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
- 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.
- With visibility for V5 as low as it currently is, I see these quests a lot more high value than they’ve ever been.
- 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! 
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.