Most core features of InstantDAO have already been built and will be ready for alpha testing within a few weeks. Our immediate goal for the budget is beta product launch and marketing outreach to inform blockchain projects the availability of our platform and the benefits of tokenizing on Stellar. We plan to hire a part time marketing manager and graphic designer. Long-term, our budget request will give us a multi-year run way for operations and support of InstantDAO and continuous product development to create value for Stellar users and ecosystems.
• Launch alpha
• Complete beta product development
• Beta product launch with marketing outreach
• Education outreach- blogs, videos, and social media
• Continuous feature update and development based on user and partner feedback
• Repeat step 5 :-)
As you could hopefully see from our track record with NiceTrade, we are high-level Stellar developers who are committed to continuous feature development and take great care of our project, including uptime and support. With every feature we build, we strive to add value for Stellar users and make progress based on user feedback. We are realistic and know that most startups won't get it right on the first try, and our goal with the budget is to sustain a multi-year runway for the project to get it right. By the time SCF selection has ended, we will have built up enough of InstantDAO for alpha testing. If we receive our budget request, we will launch a marketing push to highlight the benefits of the InstantDAO platform and Stellar as the blockchain for project tokens, and initiate beta launch for the platform. As we have historically done, most of the budget will be used to improve the platform while adding tools and services for the Stellar ecosystem.
PROBLEM & SOLUTION
Inspired by defi pioneers like Uniswap, and Compound, decentralized governance has gained a lot of traction recently as a way to add utility to cryptocurrency tokens. This is the idea that token holders could influence the direction of the project (e.g. yield farming parameters, development priorities, integrations, etc...) via decentralized voting. Projects that wish to implement decentralized governance properly must implement similar features and solve some common problems to ensure that the process is transparent, fair, and auditable. Our goal with InstantDAO is to provide platform that lets any Stellar asset issuer get up and running with decentralized governance in just a few minutes.
Our mission is three folds:
1. Allow Stellar asset issuers to easily add decentralized governance features to their token.
2. Improve the utility of project based Stellar assets
3. Attract more projects to Stellar with an easy to use decentralized governance platform.
TARGET MARKET
Our target market is any blockchain projects (whether they're on Stellar already or not) that wish to add decentralized governance as a feature to their tokens. With NiceTrade, we have interacted with various token issuers and most of them claim governance as a selling point for their token. InstantDAO will let them get up and running quickly while providing decentralized governance features for their users. Governance is a very broad concept that is uniquely applicable to almost every cryptocurrency project that seeks to add utility to their token by allowing holders to influence the direction of the project.
REVENUE MODEL
After beta testing period, InstantDAO will offer a subscription licensing model with fixed tiers based on the number of expected users for each prospective project. We've reached out to a few projects and they are receptive to this pricing model, as it costs a very small fraction of building something similar from scratch. This is a relatively new concept (there are no other DAO-as a service offerings for comparison), but based on our experience with NiceTrade, we're confident that the demand exists.
We already have a scalable backend infrastructure for operating InstantDAO. Our budget request will help sustain engineering and marketing for multiple years. We are passionate about development and our burn rate is very conservative as we love to code and will scale everything based on demand.
MARKET RESEARCH
Decentralized governance goes hand in hand with decentralized finance (Defi). Most Defi tokens are governance tokens with rewards for liquidity providers. As we can see from the defi boon, the market is rapidly expanding which itself lives within a growing blockchain space.
THREATS & OPPORTUNITIES
We think there is a large unmet need for decentralized governance as a service. Most modern project tokens claim decentralized governance as a utility feature of the token and need to solve a lot of common problems.
Decentralized governance by itself should not be directly affected by government regulations. Certain customer segments like defi may be affected by future regulations. But decentralized governance is broadly applicable regardless of economy and industry. By launching on Stellar, InstantDao is also betting on the technological strengths of Stellar providing cheaper and faster transactions than competitors.
COMPETITION
There is currently no "DAO as a service" platform like InstantDAO that we could identify. The popularity of decentralized governance is relatively recent and buoyed by decentralized finance.
It is always possible for projects to implement decentralized governance themselves. I have seen several of these on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (have not seen any on Stellar yet), and they all end up looking very similar and offer the same set of core features. We think that implementing governance is definitely no small endeavor, especially backend ledger analytics for auditable voting. When it comes to "build vs buy", we think the benefits of subscribing to InstantDAO greatly outweighs building something similar from scratch, especially after seeing how easy it is to setup and use InstantDAO.
MARKETING & SALES
We have established many prospective contacts through operating NiceTrade, a decentralized exchange and wallet for Stellar. Projects have been contacting us directly for listing and we are well connected with several popular Stellar projects. We plan to expand our social media presence by publishing videos and blog posts highlighting the benefits of Stellar to prospective token issuers, and make sure they're aware there is a ready-to-go decentralized governance platform as their disposable.
