TL;DR
- Fund nounish, a creative agency dedicated to telling the story of Nouns, and the stories of its builders, through video.
- A team of 10 people; Essentially dedicating Pixel, Goldy’s production company, to Nouns full time.
- Lead by Goldy & 142.
- 6 months of operations.
- $969K requested.
Summary
- Long-term Vision: Help make Nouns a highly recognizable brand globally and inspire ambitious builders to build on the protocol.
- Objectives for this proposal:
- Help anyone who is curious about Nouns, including non-crypto audiences, understand what Nouns is about.
- Onboard new builders & inspire current builders to make ambitious and impactful proposals.
- Rally the Nouns community around projects that we've funded and empower it to share our content.
- Enable builders to use our content to ease interactions with brands & non-crypto organizations.
- Strategy: Focus on Middle of Funnel (read more below)
- Make our YouTube channel an onboarding tool to Nouns DAO.
- Make the channel's page a shareable, digestible, and entertaining repository of videos that cover what Nouns DAO does and funds.
- Produce & publish high quality videos about the most promising projects Nouns DAO funds, to tell their stories in an accessible way.
- Publish dozens of "Nouns Explainers" covering the many layers of Nouns.
- Keep a pulse on projects' progress and share compelling updates on our social media accounts daily.
- Make our YouTube channel an onboarding tool to Nouns DAO.
- Measuring Success
- We want to spend the next 6 months experimenting with different types of video formats, channels, storytelling, and more.
- We will track the most relevant metrics to understand what works and what doesn't. Aside from reach (views), here are some key metrics we plan to measure:
- Builder recruitment (how many people get noun-pilled thanks to our content and join our community?)
- Content leverage (how frequently and in what ways is our content used by other builders to further the DAO's interests?)
- Content proliferation (how and where our videos get re-uploaded, remixed, or used in a new context)
- Video retention (when & why do people drop in our videos?)
- View sources (where do poeople come from to watch our videos?)
- We will share these metrics publicly to engage the community and learn together.
- Deliverables
- Accountability
- Form a Steering Committee: comprising of 4156 & 2 more trusted community members or subject matter experts.
- Provide this committee with frequent updates on our strategy and get their feedback & guidance. We want this committee to keep us accountable.
- Community involvement: Monthly reports + open discord call with the DAO.
- Form a Steering Committee: comprising of 4156 & 2 more trusted community members or subject matter experts.
- Staffing & Resources
- A team of 6 full-timers & 4 part-timers (142, Goldy & the entire Pixel team)
- At least 10 shoot days around the world.
Prop 64 recap
With Prop 64 we were funded to the tune of 40 ETH ($109K) for a pilot to publish 4 long-form videos that tell the stories of our builders.
What we've delivered
Long-form Videos
- 3 videos were published
- 1 additional video will be published very soon
- Naming a Frog "Nouns" & donating to rain forest conservation
CC0 Raw Footage Bank
In a few days we will be putting raw footage from our shoot days with Salvino, Gnars, Dustin Yellin, and Free Glasses projects.
- We would like to see our footage used by other builders and content creators for their needs
- Our vision is for this footage bank to be used in the future for documentaries and other content produced about nouns
Overdelivered
-
"What's nounish?" teaser video
- Pitched Nouns DAO on Alex Lieberman's page
- Created real-time activations and shared content from NFT.NYC (including the iconic gnars photo and skateboard giveaway, and a spontaneous activation by Salvino at the conference's lobby)
- Daily updates from our builders on our growing instagram & twitter pages.
- Our twitter account has received more than 644,000 impressions since starting it in June.
- We've had over 90,000 views on our videos across all platforms.
Our content is used to help other builders
Our videos have helped other DAO members to explain nouns to non-crypto audiences:
- Studio1 meetings
- Gnars.com features video on homepage and shared heaps of the content we've captured and created on Twitter
- Kenya ads in Nairoby square
- NFT Rio
- Video on NYC mural website
Our content is shared by large organizations
The next 6 months
The Challenges We Want To Tackle
- Prop builders don’t necessarily have the skills/resources/time to execute a marketing campaign for their projects.
- Wonderful projects with really great output are not being amplified and we are missing out on a lot of noun proliferation potential.
- It’s difficult to explain what Nouns are to the world.
We believe that the problems we outlined in Prop 64 still exist. Most of the amazing projects that Nouns funds need help telling their story, and video is the best way to do so.
It is safe to assume that without the videos we published, Nouns DAO would have missed the opportunity of amplifying the stories of these wonderful projects.
With video, we are able to tell a much deeper and colorful story and evoke much more emotion. We believe this must be 10Xed to recruit more builders to help the meme proliferate.
The Nouns Funnel
We think of builder & community onboarding as a funnel:
- Top of Funnel: People who heear about Nouns from a friend, stumble upon a Nouns project in their city, enjoy a piece of nouns art on twitter etc.
- Middle of Funnel: People who become curious to understand what Nouns are, want to learn how to get funded, or want to join the community.
- Bottom of Funnel: People who are ready to submit a proposal, buy a noun (or nounlet), or to join the community or a sub DAO.
In the next 6 months we want to focus on the Middle of the Funnel. We want to help explain what Nouns are to the world and get many more people noun-pilled.
Why focus on Middle of Funnel first and not Top of Funnel?
The majority of people that have heard of Nouns do not really grok what it is, never-mind all the potential builders outside the NFT bubble that we are missing out on because it’s too esoteric to dive in to. In reality, almost no one gets what we’re doing, and it’s impossible for them to have a vision for Nouns.
The hurdle to understand what Nouns is and how to interact with the community is absurdly high for someone not native to our ecosystem.
It’s imperative that there’s quality consumable content out there that helps people not only understand what Nouns is doing but be inspired to join in. What we need is social media channels (eg. YouTube and Instagram) that have a significant catalogue of content you can just sit and consume.
- We are going to try to answer questions that are not easily answered today like:
- “So what does nouns actually do and stand for?"
- This is a branding exercise, this is key for our work to answer.
- “What is Nouns actually to me?”
- The answer is not NFTs, or a DAO (that is just infrastructure), it's an open source brand that you can be funded to build on (or build on permissionlessly). It’s an energised and broad community. It’s a movement. We need to demonstrate this through our videos.
- “What’s a nounish concept / proposal?”
- Current way to understand this: read hundreds of proposals on nouns.wtf/vote, tally their results, investigate if they were “successful” or not, if the dao likes them, analyse all this data… etc. What if instead they could watch a handful of nounish videos that show the things we’re proud of?
- “How do I get funded?”
- Videos about this will be hugely valuable, currently it takes a lot of effort to understand this. Our top priority here is to make a few videos focused exclusively on getting funded via Prop House and then other videos about the other ways as a whole, and individual videos on specifics (on chain, nsfw etc.)
- “Can it be any cultural domain?”
- Here are some screenshots from version 1 of our intro. We will continue to experiment and iterate with ways to tell this story all the time. This is hugely important to be understood if we want to experiment in every vertical.
- “So what does nouns actually do and stand for?"
What we will deliver as part of this prop
Nounish across all social networks
We will spend the next 6 months churning out high quality video content about Nouns and its builders.
We plan to work on all major Social Media networks. We have started building a following on Twitter and Instagram. We will also invest more cycles into building out our Facebook & TikTok presence.
But our main focus will be on YouTube, where you can expect our channel to become the easiest way to get into the Nouns rabbit hole and come out understanding all the key concepts of the DAO, as well as learn about the most inspiring projects being built on the protocol.
Our YouTube channel will become a video learning hub for everything nouns-related
Videos about the most inspiring proposals
There are so many amazing stories to tell about nouns-funded projects that can get so much more depth with good video content covering them.
Here are some of the proposals we would love to make content about!
LONG FORM Candidates (not exhaustive)
- Rose parade / Stoopid Buddy
- E Sports
- Nouns Fashion: Nouns Brand & Dopamine & Danit Peleg & Madhappy
- Xanadu
- Prop House
- Dustin Ep 2
- Free Glasses Ep 2
- Edible Nouns: Moonbeans + Nouns Coffee
- Children's Book
- Luxury Glasses
- NounWorks: Fun Frames, Pins, etc.
- The Wizard's Hat
- Sofubi Dolls
- The Noun Square
- Nounish
SHORT FORM Candidates (not exhaustive)
- Mucho Love
- John Hamon
- Noundry
- Nouns front ends
- Nouns Brazil
- Nouns Comics
- CC0 Spacebank
- Bidder POAP
- Goat Club / Memes
- 3D Nouns
- iOS App
- Coloring Books
- Super Bowl commercial
- Murals, posters, art around the world
Nouns Explained (bitesized & long-form)
We want to make it easy for anyone to understand Nouns and the DAO. And specifically, we want to help onboard potential builders.
We will create a suite of high quality videos explaining the key concepts of Nouns.
Some of the concepts we would like to produce videos for:
- What is Prop House and how to get funded
- What can you build on Nouns?
- What is Noun O'Clock
- What is FOMO and how does it work
- What is CC0?
- How do props get funded?
- Where to start with Nouns DAO?
- How does the Nouns auction work?
- What happens when you join Nouns DAO? (so you joined Nouns DAO... what next?)
- How does voting (governance) of Nouns DAO work?
Who are we
142 & Goldy
142
Noun-pilled marketer/product/growth person. Involved in the Nouns community since Noun #2.
- Co-Founded “The Noun Square” (Prop 101)
- Builder of “The Noun O’Clock Client” prop.house proposal #777
- Built Prop 4 as part of the Verbs team
- Started & led a dozen Weekly Nouner World Call
Goldy
Filmmaker & production studio owner. Community member since TestNet.
- Founder of SharkDAO
- Founder of GOAT Club (100+ nounish reaction gifs and Mixed Nouns
- Creator and lead of Prop 20 - Nouns Stories (1st motion storytelling prop, premiering 1st short film soon!)
- Noundry project committee member
Pixel
Pixel is a renowned boutique production company based in Melbourne, Australia. They’re experts in making tricky things happen, and believe that clever, complex, and wonderful ideas need nurturing from beginning to end. So they script, design, shoot, animate and finish projects in-house. They have worked across campaigns for world class brands including Adidas, Coca Cola, Toyota, Target, and Sesame Street.
Goldy, Haley, and John
Our Team
- 142: Lead / Growth / Builder Relations
- 142 has built & marketed products that have grown from 0 to 100s of millions of users. He has led marketing teams in multiple successful startups. He loves identifying trends early and telling about them to the world. Working on Nouns is a perfect fit for 142 as he thrives most at the intersection of art, community, and tech.
- Goldy: Lead / Creative Director / Editor
- Goldy is an Oscar shortlisted filmmaker with over a decade's experience as a commercial director known for striking style and experimental techniques. Goldy joined Pixel as a partner in 2017. His obsession with Nouns has evolved from an odd quirk to a passion that has changed Pixel’s trajectory.
- John Gavin: Creative Director / Editor
- John is the Co-founder of Pixel and has run the business for 16 years. He’s a storyteller, known for his polished, design-driven projects. His practice blurs the lines between animation, technology, and design. John is a hardcore space-enthusiast who mixes up a mean negroni. He has been noun-pilled by his own work on Nounish (now the proud owner of a pair of Nouns Vision glasses in classic red).
- Haley Polacik: Executive Producer
- Haley has over 15 years experience producing film shoots, post production, and animation. As an award winning Exec Producer and Partner at Pixel for the past decade her skills and knowledge are essentially boundless. Haley’s skills even extend to being the best at fill-your-glass-up-as-high-as-possible-without-spilling-it which, in a studio rife with completely ridiculous competitive games, is no small feat.
- Meline Samson: Producer / Editor
- Meline is an impassioned storyteller, and lover of cinema. For her it’s all about the harmony between the narrative and aesthetic. She brings her french elegance and eye for details to the table with 10 years of experience as a producer she knows how to make things done with accuracy and kindness. As a frenchy living in Australia she is the ambassador of cheese ‘o clock at Pixel.
- Guy Franklin: Director / Editor (part time)
- Guy loves big ideas that seem a little scary at first. He’s a specialist in visuals with movement, colour and stories that explore humanity. He’s very comfortable on both the tennis court and the d-floor.
- Rebecca Moore: Producer (part time)
- Bec is the organisational heart of Pixel. She manages the studio, produces, copywrites, makes a sweet charcuterie platter. With a background in film and creative writing, and a masters in Arts Management, Bec combines fierce organisation and creativity in he role as producer at Pixel. Aside from being a multi-tasking kween, she also sings in an a cappella group and has a Nouns musical percolating in her brain just waiting to be unleashed.
- Liam Gordes: Editor (part time)
- Liam has been directing and editing for screen for the past decade, ranging from short films to web series, and TV commercials. Liam is a big believer in the power of collaboration.
- Dylan Hornsby: Editor (part time)
- Dylan is educated in marketing but has honed his craft as a filmmaker over the past decade, creating award winning shorts films, online content, and TV commercials. Creative problem solving is a sport for Dylan.
- Hiring: Social Media Admin
Steering Committee
We will form a 3-person steering committee to help us deal with strategic dilemmas, get feedback on our work, and help us get expert advice on social media growth strategies.
4156 has graciously agreed to be on this committee. We are seeking and speaking to other potential candidates who are subject matter experts (we are specifically looking for a YouTube content & growth expert).
Budget
- Team Compensation + Fixed Costs - $775K
- 10+ Shoot Days Globally - $113K
- Growth Experiments (ads, platform-specific experts) - $24K
- Travel (NFT London, Rose Parade, and 2 more TBD) - $21.5K
- Steering Committee Stipend ($1k/mo per member) - $18K
- Legal & forex fees - $17.5K
Total: $969K
Period of Engagement
- 6 months: November 7th, 2022 -> May 7th, 2023
Payment Terms
- $320K up front on receipt of funds (1/3 of funds)
- $649K in a stream that will start on November 7 and will end on March 7th, 2023 (2/3 of funds over 4 months).
Multisig Receiving Funds
The receiving address is a Gnosis Safe with 3/5 signers.
Multisig address: 0x8a4eb8f3383909a8138101F6E17cd8281a26eA3a
Multisig signers:
- elad: 0xfe9b3ab16AfeF3B28C0c3dfA6fa7C5b58f5c06aA
- krel: 0xFFb0E93F7e315BECcF0757845F3eF2cB9832efB9
- maty: maty.eth
- 9999: 0x6223Bc5fd16a19bcFAe2281dDE47861CFE1023eE
- 142: 0xE6232ed3436C4065D38D8BFdC8EA90858ecDfa69
$969,000 USD = ~740 ETH (@ 1ETH = $1,311 USD) Adding 20% buffer for volatility: 888 ETH
If, due to high volatility, insufficient ETH is available to cover the proposed budget, another proposal will be put on chain to top up the difference.
Multisig Plan
- Upon receipt of funds, signers will convert the ETH to $969K USDC.
- $320,000 USDC will be sent to nounish's multisig (0x49a5aEec7d9AC70990404278e93031E4C3C71875).
- A Sablier stream for $649,000 USDC will be set up to start on November 7, 2022 and will end on March 7th, 2023.
- Leftover ETH will be sent to NounsDAO treasury.