Core Contributor - Business Development

CoW Grants Program Core-Contributor-Grant
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Grant Title

Core Contributor - Business Development

Author

Max (zEniTH)

About You

I spent more than 3 years in Business Development & Sales in the Automotive industry before Crypto. I have been actively involved in web3 space for the last 18 months in both DeFi & NFT projects in full exploration mode.

Genesis Team & Outbound BD - Polygon Ecosystem DAO - MENA

  • Coordinating and organising events to educate the masses about Polygon DAO.

  • Mentoring and Endorsing fellow advocates, promoting impactful contributors with greater responsibility and incentives.

  • Arranged meetings and concert AMAs for region-specific communities (onramp/ offramp with Binance)

  • Communication relay and feedback report to Polygon Core Team.

Core Team CMS & Sourcing - Redlion Gazette

  • Business development and partnerships with DAOs and Artists.

  • Investigate and funnel potential NFT & Ethereum current affairs, then piece them together into an entertaining read.

  • content segregation and assortment.

  • Assisting in operations and expansion initiatives

DAOs & Community Contributions

  • Bankless HQ - Community support

  • Index Coop - Outbound BD (DAO Treasury Diversification working group)

  • Crypto Testers - Onboarding

Additional Links

Grant Category

Business Development & Userbase growth (Integrations & Collab Drive)

Grant Goals and impact

To start with a feedback loop on the outbound collaboration drive evolving into partnerships & inter DAO coordination. Primary focus on initiating contact according to prospect pipeline formed from evaluation loop in line with DAO KPIs. (maximising Volume & User Base).

With guidance and essential support from core contributors, I’m proposing to contribute as BD support which can be scaled up to a DAO working group in future based on results.

I have broken down the role as a coordinator, facilitator, and BD support

  • BD Support to work with Middleway to set up an initial framework for the standard operating procedure in DAO collaboration & partnerships.

  • Coordinator to search and initiate contact with potential prospects. There are increasing challenges in coordinating current Cow community participants with one another and with new prospective partners.

  • Facilitator to process inbound inquiries to filter & funnel pipeline for reaching out and implementing set strategic priorities.

Milestones

Measurable success metrics can be defined and refined on each iteration based on KPIs chosen by the designated contributors in DAO. Volume is key for batching to be profitable and that’s the primary focus in integrations and partnerships. In order to organically grow Cowmunity, collaboration with native communities & Social DAOs are considered in the pipeline mix. Setting up a framework for streamlining Collaboration. The key measurable metric will be integration success deriving volume and community.

Progress can be tracked and improved with weekly meetings and documented in line with the evaluation loop. With sufficient feedback data, we should be able to form strategies to overcome bottlenecks specific to integrations.

Potential objectives / directions

  • Expansion

  • Mutual benefit incentive structure

  • Potential prospects database

  • General Roadblock causes

  • DAO working group SOP framework

Grant Capacity

I anticipate spending 60% of my time (24 hours per week minimum) as I believe multiple parties could be handled in parallel and full thrust effort for 3 months as a dynamic pilot program.

Funding Request

I would request a monthly compensation over a three-month grant period, that could be extended.

Compensation split between COW and xDAI:

  • 1000 xDAI

  • 6700 COW

Gnosis Chain Address (to receive the grant)

0x2D9319dE02b8a02d40ED7ABB5D69c6bd7A7f9cb2

Other Information

Cowswap prospects pipeline - Google Sheets

Referral

I was encouraged and guided by Kubesqrt, MasterCoW & Middleway.

Terms and conditions

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I’m in favor of this grant.
Looking forward for @zenith to drive new partnership leads and establish BD process for CoW contributors.

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I am in support of this grant and look forward to your contributions @zenith

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I think there’s support for this grant. I would like to propose its approval and payment for the first month.
@zenith I would just like to include a simple deliverable: a monthly summery of your work that will be submitted in this forum thread. Would you agree to this?

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Absolutely, in order to scale our BD operations, we need continuous feedback & initiative ideas to adapt strategies. I have added a format to summarise WIP report in the evaluation loop. We can improve our reporting structure on each iteration.

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Great.
The color for links in the forum is problematic…
Adding it here again if anyone missed the link

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Payment for the first month of this grant was executed:

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CoW Protocol BD Integrations Update October 2022

I had a mixed reaction to our reach-out & asses sentiment initiative, main hurdle was finding the right personnel to engage and eventually pitch our integration plan as most of them were unresponsive at first. I targeted a mix of DeFi, NFT and Social communities as our senior team are already in touch with prominent DeFi projects. From interacting with folks from NFT projects apart from a few most are unaware of CoW which I believe is an opportunity to make our way in.

Learnings

  • I miscalculated a few areas of prospect identification and funnelling initially which led me to chase for integrations only, however, Treasury trades are proving to be easier to get them onboarded

  • Our Fault: Since MEV is a key conversation topic, we don’t have an active community on the front lines of social media and I believe we need to work towards it with small incremental steps.

  • Twitter communities would be a zero-cost effort to coordinate with active members.

  • Content creation plan, Tweet threads, Dune Metrics, small articles, Podcasts, community calls & Twitter Spaces.

  • The lack of enthusiasm towards our Integrations Initiative seems to be due to ignorance of what CoW protocol actually is and the overlap of investors’(VC) incentive misalignment. I believe with sufficient organic marketing we can tackle the ignorance part.

Good News

  • Prominent DAOs like Index Coop are already using our protocol for their treasury trades simply due to the inherent value, which is awesome feedback to have.
  • Our newer breakthrough in gasless trades on MultiSig wallets adds another USP to pitch DAOs.
  • Since our active trader base and volume is well below our expectation and 1inch ranks the highest in all metrics, which means we have the most to gain with a superior product in hand. That’s where social communities play a huge role (FWB, Bankless, Forefront, Crypto Testers, EVMavericks etc) as they have the best stickiest and most active members with a solid presence on social media for advocacy.

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  • There are countless projects springing up with new experiments, funnelling and pitching them at earlier stages can be easier, and would attract newer users (integration AMAs). Additionally, a cost-negative marketing opportunity.

Action Plans on Current Leads and Pipeline

  • Currently in active discussion with 8 out of potential 25 contacted and getting integration prioritised is the major hurdle. But the fact that there is response and interest in treasury trades is a driving force.
  • We are pursuing the direction of longer-term partnerships which adds stability and sustainability to our volume which is a key KPI to have a better growth forecast.
  • Research-based on Treasury size & trade frequency is the key metric considered for funnelling.
  • Wallets, Analytics, Portfolio Trackers, and NFT marketplaces, are being approached other than usual DeFi projects.

Detailed spreadsheet here

How DAO can Help

  • Almost every DAO member has connections and contacts in multiple projects to varying degrees and that can be helpful with Introductions, recommendations and any insightful information that can you think can be of help.

I would request everyone to give some love when it comes to Cowswap’s Official Twitter posts with any degree of engagement.

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Hey - thanks for this thoughtful recap. Some questions:

Referring to these points of yours…

  • Our Fault: Since MEV is a key conversation topic, we don’t have an active community on the front lines of social media and I believe we need to work towards it with small incremental steps.
  • Twitter communities would be a zero-cost effort to coordinate with active members.

Can you explain what you mean by “an active community on the front lines of social media” … and also what you mean by “Twitter communities” … trying to understand what, specifically, you envision the output is and what would go into building this for CoW Protocol? Also, how is it zero-cost?

  • Content creation plan, Tweet threads, Dune Metrics, small articles, Podcasts, community calls & Twitter Spaces.

We currently do most of this. What is missing?

Thanks,

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Hey @marshy, thanks for those questions,

The context was basically building an engaged community on Twitter, if you notice our reach is relatively low and I strongly feel those metrics can be significantly improved by better coordination. On Twitter “Communities” seems to be a region-specific feature with gated access, that will alert all community members of other members’ tweets than regular notifications. That can be used for said coordination reducing overhead and hence zero cost.

For reference

Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 05.50.09
Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 05.50.091508Ă—437 220 KB

Yes, we have some but I was emphasizing the effectiveness and reach of those valuable posts (despite having 38.3K followers). We are exploring tools and programs which can be incorporated into the onboarding process. Either way, the idea is to up our impression metrics, as it is crucial in this space and it would proportionally complement our protocol onchain.

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Payment for November was processed

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