DashLancer - A use case for Dash in Cross Border Freelancing.

Gaurav_Gupta

Gaurav_Gupta

Member
Dashlancer : Building a Dash Use Case in the Cross Border Freelancing Industry.

PREVIOUS PROJECT UPDATES I DASH FREELANCING COURSE I FORUM DISCUSSION ON VIDEOS I RESEARCH REPORT ON FREELANCING

SUMMARY

Talented professionals across the globe are on the lookout for opportunities to earn crypto for a living while employers require talent across roles that will accept payments in crypto.

This project aims to build and strongly market a platform to help match businesses & professionals for work paid with Dash, creating a new path to spend and earn Dash for the community.

So many people want to participate in the Dash movement but have no way to do so. Giving them the opportunity to earn Dash is one of the best ways we can facilitate this, and not only that, it puts Dash in the hands of the people so that they can spend Dash at all the merchants and service providers being onboarded to accept Dash.

Dashlancer aims to help Dash gain acceptance as both a currency and remittance system in the large freelancing industry and create a closed ecosystem of Dash Transactions.

Dashlancer also aims to be a self funding platform by charging nominal fees. This is not to make a profit but rather to ensure that we can become independent. We recognize that the treasury cannot keep supporting projects continuously.


Track Record

Our previous project with the Dash community focused on researching the freelancing industry and creating an educational course.

As part of that project we

a) Developed Dashlancer.Com as a platform to educate Freelancers about Dash.
b) Created a 4 part Video Course to explain benefits of Using Dash to Freelancers.
c) Compiled a Research Report on the Freelancing Industry from a Blockchain Perspective.
d) Marketed Course to Freelancers in South Asia.

Some numbers from our campaign:

- 774,000 Embedded Video Views to the Dashlancing Course on Youtube
- 22,000 Clicks on the Dashlancer Platform
- 800+ Freelancer Signups interested in Dash Jobs

We presented detailed and regular reporting to the community. View updates.

Download Our Research Report on Freelancing

Dashlancer Proposal Objectives:

a) Design and Build a Platform to match Employers with Professionals
b) Onboard Freelancers and Employers with a Multichannel Marketing Campaign
c) Optimize Platform to increase matches.

Cross-Border Freelancing Remittances : Current Pain Points

a) Freelancers in developing countries pay heavy remittance fees(~7%) to receive payments.
b) Payments take significant time(7-21 Days) to arrive, depending on payment method.
c) Many instances of chargeback frauds and frozen funds.
d) Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork charge heavy fees ( 20-30 %) with arbitrary rules.

Benefits of a Dash based Work Platform

a) Near Zero Transaction Fees.
b) Instant, Private & Global Transactions.
c) No threat of Chargebacks or Frozen Funds.

Platform Features

The platform aims to offer the following features with a clean and modern interface :
  1. Add, Manage, Edit, Mark and Categorise Project Listings
  2. Preview Listings before posting
  3. Company & Freelancer Profiles
  4. Searchable Listings Database
  5. Resume Management System for Freelancers
  6. Jobs Suggest, Project Alerts, Custom Tags, Tag Filters
  7. Apply, Manage and Review Project Applications
  8. Project Bookmarking System
  9. Review and Rating System
  10. Dash Payments Integration

Platform Pricing and Self Sufficiency :

We will charge a Transaction Fee of 1% to both Freelancers and Employers after an initial free run.

These nominal fees are to not to make a profit, but rather to fund ongoing development and ensuring that we do not have to depend on treasury funds for times to come.

Marketing Plan

The marketing plan for the project is divided into 3 major segments.

1. Scaling Job Listings

a) Collect Job Listings by reaching out to all Treasury Proposal Owners
b) Advertisements on Internal Dash Media
c) Targeted B2B Advertisements.

2. Attracting Talent

A multichannel advertising and content campaign promoting select jobs will be run on the following platforms.

a) Linkedin
b) Dtube
c) Steemit
d) Facebook / Youtube

We will also be reaching out to some select professionals for specific job vacancies to improve the talent mix on the platform.

3. Public Relations Campaign

A genuine use case for crypto-currency is a subject matter of great public interest. A public relations campaign will be run to promote crypto-freelancing on Dashlancer. We will look to target influential technology blogs to cover our platform and get us users organically.

*Dashlancer remains unaffected by the crypto-ad ban.
**A more detailed marketing plan can be viewed here.

Budget

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About Us

Gaurav Gupta is a Marketing Technologist, specialising in making marketing more effective through Lean acquisition at Scale, Simplifying On-Boarding processes, Funnel Optimisation, and Marketing automation. He has led marketing for consumer internet businesses like Labster (VR Education) and Bridallive.Com (SAAS for Bridalshops).

He has a background in the online freelancing industry and has led marketing for the Netherlands based Squads.Com, a popular online platform to match teams of top talent freelancers with employers.

Benefits of Dashlancer to the Dash Community
  1. Adoption: Builds Adoption for Dash as a currency and payment system in the Commercial Remittances space for Digital Services.

  2. Large Market: Freelancing Remittances represent a large & growing market with technically-savvy users who prefer better technology.

  3. More Talent: Adds Talented Professionals to the Dash Ecosystem.

  4. Liquidity for Exchanges : Freelancing hotspots in South Asia, Philippines, South Africa will get greater market liquidity as workers sell Dash to convert to Fiat.

  5. Eliminates Dash-Fiat Conversion: Treasury proposal owners can find talent and pay directly in Dash without having to convert Dash to fiat.

  6. Locks up more Dash : Reduces Selling Pressure on Dash by locking up currency in the Freelancing Trade.
 

Attachments

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I like the idea, have you reached out to the Dash Core team about escrow though? This is quite a large budget to request for an unknown entity without signing an escrow agreement.

This could be especially powerful if the marketing efforts were combined with Dashinformer
 
Hi name3.

Thank you for taking the time to review this. We have reached out to Dash Core for this.

This proposal is a follow up to our Research & Education Project in the Freelancers Industry
As part of that project, we built a platform to educate freelancers about using Dash for Payments.

Attaching a video from our digital course that aims to explain the money-transfer process to New Dash users.


Here are all the updates. Here is the research report from that project.

We will definitely reach out to the Dashinformer Team as you suggested, they have done some great work!

Best,
Gaurav
 
Hi Bhkien !

Our first choice was really to cover the Dash Wallets.

However, in our initial test, we received some feedback that new users found Dash Desktop Wallet a little difficult to handle.

Given that we were targeting new users with limited bandwidth(India/SriLanka/Nepal etc), we wanted something multi-platform, light, easy and something that offered good mobility.

From the given options on the dash wallets page at the time, we picked Jaxx because it was light weight, easy to use and multi platform; features that new users might appreciate.
Also the fact that it was used for other campaigns made us choose it.

We plan to cover the dash wallets with videos in the near future and try and give users more choice.

I must mention that it is one of your posts on the forum that has helped us understand the different kinds of wallets better! :)

Many thanks for your interest and support all along!

Best,
Gaurav
 
My only gripe with this, and not just this project, is that you've put "dash" in the title. Personally, I would prefer a non-dash name and let people discover that dash is the base currency. This way, your message would be "helping freelancers is our primary objective", while also implying that dash is the natural choice for such things.
 
Hi @GrandMasterDash !

I see your point, however, we zeroed in on Dashlancer keeping three things in mind :

a) While Dash is well-known in the crypto-space, we feel there was a need to build name recognition outside it.

There are only a few people who have heard of Dash in Asia outside the crypto-sphere for instance. To use Dash
in the title is to try and increase the name recognition, through direct marketing and later PR Outreach.

b) The platform proposes to use just Dash as a central currency and no other coin. By picking out another name,
people might expect integration with other coins for instance and be disappointed when they don't find it.

c) The name dash itself has connotations of speed and initiative and in just 4 letters.
Standalone, we felt it made for a good name.

Thank you for taking the time to review, appreciate your feedback! :)

Best,
Gaurav
 
Name3 said:
I like the idea, have you reached out to the Dash Core team about escrow though? This is quite a large budget to request for an unknown entity without signing an escrow agreement.

This could be especially powerful if the marketing efforts were combined with Dashinformer
Click to expand...

I agree with Name3 on all points. Take this into serious consideration. I rarely want to say no to a proposal, but we have to begin taking a harder stance on this.
 
Hi Unstoppable

Thanks for the cue! :)

I agree, we have already reached to the Dash Core to arrange this.

I will keep this thread updated with progress.

Gaurav
 
Hi

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and time. We have tweaked our proposal and are now escrowed with Dash Core.

Regards
Gaurav.
Team Dashlancer
 
Excited to add this to dashinformer when it's ready if it gets funded. A much needed service if properly executed

Also thank you for escrowing.
 
Good evening @Gaurav_Gupta, I researched the proposal a lot and I like it a lot, I think it can have a good future and can generate a lot of Dash wallets for the freelancers community.

I want to offer my support and, if possible, to comment on a proposal I have been working with my team for a long time which consists of the creation of a freelance web portal that works with Dash as a payment method!

I would like to have your feedback about this proposal and if you have any advice on how we could improve our proposal, it would be excellent !.

Together we can include dash in a market that can have a great impact on the Dash community.

If you want to contact me and I will tell you a little more about my proposal.

I wish you the best of luck with your proposal, to be approved and help the Dash community.
 
Hi @feedbands

Love the work you are doing on advertising!
Will be very happy to collaborate and explore how we can scale up the dash for work use case, working together.

Lets chat on Discord to take this forward?

Best,
Gaurav
 
Dear @Gaurav_Gupta
After 4 months of funding, how much will this project cost per month?
Do you plan to become financially independent in the future?
If so, how will you finance yourself?
Do you know that most private companies doing the same activity are in deficit, what more do you have than all the others in this sector to become self-sufficient?
Don't you think that when Evolution is released, it will be possible for everyone to offer their services directly in Dash? And to have an equivalent tool via Daps?
 
Hi @JOL

Thank you for some thoughtful questions !

We expect the ongoing Operations, Support Maintenance and Upgrades costs to fall below 50 Dash/ Month.

Sustainability is a key issue that we have thought about extensively. We believe to get to break even, it would be very important to lower marketing costs over time and scale up through referrals and word of mouth beyond the first major set of users and grow through network effects.
Since our unique selling point will be “Zero Fees”, which we hope will help us build organic traffic and keep acquisition costs low, we would not like to impose any commissions on transactions.

Instead, We have some ideas for premium services for companies such as

a) Finders fee for Elite Technical Talent.
b) Hosting sponsored Hackathons.
c) Charging for Dream Job Promotions.
d) "Top-Talent Auctions"

We hope this should cover a part of our costs, if not cover them entirely. More ideas will emerge along the way which we would love to experiment with.

Most private companies are usually under pressure from Venture Capitalists to keep growth rates unsustainably high. This forces them to invest in unsustainable discounts and marketing spends, even when their cost of acquisition is far more than Customer Lifetime Value. This is the main reason why they continuously need to raise bigger rounds of investments and become loss making.

Being a community driven non-profit initiative, we would be free from the pressure to grow at all costs. We would be able to focus on growing sustainably by keeping a close watch on unit-economics, balancing costs and growth.

We are excited about evolution and hope to eventually integrate as closely as possible with it. While evolution will make it simple to transact, there will still be a need to help match Freelancers/Job seekers with Businesses. That is where we seek to position ourselves in the post evolution era.

Best regards,
Gaurav
 
@Gaurav.Gupta,

This services is a good thing from my point of view.

Totaly free, im not sure is the best way. There is a diference with 25% commision and 1 to 5% or 0.5% or 0.1% ....

The bigest point for me it does at Evolution we dont loose this all ?.
Does we have to finance every this work again ?
Or simply does Evolution remplace this by Daps natively ?

Do you contact CORE about that ?

I like to have comments from core dev about that point
@
Tank you.
 
Thanks, @JOL

We are open charge a small fee , when the project is a little further along.

I believe we would need to create an additional native dapp for this, which we should be able to manage within ongoing expenses.

There will be little overlap, if at all. The major work relating to users and transactions would be seamlessly transferred.

I will reach out to core dev and update you on any further information on this !

Best,
Gaurav
 
I like this proposal.

My only concern is its centralized nature. This is a layer2 Dash application, and all layer2 applications are by nature centralized. I would like the data of this application to be implemented as layer1, and stored if not directly into the dash blockchain, at least in a database similar to the sentinel database (which is a database that resides in all masternodes). The reason for this is because I would like to see this alternative budget system to evolve, and maybe oneday substitute the primitive budget system of sentinel.

For your reference, I remind two old pre-proposals of mine.
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...uch-do-you-pay-for-someone-to-do-a-job.15065/
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...-way-to-propose-proposal-in-the-budget.12798/

What you are trying to implement as a centralized layer2 service, could be implemented as decentralized layer1 service in case smart contacts were allowed/implemented in dash cryptocurrency. But unfortunately smart contracts capability requires code to be writen on behalf of the core team. Is anyone of those 27 Dash core developers capable to implement a smart contract language for dash? I really doubt about it....
 
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