AshFrancis
Member
Our proposal is now live - thank you for all the support!
PDF Link (In case of rendering issues)
Budget: 25 Dash per month for 8 months in escrow through Dash core team.
Creating a better user experience to both increase Dash adoption in the UK and to improve Dash marketing.
Summary
The marketing efforts in the UK of Fernando, Feedband, et al. are having a serious impact, driving discovery and awareness of Dash at a key time in the 6th largest economy in the world.
This spend is being ramped up even further over the next quarter with an aggressive 65% of the budget targeting the UK.
Our goal is to create a friction-less user experience for UK adopters and provide Dash marketers with a complete picture of the user journey from discovery all the way through to adoption. Dash will be the first and only crypto to have a completely holistic marketing approach.
Pain point 1: The user experience of UK investors and adopters of Dash in the UK is poor
Okay so there are other ways that aren’t quite that bad, but even Uphold (which from our research we’ve identified as one of the best) constantly pauses payment by credit/debit card. They also have high fees and require slow bank transfers that have to be sent to Portugal - not very reassuring for someone new to cryptocurrency especially with businesses like bitconnect being prominent in the media.
That’s also just how you get Dash, there is a huge user journey before even looking to buy Dash that can be improved and we have extensive experience in this area. We’re going to be far more than a tool, we’ll be an educator and a point of reference - even an authority figure. We want to make discovering, learning and acquiring Dash as friction-less as sending it. Our intention is for a user who is both new to Dash and cryptocurrencies in general to feel confident using our site and, even with no prior experience of cryptocurrencies at all, leave our site feeling that the process was explained to them clearly and they have some understanding of cryptocurrency fundamentals.
We’ll also be providing use education to the offset, converting speculative investors who see crypto as a pump and dump to Dash advocates with an appreciation for the technology and future adoption of cryptocurrency.
Pain point 2: We’re marketing without the full picture.
Dash marketing is great - we’ve got an experienced team from all over the world with millions of spend in history, however it has potential for improvement. From our research there is no other crypto that has a complete view of their adoption journey - right from discovery through to purchase. We could be the very first to have a complete view and a holistic marketing approach.
We don’t expect Dash.org to recommend our exchange over any others, but the data we provide will be a representative subset of Data that can be scaled to understand the trends in the wider marketing campaign. This data will be invaluable in optimising the user journey and the adoption funnel - to be the very first crypto to have this data will allow us to outmaneuver any others in the space.
Quick note: All data we provide will be anonymous and at campaign level only, tracked through UTM & Gclid parameters - the technical side of this is out of the scope of this proposal but I’d love to chat through it on discord or telegram.
Okay so now you can see how much this project can help Dash, but who are we and why are we the ones to do it?
Meet the team
LinkedIn - Telegram
Accomplished Digital Marketing Manager with 10 years experience working with small to medium brands, has managed builds of complex, enterprise level websites & applications. Led the digital marketing efforts for businesses like:
Scrap Car Comparison - UK comparison website, managed rebuild of site & back-end systems
Leaders - One of the UKs largest real estate groups (100+ Branches)
LinkedIn - Telegram
Our Software Engineer has over 8 years experience, including projects ranging from bespoke applications, to high-throughput forex trading systems, to managing the enterprise stack for an hosted communications provider.
LinkedIn - Telegram
With 8 years in financial services, Rich will be managing all aspects of compliance including anti-money laundering and know your customer laws. He’ll also be performing various operations duties including customer support and weekly reports to the DAO. His record includes:
Harwoods Wealth Management - Publicly listed financial planning group
Affinity Financial Awareness - Financial services firm representing over 100 advisors
What We’re Building
Our first goal is to make direct purchase as simple as possible, we’re going to build an instant fiat to dash exchange for the UK market with marketing reports for Dash marketers hard baked in from the offset.
If you’re interested in the technical side of the development we’re going to be building everything to be deployable to the AWS cloud (EC2, EKS, SES and SMS) with security, speed-of-development, platform reliability and the ability to scale quickly being the main contributors to our decisions. We've opted for Kubernetes orchestration and a microservice approach with the majority of our backend infrastructure being written in GoLang. React will be used to connect the front-end.
The app will be separated by a subdomain from the marketing site which will be built with wordpress on DigitalOcean in the first couple of months to get the ball rolling from both an SEO point of view and to generate some email sign-ups for initial traction (for all the details see the full roadmap down below).
For payment we’ll be accepting credit & debit card utilising the developer favourite Stripe as our payment processor.
Compliance will a key factor early on, registering with the FCA and meeting all KYC and AML legislation.
We’re also going to be enforcing key security measures including 2FA and following best practices (SAML, https, etc).
Budget Breakdown
All payments will be through Escrow with the dash core team, we have a full road-map with set targets and will be reporting weekly along with monthly video reports.
We’re asking for 25 dash per month for 8 months to fund the full build and launch of this exchange. The breakdown of average monthly spend is as follows:
Worth noting that the Salaries are for 4 people and are based on £125 per day (£2.5k per month) this is a cut from our normal salaries and after tax allows us enough to live on whilst being able to dedicate full time (40+ hours a week) to building this project to the best it can be.
We’ve broken down the other costs in our open google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_JNy2xBsR2-Uz-ptuMCO9tOaRQZk3equ_JxBVanjHcQ/edit?usp=sharing
We’ve based this budget on the current Dash price and significantly reduced any marketing budget to accommodate for rises in Dash price, all additional funds from fluctuation in Dash price will go firstly towards any infrastructure shortfall (unlikely) and then towards marketing & growth.
Project Roadmap & Deliverables
This is based on us getting funded in the next superblock:
As mentioned before, all these deliverables will tie in with our funding and Escrow from the dash core team - we don’t deliver, we don’t get funded. We’re confident in our ability as a team and know that accountability matters.
Thank you for looking at our proposal, we invite any feedback you might have and you can nearly always reach one of us on the dash nation discord, our public discord for Ewallet here or any of our Telegram accounts (Ash is probably your best bet though!)
Some questions we would like to answer in advance:
Please note, if you have a question please make sure to check out our Google Sheet - it may have been covered there. Also for more urgent queries please chat to Ash on telegram here.
Q. What will you do with any excess budget from pricing fluctuations?
Excess budget will be first routed into any infrastructure shortfall first and secondly into marketing and growth.
Q. Why is your marketing budget so small?
We’ll be working with other marketers working within the Dash space as well as investing our own funds into this and we’re also funneling any additional funds gained from fluctuation in Dash price to marketing.
Q: How will you source the Dash for the exchange
Until there is a peer to peer element to our exchange we will source the Dash in the most financially effective manner, we’ll be seeking out access to the interbank exchange rate to convert to USD and buy at the best possible rates we can. Interestingly there may also be demand from other Dash projects to convert their budget into fiat.
Q: Who is your front end developer?
We’re currently in talks with 4 front-end developers, all of which have shown significant interests. The project conceptualisation comes from us 3 and the 4th head is unlikely to be invested in crypto like ourselves.
Q: Will this be open source?
No we’re not planning on building this as OSS, however we’re happy to share the source code and/or aspects of it privately with developers / dash core team members.
PDF Link (In case of rendering issues)
Budget: 25 Dash per month for 8 months in escrow through Dash core team.
Creating a better user experience to both increase Dash adoption in the UK and to improve Dash marketing.
Summary
The marketing efforts in the UK of Fernando, Feedband, et al. are having a serious impact, driving discovery and awareness of Dash at a key time in the 6th largest economy in the world.
This spend is being ramped up even further over the next quarter with an aggressive 65% of the budget targeting the UK.
Our goal is to create a friction-less user experience for UK adopters and provide Dash marketers with a complete picture of the user journey from discovery all the way through to adoption. Dash will be the first and only crypto to have a completely holistic marketing approach.
Pain point 1: The user experience of UK investors and adopters of Dash in the UK is poor
Okay so there are other ways that aren’t quite that bad, but even Uphold (which from our research we’ve identified as one of the best) constantly pauses payment by credit/debit card. They also have high fees and require slow bank transfers that have to be sent to Portugal - not very reassuring for someone new to cryptocurrency especially with businesses like bitconnect being prominent in the media.
That’s also just how you get Dash, there is a huge user journey before even looking to buy Dash that can be improved and we have extensive experience in this area. We’re going to be far more than a tool, we’ll be an educator and a point of reference - even an authority figure. We want to make discovering, learning and acquiring Dash as friction-less as sending it. Our intention is for a user who is both new to Dash and cryptocurrencies in general to feel confident using our site and, even with no prior experience of cryptocurrencies at all, leave our site feeling that the process was explained to them clearly and they have some understanding of cryptocurrency fundamentals.
We’ll also be providing use education to the offset, converting speculative investors who see crypto as a pump and dump to Dash advocates with an appreciation for the technology and future adoption of cryptocurrency.
Pain point 2: We’re marketing without the full picture.
Dash marketing is great - we’ve got an experienced team from all over the world with millions of spend in history, however it has potential for improvement. From our research there is no other crypto that has a complete view of their adoption journey - right from discovery through to purchase. We could be the very first to have a complete view and a holistic marketing approach.
We don’t expect Dash.org to recommend our exchange over any others, but the data we provide will be a representative subset of Data that can be scaled to understand the trends in the wider marketing campaign. This data will be invaluable in optimising the user journey and the adoption funnel - to be the very first crypto to have this data will allow us to outmaneuver any others in the space.
Quick note: All data we provide will be anonymous and at campaign level only, tracked through UTM & Gclid parameters - the technical side of this is out of the scope of this proposal but I’d love to chat through it on discord or telegram.
Okay so now you can see how much this project can help Dash, but who are we and why are we the ones to do it?
Meet the team
LinkedIn - Telegram
Accomplished Digital Marketing Manager with 10 years experience working with small to medium brands, has managed builds of complex, enterprise level websites & applications. Led the digital marketing efforts for businesses like:
Scrap Car Comparison - UK comparison website, managed rebuild of site & back-end systems
Leaders - One of the UKs largest real estate groups (100+ Branches)
LinkedIn - Telegram
Our Software Engineer has over 8 years experience, including projects ranging from bespoke applications, to high-throughput forex trading systems, to managing the enterprise stack for an hosted communications provider.
LinkedIn - Telegram
With 8 years in financial services, Rich will be managing all aspects of compliance including anti-money laundering and know your customer laws. He’ll also be performing various operations duties including customer support and weekly reports to the DAO. His record includes:
Harwoods Wealth Management - Publicly listed financial planning group
Affinity Financial Awareness - Financial services firm representing over 100 advisors
What We’re Building
Our first goal is to make direct purchase as simple as possible, we’re going to build an instant fiat to dash exchange for the UK market with marketing reports for Dash marketers hard baked in from the offset.
If you’re interested in the technical side of the development we’re going to be building everything to be deployable to the AWS cloud (EC2, EKS, SES and SMS) with security, speed-of-development, platform reliability and the ability to scale quickly being the main contributors to our decisions. We've opted for Kubernetes orchestration and a microservice approach with the majority of our backend infrastructure being written in GoLang. React will be used to connect the front-end.
The app will be separated by a subdomain from the marketing site which will be built with wordpress on DigitalOcean in the first couple of months to get the ball rolling from both an SEO point of view and to generate some email sign-ups for initial traction (for all the details see the full roadmap down below).
For payment we’ll be accepting credit & debit card utilising the developer favourite Stripe as our payment processor.
Compliance will a key factor early on, registering with the FCA and meeting all KYC and AML legislation.
We’re also going to be enforcing key security measures including 2FA and following best practices (SAML, https, etc).
Budget Breakdown
All payments will be through Escrow with the dash core team, we have a full road-map with set targets and will be reporting weekly along with monthly video reports.
We’re asking for 25 dash per month for 8 months to fund the full build and launch of this exchange. The breakdown of average monthly spend is as follows:
Worth noting that the Salaries are for 4 people and are based on £125 per day (£2.5k per month) this is a cut from our normal salaries and after tax allows us enough to live on whilst being able to dedicate full time (40+ hours a week) to building this project to the best it can be.
We’ve broken down the other costs in our open google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_JNy2xBsR2-Uz-ptuMCO9tOaRQZk3equ_JxBVanjHcQ/edit?usp=sharing
We’ve based this budget on the current Dash price and significantly reduced any marketing budget to accommodate for rises in Dash price, all additional funds from fluctuation in Dash price will go firstly towards any infrastructure shortfall (unlikely) and then towards marketing & growth.
Project Roadmap & Deliverables
This is based on us getting funded in the next superblock:
As mentioned before, all these deliverables will tie in with our funding and Escrow from the dash core team - we don’t deliver, we don’t get funded. We’re confident in our ability as a team and know that accountability matters.
Thank you for looking at our proposal, we invite any feedback you might have and you can nearly always reach one of us on the dash nation discord, our public discord for Ewallet here or any of our Telegram accounts (Ash is probably your best bet though!)
Some questions we would like to answer in advance:
Please note, if you have a question please make sure to check out our Google Sheet - it may have been covered there. Also for more urgent queries please chat to Ash on telegram here.
Q. What will you do with any excess budget from pricing fluctuations?
Excess budget will be first routed into any infrastructure shortfall first and secondly into marketing and growth.
Q. Why is your marketing budget so small?
We’ll be working with other marketers working within the Dash space as well as investing our own funds into this and we’re also funneling any additional funds gained from fluctuation in Dash price to marketing.
Q: How will you source the Dash for the exchange
Until there is a peer to peer element to our exchange we will source the Dash in the most financially effective manner, we’ll be seeking out access to the interbank exchange rate to convert to USD and buy at the best possible rates we can. Interestingly there may also be demand from other Dash projects to convert their budget into fiat.
Q: Who is your front end developer?
We’re currently in talks with 4 front-end developers, all of which have shown significant interests. The project conceptualisation comes from us 3 and the 4th head is unlikely to be invested in crypto like ourselves.
Q: Will this be open source?
No we’re not planning on building this as OSS, however we’re happy to share the source code and/or aspects of it privately with developers / dash core team members.
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