Proposals Mentors Marketplace

The current Cardano's proposals funding process is attracting more and more proposers each fund, with an aim to reach more and more outside proposers out of brilliant entrepreneurs and purpose driven enthusiast to reach our goal to impact 1 Billion people.

During Fund5 there were around 316 proposals received, with 112 (35%) securing funds. 143 (45%) of those proposals were not approved by voters (negative votes vs positive votes spread) and 214 (67%) got less than a 4 score assessment by CAs.

This situation creates an increasing frustration among proposers, and this has the potential to worsen as more proposals are submitted and Cardano's growth accelerates. Increasing complexity of the space means that it is vital to keep proposals quality high by increased understanding of challenges and proposal's feasibility criteria and other key factors of the proposal process.

This situation is significantly harder for new proposers and outsiders. How can we make a difficult space easier. How can we help onboard the proposers that have been encouraged to join the space?

The Solution

We propose to facilitate proposal creation, promotion and execution, by enabling proposers to find help among skilled members of the Cardano's community that are willing to mentor projects and proposers. Working towards the achievement of outstanding results, value and increase the chances of being funded.

A dual sided market platform will be created to generate a Mentor Marketplace, where proposers can find, engage with or get matched to mentors.

This platform will serve as a unique directory of ranked mentors, that offer their help to proposal building, promotion and even execution (after funding). Mentors profile and success metrics will be visible at the platform, with certain key attributes that help the proposer to select/be matched to the relevant mentors who can help bring their ideas to become reality.

Mentor's will be able to monetize their advice, agreeing with the proposers during the process - a coming together to an agreement. We see that this might be in the form of pre-funding payment, post funding payment, equity interest or some mix or other in kind payment. The platform will help facilitate the agreement process.

In this initial stage we will experiment with this open option to learn what are the different monetization needs from the community. Later the platform could leverage smart contracts to help with the monetization of the efforts and the marketplace itself, and maybe helping also Cardano's to send and track funding for proposals.

We plan to leverage other projects that can help to increase our delivery speed, as well as to standardize the platform so many new functionalities can be built upon this marketplace, such as a possible partnership with the Community Members profile site (https://projectcatalyst.org/api/graphql).

The Team

The proposers have extensive experience in creating value added projects, and are committed to the Cardano's community as Community Advisors. Phil has a business and design background and has already successfully funded proposals in funds 4 and 5 funded which are: Community tools (https://cardanocataly.st/en/tools)and Community Landing Page (https://cardanocataly.st/).

Skilled developers and UX/UI designers will be hired to execute the technical aspects of the project. We have a understanding that Blace.io (a Catalyst spawned marketplace base layer https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Blace-io-Marketplace-Creator/368797-48088)) is under pre-funding development. We are in discussion with the team responsible for the project as a possible base layer for out market place.

This project also has the support of the Cardano AIM team.

Estimated Timeline

We aim to reach a first MVP within first two months, giving us time to get the team together and for blace.io releases their first versions for testing. We then plan to work towards a new release each month (each 2 Sprints).

This first phase of the project will last around 4 months, to deliver a first version of the platform, with core functionality such as having mentor's profiles searchable, with filter criteria functionality, and a way to produce the match/communication between parties.

After the first 4 months, we will aim to produce new evolution based on the insights obtained during the first phase, the type of business model that end up being selected and the willingness/approval/adoption by the community.

Sustainability (Business Model) and Challenge fit

In this phase we want to provide a free version of the platform to help build up momentum and give back to the community the funds obtained to jump starting the platform.

If the experiment is successful we can either continue to provide a free version (funded by the community) or produce a fee based model - we are considering perhaps a small percentage of funded proposals. So in both models the Cardano's ecosystem will benefit from more and higher quality proposals and more proposers (specially from outside the ecosystem), thus aligning with this challenge goal. By facilitating better ways to be involved with developing value on top of Cardano. Also by generating a source of income for Mentor's we will incentivize that mentor's participation and in the future work towards bring more projects to Cardano through referrals.

Key Metrics

These can be measured by engagement fund to fund:

Number of mentors actively on the platform

Number of proposals onboarded through the platform

Number of successful proposals mentored through the platform

Costs structure

3 Developers/UX - USD 3000 per month each - USD 36.000

2 Founders/Project Leader fees, USD 2.000 each.

Infrastructure and other platforms costs, USD 1000.