Thank you everyone for the great engagement. While the vote did not pass, we are happy to see that it has generated a ton of actionable feedback in a short period of time. A lot of it is aligned with what we’ve seen when we’ve launched similar P2P learning and support programs.
Making a case for flexibility
What’s important and most valuable is creating the framework and flywheel. And while we get that it is hard to support it without seeing a particular implementation, if you focus on the implementation (eg exact topics, schedule, who are the experts, specific lists of participants etc) the main point of the approach can get lost. However, we understand that it is always easier to envision and risk manage with a specific implementation in mind and this is what people tend to often support on the first round.
With this taken into account, we’ll aim to provide a plan that has more specificity while maintaining the necessary flexibility to not lose the core benefits of the P2P approach.
Does this fit within the events budget or should it be a standalone proposal?
The main rationale as having it as an event budget proposal has been shared. We’ve received feedback that while it technically fits well in the categories of educational workshops, delegates would prefer to focus the events budget on large events.
Other delegates explicitly expressed strong preference that initiatives like this should be in the events budget which has been so far underutilised.
Others still suggested the first version of the program should be run as a community, educational and events domain allocator initiative and then should be brought back to the DAO thereafter. Since then, season 3 of the DAO was approved and we are investigating the viability to run it through there too.
Integration with other streams
We also think that this is a critical point and have taken steps to figure out how to create an integrated journey for those being supported and will strive to be in a more clear and stronger position before resubmitting a proposal.
Are events and community building supposed to be about marketing?
This is also a common misconception that we’ve seen often. Quite a few delegates looked at the proposal in terms of what’s the reach, what will we put on X, and how many activations we’ll drive per $.
For the avoidance of doubt we have no such primary objectives with an initiative like this. The experience we’re looking for is more like the dinners y-combinator organizes for their cohorts.
KPIs
To support this discussion we released this post. Naturally, there’s a tendency to prioritize easily measurable, high-visibility outcomes. While understandable, at this early stage a broader perspective can lead to more sustainable success. Effective KPIs should not only track progress for our ecosystem’s primary outcomes, but also make the builders the heroes of the story if we want the best one to work with us. When the focus is on enabling long-term impact rather than just immediate returns, the entire ecosystem benefits a lot more. It’s encouraging to see more conversations around how we can better support early-stage builders, even when their contributions take time to fully emerge.
Costs
In discussions around costs, we’ve noticed that comparisons are often made using benchmarks that may not fully align with the nature of our work. This misunderstanding has led to misaligned expectations for the budget. What we’re proposing isn’t a marketing-driven events program but a highly engaged, hands-on support initiative. Our experience suggests that getting the same results with an online format, especially when running shorter sessions is in fact more expensive than doing longer sessions IRL.
Eg getting the same quality of attention in more compact sessions, which is required because participants are less susceptible to longer calls, requires a lot more work and direct individual participant engagement beforehand being done by the team though. The challenge is that there are no obvious locations to run continuous IRL sessions of this nature or strictly expecting longer in-sync time commitment would drive adverse selection on how senior people would be willing to participate and likely increase drop-out rates.
Fortunately, with 67.2k we are able to support ~45 participants over a 3 month period, we can expect significant behavior change, substantial relationships in the group and a sense of belonging. This would amount to about $1,500, per participant. If you compare it to the typical cost of a weekend workshop of a similar caliber aiming to help a professional adopt a new technology or a business person figure out GTM in a new industry, learning what’s not written in the books from the core industry players, could be seen as quite a bargain considering the significantly higher impact.
When we walked delegates privately over the support and outcomes entailed, we got better feedback than based on the forum write up. We’ll strive to be more effective in communicating it in the next proposal.