PGP Proposal: frens community announcements app

🌱 Push Grants Program (PGP) Proposals
1

Push Grant Program Application

  1. Project: frens Community Announcements
  2. Email: drew@frens.place
  3. We are a pre-seed, lightly funded startup that has an existing community growth platform. You can find out more about frens at https://frens.place. Our CEO’s info: Drew Falkman has over 20 years experience in product strategy and development, starting as CTO/Co-founder of a web agency in the Web 1 era. He has worked with numerous startups and enterprise organizations - including Adobe, HP, and AARP - to build products (usually from scratch). Drew started a product strategy consulting practice at Modus Create, a digital transformation consulting company, and grew it to 10 PMS and 25 UX practitioners. He discovered Bitcoin in 2013, Ethereum in 2016, and has been building community apps since building daoOS in 2017. In 2021, he helped grow a number of communities and discovered the challenges community managers face daily. He was granted a residency program with Stacks blockchain foundation to research and build a prototype - this became frens place, inc., of which he is now CEO.
  • Twitter: frensplace and drewfalkman
  • Discord: frens

  1. Project TL:DR
    In working with 100 or so Web3 communities and members, we have discovered that there is a huge problem in members missing critical announcements because the messages simply get lost in all the Discord notifications or noise of Telegram. This is cause for a new way to post announcements that we will build at frens. Any community that signs up will enable members to choose how they wish to receive announcements: wallet, email, SMS, Discord, Telegram and eventually the frens mobile app. PUSH will be at the heart of our app and we will encourage community members to receive wallet notifications. Additionally, users can check in on our web app to see a feed of announcements.

  2. Proposal Category
    If just one, then Marketing, but if we can be in a few, there are three relevant categories: \

  • DAO
  • Tooling
  • Marketing

Explain
6. Project Overview
This app does not exist today. We will use this grant to design and build the MVP prototype. There will be three critical aspects to this application:

  1. There will be a community manager admin UI where communities can sign up, configure, and post messages to their communities. This will give communities the ability to connect their Discord server (if they have one) and choose the blockchain they are using and what media they wish to make available for their members to receive announcements (to start will be wallet/push, email, SMS, and Discord). They can configure the types of announcements they intend to create - this can be based on priority (critical alert, important, informational, etc) or based on membership (members, member levels, mods, admins, etc.). They will also be able to create and send announcements. This UI will take into consideration formatting limitations of different media so they will be prompted to edit their message for the media they support.

  2. There will be a member announcement interface that enables members of a community using this app to choose if and where they wish to receive messages based on priority and membership. For example, a user might choose to receive “important” messages for “members only” via their wallet, but nothing else, or a user might choose to receive all announcements via email - it’s up to them to configure. This UI will require signing up and being a member of the community. Eventually, we will add the ability to have public sign ups and unsubscribes, but that will be implemented in a later phase - for MVP we focus on messages to members. The user will get a special link for their community, for MVP we will not validate membership - the community managers will have to make sure that only members receive the link to sign up. In a later phase, we will require proof of membership via NFT or Discord role. Users will be required to connect with their wallets or Discord SSO, for the MVP, however.

  3. The announcement sending aspect of the app will use PUSH but also possibly other tools like Twilio to broadcast the messages to the appropriate channel. We can offer frens communities the ability to also post announcements to their Discord. We will also create a feed for users so they can see announcements of their communities whenever they like all in one place. To start this will require them having registered through this app to receive messages for those communities but eventually, we can use whatever the proof of membership is - Discord or NFT holdings in their wallet and automatically show them all announcements from their communities. There will be tabs/filters to this feed so they can see only announcements they subscribed to, or all announcements for their communities.

  1. Value Proposition to Push Protocol
    We hope to bring new users to PUSH by promoting the ability to receive messages via the wallet. Because we market to communities, we typically will bring in end users by the hundreds at a time, so I think this could be a great boon to new users in the system. We are going to start marketing brands who are coming to Web3 this year which could bring massive adoption. Eventually, we have plans for allowing cross-community announcements and more, so I think this could bring lots of platform fees and users to the ecosystem as we grow and add more features. And of course more users means more need for limited $PUSH tokens and higher price.
  2. Funding Requested
    We are asking for 39,500 PUSH (depending on price, value cap at $20k)
  3. Milestones
    Milestone 1: Design, roadmap and user stories ready for dev team. This includes designs for the community admin UI and the member UI - both sign up and feed. Estimated time 2-3 weeks. Cost: 8,000 $PUSH.
    Milestone 2: Community admin UI and core data structure and UI prototype. This will be a deployed web app where community admins can sign in with Discord or a Wallet. They will be able to configure the announcement “levels” and media users can choose from and get a special URL to give to members. The UI for sending messages will be built at this time, but will not be functional. Timeline: 4 weeks. Cost 10,000 $PUSH.
    Milestone 3: Next we will build the member UI where members can authenticate and choose which announcements they wish to receive in which media. The feed will also be set up with dummy data, but won’t be functional yet. Timeline 2-3 weeks. Cost: 10,000 $PUSH
    Milestone 4: Lastly, we will implement the messaging functionality with $PUSH. Announcements will be entered into the system and can be blasted out to whomever opted in to receive the announcements in the location they wish to receive them. This will also include populating the feed for members.
  4. Wallet Address
    0x832Fcc1649048D2BbFac28752F436Ea39D286665
  5. Relevant Links & Attachments
    All relevant links are above: web site, twitter and Discord are the main places for our community.
  6. Referral
    I discovered PUSH through Buidl.so and have spoken to @Jaf