No-Code Shopify plugin to accept $ADA and other native Cardano tokens

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Justin Cruz

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

justin@oldmoney.io

Additional applicants

N/A

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

5

[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?

Yes

[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.” .

A Shopify plugin published to their Marketplace and full integration with their API are required to fulfill the technical requirements and therefore are dependencies. We will use Blockfrost as a partner to retrieve blockchain data using their API to supplement our own datasets.

[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 actual technical implementation for an enterprise-level plugin with customization, scalability, relatability, data management, reporting, and accompanying user-authenticated dashboards is a large scope of work with many moving pieces. Value is brought to projects by choosing not to spend their time dealing with the intricacies of Shopify integration and instead having an out-of-the-box solution that doesn’t require a developer. Even if a team has the technical expertise to build an integration themselves, the amount of work and maintenance is entirely outweighed by the ease of this no-code solution. This decision allows us to focus on improving the product for our customers over maintaining an open-source codebase which is contrary to our fundamental problem statement.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

DeFi

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Our team has direct experience as founders in the Cardano ecosystem for the past two years. Like many other projects in the ecosystem, we wanted to move our brands into merchandise as the communities grew. We directly encountered a problem validated by our experience, market research, and speaking with others in the same situation. There isn’t Shopify support for a modern solution to accept $ADA for payments, and nothing is available for Cardano native tokens.

This leads projects to either:

• Not accept $ADA or any other native tokens, to the disappointment of the audience they built on Cardano
• Settle for an antiquated solution that forces you to use their branding and provides a sloppy checkout experience
• Spend a significant amount of their resources to develop their own in-house solution that fits their needs

Unfortunately, these decisions that projects must make have these repercussions:

• By leaving $ADA/native token payments off the table, they miss out on an additional revenue stream for their business
• By not using modern solutions, it leaves all shoppers with a false perception of the progress in the Cardano ecosystem
• By building this in-house, projects spend their resources on solving the same problem repeatedly

Our solution is to develop a new business in the ecosystem centered around tightly integrating Cardano with Shopify, starting by providing all our users with a no-code method of accepting $ADA.

The target audience isn’t only teams that don’t have the resources and technical expertise to develop a portion of the solution independently. Because of the scalability, extensibility, ease of use, configuration, and feature set of this new product, it will never be hard for teams to decide whether they have the resources to accept Cardano native tokens as payment.

Anyone interested in accepting $ADA or Cardano native tokens can read about the benefits themselves and their customers on our website. Interested parties that want to integrate our plugin with their Shopify store can simply sign up using their Twitter account. This gives them access to configure their checkout experience, available tokens to accept, wallets to divide the funds, and more. It will also provide all the guidance in integrating their store with our Cardano native token payment processor without any development assistance required. After it’s integrated, they’re provided a dashboard with summaries and specific operations details.

Overall our solution is compromised of many integrated pieces, including a marketing website, email list, managed Twitter account, customer operations app with Twitter integration, integration with Shopify API for the checkouts/orders, Shopify front-end plugin for payments listed in their marketplace, our own set of APIs to communicate with services, backend syncing of blockchain data for payments and real-time conversions of $ADA and other Cardano native tokens to fiat currencies, administrative tooling, and a support ticket system.

By creating a new product in Cardano with sustainable income streams, this new payment service can focus on serving all projects’ needs when integrating Shopify with their business. This enables projects to devote their resources to their unique value additions in Cardano that have an impact instead of wasting them solving a commoditized problem.

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

A native token integration with Shopify provides tremendous value to a large and growing number of projects in the Cardano ecosystem.

To explicitly outline the direct benefits this brings to the Cardano ecosystem:

• Projects no longer have to spend time doing market research, scoping, then developing solutions when a fully featured, out-of-the-box solution exists.
• Cardano projects can create another revenue stream by selling merchandise contributing to our overall ecosystem sustainability.
• It introduces additional utility for any Cardano native tokens as projects can now use it as a medium of exchange.
• The projects that take advantage of this new payment solution can more wisely spend their resources in ways that push the broader ecosystem forward instead of solving the same problem to different degrees.
• As this new payment product matures, it can be a flagship example of using $ADA and other tokens as a payment method for goods and services.
• Since the list of Shopify payment providers is a public resource, the presence and usage of this Cardano-specific product in the Shopify ecosystem provide credibility.
• End-users of the product will contribute to the blockchain-wide adoption and statistics of using $ADA, contributing to Cardano’s overall footprint across crypto.

Now let’s cover how these specific benefits can influence a single project in the Cardano ecosystem:

• Save over 200 hours between all the required work to launch, even with a minimal viable production-level payment solution
• Hire another team member, add more to their marketing budget, continue to cover expenses, and more with the additional revenue stream
• Create a new utility for their own Cardano native token since it can now be used in a universal way that wasn’t easily accessible in the past
• Leverage as a way to confidently decide to build on Cardano over another ecosystem because a mature tool exists and is readily available
• Equip tens to thousands of unique end-users that will be using $ADA and other Cardano native tokens in an e-commerce environment

To get a clearer example of the impact this tool will have across the Cardano ecosystem, let’s extrapolate these benefits that an individual project will experience by using this new payment solution across the target of 100 customers in the first year:

• Thousands of overall hours in resources from projects will be spent on their own unique value additions to Cardano
• A hundred new people employed in the Cardano ecosystem or a hundred projects that can continue to operate
• Significant more money circulating in the Cardano ecosystem that can be reinvested into businesses
• Considered in the decision to build on Cardano instead of any other chain for a wide range of projects
• Adds tens of thousands of people who have exchanged tokens on Cardano for physical merchandise

Addressing the challenge details directly:

• “products and protocols that improve the end user experience”
• It’s critically important for Cardano to have a modern and flexible solution for accepting fungible tokens in exchange for goods on Shopify. The current implementation of accepting $ADA is a poor and antiquated user experience.
• “more options or making something easier to use that benefits the wider ecosystem”
• Our new payment solution is widely applicable across Cardano, as countless types of businesses can integrate Cardano native token payments more effortlessly than ever.
• “the more reasons people have to interact with the Cardano blockchain”
• The impact of this payment solution being adopted in the ecosystem is easily measured as thousands of people used their $ADA as a medium of exchange.

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

To review the benefits this new product provides to the Cardano ecosystem:

1. Saves projects 200+ hours of research, scoping, developing, integrating, and maintaining a payment processor to accept $ADA and Cardano native tokens for physical goods.
2. Provides further utility to owning $ADA and other Cardano native tokens by allowing any project to accept it as a form of payment in their online stores.
3. Allows a wide range of Cardano projects to add a new revenue stream with a payment method their community is intimately familiar with.
4. Significantly improves the existing end-user experience of checking out in online stores and paying with $ADA while introducing functionality that doesn’t exist in accepting Cardano native tokens.

We’re tying measurable success factors directly to these benefits for the Cardano ecosystem:

1. Total number of customers onboarded
2. A customer is defined as having at least five sales using Cardano native tokens and at least 500 ADA (or equivalent) processed
3. Total ADA paid to businesses using our payment solution
4. The collective total of all the sales measured in $ADA. Cardano native tokens will be converted to $ADA equivalent and contribute to this statistic.
5. Estimated USD paid to businesses using our payment solution
6. A total of all the sales measured in dollars by doing Cardano native token -> $ADA -> USD conversions in real-time for every transaction
7. Total number of transactions where Cardano native tokens have been exchanged for physical goods
8. Measuring the total usage of the payment solution by end-users across all of the businesses that have implemented it

In the long term, these numbers will compound with the number of projects and community members in Cardano for years to come. This means significant growth in projects onboarded to the new payment solution, ADA being exchanged in our ecosystem, revenue streams for countless businesses, and end-users getting the best-in-class experience when using the Cardano blockchain as a payment mechanism.

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

This project’s implementation starts by quickly delivering a marketing website to describe the product's value proposition and inform the larger community that it’s on the way. This ensures any project in the Cardano ecosystem can adequately allocate its resources to something else if this is part of its own roadmap. It also allows us to collect interest in using the new product by allowing website viewers to connect their Twitter account to be eligible for early access.

While the product’s vision is circulating in the ecosystem and potential customers are being reached, the development of the MVP will be well underway. The deliverables include an end-to-end solution for users to log into our website, manage their checkout/payment settings, integrate $ADA payments into their Shopify store, and get simple reporting via a Dashboard.

After we have completed an end-to-end integration with a single customer, we will begin to share all of the success metrics we have listed publically via our website’s homepage:

1. Total number of projects using the new payment product
2. Total amount of $ADA processed
3. Total estimated amount of USD processed in $ADA and other Cardano native tokens
4. Total number of transactions

Not only will it be available on the website for the public to view in real time, but each summary can be tied directly to the blockchain via transactions created from sales. Therefore anyone can verify the validity of the data.

At this point in the implementation, we will contact the early adopters who have shown their interest via signing up on our website and begin adding more users. This allows us to work out any onboarding or technical issues before it’s publicly available for anyone to use. During this beta phase, we will finish the feature set for a viable production version during this beta phase. Paying with Cardano native tokens isn’t part of this phase, and instead, all focus will be on delivering a complete product for accepting $ADA as payment only.

After we onboarded at least five customers, we can publicly release the product. This moves the product into a traditional lifecycle of supporting the customer base and listening to their feature requests and requirements.

Upon stability of the product, proven demand with at least ten customers onboarded, and potential customers that have shown interest in using Cardano native tokens as payments, we will build that portion of the product.

Implementing payments with Cardano native tokens concludes the scope of this proposal. With 20 or more customers onboarded, product-market fit has been validated, operating costs are nearly covered, and the product can work towards profitability and growth independently. 

We ultimately aim to create three revenue streams to continue to scale the product:

• Traditional method of taking a percentage of each transaction processed by our solution
• Offering consulting services for store owners who want to go above and beyond the scope of what we offer
• Releasing our own Cardano branded store for physical goods and promoting ecosystem events/partnerships

Most profits will be reinvested in future development, marketing, direct sales, consulting, and support for the product as the customer base grows. This creates additional opportunities for various others to be employed in the Cardano ecosystem and grow this product.

There are many ways Cardano can be used to enhance the payment and checkout experience for Shopify store owners, from gatekeeping items using NFTs, discounts using coupon NFTs, sending receipts via an NFT, paying with NFTs, fungible token rewards, supporting Cardano side-chains/L2s, POS terminals, no-code payment links, payable invoices, subscriptions, fiat conversions, keeping up with the most modern UX, and more. We plan to stay in this niche indefinitely and expand to other online commerce platforms besides Shopify.

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

We have worked full-time in Cardano for over two years and have a proven record of high-quality output building production-level software systems. Our software suite is responsible for minting over 56,000 NFTs on Cardano. Previous work can be validated by hundreds of individuals who participated in advanced minting services, on-chain elections, social ranking systems, community-based roadmaps, countless integrations, and other micro products we developed on top of Cardano. We already have developed an in-house solution for accepting $ADA and other Cardano native tokens for our own Shopify stores. Those alone have processed almost 20,000 $ADA and is verifiable proof we can deliver on the technical portion of this project. We've always been completely doxxed and strongly desire to stay and build in the Cardano ecosystem for years to come.

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

The project's singular main goal reflects all of our success criteria.

By onboarding projects in Cardano’s ecosystem to our product, we save them countless hours in development and integrations. As a result, it provides further utility to owning $ADA and other Cardano native tokens and adds an additional revenue stream for a wide range of projects. All this while providing a best-in-class end-user checkout experience to ensure Cardano’s reputation continues growing.

An iterative approach to onboarding the 1st customer to the first 20th ensures we nail down product market fit and scale appropriately in stages. We have already spoken to at least that number of potential early adopters that have shown interest.

On the technical side, we have already proven our capability to deliver by building an in-house solution that accepts $ADA payments in Shopify and used it successfully to process almost 20,000 $ADA in sales. We intend to use the same development patterns and services. This includes but is not limited to a serverless architecture hosted on AWS, a marketing website and dashboarding via Webflow, Lucid to build and submit transactions, a blockchain data integration via Blockfrost, and a Shopify API integration to manage orders.

Our approach to creating three separate income streams for our product will allow us to scale indefinitely beyond the scope of this proposal after we complete our goal of onboarding 20 customers.

We have done extensive diligence and modeling of the future growth potential of this product. Reaching 20 customers would bring us close to breaking even in operations with a considerable upside to continue to expand. We feel we can grow to serve hundreds of projects on Cardano, enable millions of dollars in value exchanged in $ADA via our payment integration, maintain our ecosystem’s reputation in the broader crypto space, and develop a sustainable business built on Cardano for years. This can only be enabled via the strategic funding granted in this proposal to bootstrap us to our initial customer base.

[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.

We have outlined our journey to reach our ultimate goal of having a sustainable business on Cardano in concrete and measurable milestones:

Public Introduction

• This initial phase of the project begins after being awarded the grant. It includes administrative tasks such as creating the business entity, establishing a new domain/email/workspace/project management suite, creating social accounts, initializing Kanban workflow tooling, additional scoping, and setting up development environments. It also includes public-facing portions like the SEO-optimized marketing website with visitor analytics, Twitter sign-up for beta access, Typeform for initial survey, and social accounts starting to promote the product and engage with the potential user base.
• We estimate this milestone will take 3 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs involve 20 hours of administrative work, 20 hours of product scoping and road mapping, 10 hours of SEO research and copywriting, 15 hours of website design, 40 hours of development, 5 hours in business development, 5 hours of survey workflow creation, and 10 hours of initial marketing
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having all our internal tooling, development environments, and partners as a business setup
• Having a publicly viewable website that explains our value proposition
• Having at least 10 potential customers link their Twitter accounts to show interest

MVP Release

• This is the phase where most of the technical build will be completed. With a single Twitter-integrated customer, we will manually set up their Shopify details and install the plugin we create. Our first customer won’t have any administrative dashboards, configuration options they control, or other website-based tools. They will be able to accept $ADA as a payment method in their Shopify store, end-to-end, proving the core integration with the Shopify API. We will continue to promote the upcoming beta release of the payment solution on Twitter while reaching out to those who haven’t yet linked their Twitter account on our website to show interest.
• We estimate this milestone will take 3 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 60 hours of development on API integration with Shopify, 60 hours of development for the Shopify plugin, 15 hours of design on end-user payments, 15 hours on data modeling and database management, 10 hours of development for the real-time rate conversions. 10 hours of further marketing, 10 hours of further marketing website development, 10 hours in business development, 5 hours of QA, and 10 hours of administrative work
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having a single customer that has been onboarded to the payment solution by having them accept payment in $ADA for at least 5 orders in their own Shopify store
• Having at least 20 potential customers link their Twitter accounts to show interest

On-Board Alpha Customers

• This phase is about introducing a handful of trusted customers onto the payment platform while it’s still in its earlier stages of development. This next level of (alpha) customers will get varying degrees of administrative dashboards, configuration options they control, or other website-based tools as they are built out for the following phase. This continues to instill confidence in our solution’s scalability and gives a direct connection to our customer base to ensure product market fit. It also introduces a support workflow for customers to interact with our team. We start to leverage the projects that use our ADA payment solution to promote our partnership over Twitter to increase our visibility. We will also spend the time to add new sections to our marketing website to display Tweets from our customers, a list of all businesses using the tool, and real-time tracking of all our overall proposal success factors.
• We estimate this milestone will take 1.5 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 5 hours to create customer support workflow, 10 hours in business development and customer onboarding, 5 hours in design for the marketing website, 20 hours of further marketing website development, 10 hours of development to aggregate data for the website, 10 hours of anticipated bug fixes and minor development enhancements, and 10 hours of further marketing.
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having a total of 5 customers onboarded and fully accepting $ADA payments in their Shopify stores
• Having at least 40 potential customers link their Twitter accounts to show interest

Finish Product Development for Scaling

• This is another development-heavy phase where we complete the administrative dashboards, configuration options they control, or other website-based tools to enable customers to be entirely self-service. This also includes making product improvements, including mobile support. By delivering the product features required for the end-to-end no-code solution, we ensure viability and prepare to onboard another wave of customers. As the product development progresses, portions will be released to any customers already using the payment solution.
• We estimate this milestone will take 4 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 30 hours of website design, 10 hours of data aggregation, 60 hours of development for website application for users, 60 hours on mobile payment support, 5 hours of project management, 10 hours of minor development enhancements, 10 hours of QA
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Releasing a dashboard with a summary of all their orders paid via $ADA over time
• Releasing an order history page with a detailed breakdown of each transaction
• Releasing a settings page to allow for self-service management of the configuration options available

On-Board Beta Customers

• This is another scaling phase of the product and customer development where select customers use the fully featured platform independently. We continue to push the marketing forward, showing new content based on the payment platform developments.
• We estimate this milestone will take 1.5 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 20 hours of customer support, 20 hours in business development and customer onboarding, 10 hours of anticipated bug fixes and minor development enhancements, and 15 hours of further marketing initiatives
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having a total of 15 customers onboarded and fully accepting $ADA payments in their Shopify stores
• Having at least 60 potential customers link their Twitter accounts to show interest

Polish and Public Release

• This phase is about preparing to scale to onboard more customers with less friction and adequately establish our value proposition in the Cardano ecosystem. We will publish our documentation as a resource for all current and future users. This includes walkthrough videos for account setup, the administrative features, and demonstrating payments using desktop and mobile browsers. We will ensure our plugin is publicly listed in the Shopify marketplace. Also included is the last round of product enhancements, such as currency options, UX customization, alternate login options/users, multi-wallet support, automated variable % fees, and more. We will implement real-time chat support as an additional way to convert and support users. Another round of improvements to finalize the copy and screenshots on the website will be done. The conclusion of this phase will be a public release of the product in conjunction with executing an associated marketing strategy behind it.
• We estimate this milestone will take 4 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 30 hours of documentation and technical writing, 15 hours of content creation for marketing and onboarding, 10 hours of administrative work of getting listed in the Shopify marketplace, 10 hours of product design of the last round of features, 60 hours of development, 10 hours of QA, 10 hours on a marketing website, 10 hours of refining the support flow with real-time chat, 20 hours of business development, 30 hours of marketing around the public release.
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having at least 100 potential customers link their Twitter accounts to show interest
• Releasing public documentation for onboarding and usage of the payment platform
• Releasing a series of videos to demonstrate the various applications of the payment platform
• Releasing the Shopify plugin in their payments marketplace
• Releasing a finalized version of the marketing website
• Adding the real-time support and conversion system on the website and app
• Opening the payment platform for anyone that provides their Twitter account

Accepting Cardano Native Tokens

• This final development-heavy phase includes adding support for Cardano native tokens. This includes real-time conversions of Cardano native tokens to $ADA and fiat currencies. The administrative dashboards, transaction builders, data models, configuration settings, data syncing, and more must be updated. The marketing website will be revamped to include all the new functionality of accepting any Cardano fungible token as payment. The global tracking of success metrics will also be enhanced to include all Cardano native token sales. Documentation and support material will be updated to include this new functionality. We will market its release and continue to recruit customers via the website’s onboarding.
• We estimate this milestone will take 2.5 weeks to complete
• Estimated costs include 10 hours of documentation, 10 hours of content creation for marketing and onboarding, 10 hours of product/UX design, 60 hours of development, 10 hours of QA, 10 hours on marketing website, 10 hours of business development, 30 hours of marketing around the public release, 10 hours of administrative work and reporting
• We defined our success criteria as follows:
• Having a total of 20 customers onboarded and fully accepting any token payments in their Shopify stores
• Updating the public documentation for onboarding and usage of the new payment type
• Releasing a video to demonstrate the various applications of paying with Cardano native tokens
• Releasing a production-ready plugin to the Shopify marketplace for paying with Cardano native tokens
• Opening the Cardano native token payments to all current and future customers
• Updating the public success metrics on the website to include the native token payments
• Enhancing the marketing website to include details on paying using Cardano native tokens

Our following goals after the completion of the milestones are scaling the customer base to profitability, estimated to be over 35 varying-sized customers. We will introduce new processes like a public roadmap for our customers to continue product development. To scale, we will execute many growth tactics including but not limited to email newsletters, direct sales, gathering backlinks via blog articles, performing interviews on Youtube, participating in Twitter spaces, continuing to SEO optimize, bolstering social proof on the website with real-time notification of usage, attending and promoting at Cardano specific in-person events, promoting and retargeting on Twitter, Shopify marketplace reviews, and more. We have no estimation on its completion or scope of work but want to outline this to complete the overall path for growth and scale, but it’s outside of the Project Catalyst funding.

The project management will be managed using Notion with a Kanban workflow.

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

We have concrete deliverables at each of our defined milestones as defined below:

Public Introduction

• Completing the marketing website is the public-facing portion of this milestone and is the primary deliverable.
• Because of its integration with analytics and Twitter-based sign-up, we can accurately measure conversions of viewers, where traffic is coming from, and what sized potential customers have shown interest.
• During the completion of this milestone, we will deliver the website to browse and sign up for. We will also produce a report of unique website visitors, potential customers with segmentation on community size, and current Twitter followers.

MVP Release

• Completing the development of an end-to-end working product with our first customer is the primary deliverable.
• After we have onboarded a single customer and had them accept payment in $ADA for at least five orders in their own Shopify store, we will consider this milestone complete.
• We will produce a report of unique website visitors, potential customers with segmentation on community size, current Twitter followers, transactions processed, total $ADA processed, and total estimated USD processed.

On-Board Alpha Customers

• Completing the onboarding of the subsequent four customers is the primary deliverable of this milestone.
• We will produce a report of unique website visitors, potential customers with segmentation on community size, current Twitter followers, transactions processed, total $ADA processed, total estimated USD processed, and the number of customers.

Finish Product Development for Scaling

• Completing the administrative dashboard, order history page, and a settings page for customer configuration are deliverables of this milestone. We also will deliver mobile support for end-user payments at this milestone’s completion.
• We will continue to generate a report of the critical business metrics we track for each milestone.

On-Board Beta Customers

• Completing the onboarding of a total of 15 customers is the primary deliverable of this milestone.
• We will continue to generate a report of the critical business metrics we track for each milestone, specifically the potential customers who link their Twitter accounts to show interest in this milestone.

Polish and Public Release

• Completing an entirely self-service product where a customer can sign up, configure their store, and accept payments without any interactions from the team is the primary goal and a measurable deliverable for this milestone.
• We will publish documentation on integrating the Shopify plugin, videos to showcase the main interactions of customers and their shoppers, and validate that our plugin is in the Shopify marketplace. We will also integrate real-time chat support as an additional way to convert and support users as part of this milestone's several deliverables.
• We will continue to generate a report of the critical business metrics we track for each milestone and start to include Shopify marketplace reviews, support inquiries/resolutions, and documentation website analytics.

Accepting Cardano Native Tokens

• Completing the integration to accept Cardano native tokens is the primary deliverable of this milestone. Once complete, this system-wide update will be reflected in our admin dashboards, documentation, marketing website, and support system.
• Having a customer accept Cardano native tokens for at least five sales and 20 or more customers in total will mark the completion of this milestone.
• We will continue to generate a report of the critical business metrics we track for each milestone and start to include Cardano native token transactions and $ADA/$USD equivalent totals.

We will have these success metrics publically viewable via our website’s homepage, which can be tied directly to the blockchain via transactions created from sales to ensure its validity:

1. Total number of projects using the new payment product
2. Total amount of $ADA processed
3. Total estimated amount of USD processed in $ADA and other Cardano native tokens
4. Total number of transactions

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

Following the specific timeline of the milestones, we can break them down into separate phases of work and determine the budget for each.

While the milestones have more detailed explanations of the actual work to be accomplished, for simplification of the budgeting, we broke it down into five resource groups with fixed hourly rates:

• Administrative - $10 an hour
• Product - $59 an hour
• Design - $28 an hour
• Development - $95 an hour
• Marketing - $24 an hour

Each milestone has the estimated hours for each role broken down, and using the fixed fee for each resource, we can more accurately estimate the cost.

Here is each milestone with a specific budget allocation directly based on the resources needed:

• Public Introduction - $6,535
• Administrative - 20 hours
• Product - 25 hours
• Design - 25 hours
• Development - 40 hours
• Marketing - 15 hours
• MVP Release - $16,650
• Administrative - 10 hours
• Product - 10 hours
• Design - 15 hours
• Development - 160 hours
• Marketing - 10 hours
• On-Board Alpha Customers - $5,065
• Administrative - 0 hours
• Product - 15 hours
• Design - 5 hours
• Development - 40 hours
• Marketing - 10 hours
• Finish Product Development for Scaling - $15,385
• Administrative - 0 hours
• Product - 5 hours
• Design - 30 hours
• Development - 150 hours
• Marketing - 0 hours
• On-Board Beta Customers - $2,570
• Administrative - 20 hours
• Product - 20 hours
• Design - 0 hours
• Development - 10 hours
• Marketing - 10 hours
• Polish and Public Release - $12,960
• Administrative - 10 hours
• Product - 50 hours
• Design - 10 hours
• Development - 90 hours
• Marketing - 45 hours
• Accepting Cardano Native Tokens - $10,120
• Administrative - 10 hours
• Product - 20 hours
• Design - 10 hours
• Development - 80 hours
• Marketing - 40 hours

A more detailed breakdown of milestones and costs can be found in the “Milestones” tab of the attached Google Sheet.

We have a total cost of $69,185 for the resources required to execute the proposal.

Using this total in conjunction with start-up costs and an operating expenses runway will produce the exact funds requested for the execution of this proposal.

We have around 18 services/expenses that we anticipate we will have during the start of the project and 28 by the end of the first year:

• AWS - API, Hosting, Integrations
• Firebase - Database hosting
• Blockfrost.io - Retrieve blockchain data
• Webflow - Web design, Hosting
• Google Workspace - Gmail, Google Docs/Sheets
• Gitbook - Document collaboration and publishing
• Twitter Blue - Communication and marketing
• Google Domains - Domain name
• Notion - Project management
• Grammarly - Content creation and writing 
• Firefoo - Database management
• Photoshop CS - Content creation and design 
• Jetbrains - IDE for development
• Mangools - SEO, backlinks, and market research
• Incorporation - Establishing proper business entity
• Intercom - Business messaging platform
• TweetHunter - Twitter management, acquisition
• Shopify - Demo store with ADA merch
• Nolt - Customer feedback boards
• Google Ads - SEO and retargeting
• Twitter Ads - Acquisition via retargeting
• MailChimp - Email List Management
• Customer Budget - Incentivize reviews in the Shopify marketplace
• CPA - Finances, taxes
• Segment - Customer data platform
• Hotjar - End-user experience testing
• Medium - Blog and content creation
• Long-form Content Creation - Marketing, SEO, credibility

If you take only the expenses required to launch the project and pay for the services that allow you to do so upfront in yearly increments instead of monthly, then you get $3,211 in initial start-up costs and $442 in monthly expenses. Paying for the services upfront saves $824.

A more detailed breakdown of expenses can be found in the “Expenses” tab of the attached Google Sheet.

The length of this proposal is five months, and therefore, we’re requesting five months of operating expenses for the runway to scale to profitability, totaling $2,210.

Taking the resources to execute the proposal, initial start-up costs, and five months of operating expenses runway, you reach a total of $74,606 which is what we’re requesting as our grant.

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

We have completed great diligence in estimating the scope of what we must do to execute the milestones successfully. Each milestone is thoroughly broken down into chunks of work that can then be grouped into one of five roles. This gives us a high level of confidence in our estimations of each role’s responsibilities and, therefore, our budget. We are using below-market rates for most of the roles and carefully mapped out our path to sustainability without any additional funding. It’s important that we stay focused on the path to profitability as outlined and maximize the high leverage that Catalyst funding would grant us.

[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