Business Strategy for African Proj.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Part 1

From the perspective of helping projects operating on the African continent:

Actively monitor and pursue incoming projects on African channels, participate in town halls and keep up to date with the African community.

When I identify the intention of developing a project on the continent, I’ll offer a slot in my agenda to listen and delve deeper into what the project objectives are and how they intend to achieve their results. After this first conversation, identify the need for a follow-up if any opportunity is identified or contribute directly during this first interaction.

Part 2

With a view to expanding the consulting activity:

Identify when projects may need advice from other ecosystem leaders and make that connection.

Seek out leaders and developers from other projects who are interested in offering perspective on projects that are similar to theirs or with very similar technical requirements, rewarding these other people for review time and providing feedback on those projects.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

It’s clear that innovating on Blockchain is challenging, a bit like Brazil, Africa suffers with serious social problems, on top of that sometimes you need to be very creative to align the incentive cost to develop sustainable solutions. This is something really hard and can often turn into pyramid schemes just because of the lack of balance on incentives, creating decentralized organizations is not easy but certainly the future. In order to achieve the best results and reduce some risks, multiple points of view give the creators a better understanding of how they could navigate this new world. 

My proposal gives an opportunity and incentives to connect leaders of our ecosystem to spend more of their time with teams that want to bootstrap in Africa, with the intention to rise the odds of a project deliver with much greater perspective on top of the problem, many times those advisors will be able to contrast with years of experience in determined field. 

We also understand collaboration is key for this challenge, and that's why I also recommending this proposal to help my proposal to be even more sustainable. So please take a look in this proposal too: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/421820

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Risk

The biggest risk is basically burnout, in order to put forward many of the challenges of a decentralized ecosystem, it’s easy for a person to get exhausted. 

Solution

To this point I will reduce the ratio of the activity to balance with my needs. 

Risk

The other risk is exclusively for the second part of trying to expand this fund to other leaders in the ecosystem being invited to spend their time helping other projects. Basically my uncertainty here is basically about personal commitment on the outcome from a third party. 

Solution

To try identify this, I will create a survey to measure the impact of the calls with the teams.  

Risk

The other risk is not being assertive on the feedback to the teams. 

Solution

In order to improve and validate that the consultancy is making sense for them, I’ll apply a survey at the end of every meeting, iterate on top of the feedback and adjust for next opportunities. 

Risk

The other risk is not having enough demand from the Africa community.

Solution

In this case I will reach the leaders of the African community and understand how my hours could improve their operation. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

First month

• Announcing to the African community the possibility to book calls in order to receive feedback about their projects.
• Query all the projects that could be interesting to book a call and create the first entries in a kanban process.
• Execute a Survey with projects to understand their need in terms of specific advisory
• With some data in my hands, I will go around the ecosystem and establish a relationship with more leaders of our ecosystem to understand their availability and desire to participate in such endeavors.

Second month

• Establish a routine to execute the operational part and collect the information required to evaluate the whole program.
• Cycle back what is being done and the feedback in town halls so people could understand better the points we address in some calls.

Next months

• I will try to gather some questions and build a report to identify the most common pain points of new projects starting from the African community. With the data in hands, approach the Town Hall and raise awareness of potential solutions to be tackled by the community in the next Catalyst funds.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Basically the breakdown of the expenses will fit in these categories: 

• Hours of advisorying
• Hours of research in case of a second encounter where I need to provide some more feedback about the project.
• Hours of operational tasks, management of next meetings and coordination.
• Hours of advisorying from other community leaders

Respectively: 

• For hours of advisory and research, I will stick with the average hourly price of the software industry for a project manager or software developer, that is around $64/h. 
• To hours related to operational tasks I will consider half of the value.
• With an exception for hours of advisory, I will consider a range from $60 to $100 to negotiate exclusively for other advisors interested to contribute in specific cases.

Based on the targets of the KPIs below in this proposal, I expect an average for the expenses of:

Per week $130 in advisory hours and $45 in operational tasks. 

I also need to include a deviation where I need to prepare a second encounter for feedback and other leaders providing advice on a specific topic. 

For that I will add on average 4 extra hours a month, 2h to prepare for a second encounter and 2h for the other leaders to participate in an encounter.

This average could result in $290 per month. 

In total this project could consume on average $1165 per month.

The funds requested in this proposal should match close to the KPIs, that are above this average, so the expected coverage of this proposal is to 10 to 12 months and if stay below the KPI can extend itself for 20 months. The budget also could end sooner if I had to have more second encounters and had to spend some extra time researching a topic for a second encounter. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Thiago Nunes - Technologist in Analysis and Systems Development, entrepreneur with experience in the creation of several companies related to software development, including games, mobile and web systems. His most recent and relevant experience is related to the Marketing and Digital Strategies segment. He is currently Cardano's ambassador in Brazil and operator of the Ouros stake pool, Community Lead at Occam Association and Director of Operations at Cardano Warriors.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, if possible I would like to be able to continuously support projects in Cardano, not only for Africa but any other project of our community. At the end it will depend how much impact I will be able to cause with this project. If it was considered successful I will re-apply, if not I will also be happy to discontinue the idea. 

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

I will integrate auditability tools created by the community, like the treasury guild to manage transactions and Dework to create a pipeline to track different stages of their projects, so I can identify the right moment to have a call and discuss in greater detail an idea or problems they are facing.

On top of that I will create a spreadsheet to track meetings and the surveys received from the respective meeting.

About the auditability of the hours spent, we’ll ask for the project being advised to send an e-mail before booking the call and one at the end formalizing the participation with the duration of the call. 

Every month I will add to a spreadsheet, a report about the hours spent and description of the activities.

In order to have an easy way for the community to audit this work, I will establish a gitbook and provide the link during the first Catalyst monthly report. 

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Level 1

Project owners are happy with the approach and implemented some views or changes provided during the calls. 

Level 2

A project MPV is implemented and explicitly contains the contribution discussed in a call. 

KPI

For the main KPIs I would like to achieve the following numbers:

• 1 to 4 projects advisory per week.
• At least 1 other advisory per month from other leaders in the ecosystem. 
• 100% of Surveys answered

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This proposal is an entirely new one.