Thanks for the comprehensive proposal @Anthony.Leuts, template for other proposals going forwards.
Some of the work has been exceptional, and thank you for continuing to push the Aragon Brand, The Eagle has been a real highlight for me and is the only source of information that you need to stay up to date.
Few questions:
The separation of the community levels is a welcome step. Are you essentially including anyone who does not fit into the first two categories as ANT Holders, and if so, will we be thinking about gating specific channels or commenting to just ANT holders?
For the events, will we be targeting all of the tier 1 events going forwards once the product has been released and will we announce an event schedule that we will be attending so that builders will be able to come to an event knowing in Aragon will be there or not?
In the case of a feature delay which can happen, what would the focus be on growing the database of potential users or would the focus be on the Hackathons and brand to attract developers to the Aragon ecosystem?
When will the roughly when will next iteration of the DAO global Hackathon start, is it around the product launch?
Thanks for the feedback and questions! Here are some answers:
Re: community - our belief is that individuals are only in our community if they are one of the 3: DAO Builders, Developers (using our tools, building on them, etc.) or ANT holders. Of course all 3 can overlap, you can have a developer building a custom DAO who holds ANT and thus their user journey would be different. We are considering gating certain channels and/or leading certain community members to different channels to get what they need!
We will not necessarily be targeting all of the tier 1 events. We will target events that best fit our strategy including other parameters including the type of event, cost, geographic location, attendance demographics, etc. In general tier 1 events meet many of these requirements but they are also the most difficult to attain a sponsorship and are the most expensive. We will be at ETHDenver as a major sponsor and will adjust from there. It’s difficult to announce an event schedule far in advance. For example, DevConnect is usually in April and there is no word on if it’s happening this year or the dates.
We will have a healthy balance of product marketing and DAO related marketing (including education) and thus we will always have a wide breadth of initiatives and OKR’s that encompass both of these. We do always take into consideration “call to actions” for everything we do, whether it’s recruitment, ecosystem growth, conversion, etc. and thus are flexible.
The next DAO Global Hackathon (not public yet) will be after ETHDenver and before Devconnect (or the dates it were from last year), thus after the product launch. It will be 1 month long starting early to mid March. We are still in the quiet phase of acquiring sponsors at this point.
We will be adjusting 1 okr to be more specific to the launch now that we have confirmation it will happen in Q1. We have notified the ops guild and received unanimous approval. OKR’s after all are meant to be a source of guidance towards an ultimate goal:
TLDR: Remove: Decrease Aragon blog bounce rate by 5% Add: Convert 10% < of the Early Access List to launch their DAO on the new products OSx and App
This new KR is a better reality of what we are working on and more impactful. We will probably bring decreasing the blog bounce rate back in a future KR when we have product momentum.
Prisma will vote “yes” on this proposal. The Growth Guild has consistently demonstrated an unmatched level of professionalism and dedication to the Aragon Project, acting as a benchmark for the rest of the organization. Despite the challenges posed by the absence of a new product launch, the team never sat idle and have acted as steadfast stewards of the Aragon brand, advanced strategic business relationships, and filled critical gaps across the organization, from talent management during the offboarding of the AN DAO experiment to the constant investment in enriching Aragon’s culture.
Our recommendation for the Growth Guild is to continue to be agile and adjust their objectives as circumstances change. With the launch of a new product line on the horizon, the team will need to shift their focus to actively support and promote it. We believe that the Growth Guild is well-prepared to lead the evolution towards a community of builders, and their unwavering commitment to professional standards will serve them well in this effort.
We have complete trust in the team’s ability to make a positive impact at Aragon.
OnChainCoop thanks @Anthony.Leuts and the Growth Guild for the elaborate proposal. OnChainCoop will vote “yes” in support of the proposal.
The guild has done a great job reviving the Aragon brand and building bridges with key organizations without a meaningful product release in the past 18 months. We are excited to see what the team can do once the new stack is out.
From our perspective, a few important themes beyond Q1 are:
Focusing resources on specific target users/partners relevant in the short and mid-term
Facilitating the feedback loop by bringing structured industry, user, and partner insight to the Product Guild
Onboarding of “high visibility (i.e. large user count, strong brand recognition, high memetic relevance) reference DAOs across relevant use cases.”
The Aragon Growth Guild ended Q1 strong after an intense quarter including the new tech stack launch at ETHDenver alongside our new website, launch of the Ukraine Web3 Education Project. and the planning of the upcoming DAO Global Hackathon. Overall we believe we had a very successful quarter based on the circumstances and difficulties of launching this new tech stack with a lot of uncertainty and many variables out of our control. That being said, we had a large retro after the launch and collectively agreed that we met our goals of: “Aragon is Back”, “honest and compelling value proposition” and “setting the foundation for continuity.” The huge results from this latest Polygon deployment launch is a great indication of us hitting all 3 goals. Furthermore, Aragon is now back, and we can ship!
OKR Report:
We completed 17 of 22 Key results within our 4 objectives. The 118% indicates the over achievement of some key results.
Choosing 220 DAOs launched in 1 month was a huge ask. We achieved 163. 139 on mainnet and 24 in one day on Polygon. We are very content with this result.
The ecosystem incentive strategy being designed by Ivan was not completed, however, a first draft has been submitted and is being iterated on by Evan, Juliette, and myself and it should be done shortly.
Both KR’s related to the Eagle were a hard fought battle. We achieved an open rate of 29% from 26.5% however a dependency that may have cost us success was the data tracking on Substack which the company openly said was having technical problems. We did also manage to increase the subscriber list to 8891 people from 8600.
Finally, another dependency which we hope to fix in OKR’s moving forward is related to twitter metrics. Due to the constant decrease or increase in bots we weren’t able to match our average mention rate, settling at 1649 for the quarter. Due to the unpredictability of statistics on twitter, we will generally avoid these KR’s in the future until the platform stabilises.
Some information regarding met key results:
We launched the new website and instead of retaining 50% of SEO wins managed to retain almost 100%. A big thank you to Adri for this. The website has received outstanding feedback.
The team has been successfully transitioned into the DAO and have recently given positive feedback from the experience. As this transition is now complete we will look towards removing this objective, but of course still supporting the team to reach their goals and maximise success!
Similarly we have achieved most of our goals to be the trusted source of information for the Aragon DAO and will use the implemented frameworks (wiki and editorial style guide) to continue transparently communicate across the DAO and ecosystem with the utmost integrity and effectiveness.
Some other highlights include: successful link3 and lens launches, increased youtube watch time, and increased website CTR.
Some other wins:
Increased AMA attendance by 418%
Twitter Impressions this quarter doubled to 786K from 366K
20% increase in engagement rate
4% increase in The Eagle Readers
24% increase in Blog pageviews
55% increase in Blog sessions
100% of SEO wins retained this quarter
Partnerships with ENS, Aztec, Nation3, (15+ from DAO Global Hackathon including Lens, Uniswap, Mantle, DAOLens, Snapshot)
Conversations with prospects for the new protocol including Decentraland, Sarcophagus, Aavegotchi, IndieDAO, and zksync.
Launched the first nation state sponsored web3 course with the government of Ukraine. Aragon designed and launched the DAO curriculum and modules
Our community adjustment strategy has started to take form and we are seeing a more developer or DAO Builder focused group of people come into the discord.
Personnel:
We parted ways with 2 team members in Q1, and will be becoming more lean next quarter and reducing costs even further. We will decide if and how we replace these members in Q2 to continue to provide excellent output while potentially decreasing costs. We are now a team of 6 until further notice.
We look forward to Q2 and will post our Q2 OKR’s next week. Thank you for your continued trust and we hope you enjoyed the output from our guild the last quarter!
The Aragon Growth Guild has set the below objectives and key results for Q2, 2023. These OKR’s are meant to be a guiding light, directing the team towards reaching our and the organisations strategy and yearly goals.
All 3 objectives represent to a certain degree the Aragon funnel.
Increase Aragon’s Brand Authority: We are focusing on impact and authority over total reach, trying to position Aragon as a trusted source of information and place to launch and manage your DAO. We believe we already have the largest reach of any DAO Framework provider in the space from previous work.
Bring DAOs onto the new stack (conversion): setting the stage for DAO prospects to convert into users. We’ll do this by building a reputation of security on the new stack, create actual financial safety for DAOs worried about a lack of lindy, pass a proposal to fund top organisations looking to build on the stack, and finally to create baseline metrics with the new product for a full quarter so we can work on tracking and improving for future quarters.
Lead Aragon DAOs to be the standard (retention): Set up DAOs to succeed through an extensive DAO focused education curriculum, using that curriculum to build a playbook for DAOs, give them success with more DAO Expert support, and capture learnings from these DAOs to give them even more tools to succeed.
We believe that these objectives should last longer than a quarter and by discovering and meeting the key results indicated we have an excellent opportunity for Aragon to capitalise on the previous work we have done. We will work as closely as possible with the other guilds to achieve these goals and also adapt if needed to this very nascent space.
Thank you for sharing these @Anthony.Leuts !! Excited to see these live.
Im particularly excited about the Education section, which should have huge impact for the industry, as many others are asking themselves these questions and we can have profound impact in setting the direction for the organizations of the future.
Also excited to look into and support the migration strategy for the great organizations who believed in us right from the beginning and are currently using our old products.
Ambitious objectives with a clear path. Great work Growth Guild!
Hey Juliette, thanks so much for the feedback! Glad that you see the value and monstrous tasks we are attempting to undertake. Beyond simply trying to attain users, we are attempting to “lead the industry” whether through narrative setting, education, and/or support of DAOs as an entire class of organisation. It’s going to be a lot of work to lead this industry to success (we obviously aren’t doing it alone), but we believe it’s become necessary for Aragon to be successful. Looking forward to working with you on this!
Prisma would like to thank the Growth Guild for the report and for maintaining the unmatched level of professionalism at Aragon. Q1 was an intense quarter with the launch of multiple products, and the Growth Guild played a pivotal role in helping remind the rest of the organization of the real-world impact of our work; there are real projects that need what we are building. In times when we’re all so excited focusing on what we’re building, this pragmatic perspective has been essential.
Your collaboration with the Product Guild, particularly in product marketing for the dao.eth subdomains, was a fantastic growth hack that undoubtedly contributed to the hype around Aragon’s resurgence.
Another huge win was the website, which is looking fantastic! It serves as a major step in positioning Aragon as the leading authority in launching DAOs, leveling up our professionalism and brand quality. In line with this, we agree that the shift from growth-oriented metrics to more strategic impact and reach is a wise move. This decision has implications that the rest of Aragon should be mindful of!
Regarding the reduction in headcount, we recommend not backfilling positions until we shift our focus towards scaling. It’s important to maintain the team’s exceptional talent and focus. By pulling back on lower-impact efforts like hackathons and some smaller conferences, the Growth Guild can concentrate on what truly matters. However, please don’t hesitate to request support from other Aragon contributors for bandwidth-demanding and often cross-functional projects, such as the DAO playbook.
We’re confident that the Growth Guild will be essential for Aragon’s success in 2023 as we show the world that Aragon is back and ready to onboard DAOs onto our new stack.
The Aragon Growth Guild ended Q2 strong adjusting our scope mid quarter to a more product focused quarter. Overall we believe we did the best we could under the circumstances of active conversations going on within the token holder community. More information is below.
OKR Report:
We successfully hit 11 of 14 Key results within our 3 objectives.
Publish 1 DAO Playbook with an Aragon Partner - unfortunately we were not able to complete this KR, instead deciding to ship a “DAO Creation Checklist” at the request of several prospects including zksync, OnDefy, and Drife. This checklist has been well received by partners and is being productised to some extent currently.
Pass a grants proposal to incentivise plugin development - the grants proposal to incentivise plugin development was prepared with several team members and put forward for review in the forum and for a vote. It is complete, however we cannot claim it’s been “passed” yet and thus have not achieved the KR. In retrospect this dependency was too high.
Pass an insurance proposal - this proposal is complete but unfortunately will not go up for vote due to token holders indication of wishes
Some other wins outside of KR’s:
Twitter Space Attendance increased by 76%
Lens Mirrors have increased by 68%
Twitter Engagement Rate is up by 41%, overall impressions by 90%
Website Session growth is at 50%
Bounce rate has also decreased by 25%
Education Portal had a 220% growth in users this quarter, with time spent now at 3m30s from 1m12s
New partnerships include: Push, dOrg, Definme, Blockchain Lawyers Group, Turing Consulting, DAOBox, Thing3, and Deep Work Consulting.
It was a fantastic quarter for prospect product discovery - interviews conducted include: Unlockd.Finance, Coto, Gravity Finance, MEV Capital, Ondefy, Push, and Rocket Pool.
A DAO hired a community member to build their custom DAO.
Our developer and builder community is as active as ever with daily questions, reports, etc. coming into the discord. Many questions are even answered by community members themselves.
Personnel:
We parted ways with 2 team members: one in Q1 and another in Q4 whom we did not replace. As long-term token holders have explicitly indicated they would like to reduce expenditures on strategic product creation and growth, the growth team have continued to operate as lean as possible, and are on pace to be 40% under budget by the end of the proposal time at the current burn rate. This has included firing members and not replacing others who have left. This obviously has adverse effects on growth. However, at this time, we respect cutting costs and have abided by this indicated wish.
Budget:
Below is the Growth Guild quarterly budget report. As mentioned above, due to a demand for guilds to reduce spending, the growth team is currently operating 40% under budget by the end of the proposal time. This has included firing members and not replacing them. This has obviously had an adverse effect on growth, however we will continue to do our best.
We look forward to Q3 and will post our Q3 OKR’s shortly. Thank you for your continued trust and we hope you enjoyed the output from our guild the last quarter.
The Aragon Growth Guild has set the below objectives and key results for Q3, 2023. These OKR’s are meant to be a guiding light, directing the team towards reaching our and the organisation’s strategy and yearly goals.
All 3 objectives represent to a certain degree the Aragon growth funnel, the objectives are unchanged from last quarter with new KR’s in place to reach them.
Increase Aragon’s Brand Trust in web3: We are focusing on impact and trust over total reach, trying to position Aragon as a trusted source of information and place to launch and manage your DAO. We have already succeeded at having the largest reach of any DAO Framework provider in the space from previous work.
Bring DAOs onto the new stack (conversion): setting the stage for DAO prospects to convert into users.
Lead Aragon DAOs to be the standard (retention): Set up DAOs to succeed through an extensive DAO focused education curriculum, using that curriculum to build a playbook for DAOs, give them success with more DAO Expert support, and capture learnings from these DAOs to give them even more tools to succeed.
We believe that these objectives should last longer than a quarter and by discovering and meeting the key results indicated we have an excellent opportunity for Aragon to capitalise on the previous work we have done. We will work as closely as possible with the other guilds to achieve these goals and also adapt if needed to this very nascent space.
Thanks for sharing the review and the plans for the Growth team in the upcoming quarter Anthony! Continuously impressed by the work the Growth team is doing, particularly with such high dependencies on externalities like market conditions, product, and community’s wishes.
I’m especially excited to review the pilot course and the glossary - which I’m sure will have huge impact in the industry as a whole and the positioning of Aragon in the wider market.
Hi, I’m a bit dubious regarding the “number of DAOs launched”. Of the 163 DAOs, how many have more than 10k$ of liquidity? I believe almost none.
From my experience, and especially for Aragon as it’s a b2b activity, bizdev is paramount and 80% of the value added by “growth teams”. I see a lot of placeholders KPIs (like youtube view time, c’mon), but it’s very short on business development.
Have you talked to Rocket Pool by the way? Such a statement is quite damning for Aragon:
Quadratic voting
Delegate voting (available in Q3 from Aragon)
No DAO tooling provider in web3 can offer this currently, thus they are considering building it completely custom. The fault proofs methodology they’ve created a concept around seems strong. I’ve forwarded it to our voting teams to take a look and we are discussing it further. They also seem to have a tight time-frame and are under pressure from the industry to move to fully onchain voting. I have offered to discuss with them more deeply using Ovote which our AZKR team created a POC of, as well as originally pitching our offchain voting solution with onchain execution which will be integrated into the App next quarter (alas they want onchain).
Previously for example with Enzyme finance, they have their approved modules/plugins made by enzyme team, then 3rd party ones, where they say the liability is not theirs as its third party.
It is probably best for RPL to make their own module, that way they can trust and be liable for their own tvl - and others will only use 3rd party modules/plugins of those used and trusted by the largest tvl
Orion basically answers it: the Aragon team will build and have top-level audits on the plugins we build to deploy in the more opinionated Aragon App (our front-end). The technology is permissionless and open source, thus, anyone can build plugins that others can use. Aragon doesn’t/cannot guarantee the security of all 3rd party plugins, and this is industry wide accepted/known as part of building on this kind of technology. There are some ideas on how we could monetise these but first we need to onboard more users/more TVL. “Import tokens” was deployed earlier this week, which now allows existing DAOs and tokenised communities to begin using the products. Next will be Walletconnect. If you have more questions about these feel free to drop into the Product thread.
In regards to “fake/empty DAOs” created. Once again, our technology is permissionless and thus anyone can create a DAO, we can’t stop people from creating DAOs on OSx. I’m not sure where someone told you we target “fake/empty DAOs” but that’s simply not true, it’s why I’m in conversations with DAOs who’s total TVL is greater than $17 billion in AUM. The consensus is that they love the direction we are heading. Regarding fake DAOs: In theory there is no such thing as a fake DAO, if someone deploys a DAO it is a DAO. Whether they use it or how they use it is another question, just like anyone in the world creating a company, even an offchain one. We track dozens of metrics, including DAOs created, TVL, # of DAO’s with TVL, etc. TVL will probably be one of the most important metrics we track in the future. Hope this clears things up.
We’re confident that the Growth Guild will be essential for Aragon’s success in 2023 as we show the world that Aragon is back and ready to onboard DAOs onto our new stack.
