The Noun Square is a daily Twitter Spaces ritual celebrating Noun O' Clock (NOC) in a fun and engaging format. Spearheaded by Toady Hawk, Ser Noadz and Noun 142, administered by a talented committee of Nounish builders, and supported by a growing international community.

After a two week unpaid experiment, plus a one month funded trial (Prop 101), we believe we have proven our worth to the Nouns ecosystem, both as a daily touchpoint for the community, and as a powerful onboarding tool for Nouns-curious passers-by the world over. We are requesting funding to continue running and growing the show for the remainder of the 2022 calendar year.

Accomplishments

• 58 Consecutive Daily Spaces, none missed.
• A 24-hour Twitter Space for the nouniverse with over 60 Nounish guests and 1,400+ attendees from all over the world (attendance never dropped below 100 unique listeners all night and day.)
• 3 successful Coordinape Rounds completed, awarding USDC to a total of 12 unique contributing members. Pioneering completely decentralized rewards-based compensation based loosely on Nouncil model. Average compensation per contributor $1,500 USDC per round.
• 120 Daily Attendees on average, with some shows as high as 400.
• Surpassed our metrics for the entire one month trial in just 2 weeks, and have now in some cases doubled expectations.

Our Stated Goals from Proposal 101

Screenshot from Prop:

Our Actual Metrics to Date:

• 1.2M Tweet Impressions(!!) (More than 2X of goal)
• 1,750 Followers (1.5X goal)
• Average attendance: 120 per day
• FOMO players: average 50 per day
• 1,650 Contest Entries (2X of goal)

We Also Achieved All Broader Goals from Prop 101

Amazing Nounish Content

Engaging Contests

• 6 weeks+ of consecutive contests: awarded over 11 ETH in prizes to creative and talented Nounsfolk. Contests have resulted in over 1,650 unique pieces of user-created Nounish art/content so far, and has spawned at least 3 individual Nounish art collections.

• Among the winning entries of these contests have been some truly incredible pieces of art, including this Watercolor Cloud Noun by Jheeart_NFT.
  • We helped this artist to create a collection "With Noun" using Manifold, and release the piece as an NFT (which sold for 0.69!) and she is releasing more pieces in the same style, you can see the collection here.
• Our show has become an efficient marketing tool to discover and recruit new artists & builders for Nouns DAO. With contests we are able to identify top talent and funnel it to Small Grants or Prop House to onboard to building for Nouns!

Some Other Example Contest Entries

Contest entry from Yujujae 유주재 ⌐ⓝ°ⓒ 청어

Nouniversary contest entry by Jhee:

Nouniversary contest entry by Skwalo691

This physical oil painting contest entry from Sasohan

Awesome Guests

DeezeFi (twice), David Horvath, Taco Noun, Salvino, Oni, Messhup, Brennen, Grammy-winning Musician Violetta Zironi (who performed live), Stoopid Buddy, Jack Butcher and more.

A Platform for Builders

We provide a live and engaged audience for builders to update the audience on the progress of their projects. This is a very effective way for builders to get attention to their work.

FOMO Engagement: Just Look At Those Nouns

Through increased FOMO engagement, we have helped mint some truly beautiful Nouns (including an incredible triple Void run!)

Using POAPs to Gamify Participation and Give a Platform to Artists

We have given a daily POAP to attendees of The Noun Square every day since our inception. This is the purest use case for the protocol, and works well for us to incentivize people to attend our Twitter spaces, play FOMO live and participate in our contests.

Additionally, this has allowed us to feature the art of talented established artists like Ser Noadz, Sam Ellis, SuperTightWoody and Greta Grempllin, as well as giving exposure to talented new creators like 0xAprilia, Illustradora.eth and Leetlestar.

We also plan to continue to use the data from these POAP distributions in the future to do token-gated raffles and contests that reward past participants and strengthen our community.

Bonus Things We've Done That We Didn't Even Say We'd Do

• 24-hour Nouniversary Celebration: an audacious Twitter Space on the Nouniversary with dozens of guests booked, contests, games and more.
  • Over 1,400+ unique attendees, attendance never dropped below 100 at any time.
  • 50+ Nounish guests
  • Amazing community shared moments.
• Nounish NFT collections: We have helped community members to set up Nounish NFT collections based on their Noun Square contest entries using Manifold.
• International outreach: We have done outreach to international audiences by hosting non-English Spaces on some Saturdays, and making foreign-language channels in Discord with moderation.
• Community involvement in DAO governance: Noun 142 Delegated his Noun to The Noun Square multisig so that we could initiate an Audience Voting initiative.
  • We invite proposers to pitch their proposals to the audience.
  • The audience then votes live in our discord.
  • We then execute the voted on-chain accordingly.
  • This has been a popular segment, and we look forward to expanding on the experiment in future.

The Future of the Noun Square

We hope the above sections paint a clear picture of all the accomplishments our team has achieved over the past 6 weeks, meeting or exceeding all the engagement goals we set for ourselves in Prop 101.

The Purpose of this Proposal is to ask the DAO to fund our proven team for an additional 5 months, until the end of the calendar year, to do the following:

• Continue to plan and execute daily Twitter Spaces: Engage newcomers, Nouners and Nouns community members alike, with informative guests and fun contests that produce a plethora of Nouns-based art and authentic social media engagement.
• Continue to organize Contests for our community: Using data from our trial, we have found that 1-2 weekly contests with larger prizes are both more effective and less administratively onerous compared to daily contests. We would plan to move forward with 1-2 contests per week with prizes ranging from 0.05-1ETH, which will no doubt encourage more thoughtful and skillful entries (while also peppering in smaller contests live on the show for variety.)
• Innovate on contest voting and prize administration: We have spoken with Nounder Seneca and, if funded, plan to move forward with an implementation of Prop House for our contest entries to be voted on weekly, as an alternative to the current system of emoji voting in Discord.
• Work with the Noun O'Clock Web App team: Iterate with the team to ship a product with product-market fit and integrate these clients with our own site and daily Spaces as much as possible.

Areas of Focus

Our vision for TNS in the next 5 months:

• International growth: As we enter a European/APAC friendly Noun O Clock, we want to seize the opportunity to introduce Nouns to these regions of the world even more than we already have been.
• Be a leading onboarding funnel to Nouns: We have seen initial signs that our show is a great vehicle to onboard artists, builders, and future Nouners to the DAO. We want to lean into this and make sure our show becomes a strong funnel into nouns.
• Expand to new channels: We want to explore growth opportunities via new channels like podcast platforms, Youtube, TikTok and Twitch.
• The Noun Square as a platform for builders: We want to keep attracting talent to build on top of our show. Two teams (NOC nouns client & NOC Onboarding Materials) have already won prop house funding to build specifically on top of the Noun Square show, in addition to the previously mentioned artists whose collections have been prompted by our contests, and we hope to see more in the coming months.

So what does success look like at the end of 2022?

• Grow our twitter followers from 1,600 to 5,000+
• Average daily attendance by end of year 200+
• 5,000+ contest entries
• International growth: Our goal is to contribute to growing a much larger international noun ecosystem by end of year. We have already started this outreach and plan to continue with more foreign language "takeover" spaces on the weekends, and focus on non-English accessibility in Discord and Twitter.

Budget

Monthly Operations Costs:

• Contest Prizes: 10 ETH
• Team Compensation and Administration: 50 ETH per month, allocated by Committee Coordinape on a Biweekly basis.
• Time Period: 5 months until end of 2022.
• 5 x 60 ETH = 300 ETH Total Proposal Ask: 300 ETH (Cost of 3 Daily Nouns Auctions for 5 months of daily Nounish multimedia content and organic social media engagement.)

Team

We will continue with our "3C Model" of governance and accountability:

Core (Founding) Team (Responsible for Execution):

Toady Hawk Noun 142 Ser Noadz

Council (Responsible for Decisions and Daily Direction)

Aubtoshi Benbodhi SuperTightWoody RyanMac21 !Xargs Sam Ellis Maty.eth Joshua Fisher

Members of this committee may rotate depending on timezones, availability, etc. New incoming Committee members from APAC timezones will most probably include 0xigami, Goldy, Mr. Boney, Mintfaced, and more.

Community (Talent Funnel for Council)

Anyone in our Discord and Twitter communities can join and participate in all our public channels to help with contest ideas, guest ideas, and more, and can apply to join the Organizing Committee at any time. We have forked Nouncil governance with procedures for adding/removing contributing committee members at any time.

The above organizational strategy (modeled loosely on Nouncil) allows us enough structure to execute on a daily basis, as well as enough flexibility to adapt to new timezones and other challenges as they may arise.

Strategy for North American "Nouns Winter"

NOC happening during North American late night/early morning may have some impact on our attendance rate, although we have been attracting a sizable audience from Europe and Asia already (for example, during our recent 24H long Nouniversary Spaces, attendance never dropped below 100 even during NA non-peak hours.) Nonetheless, we think of this as an opportunity rather than a challenge:

Proliferation opportunity

• Auction times drifting enable fairer distribution of nouns across the globe. We think of our show drifting with NOC as giving a fairer opportunity for Noun proliferation outside of the Americas timezones
• We will have the opportunity to engage with international guests, and introduce our nounish energy to a new audience.

Host Recruiting & Scaling Ops

• We have begun recruiting additional hosts and administrative helpers from Europe and APAC timezones so that we can smoothly transition into North American night.
• Several of our Committee members are also excited to continue hosting/attending the show well into the North American night.
• We are already pulling in an impressive daily audience from Europe, Australia and Asia (especially Japan and Korea.)
• We plan to work with members of NounsDAOJapan, NounsDAO Brazil and GnarsDAO (Australia based) to continue to pull in new viewers and new Nounsfolk even through the North American early morning hours.

New distribution channels

• We will begin posting recordings of our daily spaces both on a podcast server and on Youtube, so that North American audiences will still be able to listen and interact with our content daily.
• We will also experiment with doing trial versions of The Noun Square on Youtube, Twitch, and TikTok Live to test engagement on those mediums.

Scaling with systems

• Our team has created a robust Notion for knowledge management with Planning Documents, Tracking Databases and Daily Run-of-Show Templates to enable onboarding of new hosts and contributors as easy and decentralized as possible.

LFG!

We were funded for a trial and have surpassed all goals and metrics by a large margin, going above and beyond with initiatives such as the 24 hour Nouniversary Spaces.

We represent a group of committed Nounish builders with a good track record of success, and we are asking for the DAO's trust, as we lean into a very successful concept and continue to improve, grow and scale this new platform centred around the daily Noun O' Clock.

We believe that in a short time, The Noun Square has become the defacto watercooler of the Nounish ecosystem, as well as an impressive funnel for new Noun owners, artists and builders.

We are excited by how much more we can do if given a mandate to keep on building throughout the remainder of 2022.

Thank you for your support, and we look forward to having you as a guest on the show one day soon!