[RFC] PTBR-14: Pooltime

Governance PT Budget Requests
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PTBR-14: Pooltime

Start Date Jan 1st, 2024
Duration of work 3 months
Budget $90,000 USDC (-20,000 POOL)

We are a team of long-time high-impact contributors getting together under the umbrella of Pooltime - PoolTogether’s community-building action squad. We have been meaningfully involved in creating webs connecting people to the protocol.

What’s new:

  • Darby is joining the team
  • We’re leaning into building out the contributor fund
  • We’re spearheading and contributing to several campaigns to promote PoolTogether V5, protocol incentives, and new features
  • We’re increasing the cadence of content on social media & mirror
  • We’re returning 20,000 POOL from previous quarters to the treasury

Scope of Work

Motivation

The PoolTogether community is often described as the prime example of Defi communities. This community needs safe spaces to get together and align. These spaces need to be responsibly maintained and kept safe.

Our team is obsessed with the vision of prize savings on the blockchain and has a track record of serving the community’s needs while adapting to them accordingly.

Goal

Our goal is to give the PoolTogether community a voice and amplify it to the maximum. PoolTogether V5 offers a lot of opportunities to talk about in 2024 - we are making sure the message gets across.

Milestones & Deliverables

Community Management

We manage and maintain PoolTogether’s community spaces, facilitate events, foster community, and empower community members to take ownership.

  • Moderate community platforms & social media handles (Audience of +70k)
    • Discord community support, responding to questions and requests
    • Proactively combat scams and malicious actors by constantly adapting to the latest security standards
    • Re-engage inactive community and determine three pain points why they haven’t used V5 yet
  • Facilitate events and foster cross-community pollination
    • Host weekly community calls and provide recordings for each
    • Organize and conduct 6 ecosystem-focused Twitter Spaces to engage the community and discuss key developments, including integrations and collaborations as part of co-marketing efforts (Oamo, Decent, Cypher Wallet…). Average Q4 listeners: 106
  • Steward the content booster program
    • to attract creators to our community
    • successful if we can entice 5 high-quality pieces of community-created content
  • Re-launch the PoolTogether community newsletter to reactivate and re-engage our 2.3k subscribers
  • Clean up docs.pooltogether.com
    • Create a central collection of information for the PoolTogether ecosystem
    • Provide guides for frequent community questions

Social Media & Marketing

Users need low-barrier entry points to the community. We adapt to PoolTogether’s current needs and create and promote smart content such as newsletters, guides, and articles. Additionally, we’ll execute innovative marketing campaigns to promote PoolTogether V5 with a focus on Optimism.

  • Promote incentives, vaults, and tooling
    • Increase the cadence of our social media postings from 1.5/week to 2.5/week
    • Produce and release at least 4 educational blog posts highlighting key features and updates of PoolTogether V5
    • Conduct a quest campaign to attract new depositors and highlight incentives
  • Initiate and manage at least 6 partnership conversations, focusing on potential collaborations and integrations
    • Launch two PoolTogether Layer3 quests, including a collaboration with Rainbow wallet to increase awareness of V5, expecting a minimum of 5k unique participants in each quest
    • Spearhead the integration of a fiat onramp through Decent.xyz, facilitating easier access and onboarding for new users
    • Coordinate the Oamo collaboration with incentives provided by Oamo, ensuring effective execution and community participation, expecting ~2.5k unique participants.
  • Manage the community’s delegation budget and allocate it to campaigns
    • The budget will be applied to balance the needs of community member satisfaction, incentives, and cross-community campaigning

Development & Tooling

Pooltime is building and hosting infrastructure to invite the community to run their own experiments.

  • pooltime.app development and upkeep
    • Including several mini apps, such as the liquidator, win booster, draw machine, prize API, and a suite of V5 bots
  • Pooly bot development and upkeep

Contributor Fund

In Q4 we announced the contributor fund. We want to offer the community new sustainable ways to get involved and co-create.

  • Steward the contributor fund to get more community members involved
    • 2023 ended with an idea - in Q1 we want to get at least 5 community members involved
  • Facilitate experiments to grow the fund
    • Community-driven art projects, increased presence on Mirror, vault fee experiments, etc.
  • Aim for a first distribution event at the end of Q1

Reflections on Q4-2023

In Q4 our team of three executed work in six different categories:

  1. Community Building & Management: We hosted weekly community calls, joined an Optimism Demo day,
  2. Foster Safe Spaces: We continue our streak with zero account, channel, or server takeovers and have adopted our security measures several times. We saw an uptick in fake accounts, but continue to combat these through real-time monitoring.
  3. Establish the Brand using Social Media Platforms: We sustained a social reach of 70,000 users across Discord, X, Lens, Mirror, and Substack. The social sentiment on PoolTogether is highly positive with few exceptions. The most asked question in Q4 was “When is PoolTogether coming to chain x?”.
  4. Build out Community Tooling & Dev Ops: We continued to build out the pooltime.app interface, including different tools such as Win Booster, Draw Machine, and Liquidator. We are maintaining a suite of V5 bots, built a self-claim function, and finished work on a prize API. Additionally, we have deployed a DAI vault and removed its ownership.
  5. Public Launch campaigning: We collaborated and rolled out social media content, blog articles, and newsletters, ranging from hundreds (Mirror & Substack) to thousands (X) of views. In collaboration with Superfluid, we hosted a hackathon to invite developers to build on PoolTogether V5.
  6. Redesign Contributor Rewards: We have transitioned from Coordinape and POOL distributions and started two new programs: the content booster and the contributor fund.

Budget

Asking for 90,000 USDC
Returning to treasury 20,000 POOL

In addition to this budget, we manage a delegation budget of 250,000 USDC.e on Optimism for campaigns. The Executive Team is holding custody of this budget.

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Hi there. I’m going to nitpick this one thing at a time. Please enjoy!

Okay moderating 70k active members is quite a daunting task. The good thing here is that we have maybe 1% of that (700) people as active members in our communities across various social channels. That’s being generous.

Okay that seems useful but these should be actionable items that can be implemented in other avenues of the protocol design. Is this out of your control as the Community team or Pooltime? It seems our feedback often falls on deaf ears when it comes to Generation Software.

What exactly is that message? I do not see it here.

Hosting weekly calls is important. Recording takes 0 effort and I’ve been shocked we even stopped recording them for almost a year.
These twitter spaces have little to no impact and seem like a shoehorn of the previous Growth team deliverables, which as I’ve stated many times before are just busy work.
I’ve attended several of these events previously and each time I question why I attended in the first place. It’s a simple regurgitation of buzzwords and uninformed questions for qualified guests. We are shouting into the same crypto twitter echo chamber as always.

106 listeners out of 70,000?

Have we not learned that these quest campaigns are not worth the cost?
How much will be spent on these quests? Are the costs going to “users” that will do a few transactions for monetary rewards and or does it go to the quest platform to host our quest?

For the Social Media & Marketing section:
I see some arbitrary participation estimations. 5k unique users, 2.5k unique participants.
Do we expect these "users’ to stay and use pooltogether?
This does not seem to be any kind of new innovation besides creating metrics to create a track record of participation.

Actual value here. Fully in support of this.

I am likely out of the loop here and have not read the contributor fund in full.
This will vary greatly from the previous coordinape template I assume.
Having only 5 community members involved is a rather pitiful milestone.

What is the team budget breakdown here and who are all the team members?
I see Darby is being added, who are the rest on this team?

I think presenting the due diligence will give voters confidence that the compensation is appropriate by seeing evaluation criteria and rationale.

We need to provide voters with enough information to evaluate a budget request. Not all voters have the same experience or background, so we need to step up.
I think we are well aware that there is a race to secure funding before the treasury is sucked up completely but this should bring forth a higher degree of transparency!

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Hey Andy,
thanks for your thorough review! Let me take these one by one:

Feels like a fair evaluation. Community members don’t have to be actively participating to be from value or get value out of it. The content gets consumed and if people want to engage they can.

We can directly apply feedback to our own interface and run the necessary experiments to prove those pain points.

The message is that V5 takes people’s shoes off once it gets fed with the necessary yield. We have a lot planned in Q1 in tandem with the user incentives.

With V4 and especially thanks to the Optimism Quests hosted by the Foundation we gained a lot of traction. Quest campaigns haven’t proven valuable in terms of attracting substantial amounts of TVL, but well executed campaigns have helped us to gain visibility and grow PoolTogether’s brand awareness. While I have generally argued against running these campaigns out of the blue I’m fully convinced it never was a better time to engage in one. We have a fresh protocol, we have rewards in place, and we have a LST coming to V5.
When there was ever a good time for some marketing, it’s now.

The costs are charged by the platform for hosting them.

This is the beauty of V5. Even non-sticky capital now contributes to grand prizes. Small spikes in TVL can substantially grow the grand prize. We believe it’s worth experimenting with these things to build up a more enticing GP.

We want to get five people involved in directly collaborating with us to make this contributor fund more tempting for anyone else. We’re planning to work out a “distribution event” that is open to all (think retroactive rewards or small grants) and hopefully goes into the hands of more than 5 people at some point.

You know what time it is?! It’s Pooltime: underthesea, Lonser, darby & Tjark

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While I highly respect the members of this team and expect they will deliver what is promised, I think now is not the time to be increasing budgets. After seeing many friends in the crypto space lose funds from connecting their wallet to a bad contact, I am over the idea of quests. I think it is bad practice to get users in the habit of connecting their wallet to all sorts of different sites for merit points. I think this budget should be reduced and the team should focus on things that are necessary for the protocol.

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hey there, tuna! curious, would you be against the free quests i have in the pipeline as well?

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hey andy! welcome back.

as mentioned in the tbr, twitter spaces this quarter will be part of several co-marketing campaigns. additionally, i’ve been using twitter spaces not only to engage communities outside of pooltogether and spread awareness of V5, but to repurpose for content on social media. i’ve even been repurposing other podcasts that community members have been on to amplify V5. pretty valuable imo as no one else from the community outside the growth team was creating or promoting high quality content like this.

ideally this type of content would’ve been posted from the PT account. unfortunately the growth team was never able to help manage or contribute directly from PT socials. thankfully the pooltime team saw the value i was providing and has asked me to to help grow PT’s online presence as part of their team.

the last time i remember seeing you in the deep end was when i had jiho as a guest almost a year ago, and you were pretty happy with that space iirc! especially since you got to join the stage and ask questions. that was prob the third or so PT twitter space i’d done. i also remember you being one of the deep end’s earliest vocal supporters when allanon and i started out. it was very encouraging and i appreciated your support very much.

for the record i do thorough research on every project i invite to the deep end and give each guest a doc with questions i have prepared for their approval beforehand.

i’m always looking to improve tho, so if you or anyone else has constructive feedback on how i could improve the spaces, i’m all ears! :slight_smile: i have only ever heard supportive feedback and praise from the community until now. all twitter spaces are recorded and still up btw.

to be frank the deep end could still use more support from the PT official account and the PT community. i’ve been hosting from my personal account.

apologies, the tbr could’ve laid out the quest campaign much better. we’re not paying for all of the quests/initiatives planned:

  • oamo - incentives covered by oamo
  • layer3 quest for decent’s PT deposit/migration tool - costs covered by decent
  • layer 3 quest w/ rainbow - costs split w/ rainbow
  • layer 3 quest PT-focused - costs covered by PT treasury

so out of those four, we’re funding 1.5 of them.

the 5k number was provided by layer3. also, layer3 started a V5 quest last quarter and from what i see rn it has 6,918 participants so far.

yes, of course. i’m coordinating these efforts to coincide with incentives. the quest campaign was supposed to begin this month but with the newly discovered vault issue, it’s been put on hold.

i’m still committed to working part-time in respect of the treasury concerns.

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Yes, I am against all these quests because I think it teaches users habits that can lead to lost funds. Some of these avid defi users are constantly signing contracts and minting all kinds of NFT’s in hopes they will get something for it down the road and ultimately I have seen a few people sign a malicious contract and get drained for thousands. I think we need to keep it simple and avoid all these silly quests.

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I’m a bit short on time so I’ll also give a short reply. Thanks for commenting.

People are able to attend on different accounts in spy mode :wink:
The jihoz interview was great but honestly there was little to no topics of substance had I not joined to actually discuss key topics in the ronin ecosystem.

There has been some improvement I agree but you need to find or choose the divide between attracting fresh users who know little about crypto with simple topics (why are they on crypto twitter already then) or having more robust and detailed expertise discussions. That middle ground can be hard to find and you risk boring the hyper active DeFi users which we want.

Will this ever be a thing? This is out of your control and we’ve discussed it before but this is a huge roadblock for legitimacy to new users. Why should they care about
MACHO MANNNN RANDY SAVAGEEEE posting stuff like some random twitter user?

Crypto twitter especially people tend to be extra careful. PT needs to let us make growth impact where it matters, the official account.

Nice actually pretty good. Are the costs available anywhere?

Yes but I’d like to see a breakdown of the total staff costs to help voters decide for themselves. I worked part time on poolgrants but the pay was quite generous at the time (although all in POOL that I didn’t sell :joy: )

So this is not directed at only you but instead this and other teams putting forth PTBR as a whole.

What is the expense breakdown and salary for each member?
I think presenting the due diligence will give voters confidence that the compensation is appropriate by seeing evaluation criteria and rationale.

We need to provide voters with enough information to evaluate a budget request. Not all voters have the same experience or background, so we need to step up.

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Can you tell us the detailed spending? We only see $90k of budget.

How much are each one of the mods getting?
How much will be spent in the other points?

We need more transparency please.

How was the earlier $70k for 3 months of work spent?
Can we have a brake down of that too?

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You forgot to answer to the breakdown of the budget, please do.

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As I briefly discussed in the governance channel, I’m not happy with the path taken by the PoolTime Team.

As I view it, the team is basically adding the Growth Team (or a reduced version) and continuing previous work. Over the past quarters, I have expressed my lack of conviction over the value of the work done by the Growth Team. Taking into account that the value of the Treasury is being reduced at a considerable rate, I am of the opinion that we should be reducing costs.

If the PoolTime Team can cut costs and separate from the Growth Team, I will happily support the continuation of the amazing work they’ve been doing. If that doesn’t happen, my vote will definitely be against this proposal.

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This will be long. But many of my thoughts have been captured by others so I’ll call those out as I can.

I’m not going to do a breakdown like I did with GS, this team has evolved too much to get what I would consider a reasonable list of deliverables.

Ballparking the Community Team + Growth Team for 2023 there’s been $300k in requested funding. Did we see $300k in value in 2023, I don’t think so, but I’m not sure I’m drawing an accurate comparison so I’m not going to cut this request down for the past expenses. But this $90k does feel higher than the protocol could accommodate.

I said this last quarter, but it would be helpful for the teams to identify who these people are. GS I can check discord roles (not everyone will do that), Pooltime I have to guess; Tjark, Underethsea, Darby… Daboom? Lonser? Someone else? Tjark did provide the answer, it’s Lonser, but this should be in the PTBR.

And as others have said an actual breakdown of fund allocation would be helpful - this applies to all PTBRs.

Moderate community platforms & social media handles

it’s not as active as it used to be, but there’s still scammers scamming so we need this.

Re-engage inactive community and determine three pain points

They haven’t moved to v5 because there’s no easy button. And some people need to migrate chains. v4 Christmas Cards were on Polygon, those wallets did not win, people lost interest, so they aren’t going to know to go to v5 or how to do it. At least for the cards I gave out…

Cross-community pollination

Is this bringing people in, can we track that at all?

Twitter spaces

Andy nailed it that these don’t have huge engagement numbers - but maybe those are big for crypto Twitter. And the fact that the PT Twitter can’t be used is just insane, PT Inc. or whoever owns that account is sabotaging Darby’s success - flat out. Darby’s response that the repurposing for additional content provides value is interesting. It’s hard to put numbers to, but I’d love to see that done. How much additional content came from repurposing other content, and what were the CTR numbers of that new content.

Content Booster

This is good it encourages anyone to make content, importantly those outside the PT Ecosystem

Incentive, vault promotion

Good and I like these defined goals.

Quests

This was identified Andy and answered by Tjark. Some work and some don’t it’s dependent on good execution and marketing. Hoping with LST launch it’s all rainbows and poolers, but TBD. Darby gave solid numbers and I’m more comfortable with them as an experiment.

Fiat onramp

This is exciting, is there an approximate timeline?

Oamo

I’m out of the loop here, 2.5k users is an exciting number to capture even 20% of, so this is great.

Pooltime

Can’t say anything bad about any of this even if I wanted too… Idk not enough blurple - best “bad” thing I can muster.

Contributor fund

I’m behind on this but it seems exciting. I hope the small target of 5 community members involved is because they will be exceptionally involved or have very good use cases. We don’t want a repeat of Coordinapes “that name looks familiar, have GIVE”

Long story short: Most of this is ok. I’d like to see some of the cost cutting, fluff reduction, and spreading of solid goals through out the PTBR.

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Thoughts on the Pooltime team

I’ve been a fan of Pooltime since it started. Ultimately, the Treasury Working Group (TWG) transitioned into the Finance Team once it became clear treasury management wasn’t the community’s priority and the desire was to put most of the treasury USDC into the PoolTogether protocol to generate yield and use as delegation capital. Tthe Finance Team managed the prize tiering in V4, which cut the subsidy quite a lot, and they established Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) to reduce slippage and stablize the value of POOL held in the treasury. While this POL isn’t performing well in the current market, it did perform well and provided an efficient use of resources for ~2 years. The Finance Team then transitioned to Pooltime once V5 launched, since underthesea created the first community user interface (UI), which displayed all available prize vaults and didn’t take the curation approach.

underthesea

I’ve been a big proponent of the work that @underthesea has done for years in the PoolTogether community. He’s created the Pooly bot in Discord; provided support in general, get help, holders hangout, developers, and governance when he’s been able to; underthesea and bronder both worked to provide an overview of team spending throughout 2022 and 2023; underthesea created and launched Pooltime, which has features that allow everyday Poolers to claim prizes, liquidate yield, etc. I view underthesea as an invaluable asset to the protocol and DAO.

Of all the contributors, I believe underthesea provides for the most value for his individual funding requests. He’s also raised concerns about runway throughout 2023 and tried to have some of the discussions we’re having now, with the most recent post being the Q4 2023 Treasury Report and Runway Considerations that was posted in November 2023.

Tjark

Tjark is right up there with underthesea. He’s been active for quite some time, and he provides a lot of value for the community. He hosts the weekly community calls; provides support in Discord and communicates bug reports to GS as they are shared on Discord; shares updates on the forum and Discord; posts on the PoolTogether Twitter and Lens accounts; led the initiative for a PT V5 hackathon in Q4; led the effort to start the contributor fund to encourage more community participation without impacting the treasury; and more. From my point of view, Tjark has been a constant presence in the PoolTogether Discord and is a great representative for the PoolTogether brand. When Lens launched and Tjark created the PoolTogether Lens handle, he was active in the Lens contributors Telegram and Stani and the Lens team were highly engaged with his posts from the PT Lens account. Through Tjark’s efforts, he’s gotten a lot of exposure for the PoolTogether brand.

Feedback on Current PTBR RFC

For the Pooltime budget request, I would be in favor of supporting both Tjark and underthesea. Looking at the previous Q4 2023 budget request, the ask was $58,000, which is an amount I would be happy to support. I would also be open to cost optimization, but I can’t see myself supporting an ask greater than the Q4 2023 Pooltime request given the current environment.

I will say that the Pooltime PTBR could use greater clarity on how the team plans to re-engage community members who aren’t in V5 or who have drifted away from the community. Retention and growth should be the core focus for the next quarter. Again, applying some more quantitative information on how these deliverables are expected to have impact would be a welcome change before this moves to a formal PTBR.

Costs from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024

Looking at the cost between the two quarters, there’s been a ~55% increase quarter over quarter. I know that both Tjark and underthesea were on Pooltime in Q4 2023.

There’s no budget breakdown in either of these PTBRs but the move away from budget breakdowns occurred after the Council Discussion: Changes to the Team Budget Request process was published. This was a council-driven change and not something POOL holders voted on.

I have to assume, then, the increase comes from the cost of adding Darby and Lonser to the Pooltime team. I was present on council calls when both Darby and Lonser shared they were winding down the Growth Team and Grants Team respectively and were planning on joining Pooltime to reduce cost. However, there’s only a ~17.4% reduction when you add up the total of the Q4 2023 Growth Team, Grants Team, and Pooltime budget requests and compare it to the current request on the Q1 2024 Pooltime request. The additional cost to this current request is $16,000 per new contributor and that annualized cost is $64,000 per part-time contributor being added to the Pooltime team.

While I think Darby and Lonser are great community members and have done valuable work before, their respective teams have not contributed to protocol growth or adoption in the last couple of quarters. The metrics of the Growth Team and the impact of the Grants Team don’t indicate to me that it’s a good use of funds at this time. However, I may be wrong here. I know the Growth Team was dependent on other teams completing their deliverables.

I’d be happy to review a funding request for @poptones and @Lonser if they can provide a detailed RFC for separate PTBRs that outline their deliverables, the quantitative impact they estimate these deliverables will have (would welcome stretch goals), and how these deliverables will contribute to TVL growth and adoption of V5.

Closing Thoughts

As others have stated, I don’t support this RFC in its current form because it’s not clear what roles the new contributors have, how they define their relationship to the team, and the impact of their deliverables. Going back to the comments I’ve shared elsewhere, incorporating OKRs or KPIs that let us measure your success and impact is feedback that applies to every team and contributor creating a PTBR. I don’t want Darby or Lonser to think I’m singling them out with this comment.

@poptones and @Lonser, I know you’re dedicated, but I would encourage you both to create a team together or draft and post separate RFCs from the Pooltime RFC to request funding for Q1 2024.

While I’ve been able to see the impact of underthesea’s and Tjark’s contributions in recent quarters, I haven’t seen the same success from the Growth or Grants teams. Please show me and others what we’re missing and share your RFCs on the forum. I’d be happy to give feedback and help in anyway I can.

My overall view is that the community needs to take austerity measures to preserve runway however we can until it’s clear what direction we need to head in to grow TVL and boost adoption. I know all contributors work hard and give it their all, but we’re at a point when hard decisions have to be made, so we can ensure the protocol survives until market conditions improve and we can find a way to grow our runway resources.

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I do not approve this request.

We are in a situation where we have no revenues and we are spending too much money compared to what we have left.

Discord community is not 70k but at the moment less than 20 active users, probably less than 10.

Telegram community is absent.

We should spend way way less, not hire new people and on the contrary reduce for the following months Pooltime/community team.

Spend to build the product, once the product is here and the community is here we can improve the spending of the community managers.

I am in many projects and the average mod on a low traffic Discord server cost $1,000 per month.

Plus there aree too many deliverables in the same proposal: we need Discord moderation at minimum gas (1 or 2 mods it’s ok for the moment) but we don’t need to spend to build two user interfaces.

In a time where money are scarce we are paying to build pooltime and cabana. This again is not wise.

I ask to submit another proposal with only two mods, and different proposals for different cost voices.

We must pay a minimum for the managing of the community and pay for results for community building. KPI as many others have suggested.

Edit: I deleted last sentence that was indeed too much.

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hey @BRONDER @Taliskye @BraveNewDeFi @mr_DvD, thx for the feedback. it’s become apparent that the community does not keep up with the growth team updates i post on a weekly basis in discord during council calls.

i have no problem separating from pooltime and submitting an rfc for myself. i have always listened and worked together with the community when revising tbrs and i appreciate everyone’s willingness to find a middle ground.

i’d also like to remind the community that the growth team’s budget request was just 3.61% of the entire budget requested across all teams last quarter (q4).

my high-priority deliverables for growth this quarter are:

  • a fiat onramp to set the stage for retail next bull run
  • a highly-requested migration/cross-chain deposit tool to bring funds from previous versions to v5
  • a marketing campaign comprised of four quests (half of which will be funded by partners) planned to coincide with incentives to optimize tvl growth

all of which were set to launch this month and have been put on hold due to the newly discovered vault issue.

i appreciate the community members who have noticed and understood the blockers that have continuously hindered the growth team’s impact. despite all this, the growth team has produced high-quality content that will remain relevant and valuable for as long as the hyperstructure is around.

thx again to all who voiced their opinions, i will start preparing a separate rfc and post it once it’s ready :saluting_face:

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Thanks for engaging. This is a lot of great feedback and many good discussion points you are bringing up. @AndyKaufman @TheRealTuna @BRONDER @Taliskye @BraveNewDeFi @mr_DvD

I can understand your concerns - our users being scammed is my deepest fear and I do a lot to make sure this doesn’t happen. In the last quarter alone I have reported three malicious PT frontends for takedown.
The thing with these quests is that we’re not trying to convince PoolTogether users to do quests, but are tapping into the quest-affine user base of Layer3.
On top of that

  1. Quests are now not just earning gas for the OP sequencer but also helping to fuel the GP. The longer we can keep capital in the better obv, but every bit helps now.
  2. With visibility for V5 as low as it currently is, I see these quests a lot more high value than they’ve ever been.
  3. With V4, questers often missed the fact they won prizes. V5 changes that, so it’s worth seeing if that makes users stickier.

This is why we want Darby on the team! V5 needs marketing from the source. Darby has done amazing since becoming a part of this community and later the Growth Team.
Being present on so many platforms is a lot of work. Most of the time content ideas remain drafts and never see the light. She has the skills to get our content over the finish line.

It has been due to the general process for some time that all budget requests are tied to a team’s deliveries, not the individual’s salaries. However, underthesea and I haven’t received any increases since those have last been disclosed.

Thank you for taking the time to review the request and engage.

This is only a small part of the story. The Growth Team consisted of four members. I don’t want to paint the picture of us absorbing it. We’d like to see darby join for her individual talent instead of her acquired expertise getting lost.

Additionally, Lonser is stepping up from a previously very small time commitment. A lot of the time he spent on support and running experiments was previously actually unpaid.

This quarter we have additionally added costs for quests ($7500), infrastructure ($1000 - previously paid out of underthesea’s pocket), reimbursements for transactions ($250 - previously paid out of the team’s pockets), and rewards for the content booster ($2250).

thank you! :pray:

This feedback is well heard. I actually forgot why we stepped away from having members on PTBRs by default.
Our actual PTBR will list all members (underthesea, Lonser, darby & me).

I agree that activity surged but I see a demand for all the platforms we are active on. We were able to see some spikes of activity around certain events like the V5 beta & launch and I feel once the protocol gets on a winning streak again our strong foundation will pay out a lot more again.

I hear you and agree. This is why Pooltime pushed on PTIP-89 and helped with the Portals.fi integration.
Not having this earlier in place was a missed opportunity and supporting the migration should probably have been listed as another deliverable on this proposal.

We could but it’s hard to do. You can measure interactions & new members in our social reach and put it against a previous average. In the end, these metrics are easy to manipulate by engagement farming and similar - so I’m not a fan of most of the quantitative community management KPIs.
Many actions you take in community building and marketing can be seen as “training a muscle”. The more often get to see our content or interact with PoolTogether the likelier they are to trust the protocol with more time and funds.
Previously we have worked together with almost every contributor working on something and any other team contributing to PoolTogether. Again - this makes it hard to directly point at a number you can track.

Having darby join us is a response to that and will mitigate the issue.

Thank you for taking the time and all your positive words. This means a lot coming from you!

I appreciate this a lot! However, we are spread thin across all the positions we’ve grown into. To be efficient and deliver growth we are in desperate need of some help and workforce.

We’ll work on a better framework that will allow us to track necessary metrics more efficiently. So far we refrained from spending money on paid services or giving up a portion of user data to Google Analytics or similar.

Yes, partly this, and partly some other expenses I’ve listed above. We’ll include these in an updated PTBR.
It is worth highlighting that we have previously operated with a very lean budget and many times personally absorbed costs for infrastructure, giveaways, gas spending (100s of $), subscriptions, and similar.

This feedback is heard and Pooltime team members have voiced that they are considering this approach. Personally, I see many dependences between what they are bringing to the table and Pooltime’s current needs and vision. That being said - I’m torn on this.

I know - you have been personally attacking me through four different means of communication (that I know of). You have been accusing me of various things, including bad faith and have heavily engaged in spreading false information, half-truths, and plain FUD. I still want to take the time and reply to you.

The Discord community is only a part of the social audience. Discord alone has 12k members. Over the last month, it had 77 active communicators, and the announcement channel had 800 readers. It was a relatively quiet month due to the holidays.

Be the change you want to see. Help to make it engaging and bring some life to it! We have identified Farcaster as a lot more beneficial secondary social platform.

I don’t agree - we should maximize now and get some traction to V5.

Our team does far more than being a Discord mod. You called your colleague in for support on X. They shared the following statement: “With that amount,tbh I’d be helping with development of the protocol,design, community mod,biz dev and whatever it takes.”
Pooltime has always done exactly that.

Right now there aren’t even two mods on the team. A small portion of my time goes into moderating. Also, Lonser previously did some part-time work on that behalf.

I hope we can remain civil, even though you have thoroughly voiced your dissatisfaction with my person. This was different in the past (1, 2, 3, 4), and I’m hoping to let actions follow to bring you back to that stance.

Closing Thoughts

I do understand the fear of a depleting treasury. Even if it’s still out in the unknown it already feels very imminent.

For us, this is a reason to get active right now and do the best work possible to reach a point where the future looks different. Our team has been wearing many hats for a long time. I’d argue that we are already doing a lot to make things work with a comparably low amount of capital.

Community Building, Moderation, Content Creation, Social Media Management (just to name a few) - in a perfect world we would have a team consisting of multiple people for each of these jobs. In reality, all of this has been concentrated between 1-2 people.
Pooltime has been doing a lot more than just that. At times this has been a very demanding task. On top, custody of Discord and Twitter holds a lot of responsibility and risk.

Again, thanks for all the feedback and valuable discussion in this thread. Pooltime is going to regroup, discuss, and revise.
At the same time, I’d like to ask you to re-evaluate this ongoing discussion with the arguments and replies our team has brought up.
We are hoping to do the work necessary to present the community with a proposal that is good for a positive consensus.

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Not true: I just asked where is the work we pay so much. I used you as an example because you are the front man and I also asked pardon yesteday.
If you were with us yesterday you would have seen it yesterday, I don’t know how to ask these questions without appearing hostile.

I repeat, I have nothing against you as a person, I have a lot against your team results vs costs. I think I am allowed to have this concern. Maybe I am right maybe I am wrong.

Instead of avoiding to answer just prove the community that your work is worth your cost. This is what I would do and expect to see.
Want to mute me? I deserved it probably but answer the question for everyone reading, and then mute the fucker (me).

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Are you suggesting I should post a RFC for a PTBR to become Telegram community manager for Q1?

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I don’t know why that part was still there in your reponse: I deleted it way before your post because it was objectively too much. I’m sorry you managed to read it.

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And why don’t you discolse it again so we know how we are spending the money we are voting to spend?
It is 3 days I’m asking to know how much you guys earn and I have no answers yet again you say: “go to read it yourself”.
I may have asked in a wrong way, but the question is legit and I still have no answer.

Why? If what you take is less than what you deserve for your work, as you stated before, what’s the problem to disclose it?

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Sir, take it down a notch. You can ask questions and still be civil. You’re choosing not to do that. You were timed out on Discord for violating the Code of Conduct community members agree to. You were not muted for asking questions. You were muted for being overly aggressive and harassing people in the server and in DMs. Since you were timed out in the server, you’ve taken to the forum here, Twitter, and Telegram and have lashed out at many people. You’re still violating the Code of Conduct, even after being timed out in the server for it.

People have shared with you that you can find this information in past PTBRs before the council made the change in the Council Discussion: Changes to the Team Budget Request process. I raised this issue with the current PTBR process in my [Discussion]: PTBRs, Council, Direction, and Lack of Accountability post.

That being said, here is the info you’re looking for. @underthesea and @Tjark can provide any updates if these amounts have changed:

The old process implemented by the council was a little strange, so you’ll see the Yearly USD Compensation and the Commitment Percentage fields. If the Commitment Percentage is 50%, that means the annualized request would be for 50% of the amount in the Yearly USD Compensation field.

Tjark’s Role in TBR-Q2-2023 - Community Team Proposal

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  • Annualized request: $120k
  • Quarterly request: $30k

Underthesea’s Role in TBR-Q2-2023 - Renewal Finance Team Proposal

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  • Annualized request: $60k
  • Quarterly request: $15k

Any TBR or funding proposal from Q2 2023 or earlier will list out the team members, their roles, their yearly USD compensation, and their commitment percentage. You can see that in the Budget Requests section of the forum.

Many, many Poolers have shared with you that they agree with your points and concerns. However, community members don’t appreciate the aggressive tone and are less likely to point you toward these resources if you continually harass them.

If you want to put up an RFC or a Telegram team PTBR, go ahead. That’s the great thing about governance: anyone can create a proposal and start a discussion. If you go through the process and put it on chain, you will see if people support that request or not.

I can say for sure if you adjust your tone and take time to type out questions and comments that aren’t pointed and aggressive, people will help you find the answers you’re looking for. The PoolTogether community is very welcoming, but no one likes a bully.

I’m happy to help you find whatever public information you’d like, but I’m not going to tolerate your tirades in DMs or on any other social channel.

As I said, many people agree with your questions but no one appreciates your current tone and demeanor.

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Thank you @BraveNewDeFi !

Edit: If I am not wrong it is $10k/month and I think it is too much in a period like this.

If you take this as a personal bully attack I don’t know what to say.

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This isn’t bullying.

This is being incredibly aggressive and mean for no reason.

There’s a big difference.

Again, this information is public. I would encourage you to spend some time on the forum to look at past proposals. If you have specific questions, I’m happy to help as long as you keep things civil.