Purpose:
Phonon DAO has created a marketing team working group for the DAO, and for the PhononDAO token. The marketing team has a lot of outreach goals, but one of the goals is attracting talent to the protocol.
This post is a place to discuss preliminary goals/targets and KPIs for the marketing team and for the DAO more broadly on this topic. Its important to note, this hinges on our ability to build out a treasury and is of course connected to all elements of the DAOs governance.
Background:
PhononDAO is a governance token that spun out of the GridPLUS project. The Governance Token and the PhononDAO are set to play a key part in Phonon, a layer 0 protocol that uses a hardware layer to send private keys.
The potential for this technology is enormous, and marketing is essential in the success of the Phonon project and its adoption as a technology. While Phonon is a layer zero from a technical standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, it should be conceptualized more akin to a new layer 1, with comparable marketing and community growth behaviors mirroring those of Solana or Avalanche.
The reason for this is that (Unlike applications like Helium or layer 2s like Arbitrum) the protocol lives or dies by the applications built on-top of it, using Phonon and its hardware layer. While the technology itself is exciting, that excitement dies quickly if developers or the public don’t see phonon solving problems in the real world.
While we in the DAO might speculate (especially since we are early in the lifecycle of Phonon) on the best applications of the protocol, in the long term, it’s a difficult prospect for the DAO to be both building application layers and developing the protocol and tokenomics. In other words, you almost never see a team develop Ethereum and uniswap and cryptokitties.
Successful applications will lead to technology adoption, and technology adoption is good for PhononDAO, so long as PhononDAO’s tokenomics are correctly implemented as the layers ontop of Phonon are built.
In software, and perhaps the world as we know it, nothing beats a bunch of smart developers working together, competing with other teams for big rewards.
Here are a few bullet points on the big ticket items that we need to be focusing on, and following that clear strategy, we will need to be evangelizing this shit everywhere we go.
Attracting Talent
The most difficult (and competitive) process for any blockchain project right now is attracting talent. Good devs are very difficult to find, any developer with 3-5 years’ experience probably has made a considerable fortune in the last few years. In addition, there are a lot more projects now than ever before and a lot more places for talent to work.
Seeding the Market
Since we are a brand-new organization, perhaps the best way to kickstart any projects built on top of Phonon is to build something ourselves. Hence the discussing in the Discord about building a cross-chain DEX. I think this is an awesome idea, and I suggest adding something to sweeten the pot.
I think we need to invite competition and juicy rewards, and also give Karl and any other people on podcasts or on social media something to talk about. That said, this all hinges on the growth of our treasury and our Liquidity group.
Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling, all spit-balled and by no means exhaustive.
- Airdrops for any dev who comes in and can achieve some challenges set by the dev team, goal would be to bring more devs talking and into the discord and get more collaborations. If these rewards are big and juicy enough, then devs will share this with other devs. We could even formalize the challenge with a leaderboard and run it for 30 days. Maybe we give some vested tokens to the top 3 devs. Measure the increase in #DEV activity and pivot accordingly.
- While we might be building technology like a cross-chain dex internally, maybe we introduce the concept to a few other competing teams and set a prize to the winner. This pushes our team, gives carrots to them and to the other teams, gets better ideas.
- Setting up HUGE prize ($1M+) in vested tokens (that is paid out in a vesting schedule with milestones, etc) for teams who can build out technology using Phonon. We leave it very open ended and the DAO will judge/vote on whether or not teams reach the KPIs that we want. Maybe we have a prize for most innovative, highest TVL, most throughput, etc.
- Would love your ideas!
Roadmap For the Future
Broadly, the marketing team should be producing content that explains to both a technical and non-technical audience what the roadmap is for PhononDAO, the roadmap for Phonon as a protocol and the opportunity that is present with both. This is something we are working on so I dont want to harp on this too much, but any package that attracts talent needs this.
Concise, clear, marketing statements
We need quantified value propositions for everything Phonon can do. Is it faster than the fastest L1? Ok how much faster? 100X, 1,000X? Is it cheaper? Ok how much cheaper? Is it 1,000,000X cheaper? Is it 10X cheaper?
We want to be able to say something like , “We have a technology stack you can build on today for crypto that is over 10000X faster than any crosschain technology, more private than tornadocash while being 100,000,000X cheaper, that can build X, Y, Z.”
and/or something like, “We have the technology that can turn 1 billion cellphones into nodes in a network you can build, where you can build a micropayment TOR browser system, crosschain dex, thats 100x faster, than anything that is available today”.
Anyway, these can be refined but these concise sales points need to be the meat and potatoes of our marketing efforts to attract talent and to attract investment.