Hey Nouners!
Super excited to share with everyone a proposal to help the Nouns ecosystem scale with our new project, Fam!
We’ve been working with a number of folks on this proposal, including Dane Lund on the DAO/community governance aspects, and we’re really excited to present it to you all here.
Would love any notes, questions, feedback, etc.; we look forward to hearing from everyone!
Cheers,
ckt, Bluefin, 0xYungApple | fam.
tl;dr
Fam is building a community scaling solution for blue-chip NFT projects. As the Nouns ecosystem grows, we want to make it easier for holders to connect and engage with one another by creating “Fams” — exclusive, holders-only communities — for Nouns and Nounish projects on the Fam mobile platform. We are requesting a grant of 50ETH to accelerate the development of Fam and to make Nouns the focus of the inaugural product. We will create Nouns ecosystem Fams and allow holders to join and participate via the Fam app. Fam’s ultimate goal is to be a public good driving proliferation of high-quality, innovative NFT ecosystems by empowering NFT communities.
Value Proposition
Fam simplifies communication and governance for blue-chip NFT communities. Primitive social tools are holding back vibrant ecosystems (like Nouns) from realizing the potential of having an engaged network. By providing Fam with a grant, Nouns and the Nounish ecosystem will help create tooling that unlocks the network effect of having a compelling and simple location for interacting with the community.
Through the grant, Nouns will become the inaugural community on Fam and will show its status as a leader at the intersection of NFTs and DAOs. Nouns will have a chance to shape the product to help bolster its community, improve governance, and further establish itself as a thought leader by showcasing the incredible DAO that has been built.
Nouns will also receive special status on Fam (specifics TBD, but e.g. special OG Founding Fam status and member badges), enshrining the community’s status amongst the pantheon of NFT communities on the platform. Moreover, Fam will give visibility to Nouns publicly alongside its own exposure as a prominently-backed project (in stealth until Demo Day).
Background
Social identities, and the communities that come with them, have now formed around collective ownership and creative expression. The best NFT projects (again, like Nouns) are creating a sense of familial belonging, driving millions of new users to web3. Unfortunately, there aren’t yet easy ways for community members to congregate and interact, leading to a diffused sense of community and low engagement (e.g. voting turnout, active discussions, event frequency, etc.).
“Fams”
Simplicity is our touchstone. Fams are exclusive, holders-only communities built directly on top of NFT collections, making it dead simple for holders to connect and interact with each other. Fams are accessible via the Fam mobile app, which verifies holders of NFT collections, permissioning them into Fams with their co-holders.
Once holders have access, Fams build community and drive engagement in four main ways:
- Connect with other members of the community
- Communicate with each other via group chat
- Coordinate activities like Voting
- Calendarize things like Events
Connect
Meet fellow holders, learn more about their other holdings & interests, and connect with them via follow / DM.
Communicate
All holders are automatically joined to community-only chat rooms that keep you connected with everyone else and up-to-date on the latest topics, sentiment, and happenings.
Coordinate Voting
Community proposals and their status changes are delivered straight to your phone, right next to any related discussions and debate, with the ability to action on proposals seamlessly integrated.
Calendarize Events
Fam also visualizes all community events in a community calendar, including online/offline gatherings, airdrops, mints, voting deadlines, etc., with the ability to register for and participate in events built into the app.
Roadmap
Stage I — MVP (July 2022)
We are currently working on building our Fam MVP app — which will only be available to blue chip NFT projects with Fams — targeting a July launch. MVP features will include Communities, plus Connect and Communicate features, like member lists, user profiles, and group chat.
Stage II — Core Features (September 2022)
After our MVP app launch, we will continue rolling out additional core Community features through September — including Voting and Events features — as well as other feature requests that we encounter with our closed group of early Fams.
Stage III — Expansion Features (December 2022)
Once we have launched our core features, we will look to build out additional activities for Community members to engage in, as well as cross-Community features, which we hope to target launching by the end of the year.
Long-term, our goal and vision with this project is to bring more people into the world of high-quality, innovative NFT projects — like Nouns and Nounish derivatives — which we believe to be a long-term societal good. For both holders and creators of such projects, we hope to build features for their communities that are able to help them thrive.
Team
Fam is being built by a team of NFT maxis and web2 converts from various disciplines who were previously teammates together at Google, building social payments products for global users.
ckt | Twitter
Ckt is all in on the potential of NFTs to free our content from centralization and instead build content-centric communities. He has more than a decade of experience in tech products as a two-time founder, YC alum, and product lead at Google / Alphabet. In a prior life, he was a proprietary investor and trader at Goldman Sachs, and has degrees from Harvard (MBA) and Yale (Econ & Math).
Bluefin | Twitter
Bluefin is an architect turned product designer who believes in the power of NFTs as a social movement and the future of creative expression. He has more than a decade of experience designing everything from buildings to apps to 3D NFTs, at places like AnalogFolk and Google, and has design degrees from HK Polytechnic (Master’s) and RISD (Architecture).
0xYungApple | Twitter
0xYungApple is a cryptographer and full-stack technologist who believes in the transformative nature of the blockchain for web interconnectivity. He has spent his career building globally scaled products at Google for hundreds of millions of users, after conducting cryptographic research at a national laboratory, a field in which he earned a Master’s degree after a Bachelor’s in CS.
Ask
We would like Nouns’ support to:
- Endorse the creation of Nouns and Nounish Fams to help scale the Nouns ecosystem
- Contribute 50ETH to help accelerate the development of Fam
- Invite Nouns ecosystem holders to join and engage in their Fams on Fam
Use of Funds
We will be using the funds to hire additional team members (e.g. designers and engineers) to help us accelerate the development of the platform, as well as to keep up with additional feature requests that we may receive from community members.