Cardano Community & Ecosystem Hub on Alphaday

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Deniz Omer

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

deniz@alphaday.com

Additional applicants

Michael Hagopian - mike@alphaday.com

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

The smart contracts and front-end are open source. We have started to open source the application, but it involves a complete rewrite so it will take time.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

Data tools

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Alphaday builds crypto experience dashboards for enthusiasts, developers, and projects. Users can drag and drop from hundreds of services, news and social feeds, charts, and dapp functionality to create their daily workflows inside a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to have multiple browser tabs open to get different bits of information. i.e. imagine having token prices, Reddit and other social media feeds, latest news headlines, TVL, events and any other information any user could possibly want all within one single dashboard. 

Having all this information in one place will allow Cardano stakeholders (i.e. users, developers, investors, community members) to easily stay up to date on Cardano ecosystem updates, see the latest news and developments, do research and stay engaged. In general, users who can track their favourite projects more easily stay more engaged with the project which in turn supports user retention.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The grant work will result in a dashboard dedicated to serving the Cardano community by aggregating all relevant information about Cardano including media communities, on-chain metrics, Cardano documentation, ADA tokenomics into one place. Our desired outcome is to provide a new end-point for community engagement and to bolster Cardano’s outreach.

For newcomers, the dashboard will serve as a point of aggregated educational content and news feed. The dashboard can also be used for onboarding developers through the Hiring directory, developer documentation, or a developer event in the Calendar widget.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

In terms of concrete numbers, considering Cardano has 1.3M twitter followers and using this as a very crude proxy for community size, we would consider it a success if we could serve at least 1% of them on a monthly basis (13K MAU).

We launched our public beta in August 2022 and have been growing roughly 40% month on month and currently have ~20,000 MAU but have in mind this is with minimal marketing and promotion. We expect numbers to significantly increase over the next year or so, as we’ve agreed with projects like Aave, Dfinity, Zcash and a dozen others to co-market their dashboards to their communities.

Additionally, we consistently work as a team to develop new marketable widgets and features for users. Given enough time, this would include Cardano-exclusive Dapp integrations.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

On a monthly basis we will share the number of Monthly Active Users, average session times, what are the most popular widgets Cardano community members use and other datapoints provided by hotjar and google analytics. With this data we keep making iterations and improvements to the dashboard layout and keep adding new widgets to increase stickiness of the product and maximize its usefulness to the Cardano community.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Our product has been live since August 2022 and we have established multiple partnerships with other blue chip projects including Avalanche, Aave, Zcash, Dfinity. We’ve built successful community boards for our partners (you can see these boards at app.alphaday.com).

Co-founders Deniz and Felipe have been building dapps on Ethereum since 2016 (Kyber, Consensys etc) while our frontend lead Vicente was the R&D Engineer and Lead Developer of Yoroi Mobile, the mobile wallet for ADA.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

In order to reach higher MAU organically, we are currently working with existing partners to co-market dashboards. We constantly keep in touch with a representative of projects, even after the completion of the initial dashboard, so as to discuss what could be improved or if a newly developed widget would be suitable for their users on the dashboard.

Objectives from the development perspective are to create new widgets and features that are ubiquitously adoptable by projects that we are in partnership with. We also focus on QA and testing before deployment so that user experience is not compromised.

From the marketing perspective, our objective is to gradually appeal to the roots of our partners’ communities. We want our partners to provide us all the feedback they can so that we can mold Alphaday into the UI that users love to use.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Milestone 1 : Development and initial deployment of the Cardano community dashboard.

We would like to create a Cardano ecosystem dashboard that aggregates the following information into a single community dashboard:

• The latest Cardano official announcements and blog post content.
• A feed of all news mentions of Cardano from coindesk, cointelegraph and 20+ other news sources aggregated from across the internet.
• A calendar containing all Cardano events including important events, meetups, hackathons with Cardano bounties, AMAs and any other event related to the project.
• Podcast feed containing the latest appearances and interviews given by Cardano team members.
• Youtube stream containing educational Cardano content.
• Cardano Developer Portal and Docs directory.
• Integration of Cardano Forum to show the latest and trending discussion topics.
• Lens, Discord & Reddit Integration to show a feed of latest discussions.
• FAQ, original whitepaper, ADA tokenomics information.
• Cardano Careers integration to show the latest open jobs listed.
• Cardano metrics including TVL, pulled in from Defillama.
• A widget featuring the Cardano roadmap with all the descriptions and links included.
• Links and descriptions of Dapps and other platforms within the Cardano ecosystem.
• Live market chart of ADA.

We should be able to build and deploy the above dashboard within 2-3 months so if this grant is approved we want to launch the Cardano dashboard by October 2023.

Milestone 2 : Maintenance and improvement of the Cardano dashboard over a period of 12 months.

Thereafter, we will maintain & curate the dashboard on a daily basis throughout 12 months, as well as improve the functionality and availability of features in our application as a whole. 

Note: After those 12 months we will automate the process of maintenance and periodically still add widgets/features that are relevant to Cardano.

In this milestone, we will also include co-marketing of the Cardano dashboard specifically, as well as other marketing practices that we carry out for Alphaday as a whole.

Please note that we can add and remove widgets and/or contents as required by your team. For a brief idea about other widgets and data that we can include, please visit our Live product page (Beta) at: https://app.alphaday.com/ 

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

In the 1st milestone, we will produce a dashboard that integrates all relevant data surrounding Cardano into one customizable interface. This phase of our deliverables will need to include the input and feedback of a representative from Cardano’s foundation and community ambassadors. Feedback will not require much effort or time as we will create the dashboard, share it, and simply expect feedback on what to include/remove/add (including sources used). This is done to optimize the dashboard as much as possible before publishing it to the community.

In the 2nd milestone, we will maintain the dashboard’s integrity and contents as well as market the dashboard to its potential target audience. To start things off we market on social media platforms as well as execute mini-campaigns to attract new users. Our marketing efforts are projected to increase gradually as we allocate more resources to it as opposed to development.

As for development, we do our research to see what our users seek most. That is, once we onboard enough Cardano users, we will allocate even more resources to build Cardano Dapps that users would love to see on their dashboards.

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

15,000 ADA upfront costs for development and deployment of the initial dashboard.

1,000 ADA per month for 12 months (disbursed Quarterly) for maintenance including having an Alphaday content analyst quality-checking the dashboard every day and ensuring the Calendar widget is up-to-date with latest Cardano events, all news mentions across the internet are captured by the dashboard, any updates not automatically captured by the Alphaday aggregator engine is manually added to the board, and other maintenance tasks.

Total Requested Budget: 27,000 ADA

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Building the Alphaday infrastructure was not easy as we pull so many different types of data from different sources. It took a team of 4 developers over a year building the engine that can pull the data, analyze it, and categorize and contextualize the data (i.e. understanding different crypto concepts like NFTs, DeFi, Staking) so that users can find it easier to navigate through all the information. This required a lot of resources being poured into building the platform.

That being said, now that the application is ready, deployed and tested, the implementation risks from a partner’s perspective are minimized and more emphasis can be given to marketing.

Our team is full-time and international, but not freelance. What we ask for is proportional to the amount of work we, as a team, will put into the dashboard over the course of a year. This includes the initial fixed costs of dashboard development and deployment.

The value we provide depends on our general success as a project as well. Our partners, potentially including Cardano, will benefit directly as Alphaday grows and is adopted by users.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept