Thanks for your all your work, @tim, and the time you’ve put into the proposal!
Overall, I think the budget is reasonable, though I agree with @BRONDER that the PoolyCon expenses are quite high and might not be a suitable request for a team budget.
Performance Metrics / Milestones
These are all great goals to have, though it will be hard to measure the bulk of these goals without some quantitative figure to measure by:
Are we looking to increase daily active users across the whole prize network or on targeted networks like Polygon and Optimism? What is a stretch goal in terms of an increase–30%? I like the goal, but if you can give yourself something that POOLers can measure success by, it would be helpful when you evaluate your progress in Q2 2023.
Would also be good to have a baseline on what our notable social interactions are now and what our reach is vs. what you’re hoping to accomplish by the end of Q1 2023.
I’m not sure what the objective of PoolyCon is, and I haven’t seen it previously on the forum. Taking the total budget request / 30 attendees equates to $1,666.66 for the week, excluding airfare. It would be good to note what the objective of PoolCon is, why it’s exclusive to the team and core contributors, and how it furthers adoption or development of the protocol.
If this were an onboarding event or an educational event, I could see the value. It would be great to have more detail on PoolyCon. I’ll talk more about the budget request below.
While the podcast is great, I think you already cover this in the Purpose section. Since it’s not exclusive to Q1 2023, I think it can be removed from the milestones.
More detail on this would be great, too. Does “gather” mean on Discord or does this relate more to in-person at PoolyCon? If there isn’t a metric to measure here and it’s not exclusive to Q1 2023, it might be more suited for the Purpose section.
Budget Request
In-person events are important and do allow team members to connect. For remote teams, these events can be invaluable. As @BRONDER noted, the question is whether or not funding for team off-site should come from the protocol treasury or not. I’ll leave that question to POOLers.
Just going on the cost alone, $50,000 is a lot for one event. If compared to other team’s TBRs, the cost of PoolyCon could provide funding for the Finance Team, Community Team, and Education / Onboarding Team for nearly one quarter. In a bear market, every dollar counts.
I do think if PoolyCon were funded, it could be done for less. The LifeHouse Hotel is about $100/night higher than other hotels in Denver that could be booked. Saving $100/night on hotel rooms would save nearly $10,000 in expenses.
On the hotel: how many people do you anticipate having stay in the hotel and how many extra rooms do you have funding allocated for? If I’m assuming 30 people, that’s quite a large number of people to attend an off-site and conference for a week.
I do think the PoolyCon budget could be reduced by $10k to $15k if not by more. More than anything, I’d like to understand what we’re hoping to get out of PoolyCon and if this is a cost that should come from the protocol treasury.
Again, I think the Growth Team is really important. It would be great to see some revisions, so progress can be measured later; in addition, some budget trimming would go a long way as well.