Mooonbeans. web3 meets FMCG. A collaboration proposal between Nouns and Sublime

Hello. I’m the founder of a business called Sublime Butter based in the UK. And a big fan of Nouns. I love the concept of a community driven brand with no particular strategy other than the proliferation of the brand itself. It’s easy to see how Nouns could eventually permeate many parts of society. A big step here would be to get the Nouns brand featured on products sold in shops, in particular grocery stores. The brand lends itself nicely to the FMCG space.

Me and the team have worked up a collaboration concept that would see Nouns brand incorporated into the creative, of an entirely new product concept. The idea is a bit weird, a bit goofy but very much on brand for both Sublime, and IMHO Nouns too.

Aside from the creative concept, Mooonbeans introduces some innovative ways of on-boarding new ppl into crypto that are both as bonkers as they are brilliant.

And if things go to plan the initial investment will be returned to Nouns DAO within a year, and Mooonbeans will provide an ongoing stream of real world revenues straight back into the DAO.

The idea is a big one, but entirely achievable within the timelines.

The proposal can be found on the Mooonbeans.com website.

We’d be happy to host a collaborative Mooonbeans discussion on Twitter Spaces or wherever suits.

My Twitter profile is @0xlun feel free to reach out to me there. I’m x00b#4865 on Discord.

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I think this is a really cool concept. A couple questions I’m wondering about:

Have you polled the customer base to see what percentage would actually utilize the tokens? Do you have any plans to help educate them to this end? What ways would you use Nouns to advertise the project? Would there be differentiation between your traditional product and the Nouns one, or would it all be merged into one thing?

Now I’m hungry for butter and beans and I wish these were available in the U.S. Ha!

Great proposal! I hope it gets picked up for it’s unique utility and potential to bring Web3 mainstream in one of the most important markets in the world.

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welcome @x00b! definitely agree that CPG will be a huge lever in proliferating the Nouns to the mainstream and appreciate the the detailed proposal [1][2]

a few follow up questions:

  1. how does the team plan to leverage Nouns in a creative sense?
  2. could the project lean into the Nouns community (dev, design, ops talent), given the aggressive timeline?
  3. is there a clear strategy to stream revenue back to the Nouns treasury? this is an exciting first for the DAO IIRC and could set a precedent for future projects

excited to follow along :cow::beans:

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Hey Andrew, Firstly apologies for the delay in replying. Sublime was featured on national TV over the weekend and I’ve been managing the madness that has ensued since. A nice problem to have! Anyways here now and happy to answer your questions.

We have not polled consumers yet as the idea is in development phase. It should be said that a huge objective of moonbeams is to be an on ramp for new users into web3. To this end education will be an important part of the idea. When people purchase moonbeams there will be a link to claim the beans online. Initially the beans will be off chain assigned to the purchasing account. The user will be able to participate in the various games etc without necessarily claiming the on chain $BEANS. There will be clear signposting etc to help people setting up their wallet for the first time. Although we want the platform be fun, playful and a bit goofy/weird that doesn’t mean we can’t be educational at the same time.

In terms of branding, we have a few ideas here some more drastic than others. In terms of the mooonbeans product the way I see it is a collaboration of sublime and nouns to create a brand identity that coexists on packaging centred around a cow who wears nouns glasses and a top hat. Mooonbeans will develop its own identity and tone but it will always be clear that this is a project by nouns and sublime.

One idea we had was to create some of the games that used the various nouns projects as characters in the adventure. Not sure if you have seen it yet but the idea for the initial website is going to be like a modern day fairy tale based on the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We have written up the first couple of chapters here. When the users climb up the beanstalk they will be in a world where they can play all sorts of games etc. The idea we had was that some of these games could be based on the different nouns projects like thenoadz/nounpunks/etc.

To give you a flavour of the games I’m talking about check out vole.wtf. The intention will be to build lots of simple games and interactions that sit within a framework. The games themselves will be of varied complexity but most will be simple.

Beyond mooonbeans and at the extreme end of how I see the nouns and sublime branding, I am not averse to extending the collaboration so that we include nouns brand on other products or even as a fully integrated part of our brand communications. If you noticed the pfp on our twitter it’s the nouns cow with a top hat we added. Personally I love it and see no reason why we don’t just adopt it for our overall customer loyalty identity. I’d like Sublime to be synonymous with web3 and what better way of doing that than by adopting the brand of the coolest CC0/web3 brand in existence. Plus there is something quite nice about the juxtaposition of the eccentric traditional sublime logo and the quirky modern brand of nouns.

Anyways, I hope this answered your questions. If things gain momentum then we are planning to hold an AMA soon and would love it if you could join.

Many thanks for taking an interest in our proposal, means a lot.

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Oh and plan will be to ship to US as quickly as possible! Much easier shipping canned beans than butter I assure you and we’ve already managed to do that :slight_smile:

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Hey brushee :wave:t3: and thank you for the warm welcome. Your appreciation is much appreciated. In terms of your questions, parts are covered in my response to Andrew’s post above, but I’ll cover directly here to ensure I have answered specifically enough.

As mentioned :point_up_2:t3:our ambition for Sublime is to be a pioneering web3 FMCG brand and I see no reason why this can’t go as far as to include Nouns creative not just within a contained project like Mooonbeans but make a part of our broader brand/ product strategies too.

After all, why not? What’s stopping an FMCG brand adopting a web3 CC0 brand as as integral part of its own brand identity. I see more positives than negatives in that. I love the idea of working on what would be a pioneering collaboration.

Mooonbeans is a great test case where we can get a product to market in a short period of time and make a big splash about it. But beyond that there is so much more we could do. If we can make beans happen (which we will) then what else can we can, or bottle or whatever? There are many product categories we could disrupt is my bet.

Not wanting to get ahead of myself, but the opportunities are endless.

Back to the here and now though…

In terms of the Nouns community participating in development there is an obvious place to start and that’s around the games within mooonbeans. As mentioned above we want to create an environment where there are always new games to play and ways to spend your beans. Rewind to what the Internet was like back in the early noughties when sites like B3ta or any of those Flash games hubs that used to send you down random rabbit hole of inanity. That’s the vibe we’re planning for mooonbeans. Lots of low-fi content updated regularly. As mentioned above vole.wtf is a good reference point here. The idea to collaborate with Nouns community to plan & create these games over time is a brilliant one and we would love it if we could make that happen.

For example, we could make a version of that game where a frog has to cross the road but instead of the frog we make it thenoadz. In this instance we just need to figure a way to integrate thenoadz into the overall mooonbeans storyline but that would be simple thing to do.

With regards to your question about payments back into the DAO, this is a point that Oni mentioned on a call we had earlier. As far as I understand the team are looking into things from a legal stand point. From our end we can be flexible here, depending on the feedback from legal. I don’t see an issue with sending profits back to the DAO in ETH but if that was not possible your end then we could look into other things like sending to a foundation or creating a separate DAO controlled by Nouners. We are open to discussions on this front based on your requirements.

Thanks again for your interest in Mooonbeans and look forward to chatting again in the future if things progress.

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Following feedback shared by Oni and detailed on his 5/24 Nouns US Weekly Call update on Discord, we have written up some supplementary info which hopefully goes some way to addressing the outstanding questions / areas of concern.

Please feel free to comment into the document directly or post any further questions here.

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Thank you for the detailed response. You all have clearly thought this out.

I would love to listen in on the AMA. Please tag us if that get scheduled and I’ll share it around wherever I can.

I’ve read through all the recent proposals, and this one is so so good. I hope it takes off and that you sell many beans and much butter for the cause. Keep up the great work!

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I think (nounish) educational/on-boarding materials for people completely new to the space is something we can always use more of

x00b will be hosting an AMA to discuss the proposal on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 3:00 PM

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This looks great but what is the ask for the proposal? How much eth is being requested? Thanks!

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Apologies we should have signposted this much better! We linked to a spreadsheet in the original proposal with a breakdown of costs & three year projections, but it was hidden away & I failed to mention elsewhere. My bad. Attempted to post link here but 'twas flagged as spam. Will post link in a reply here but if that doesn’t get through you can find the link embedded on p.12 of the proposal here. Failing that we’ll include a breakdown of costs in the on-chain proposal we’re finalising as we speak. Thanks for pointing this out, much appreciated.

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A few questions/comments on the latest draft:

  • would love a bit more detail in the TLDR section, especially amount of funds being asked for

  • i really like the idea of getting nouns on store shelves as a bean can, seems perfect for proliferating nouns in the UK

Each 400g tin will be sold for £2.50, and will feature a code with which to redeem some $BEANs — our ecosystem’s token.

  • this came as a surprise — where is the code to redeem tokens stored? can it be exploited by scanning cans in the store?

  • The game part of the website seems like a risky idea and potentially just bad use of funds to me personally. Are you experts in game-dev too?

Nouns DAO will get 20% of all profits

  • The Rev share model is pretty uninteresting to me personally. I would rather see you accumulate eth in order to buy a noun at auction and join the ecosystem.

All in all i was hoping for a simpler prop, like:

  1. Put nounish beans on store shelves
  2. Use part of proceeds to buy noun and join the ecosystem
  3. Make more beans, buy more nouns, etc, etc.
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Good point on the codes! I wonder the plan to avoid it being gamed.
And agree that the budget breakdown could be in the TLDR.
Also agree about revenue being used to buy nouns.
Great thoughts.

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Hey krel :wave: Thanks again for the time you have spent getting under the hood of the Mooonbeans proposal. I know there is a lot to unpack and you spending the time to do so is much appreciated :pray:

Just for everyone else’s information krel is referring to the initial on-chain proposal submission that was shared in the Nouncil channel on Discord. It’s still work in progress but mostly there, you can have a read here.

In response to your questions/comments krel…

would love a bit more detail in the TLDR section, especially amount of funds being asked for

  • take this on board and will work on improving this section over the weekend.

i really like the idea of getting nouns on store shelves as a bean can, seems perfect for proliferating nouns in the UK

  • this is a primary ambition of the project, there will be a roadmap to achieve the goal. Initially sales will be managed via DTC platform, which will ensure we have control over token distribution. The aim will be to distribute to consumers in the UK to begin within, but to other markets as quickly as possible. Retail strategy will follow, by which stage we will have defined the redemption mechanic for that. Products will be available for sale via the website by the end of month three in the UK, by next year in the US. Aim will be to have mechanics set up in order to sell in grocery stores next year.

Each 400g tin will be sold for £2.50, and will feature a code with which to redeem some $BEANs — our ecosystem’s token.

this came as a surprise — where is the code to redeem tokens stored? can it be exploited by scanning cans in the store?

  • addressed this above. There will be no way to exploit the system. We have a lot of experience creating such initiatives both in the crypto space and irl. We built a B2B CRM system for Nokia for example.

The game part of the website seems like a risky idea and potentially just bad use of funds to me personally. Are you experts in game-dev too?

  • Our team have built games and digital brand experiences for hundreds of different companies. Diesel, BMW, Burberry to name a few. We are highly proficient in this space and know what we are doing. Regarding your comment that it’s a bad use of funds, I would counter that our belief is that the games are a critical aspect. A main goal is to onboard new users into the crypto space and make Nouns a key part of the educational experience. Simple games are a great way to achieve this. I should note that we are not talking about building Fortnite here, rather a more raw approach inspired by some of the old school web1 gaming platforms.

  • We addressed some previous comments along these lines which is linked in post 6 above in case you hadn’t seen already.

Nouns DAO will get 20% of all profits

The Rev share model is pretty uninteresting to me personally. I would rather see you accumulate eth in order to buy a noun at auction and join the ecosystem.

  • Ngl I would like exactly the same. Got my eyes on Cow nouns in particular! I love the Nouns community and would love nothing other than being part of the DAO itself. I see this as a personal goal however and one that is eminently achievable if we get Mooonbeans right! The reason I like the rev-share model is that it opens up a new area for opportunity for the broader Nouns experiment. If we can establish a model with Mooonbeans that provides real world revenues back into the DAO then surely that means there’s simply more money to be invested in new ideas to proliferate the Nouns brand elsewhere. We smash Mooonbeans then we set about picking off other verticals in need of disruption in the FMCG space. If the consensus is that you are not interested in a rev share model than I am not going to argue, I just think it’s a positive and innovative idea if we can make it happen.

All in all i was hoping for a simpler prop, like:

  1. Put nounish beans on store shelves
  2. Use part of proceeds to buy noun and join the ecosystem
  3. Make more beans, buy more nouns, etc, etc.
  • Perhaps we can make a simplified approach like this for the update TL;DR?
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Addressed these points in reply to krel and happy to discuss further on AMA next week if needed.

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We’ll be hosting the AMA on Twitter Spaces next Tuesday at 8PM GMT - set a reminder to join here

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Folks, we just wanted to thank you all for your support up until this point. As you may know, we were due to get the proposal on-chain yesterday, but Oni passed on some feedback to us that we wanted to address first. Alongside our previous documentation, this post should contain everything you need to know. If there are any outstanding topics, feel free to raise them in a comment. Otherwise, here goes.

Feedback: “a more viable proposal would just be for nounish branding on the bean cans / DTC site”

We really want to stress two things about viability:

  1. This proposal, while complex, is absolutely viable with our team. We’re exceptionally good at what we do and we’ve built many complex systems before with great success.
  2. The MOOØNBEANS product is ONLY viable with the web3 universe behind it. Nounish branding on beans does very little in isolation. We’re getting in front of people who currently either don’t know or don’t care to know anything about crypto, NFTs or web3, so while a “pure brand exposure” exercise may tick some metrics, it won’t move the needle in any way that relates to commercials, true proliferation, or mass adoption.

Feedback: “If we’re paying that much, I want a big fat nouns on the bean can”

A couple of things to unpack here:

  1. What this Nouner may be referring back to is our mock-up of some MOOØNBEANS cans. We want to state clearly that these are for illustrative purposes and in no way reflect the final look of the product, which would be created as part of our product development phase. The packaging will be heavily Nouns-focused.
  2. It’s super important to stress that the physical purchase of MOOØNBEANS is actually only a small part of the brand experience. To refer you back to our Web Proposal, Nouns will be an integral part of the education, gaming and narrative experience as well; Nouns will feature as story characters, game characters, and more, and they’ll have a prominent identity within the branding and look-and-feel of the D2C site.

Feedback: “Website and $beans token doesn’t feel like a compelling proliferation for the DAO”

How many people on the street own Rolexes? Very few. But everyone knows Rolex. Many people want one. And as long as they’re in the watch-buying space, they’ll aspire to have one someday. The MOOØNBEANS brand puts people in the NFT-buying space. And maybe they won’t buy a Noun today, tomorrow, or even ten years from now. But they’ll want to.

By putting Nouns and Noun derivatives into peoples’ hands and minds, enabling a fun environment with which to play around with them, learn about them, and crucially, understand them, we inject an enormous aspirational value to Nouns DAO that nobody, nowhere, nowhen [sic] has done before. Through this project, we can take steps to turn the crypto subculture into a culture, period. For us, that’s just about as compelling as it gets.

Feedback: “Feels a bit opportunistic to get us to pay for the whole thing by slapping the glasses on a can”

Can we politely, collaboratively protest this statement? We love Nouns and all they stand for. We deeply understand the need and the desire to encourage mass adoption, herald the movers and shakers to the masses, and educate people in a way that’s not completely abstract and bamboozling.

This lovingly thought out and deeply strategic concept is far removed from “slapping glasses on a can”. This is a world-first: a uniquely immersive experience that gives Nouns a REAL foothold into the FMCG space whilst bringing new people into crypto that just wouldn’t have been interested before. We’d encourage any Nouners who really believe in this piece of feedback to dive back into the proposals, and have a look around. There’s SO much depth and utility to this thing, and it would be such a shame if we didn’t all get to move forward with it due to a simple misunderstanding.

We think that’s everything from the last bunch of feedback, but as above, if you’ve got anything further to add, let’s talk! Pop any questions, queries or reservations into the comments below and we’ll hash them out. If there’s sufficient demand, we’ll organise another AMA to get this all over the line and on-chain.

Thanks again!

Team MOOØNBEANS

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Following feedback from Nouners we have recut the MOOØNBEANS proposal. The updated proposal presents a more simplified concept focussed on product/brand development and parking the token aspects for now. Would appreciate any further feedback ahead of on-chain submission which should hopefully be happening this week.

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Following further feedback provided by the community we have updated the MOOØBEANS proposal to make the can design more Nounish (n.b. to be clear this is still only a mock-up) and to remove all the game ideas for now. V.3 of our proposal can be viewed here.

While I’m in favor of a simpler proposal, I wonder what made you compromise on your vision so much during the course of a week?

This gives me pause, and I wonder how committed you are to the current version of the prop?