About Me:
I am the Marketing Lead for Tollan Worlds and Voltage.Finance. I am a business management and marketing major with 6 years in the crypto space.
Email -zach@xsauce.io-
Twitter -twitter.com/xsauce_io
Discord - coming soon
Project TL:DR
Xsauce is an ecosystem of three tools that merge fashion, collectibles, and other cultural assets with blockchain technology. Each piece of the Xsauce protocol offers a tailored user experience for our community.
Proposal Category
Defi
Project Overview
The Xchange is a dapp that allows users to mint leveraged synthetic tokens using stablecoins for price exposure to real-world fashion items.
The Xvault is an intuitive staking mechanism for those who like less risk and want to earn a passive yield. A portion of the revenues accrued by the Xchange is used to give designers grants to continue to create.
The Xhibit is a fully detailed marketplace that allows our community to purchase real-world assets at a discounted price. This is only accessible if you have met the specific utilization requirements of other apps in the ecosystem.
We have our designs done, and have some of our contracts compiled. Our most pressing need is capital to get our legal entity set up so we can take on funding. Ideally, we would also like to be able to bring 2 devs on full-time to get our product launched ASAP.
Value Proposition to EPNS
We are creating a leveraged marketplace for consumer items. More people understand the cultural value behind fashion and jewelry than they do crypto assets. This is an attractive platform that will grow the global user base of the crypto community.
1.) EPNS will allow users to track their portfolios to manage their profits/losses when assets have large fluctuations
2.) EPNS will alert our users every time we drop new items on our e-commerce platform.
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.
Funding Requested - $20,000 - 17000 $PUSH
Milestones
We are looking for $10K upfront to get our legal opinion and create our foundation company for our DAO.
Referral
Did someone from EPNS, or any of our friends refer you here?
I spoke to Jaf personally after listening to him speak on the Float Capital community call. Super bullish on EPNS and excited to work with you all!
First off, thanks for the uplifting words . Below I will address each of your questions:
The potential for EPNS with Xsauce is huge! Our Xhibit will rival retail applications such as GOAT(https://www.goat.com/), StockX(https://stockx.com/), Nike, Footlocker, etc. This is just on the sneaker side of things. We will feature jewelry, streetwear, handbags, and any other consumable art.
To put that into quantitative numbers: GOAT averages about ~8 million visitors a month, and StockX ~20 million visitors. Keep in mind that StockX sells just about anything that has re-sell demand. We likely fall somewhere between there once we hit critical mass. I anticipate we will push around 75-100K notifications monthly for the first 6-months following our release.
For the grant money requested the allocation goes as follows:
$7,500 - For foundation company creation and legal opinion.
$10,000 - For development salary runway prior to our fundraise
$2,500 - Preliminary marketing budget for graphics, and promotional materials
Looking forward to meeting and speaking with you later this week. I wanted to add some additional commentary to address your question about the GTM plan.
Our GTM plan is comprised of 3 stages, each spanning 45 days. We recognize that our largest barrier to adoption is a lack of general understanding of synthetic assets; however, there is large overlap of this same group in their desire to enter the web3 space (this is evidenced by StockX’s move into NFTs). What this means is that our first stage is pivotal in creating awareness and vicarious trust through strategic partnerships, AMA sessions and impactful educational material.
Below is an outline of the objectives and core actions which will deliver the outcomes desired for each stage:
Stage 1 : The Synthetic Bridge (45 days)
Key Objectives: follower growth, AMA participation, Twitter engagement and new testnet users
Strategic media partnerships with global cultural leaders - e.g. Complex, Hypebeast, Highsnobiety, SoleSavvy and SneakeFreaker
Core product messaging will have strong focus on education to support adoption; this will be done via tutorials, protocol bounties, editorial support and podcast appearances
Primary marketing efforts will be supported by weekly Twitter AMAs and roadmap updates
Stage 2 - Community Synchronization (45 days)
Key Objectives - # of NFT sales, net community growth, user feedback and retention rate, average trades per user and also landing a game-changing partnership
Employ a dedicated community manager and early product evangelists to drive continued engagement and organic growth
Conduct weekly polls for sneaker and streetwear drops to engage community before DAO voting implementation
Here are more details on our GTM plan as requested:
Stage 1 - the synthetic bridge (3 months)
Key KPIs: follower growth, AMA participation, Twitter engagement and new users
Strategic cultural partnerships with key cultural outlets globally - e.g. Complex, Hypebeast, SoleSavvy and SneakeFreaker and some undisclosed sneaker brands
Heavy slant on educational support both via tutorials, protocol bounties, editorial support, and podcast appearances
Supported by weekly Twitter AMAs and roadmap updates
Stage 2 - community synchronization (3 months)
KPI - numbers of NFT sales, net community growth, new users and landing a gamechanging partnership
Dedicated community managers and early product evangelist driving continued engagement
Weekly polls for sneaker and streetwear drops to engage community before DAO implementation.
Nested NFT pfp launch for early access (free mint)
Wow… VERY interested to watch this one I use other resale apps all the time and I swear I get 40+ notifications per day!! This project would be a FIRE add to the defi world
Xsauce team
read over your proposal and love the idea behind your project (bonus points for reminding me of my love for Xhibit–remember Pimp My Ride??)
as this grants program is funded by the EPNS community, the most important thing we look for is how each proposal will benefit EPNS directly. i do see under the Value Proposition to EPNS listed a few ways our protocol could be implemented into your project, but that’t not what you’re requesting the funding for.
while i understand projects will need funding for certain things, i don’t see how EPNS providing that is at all beneficial to our community at this point. so while we may think it’s a great idea, i don’t think it makes much sense for us to fund the very beginning stages of your project creation.
once you’ve got an MVP, or beta release, and are ready to implement our EPNS protocol into your own then it’d be a clearer path for us to possibly fund some of that work. the development is by far what’s most important at your current stage. don’t concern yourselves too much with legal considerations, and marketing will be your next big focus once dev is further along for sure.
thank you for taking time to submit this proposal and considering EPNS as a preferred partner! but at this point i do not believe the Value Proposition to EPNS is sufficient for the community to justify the funding.
. Below I will address each of your questions:
I use other resale apps all the time and I swear I get 40+ notifications per day!! This project would be a FIRE add to the defi world
Xsauce team 
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