PGP Proposal: Backed

đŸŒ± Push Grants Program (PGP) Proposals
1

  1. Project Name
    Backed

  2. Email
    rohit@alternate.ventures

  3. About You
    Our team consists of :

  • 3 fulltime co-founders:

        Vaibhav Thakur
    
    * https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhav-thakur-
    * https://twitter.com/rokrvaibhav
    * Discord: prototypevenom#8097
    
    Raj Khandelwal
    
    * https://www.linkedin.com/in/raj-khandelwal/
    * https://twitter.com/raj60khandelwal
    * Discord: Rajk | CryptoStellar#6643
    
    Rohit Adlakha
    
    * https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-adla
    * Discord: RAd#2374

  • 4 full stacks devs

  • 2 designer (1 part-time)

  • 2 Marketing

Our team has years of experience when it comes to marketing, research and tech development in the web3 space ranging from DeFi, infrastructure, marketplaces and structured products. We have worked with several top projects over the years and have made several important connections. The founders are proven entrepreneurs with business acumen.

  1. Project TL:DR
    Backed is a platform that is reinventing traditional investing with blockchain technology. We offer a new way of investing in alternate investable assets via fractionalization and possibilities for redemption. Our platform also provides investors with unique experiences that are tradeable and redeemable.

  2. Proposal Category
    Defi

  3. Project Overview
    Backed: Smart Investments for the Decentralized Future

  • Building Smart Investments for the Decentralized Future by offering real asset-backed opportunities and unique experiences that are tradeable and redeemable

At Backed we saw the following problems:

Lack of Accessibility: Most alternate asset classes are only accessible to the top 1% due to geographical and economic constraints.

No Safe Venues for Parking of Funds: Stablecoins are not so ‘stable’ during blackswan events and in general do not appreciate in value.

Market Volatility: Popular investment classes such as crypto & stock are volatile and investors lose capital and confidence in trading.

The Team being from geographical region & financial background where not a lot of non traditional venues are available, and seeing how volatile the crypto market investments have been including the de-stability stable coin pegs. We found with the help of the blockchain technology this can be easily solved

Key features:

  • Enables investors to invest in assets which are only accessible to the top 1% due to geographical and economic constraints.

  • Makes investments feasible for the masses by fractional ownership using pools.

  • Asset-Backed Investment opportunities which are less volatile.

  • Redemption of Virtual NFTs to tangible assets

  • Tradable & Redeemable NFTs which enables Exclusive IRL experiences like dine-ins with celebrities

  • Flexing of Physical Assets in the Metaverse Era

Product:

Backed is an execution first product; wherein building early traction will help us stay ahead of the competitors. We have already developed the product in testnet and also validated the idea within the inner investment circle.

We offer a new way of investing in alternate investable assets via fractionalization and possibilities for redemption. Our platform also provides investors with IRL experiences like dine-ins with celebrities etc which are tradeable and redeemable.

Competition:

We want to make alternate investable assets accessible to the masses. All our competitors are focused on building solutions for a selected few asset classes but we are focused on building solutions for the whole category.

Positioning:

The world is heading towards a global recession and this is making people explore other investment classes to preserve and diversify their wealth. With Backed we are solving this problem by offering asset classes that may stand their value even during a financial crisis.

We are positioned in the market in such a way that makes the product with all its uniqueness be the “uniswap for the investments”. Backed is making the alternative investments come into light for the broader audience who just have exposure to stocks or crypto assets, and also for the newer generations who are buying assets such as sneakers and watches to flex or flip.

  1. Value Proposition to EPNS
    1.) EPNS notifications will allow users to track their portfolios & get notifications for pricebumps
    2.) EPNS will alert our users every time we drop new items
    3.) EPNS will have access to our API via our price updates to spread the amount of non-traditional data that is brought on-chain if they choose.

  2. Funding Requested
    62500 $PUSH token (Approx $20k according to price at 27/09/22)

  3. Milestones

Phase 1: Product Launch

-Alpha and Beta Launch with limited Tangible products: Sneakers, Watches, Liquor

-Initial set of investors by tapping into existing collectors’ groups & strategic partners’ inner circles

-Promotions through reputed influencers & AMAs etc

Notifications:

  • Weekly technical update on the development process
  • New Product launch announcements, and call to action to participate by clicking the link in the notification
  • Community calls, game nights, and other community events starting announcements
  • Partnership announcements
  • First & Secondary sales announcement: Item sold & Outbid

Phase 2: Scaling

-Capped Launch with experiences and fractionalized pools

-More Verticals in higher ticket size: REITs, Sports Cars and Mystery boxes

-Celebrity and influencers partnerships

-Launch Product Indexes

-MultiChain Support

-support of threeway assets: real,virtual (nfts), meta-fication

Notifications:

  • Pool related Announcements and notifications : Start of new pools, pools ending date/time, Asset to be moved from pools to auction
  • Auction updates
  • New Category Launch updates
  • Updates on experiences pools and listings: New experience added, experience pool ending, experience moving to auctions, exclusive experiences

Phase 3: Mooning

-Real & Metaverse events

  • $300k MRR & $100M Trading Volume(Annual)

-Lending out AssetBacked NFTs to other web3 partners

Notifications:

  • New users joined in metaverse
  • Metaverse related notifications: celebrities events in metaverse
  • Option to enable which notifications

  1. Wallet Address
    0x0C35C763D1F41f84212Aad9eaD9b8921af253679

  2. Relevant Links & Attachments
    Backed.fund
    alternate.ventures

  3. Referral
    Zaryab Afser - Lead Contract Developer

2 Likes
2

How will you guys make sure that the assets are genuine and not a replica?

3

Best of luck Rohit and team!

4

hi @rohit

Congrats on creating such an innovative product.
Based on the information shared here I believe you are still in building phase.

Now while this question might not apply at your current stage, I gotta ask to understand to form my opinion.

  • Do you currently have active users?
  • Phase 1 Milestones
    • When is the expected launch?
    • What is the expectation in terms of initial number of investors coming to the platform? And how are you coming to these numbers? Can you share info about the groups & strategic partners?
  • Which reputed influencers and AMAs are you planning to reach out as a part of your marketing strategy?

Without going to Milestones 2 and 3, to me is important to understand whats the user acquisition strategy and how you are planning to generate momentum for the platform.

Looking forward to your answers

6

Hey @Jaf,
Sharing some keypoints in brief how we are taking things ahead.

Do you currently have active users?
As of now we have launched the project on test net only and sharing the same with a gated community only (specifically comprising of our friends and our partners)

Phase 1 Milestones
When is the expected launch?
Q4 (2022) - Capped testnet Launch with Polygon Testnet - Whitelisted users only
Q1 (2023) - Beta Launch with Polygon Mainnet

What is the expectation in terms of initial number of investors coming to the platform? And how are you coming to these numbers? Can you share info about the groups & strategic partners?
With the Team’s background in running marketing and tech development agency, the partnerships and connections with investors, media and technical assistance will be easier and with past experiences in marketing in web3 space we can use a modest conversion rate to estimate the number of users and revenue.
Initial number of investors in the Q1’23 Launch with fractionalization and pools with our marketing in plans:

  • 20+ web2/web3 partnerships with co-marketing and visibility. Some of our pre existing partners :
  1. Polygon
  2. Filecoin
  3. Biconomy
  4. Arcana Network
  5. Fundle3
  6. Cult Wines
  7. StockX
  8. Vint
  9. Red 8 Gallery
  10. Oeno Group
  • 50 AMAs channels in contact to showcase & product demo (approx. ~10k users each)
  • 20 influencers would be joining referral program
    200 articles in knowledge hub - our initiative to educate the audience about Alternate investments which safer and lesser known investment class.
  • Daily spaces and Clubs with known web3 hosts
    We are expecting monthly traffic 50-60k, and the number of users trying the product to be 200-500/mo and with average investment $250. We expect initial trading volume of $100k-$150k.
    These numbers are carefully calculated with our previous experiences with marketing and product launch with conversion rates of 0.1%-0.5%

Which reputed influencers and AMAs are you planning to reach out as a part of your marketing strategy?
We have worked with multiple web3 reputed and known groups and influencers, which have decent ROI in our campaigns in past. The numbers in the first launch campaign are stated previously.

7

As with other Grant proposals where the product is still in development, it is important to attach the milestones and the corresponding installments against measurable goals.

The numbers you are sharing here require a very aggressive GTM strategy, which considering your team background and skills its probably doable. However, the importance of quantifying the impact for Push is still there.

From my point of view, I’d love to see the milestones expanded to include:

  • Specific Push notifications developed
  • Number of users by the end of Milestone1
  • Number of transactions and raw estimate of notifications corresponding to these transactions

All the marketing efforts will definitely have an impact in your product growth and consequently in notifications sent, but for Push is important to ensure that every Grant awarded will transform into more users experiencing Web3 communication through our Protocol.

8

With Backed we are trying to create a safety net (i.e., sustainability) in web3 investments to bring back investor trust. Let’s see how Backed will look after completion of Milestone 1:

Tech

  1. Testnet/demo: Where people can feel and explore the project without actually putting their own money. This is being built on Polygon (Matic). People will be able to buy, sell and trade asset backed NFTs.

  2. Mainnet: The actual product where people will be able to invest in the assets offered again built on Polygon (Matic). This would have these main functionalities:

  • Buy, sell and trade in the secured NFTs
  • Redeemability of physical assets
  • Two ways of investing: 1. Single NFT purchase 2. Fractionalised Investment through Pools.

Marketing

After working with multiple projects and studying countless projects we found out that every successful project had combination of these factors:

  • Influencers (On-board or promoting)
  • Good Art/PFP
  • Team
  • USP (Unique Show-off proposition)
  • Storyline
  • Sense of belonging/ Community
  • Value proposition (Benefits to holders)
  • Future growth Prospective
  • Transparency

Keeping all these factors in mind. We have formalised some marketing strategies to give degens what they love with a safety net on it. We couldn’t tell all our strategies publicly but here are some:

  1. Knowledge Hub (or 1% Better Club): With this initiative we will teach degens on what alternatives do they have for investing, what are alternate assets and their pros and cons and everything in between they need to know.
    Most of the degens are Late Millenial and GenZ and have a shorter concentration. So we would be teaching them through Infographics and Video in the form of skits that are easily digestible.
  2. Referral (Early Access Program): Like mentioned above Influencers play a big role in the success of a project. We would be onboarding them with a very unique program that would be win-win for both of us.
  3. Experiences: Who doesn’t love unique experiences? All our offerings will have unique experiences associated with them.
  4. Promotion, Spaces and AMAs: We’ll also do all the common marketing methods used by projects.

Designing

We won’t be selling plain boring NFTs as offered by our competitions. We are partnering with multiple designers to create arts as PFPs. This will not only make it fun for investors to collect the NFTs but also adds brownie points to the project.

Now to answer your questions:

Q1. Number of users by the end of Milestone1
TBH this is very difficult to quantify. The market is very unpredictable right now but if every thing goes as per plan we expect 200-500 monthly paying user.

Q2. Why do we need EPNS:

  1. Investors are investing for the medium to long term (6mo-5YRS), which makes it very difficult for end users to login and check what’s their status of the purchased assets or the pools.
  2. Order notification: Any orders placed on the site, bids, redemptions which are shipped out could be information which is important and relevant.
  3. Auction notifications:

Q3. Number of transactions and raw estimate of notifications corresponding to these transactions?

No. of users=500
App Downloads(10%) = 50 users
Minimum Notification per user= 2
Total notifications = 100

This is contingent on the market conditions at the time of launch.

Q4. Specific Push notifications developed:

Overall:

1.) EPNS notifications will allow users to track their portfolios & get notifications for price bumps

2.) EPNS will alert our users every time we drop new items

3.) EPNS will have access to our API via our price updates to spread the amount of non-traditional data that is brought on-chain if they choose.

Specific:

SELL

  • Seller : NFT sold successful
  • Buyer : You just bought an item

AUCTION BUYER
Ongoing auction
● There’s a higher bidder, increase or withdraw your bid
● Bid placed successfully
● You just won an auction, claim your asset now
● Auction lost, withdraw your bid. - Redirect to /stats

CHECKOUT
● Successfully checked out, track your order

9

thank you for taking the time to elaborate more @rohit
I do still have a few questions again related to setting measurable goals to the milestones, and hopefully even suggesting funding required per milestone.

  • Would you be able to suggest a goal regarding the number of users that you will work to get by the finalization of Milestone 1
  • can you attach required funding per milestone?
  • can you add ETAs to each milestone to finalize and meet all the goals

Also, I encourage you to bring your project to conversation in the Discord in the Push-Grants channel. Put it in front of the community, and lets get their feedback as well!

10

@MrJaf @Jaf

Checkpoints 1

Q4 Prototype & MVP - DONE

  • Prototype: project testing on testnet and mainnet
  • Demo and Documentation
  • MVP: Implementation of UI/UX, all contracts tested and deployed
  • Partnerships with various web2 Alternate Portfolio Investment Companies for :Multiple Fine Wine, Liquor
  • Contract audited: MythX (Consensus Labs)

Q4 (2022) - Capped testnet Launch with Polygon Testnet - Whitelisted users only (December-4th week)

  • Testnet launch for finding technical bugs
  • Testnet for UI/UX interface feedback
  • Overall review & feedback from community
  • Web3 Partnerships
  • # of Users expected: 50-100
ETA: 2nd-3rd Week of Jan’23 to 1st Week of Feb’23
Funds Needed: Push tokens worth USD 10,000
  • Building prototype, ui/ux and MVP
  • Marketing: $1500
  • Upfront Fees for Partners Assets: $5000
  • Implementation of better UI/UX: $500
  • Implementing Testnet: $3000

Checkpoint 2

Q1 (2023) - Beta Launch with Polygon Mainnet
  • Web2 onboarding Interface (login with email ids)
  • Implementation of better UI/UX
  • onramp/offramp solutions for deposits & withdrawals
  • Fractionalisation implementation & launch of pools across fine wine and fine liquor categories
  • Implementation of PUSH SDK:
    • Notifications overview:

1.) EPNS notifications will allow users to track their portfolios & get notifications for price bumps

2.) EPNS will alert our users every time we drop new items

3.) EPNS will have access to our API via our price updates to spread the amount of non-traditional data that is brought on-chain if they choose.

Funds breakup:
Funds Needed: Push tokens worth USD 10,000
  • Implementation of onramp/offramp: $500
  • Implementation of Pools(with UI): $2500
  • QA of project: $2000
  • Marketing: $5000
# of Users expected:
  • Mainnet Users: 200-500
ETA: 4th week of Feb’23
11

Thank you very much @rohit for the information explained here.
Your proposal is super close to getting to polling phase. Just missing 2 likes.

How about if you join us for Office hours next week?
Let’s talk more in depth about your project.

  • Perhaps do a demo for our community?
  • Do some Q&A?

Would really love to have you join us to add more visibility to your proposal.

1 Like
12

@MrJaf Thank you so much for the response.
We’d love to join the office hours, we can host a demo and Q&A session.