@BlockworksResearch Thank you for jumping on a call yesterday and offering suggestions on how to approach the KPIs. We tried to apply them within the constraints we discussed. Writing up here for visibility:
- Yes, we will likely record the sessions and would be happy if the content is used for the OCL YouTube or any other educational avenues. The core value proposition of these sessions is different and while we are keen to produce engaging useful content, at least at this phase this is a secondary objective. AGC is also more about hands-on, P2P support and learning which tend to be high context, cross-topic conversations that seldom make sense as youtube soundbites to a broad audience.
Our market research findings show that founders in the Arbitrum ecosystem, especially the more early stage, want a shared space where they’re encouraged to work with others around a shared purpose with a community of like-minded builders. Thinking holistically about the builder’s journey and how each piece of the story fits together, we find that a 3-month sprint of virtual events is an effective way to plant a flag and seed a supportive peer community for founders. This also supports AVI’s ecosystem investment thesis which prioritizes empowering founders as the true leaders of new initiatives by providing the resources they need to succeed.
Effective P2P learning programs thrive on prioritizing Agency, Responsiveness, and Hyperconnectivity. Keeping things too rigid—especially when agendas are set by administrators instead of participants—can get in the way of these principles and make the experience less effective. That being said, in the last couple of days we did begin the process of making the program flow more rich and clear, as well as well integrated with IRL touch points for the group, while maintaining responsiveness to emerging topics and needs design.
KPIs
We’ve put together a post that dives into the logic model driving our KPIs. Beyond our core metrics, listed above, we’ll be proactively tracking a variety of additional indicators.
That is not the core goal of the proposal, although we see how it came across this way. It does however stem from such a problem statement. Since these comments we’ve clarified the purpose by moving even further from this framing. Even though it’s designed to make it easy for them to plug in and get/create value, the main goal is to create a P2P learning and support flywheel. If anything we want to decrease the dependence of builder engagement with any one expert group.
We decided to pivot away from this as a core idea, while at the same time have made an effort to align it with our understanding of the core challenges we believe around them and make it easy for them and AF to plug in and drive value.
We covered how we believe we drive these suggested outcomes in this write up
The first 2 we’d consider Primary Outcomes, requiring rigorous tracking, ideally by an independent evaluator. Properly tracking and attributing outcomes to specific activities—without reducing them to vanity metrics or incentivizing the team to claim easy wins—is complex. Measuring meaningful impact is challenging and should typically be done on an annual basis, rather than rushing to report on it immediately after the first activities. For now, any measured impact will be captured through qualitative anecdotes, for critical thinking discussions with high context stakeholders, rather than premature data reporting.
For the 3rd, about relationships, this is a better metric for this phase, because the attribution case can be much more clear. We’d consider it a Secondary Outcome. Defining a ‘formed relationship’ can be tricky, but again that can be aided by qualifying anecdotes and surveying the participants (eg. before and after the series of activities and then surveying them again 6, 12 months later). We made this a formal KPI in the published proposal.
That’s a great question! Generally speaking we use the word ‘expert’ as a shortcut to make the proposal more understandable, but a core approach of the methodology is to strip people’s ‘expert status’ and put everyone on the same plane. Answering the question on incentives succinctly enough for a comment is a little tricky, but in a nutshell founders would participate in the early stages of this community because they have skin in the game in the ecosystem and supporting earlier stage teams is a big part of growing vibrant ecosystems.
TL;DR, founders need and find value in peer support networks. In our market consultations from the AVI pilot some of the most requested help was centered around relationship building.
Usually when you’re building a community like this you need a good mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators ideally leading with the former. On that it’s a very human founder behavior to get in the ditches with other founders and talk war stories, which for some reason we all enjoy. This is especially true when you get a chance to have your pain be converted into an immediate pain relief for someone else adding more meaning to ones journey. In the many years in which we’ve supported such interactions, one of the things we have often gotten as feedback from in some cases very capable senior people, is that we create spaces which are filtered for high integrity and intellectual honesty and naturally excommunicate people driven primarily by self promotion. Often this is driven by pushing back on being transactional around driving funder objectives and focusing on catering to the participants as the ultimate clients rather than the other way around. This of course over a longer period of time benefits the funders substantially more when it works.
Looking at this more extrinsically, careful orchestration of these experiences across a carefully developed venn diagram of participants, who can unlock value for each, but are not yet meeting and talking effectively is very value generating. Especially for forward looking people who can recognise that getting involved in these communities ‘before it’s cool’ is the highest leverage moment to build deeper relationships and learn. While not strictly limited to that as motivation, this is the ideal persona we are looking for.
Yes, we want it to be a part of the events program. We now have the KPIs and budget breakdown listed above.
To clarify, there is no demand for their participation. The goal is to create a flywheel of peer support to lessen the reliance on any one expert group. OCL was used as one example in the core problem statement of builders wanting more organic engagement and interaction with them and while being met where they are.
We absolutely agree with the focus on long term effects. We are using the term Primacy Outcomes rather than long term metrics in this writeup of a proposed Logic Model. In some cases hopefully we should be able to achieve them in the short term and retain the results.
That being said, we feel that at this stage it’s premature to try to put all the effort and patience into doing this well. Instead we can make a bet on the theory reflected in the logic model, that if we make builder life on Arbitrum better, this will very likely lead to some of these bigger benefits. Then ofc we need to separately challenge this critically and introduce the necessary metrics to be able to drive optimising a more scaled up version of this work, should such be funded.
So the metrics we are proposing are trying to measure if we are making builder life better via creating a community and P2P support flywheel. And we are keen to deepen the discussion around them. But ideally not at the expense of doing what we believe is fairly safe to try in a more timely manner and plant the flag. To our knowledge the education track is currently not live and this budget is the best fit.
We think what you’re saying makes complete sense. But step by step. It’s in the pipeline more on all the parts of the AVI portfolio construction being considered here: DocSend.
On the point of Arbitrum D.A.O. Grants program point, to our knowledge there is no such live program at the moment to consider and the events budget is the best fit.
We’ll say more during the office hours scheduled for Monday