TL;DR
In the last prop, we turned Pixel, a boutique production company of 10 world-class storytellers, into "nounish" - a full-time video production agency working on Nouns.
We are only getting started and are seeking to continue funding nounish with the same budget ($969K).
In Season 1 (prop 143) we:
- published 92 minutes of high quality content
- got 3M views on our channels
- got 750K proliferated views via media on other channels
- 2.8X our followers
- published 80 new nounish gifs (and got 80 million views on giphy)
- many people are using our content to explain & onboard people to Nouns
Our mission is to produce content of the highest quality and play a key role in making Nouns a globally recognized and loved brand.
How to read this prop: For a quick review of our prop, read the Summary. For a deeper dive, read Deep Dive.
Summary
Season 1 Recap
Delivered
- 92 minutes of total video content (46 minutes of Longs, 46 minutes of Shorts)
- 5 Long form videos
- 8 Commissioned videos (videos requested by other projects/nouners)
- 77 Shorts
- 80 new nounish gifs
Performance
- Views: 3 million views across all our @nounish channels
- Followers: 2.8X followers from 2,917 to 8,184
- Proliferated Views: 750K views in 50+ instances of proliferation by others
Content delivered in season 1
- We had committed to deliver 8-10 long form videos and 140 short form videos, which at 3 minutes for longs and 30 seconds for shorts is approx 90min total which is what we delivered.
Long Forms (5):
- Mega Nouns Explainer (10:56)
- Creative Absurd (13:50)
- Nouns Brand (5:09)
- 100 Nounish Things (2:20)
- Mucho Love (8:00) delivering soon
Commissioned Videos (videos requested by DAO members/builders) (8):
- Danit Peleg (1:37)
- What is Nouns (0:37)
- Rainbow Wallet (1:50)
- 5 x Rose Parade trailers (2:68)
Short Forms (highlights):
- Praca XV
- Taki from Nouns esports
- What is Nouns & How does it work?
- Gnars & Esports
- How can NFTs make coffee, comic books and glasses exist?
- noggles timelapse
- What's the deal with these glasses?
- A simple Nouns explainer
- A brand with no copyright
- Nouns Coffee
- Unboxing nounish figurines
- and many more
Content Proliferation
Our content is used as the backbone of media for the DAO. We have seen more than 50 instances in which our content is used by various creators, including for example:
- KTLA - with estimated 500K views on TV and online
- Nouns Motors (from #enterthenouniverse)
- Rug Radio - to promote their Prop House
- TikTok reaction video in Brazil - 160K views
Our Content In the Press
- NFT Now: An NFT Every Day: A Guide to the Nouns NFT Project, DAO, and Ecosystem - Embedded Free glasses for kids video, as well a Danit Peleg tweet.
- Yahoo Entertainment / Decrypt - Nouns Ethereum NFTs Will Appear in 2023 Rose Parade - Rose Parade trailer
- Decrypt - Nouns 3D-Printed Fashion Collection Turns Heads at NFT Paris -
- Decrypt - What Are Nouns? The Ethereum NFT DAO Building Open-Source IP
Season 2
Our Strategy
- Create world-class, engaging & inspiring content about Nouns and projects built with the brand.
- Cater to the DAO’s video content needs, e.g. from season 1:
- Mega explainer on nouns.wtf
- Danit Peleg’s exhibition video
- Nouns trailer used for onboarding meetings (e.g. pitching brands) and conferences
- Rainbow Wallet Explainer as part of using an eth wallet for Prop house onboarding
- Encourage the distribution of our content
- Open source our content and make it extremely accessible and easy to use for remixing, sharing, and as raw material for other builders to create with.
- Leverage Prop House to get the top distribution ideas funded.
- Be a leading voice of the Nouns brand
- Use the @nounish social media to further build the Nouns brand by sharing on-brand, aspirational, content.
- Mint our content
- To create a deeper connection with Nouns fans and to raise additional funds for our Prop House and for the DAO directly.
Measuring our Success
Our leading principle is to create the highest quality possible content that makes the Nouns brand aspirational.
Within this constraint, in season 2 we plan to measure our success with three metrics:
1. Content Proliferation & Total Reach
- Number of proliferation instances of our content is leveraged by others (e.g. KTLA using our content as b-roll)
- Total Reach - how many people saw our content
- Why this metric?
- This contains both our own reach, and reach by content proliferation.
- This is a proxy for the usefulness & quality of our content.
- It will lead us to making our content as accessible and re-usable as possible.
- Why this metric?
- Season 2 Goals:
- 200 Instances of proliferation (vs. 50 in season 1)
- 5M Reach (vs. 3.75M in season 1)
2. Social Media Followers
- Total followers on @nounish social media accounts
- Why this metric?
- This represents affinity with our content and is a proxy to our success as a "voice of the Nouns brand"
- Why this metric?
- Season 2 Goals: - 16,000 followers (2x) 3. Minutes of content published
- Why this metric?
- During Season 1 we learned that having a constraint of the type of video we commit to make (e.g. short form or long form) is inefficient
- We think our high quality content minutes should be fungible and that we should be able to choose the type of content that best fits the story.
- This is an output metric and not an outcome metric, but we think it's important for the DAO to get a sense of what quantity of high quality content can be expected from this prop.
- Season 2 Goals:
- 90 minutes of high quality videos delivered (~same as season 1)
Content Pipeline for Season 2
Writing
- Nouns funding Crypto Infra
- Agora, Prop House, etc.
- Nouns is a radical governance experiment
- Covering from the beginning of the DAO and climaxing at the DAO Split implementation
- What Makes a Nouner Tick?
- Include many Nouners vision for the DAO, what makes a good proposal to them etc.
- Nouns Deli
Filming
- Nouns Esports
- Xanadu
Post production
- Danit Peleg
- Rose Parade
Prop House
Investing in high quality content is super valuable for the DAO, but we also should tap into the power of decentralization to proliferate our content as well.
The first Prop House Round is live and we will be running more of these, both open and targeted rounds.
Open Sourcing our Content
As part of our effort to lean into content proliferation, we will be working on making our content more accessible and easy to use.
Similar to how nounish gifs are so easy to use on social media, we want our video content to be as accessible and easy to remix and reuse by anyone.
It will be searchable with tags and key terms, like a stock photo website but for Nouns media and all of it is CC0.
Minting
We have started minting our work, to create a deeper connection with our content. The funds will be split between Nouns DAO and our distribution fund so that we can use the funds for further proliferation.
Team
Our team consists of 10 people:
- Goldy - Lead
- 142 - Lead
- John - Creative Director / Editor
- Haley - Executive Producer
- Guy - Writer / Director / Editor
- Becco - Writer / Host
- Meline - Producer / Editor
- Liam - Editor & VFX
- bk - Social Media
- 3 freelance helpers
About Pixel
Most of our team is from Pixel, a renowned boutique production company based in Melbourne, Australia.
Pixel is a perfect fit for Nouns - they are 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.
More team bios in Prop 143.
Budget
Season 1 planned
- 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
Season 1 actuals
- Fixed costs and compensation $779K
- Shoots $107K
- Legal & Fees $28K
- Travel $28K
- Distribution/growth $12K
- Prop House $15K
- Steering committee $0
Total: $969K
Season 2 planned
- Fixed costs and compensation $773K
- Shoots 104K
- Legal & Fees $14.6K
- Travel $20K
- Distribution/growth $5K
- Prop House $36K
- Web development $15K
Total: $969K
Deep Dive
Learnings - a retrospective on our last prop
We want to share our challenges and learnings during season 1 to augment the conversation in the DAO and highlight opportunities for other teams.
Our two top challenges, which we dealt with throughout season 1 are:
-
Explaining Nouns is very hard
- Nouns is a very layered topic that is hard to explain succinctly.
- If it's too simplified, it becomes boring and doesn't make any sense.
- Breaking it into parts is also challenging because Nouns makes sense only as one package.
- Different audiences and different contexts require different explanations.
- Learnings:
- Continue spending a lot of cycles experimenting with different ways and formats to explain Nouns.
- Continue iterating on messaging and observing what resonates.
-
Figuring out our target audience is challenging
- Initially we tried to target potential builders as our audience, but we felt that it wasn't capturing the opportunity of getting more nouners and fans on board.
- Halfway through season 1 we landed on the thesis that we are looking to reach early adopters of crypto and new tech who will find the Nouns experiment appealing.
- We still don't know exactly who Nouns resonate with most and who we should target.
- We are missing data on the funnel and believe the DAO should spend more resources on figuring this out systematically.
- We grappled a lot with the question of how we get people to care about the story of Nouns and the things being built on it and become fans.
- Learnings:
- We need more funnel data - we would love to see a team propose a data project for Nouns to:
- Understand who are the builders, nouners, and fans of the brand
- Map out the "customer journey" of each of the audience segments identified
- We are open sourcing our content to let more parallel experiments on different audiences, to be run by more teams
- In our opinion, proposals need to focus on making people care about Nouns
- Our belief is that public good funding is the easiest shortcut to make people care about Nouns.
- We need more funnel data - we would love to see a team propose a data project for Nouns to:
Additional challenges & learnings:
-
We didn't get enough input and feedback from Nouners from across the DAO
- We received feedback that during season 1 we didn't cover the breadth of what Nouns funds - and focused on mostly creative props.
- We want to represent and cater to various parts of the DAO, and we need to do a better job getting inputs from Nouners with varied visions for what the DAO is.
- We want our content to be neutral and do the best job to represent as much as possible from various points of view in the DAO.
- In Season 2:
- We will consult various DAO members to hear what content they think would be powerful and useful, as well as represent their varied vision for the DAO.
- We will take our lead from the Tech Pod's approach to coming to the DAO with a slate update and getting a read on what the DAO wants to see and prioritising it.
-
The logistics of proposals is hard to manage
- We have limited control over the stories that we are reporting about, and that can hurt our content pipeline.
- With many props, the timelines are in flux and it's difficult to plan ahead.
- Learnings:
- We focused more on making original content such as the Mega Explainer & 100 nounish things (a video to be published soon, before the prop goes on chain)
- We created a Shorts format that is not dependent on specific props
- Creative Absurd focused on interviews and stories that are not dependent on delivery timing
-
Over optimization around fast growth diminishes brand building
- When we focus too intently and on viral thumbnails & titles, it makes the brand cheaper
- Learning:
- We never want to get in a race to the bottom on virality.
- We always want to be top of class in terms of our content, to maintain the Nouns brand as a premium brand.
- We open source our content to let others also experiment with virality with less risk to the brand.
-
Short form vs Long form and generally video formats
- Committing to a discrete number of videos, whether short or long, was a mistake:
- Instead of thinking about how to maximize on content, we oftentimes focused too much on delivery formats and cadence.
- We want to be free to experiment with more variations in lengths, format, style, and audiences.
- Learnings:
- We are shifting to a minutes-published goal and not a specific number of videos released.
- We are shifting to a more open and experimental approach to what kind of videos we ship in terms of their content and story.
- Committing to a discrete number of videos, whether short or long, was a mistake:
-
It takes time to build momentum
- Ramping up internal momentum and onboarding our entire team took longer than expected - Nouns are hard to explain and to understand
- Building rapport and trust with builders and getting great content and input from them takes time.
- Learnings
- We believe that the DAO should hire world-class talent for long-term contracts to amortize the fixed cost of onboarding and momentum building
Stats
3 million @nounish social media views
- Out of 3M views, two videos stand out as outliers and got much more views than the rest:
- Taki from Nouns esports - 500K on instagram
- Praca XV - 1.1M on instagram
- Why?
- Traction with communities (extreme sports, skateboarding, rio skate culture, rio nft culture, esports, fans of taki)
- Boosting our organic winners with a few hundred dollars of paid media (it only works well if you have good PMF with the videos)
750K Proliferated Views
Transactions
- 30% up front ($290K USDC)
- 70% streaming over 6 months ($679K USDC)