ProposalsProposal 594
ProposalsProposal 594
After sharing our latest proposal, the community gave us some valuable feedback and we've taken it on board. This new proposal sees changes in our cost and runway, and our reconnection to the Nouns community.
What remains is our commitment to becoming a sustainable business and our belief that brand-building is central to the long-term success of Nouns.
We’ve grown our audience from 80K to 550K and have built a passionate audience of creatives on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok
After finding product market fit with Three Artists, we've created multiple follow-up hits in Drawn Apart and Drawn Together. And they're growing fast!
We've also translated our top performing videos for our spanish language instagram and tiktok, to go next level.
As we've continued to grow, international brands are reaching out: we’ve formed relationships with the likes of Adobe, Wacom and Magma (our Adobe friends were sufficiently Nouns-pilled after watching our Nouns Explainer).
And as we build our network, we provide a bridge for creatives to learn about crypto, including setting up wallets for all of our artists to mint their work.
Brand building is about creating a strong, memorable identity that resonates emotionally with our audience. For us, this means making the ⌐◨-◨ a symbol associated with creativity, connection and self-expression.
We’ve started this journey by telling stories that celebrate the creative process and show how we can connect through creativity.
Our audience is taking notice: they see the aspirational quality of our work (like @Cheyenne), feel the quality of our culture (we literally healed something in @Carly) and @Ellie just wants to buy merch (it's coming @Ellie).
They are starting to understand that the ⌐◨-◨ represent this feeling of being creatively lit up - and it's getting them excited.
We need to keep speaking to an audience that want to be courageous and inventive and inspired - because those are the legends we want wearing our funny square glasses.
Now let's get into some key changes we'll be making moving forward.
After many excellent discussions with members of the community, it’s clear Nounish needs to adapt to a smaller treasury. To lower our ask, we've decided to make significant sacrifices.
We’re reducing salaries, shortening the prop's timeline, and slimming down our team (from 12 to 7). We're not interested in retreating to our cushy lives in advertising - we want to build something we believe in.
We are so certain that Nounish can grown into a massive, sustainable business that beams Nounish values out into world, that we’re prepared to make sacrifices in the present to invest in something amazing in the future.
Last season we put our heads down and focused entirely on reaching a follower target. This saw rapid growth but didn’t give us much of a chance to connect with, or celebrate, the wider nouns community.
Moving forward, we're super excited to celebrate Nouns projects, and other Nouns builders. As we continue our growth we’ll be sharing the creative, the inventive, the absurd and the philanthropic - projects that bolster our brand building north star.
We're pumped to show our new audience that Nounish is part of a much bigger brand - where exciting, wholesome, strange shit happens.
The north star of our previous proposal (413) was growth, so we made the strategic decision to pilot ideas in the 60-90 second range (allowing us to hit all major short-form platforms). But with our new vision of helping to build a beloved brand, we need to provide our audience with more depth. Love takes a little longer to foster than 60 seconds.
This depth can be found in longer form content - specifically, YouTube - which will be the focus of our next follower goal. We aim to get 1 million YouTube subscribers over the next 2 years.
Increasing the length of our stories on YouTube will allow us to provide more depth and nourishment to our audience, because it's where people go for nourishment. Yes, we want ⌐◨-◨ to represent playfulness and absurdity - feelings that may be considered more fleeting - but the awesome thing is that there's so much depth to celebrate: open-mindedness, curiosity, experimentation - powerful values that drew us to Nouns in the first place.
We've already run some longer-form experiments, which means we can take everything we have learnt and apply it immediately. Longer-form stoytelling is what we want, it's what our audience wants, it'll help us brand-build more meaningfully and it'll be key in becoming sustainable.
Becoming sustainable is essential for the stability and longevity of Nounish and Nouns DAO. Cutting our costs will obviously assist us on this path, and we’re now looking into all the ways Nounish can make money.
We want to explore the many options below (to run experiments as soon as we can):
We are asking for 545K USDC to give us a 9 month runway (excluding additional revenue) to get us on the track towards sustainbility. This is a 64% lower burn-rate than our last round of funding.
Salaries (team of 7) – $440,000
Operating Expenses* – $64,000
Production – $41,000
Total – $545,000
*rent, utilities & maintenance, insurance, accounting, legal, consumables, software, equipment etc.
As brand builders and visual storytellers, we’re following the classic filmmaking rule: “show, don’t tell”. Our aim is not to educate or “tell” our audience why something is good. Our job is to “show” our audience what Nounishness represents - what it feels like.
We're going to continue brand-building with this philosophy, creating the most nourishing stories we can - all while showing our audience that Nounish is one thread in a weird and wonderful tapestry where creative minds are coming together to build something new.
We're playing a longer game. We know it's where we can make the most impact. It's why we are driven to become sustainable - because we know that the more our talented team can iterate, learn and execute the more we succeed. We've proven this with each proposal.
We're starting to find some real reach. Let us grow our audience, explore new ideas, expand into longer-form stories and become an influential, aspirational brand inextricably linked to Nouns.
If you stopped believing that Nouns can become a household name, we’re here to tell you it can be and it will be.
