Prop House Funding round 1

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
1

Nouns, I am excited that the first funding round of the Prop House has started.
And of course I am proud of my first proposal to the Nouns.
I am happy about feedback and a discussion of the proposals in general.
What do you think?

2

So, here is how the application process could look like.

3

Hey Cairol,
I read through your proposal and it’s comprehensible and I took a look at the proposed application process you linked - thank you for sharing! I have a couple thoughts I’d like to feed back:

  1. From working on multiple projects an implementing these types of proposal/initiative intake forms in large corporations, these special type of forms - e.g. typeform; haven’t proven to be beneficial in the submission process. I would advise to use a simple form to work with - google forms, google spreadsheet, etc. This finding came out of several user journey analysis in different companies and brands.

  2. What is critical for the submission process to be a success are a couple things to consider when crafting:

  • Standardised proposal structures are great to analyse data but it does not foster creativity. I know from experience that this is a one and done type of project and will require refinement over time.
  • Over-engineering is a thing and as long as there isn’t an actual problem statement identified, I wouldn’t go too deep into building out a workflow and rather focus on setting the fundament to build from with minimal simple steps for all audiences. The fundament would be to start with the user stories as well as the basic decision tree to craft and tie together the submission and evaluation process from there.

Let me know if this is helpful

4

Hi Benjaminlatsko,
Thanks for your valuable thoughts and feedback. I really appreciate a discussion.

  1. Do you know and/or can you specify why the UX with e,g, typeform wasn’t good. This would really be of interest for other projects as well. I could also think of a good google forms template, where you have everything on one page.

  2. The core of my idea is to efficiently connect the proposal with the evaluation process.

    • From experience I know a lot over-engineered proposal templates from governmental and institutional funding programs or customer specification sheets. I fully agree that those stiff templates don’t foster creativity at all. Independent of the format btw.
    • On the other hand from experience as jury member in large businessplan challenges I found, that giving no structure ends up in many different styles. The challenge is then to read though all these proposals and understand their core idea/innovation. Comparability is impossible. In my opinion that is a waste of time for the writer as well as for the reader.

  3. So as often, the challenge is to find the balance. Thinking from the problem or the task to be done is key.

    • For the few nouns proposals I would leave the proposal format open as it is for the moment. But I would define good selection criteria to guide the evaluators.
    • For the Prop House proposals: Who has read all 24 Prop House proposals so far? Has proposal #2 a better fit to the Nouns philosophy than #19? Is the roadmap of #6 more realistic than of #21?

I would love to develop the Prop House process further together with the Nouns. A strong fundament would even increase the already enormous potential. I am absolutely convinced that there is always room for improvement and that reasonable guidelines help.

Let me suggest a modification or an initial first step for my proposal. Let’s do a lessons learnt and collect feedback from the evaluators of Prop House Funding round 1. From the feedback we can decide what has to be done to streamline the whole process.

Looking forward to building something of added value.