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Our Purpose

Complementing and furthering the successfully funded Fund 6 Proposals Mentors Marketplace (under development), this second phase proposal seeks to adds a new functionality to the platform and also continue to enhance capabilities after launching the first release in March. 

Catalyst Proposal LifeCycle

After our Discovery phase, we have identified three main stages of the Proposal Journey:

1. When a proposer enters the Cardano's Ecosystem and the Catalyst Project and wants to understand how she/he can be part of it, wether she/he has an idea for a proposal or not.

1. When a proposer wants to create a proposal and realize her/his idea, applying to a Catalyst Fund round.

1. When a proposer got her/his proposal funded and needs to deliver on the promises.

Our 1st phase, F6 funded proposal - Proposals Mentor Marketplace - aims to solve Stage 2 of the Proposal LifeCycle, and it is on track to deliver on that goal. With our first MVP to be delivered during January, a second MVP during February and the Initial release in March. 

This proposal intends to provide a 2nd Phase to PMM, with two main objectives:

- Adding support to the platform to cover Stage 3 of the Proposal LifeCycle, to enable funded proposers to be matched with skilled mentors that help them to deliver on their promises.

- Continue to evolve our platform based on our first real life interactions with Mentors and Proposers after the platform is published (by 2nd MVP).

Why this is important?

Project Catalyst's funding process is funding significantly more proposals each fund. In order to continue to grow, a principal aim of the ecosystem is to reach outside the existing pool of proposers and encourage and engage entrepreneurs, developers and idea generators. We aim to help guide these enthusiasts to reach towards Cardano's long term goal of impacting 1 Billion people.

During Fund6 around 150 proposals were funded, adding to the previous 150 proposals funded in previous funds. With the increase of the available Funds in each funding round ($12M in F7 and $16M in F8) the number of funded proposals will likely continue to increase.

Even though each proposal is being given feedback, assessed and finally voted, that is not the end rather the start of the journey to deliver real value. Delivering on intention, even for experienced proposers is not always easy. Hurdles and unexpected complex situations are often encountered.

Having a pool of dedicated, skilled and knowledgeable mentors that can continue to offer benefits to the proposers, community and ecosystem. By having access to highly skilled and seasoned mentors proposers can have access to the wealth of experience to deliver on intention.

The Solution

We propose to add functionality to facilitate funded proposal, planning, team building, strategy design and execution, by enabling funded 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 creating amazing, impactful and lovable products and outcomes.

Our Platform (PMM - Proposals Mentors Marketplace)

Our dual sided market platform, that is being created and will deliver its first version in January (Fund8), will be expanded to add new functionalities, where funded proposers can find, engage with or get matched to mentors posed to mentor for the funded phase of a project.

This platform was planned as a unique directory of ranked mentors, that offer their help to proposal building, promotion and now execution (with this proposal). Mentor's 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, should they desire this. By agreeing with the proposers during the proposal submission process - a sort of 'coming together' to 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.

Our current State

At the time of these proposal writing, we are finalizing our Prototype, after our Discovery phase, that delivered the initial insights on two User Personas (Proposers and Mentors) and the corresponding Journey maps with their Pains and Gains and Value Proposition Canvas to understand which Product Functions are needed to create and outstanding user experience. We will enter the development phase during the week of December 12th, with the first MVP expected to be delivered in January.

So this proposal, if approved, will be perfectly timed to continue our building process after finalization of Phase 1.

How we are planning to make it work

This tool's first goal is to serve the Catalyst Community, our Discovery showed that there are many members of the community willing to perform as Mentors (both Pro bono and Paid) so our current hypothesis is that recruiting mentors to the platform is doable, as this stage, with some effort, thru the Catalyst Discord and Telegram channels. Recruiting proposers imposes a tougher challenge, as per the immense information that a new comer faces when entering the ecosystem, is not that easy to stand out. We will try several approaches to achieve that, including: 

- Presentations at the TownHalls (Catalyst, Eastern and the upcoming Latam), Swarm sessions, AfterTown Breakouts, Ideafest. 

- We plan also to make agreements with the Accelerators and Mentors program within the Challenge to make coordinated efforts to leverage the platform for their mentoring efforts or as a staged process from-to Catalyst (e.g. Seedstars, whom we been interacting)

- Then we have our early adopters' mentors which will likely be active community members, that are usually go to persons for new proposers seeking for help, they could be incentivized to bring those proposers to the platform and use it as a way to facilitate and formalize their agreements.

- And finally after building some initial momentum, we will be able to show the community how much better possibilities you have on getting your proposal funded, if you use the platform and its mentors, creating a viral type of adoption.

Regarding the FIT between the proposer's proposal and the mentor, we found many insights during our Discovery phase on Why and How this shall happen. Deciding at this stage to keep agreements open to learn what works best, before adding Smart Contracts to the platform.

The platform also considers a Ranking system, created by the community's opinion after each mentoring opportunity ends, both, Proposers and Mentors will be building their reputation, based on this ranking, helping future proposers to see the history of a certain mentor and help her/him decide on wether that mentor is a good match for the proposal.

The Team

Alex has 20+ years of experience building Digital Products and Companies. He has a dual background, on one side a Solutions Architect and Developer (Cloud, Blockchain, C#, .NET, Java, Angular, DevOps) and on the other side a Company Builder and Advisor, building high performance teams to deliver Products that customers love (Customer Development, Agileism, Lean, Design Thinking). Alex is also a professor and public speaker, helping to build common knowledge around the Digital Transformation, Exponential Organizations and Abundance. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apestchanker/ 

Within Cardano, Alex is an active community member, helping now to build the LATAM ecosystem, performed as Community Advisor in F6, with high ratings on his assessments and won a fund for his co-proposal Proposals Mentors Marketplace ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/369749-48088 )

Phil has a business and design background. Is a founder of Carndano AIM and has already successfully funded proposals in funds 4, 5 and 6 which include: Community tools (https://cardanocataly.st/en/tools), Community Landing Page (https://cardanocataly.st/ ), Incentivized Voters Survey (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Incentivized-Voter-Survey-AIM/369554-48088 ), Proposal Framework Tool (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Proposal-Framework-Tool-AIM/369300-48088 ) and others.

We have an active Project Management and UX team that is currently working on the platform and can continue leading the efforts in next phases.

Our Development team is provided via an agreement we have with the Win-Win dispute resolution and Blace.io team ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Blace-io-Marketplace-Creator/368797-48088 ) as they created a company that provides expert Cardano's blockchain development.

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

Estimated Timeline

We aim to reach a first MVP within the second month and then a new release after the 3rd month (each 2 Sprints).

This phase of the project will last around 3 months, to add this new functionality to the platform.

Sustainability (Business Model) and Challenge fit

The added functionality in this phase will be provided for free to Catalyst members, 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 charging a small fee percentage from funded proposals. So in both models the Cardano's ecosystem will benefit from more and higher quality proposals and outcomes and more proposers and mentors (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 bringing more projects to Cardano through referrals.

Also in order to help the challenge objectives we are in talks for collaboration altogether with two other projects that are related with Mentoring within Cardano and Catalyst.

The first one is Match New Members profiles & Tasks (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Match-new-members-profiles-tasks/381856-48088 ) which aims to onboard new people to Catalyst by helping to match their skills with existing tasks in funded proposals, so it makes sense to explore the synergies to include that functionality within the platform.

The second one is AI Powered mentor platform (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/AI-powered-mentor-matching-platform/384036-48088 ) which aims to help women-to-women mentorship with their very successful AI algorithm. So we are talking about collaborating, by including the AI algorithm in the platform and also to produce a women focused section within PMM that seeks to attract and impulse more women within Catalyst.

Key Metrics

Project progress metrics:

Team assigned within 1 week after funding is provided.

Functional design ready in the 2nd week since start (1 Sprint)

Prototype ready in the 3rd week.

Development started within the 2nd sprint

MVP 1 delivered after 2nd month

Release delivered after 3rd month.

Outcomes 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

Number of agreements registered in the platform

Quality of mentored proposals, as assessed by CAs, after mentoring via the platform

Costs structure

1 PM (30%) - 3 months - USD 1.000 per month = USD 3.000

1 UX (30%) - 3 months - USD 1.000 per month = USD 3.000

2 Developers - 3 months - USD 4000 per month each = USD 24.000

2 Founders/Project Leader fees, USD 2.000 each = USD 4.000

Infrastructure and other platforms costs, USD 1000.