

@anon10525910 I just want to acknowledge some minor administrative errors (apologies, first time and all that!) : not explicitly labelling the poll as a FINAL poll and manually closing it after 4 days instead of automatically after 3. Are you satisfied that despite this the results are sufficiently indicative to be considered effectively valid?

I can see 1 vote AGAINST. GMWG welcomes all feedback, concerns and fair criticism however understand that doing so in a public forum is not always easy or feasible. An anon form is available here for anyone wishing to submit their feedback. (Responses will not be publically shared)

Thanks to all who voted, provided feedback, questions and patiently awaited answers! :pray:

5 Likes
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Working to confirm the total budget.

$450,975 in INDEX; all to be held by the FC Wallet.

21,000 + 429,975 = 450,975

Is this correct?