The Noun Square: A Community Hub and Media Network for the Nouniverse ⌐◨-◨
The Meta-Square: This custom commission by amazing Nounish Artist Laureate Messhup depicts a futuristic Noun Square with representation of all our content & community partners, and it will be minted by the TNS Deployer contract as a Zora Open Edition, activated by the execution of this proposal (thanks to Zora's Nouns Connect.)
TL;DR:
The Noun Square was funded for a 5 month term to continue doing Nounish Twitter Spaces every single day, plus to expand our reach into other mediums and socials, while acting as an onboarding and community hub for Nouns.
We have crushed all of our metric goals, 4X-ing our Twitter impressions and daily listens, going viral on TikTok with 8MM+ views, and becoming one of the go-to Nouns DAO onboarding sources for artists, builders, and new Nouners alike. We even managed to squeeze an extra month of operations out of our budget by creating a game (NOMO Nouns) that has generated 7 ETH for the show during its beta release alone.
Our proposed budget for the next 6 months of continued media growth and Community-As-A-Service to the DAO is 319 ETH (53 per month, including funds ear-marked for art contests and community project grants.) However, we are committing to self-raising 50 ETH of revenue through several crypto-native and media-native strategies.
Therefore, our ask of the DAO today is 269 ETH. Please read on to better understand the work we have been doing, the impact we have been having, and our goals for the next 6 months. 👇
Victor Solomon on TNS's success as a media platform and onboarding avenue.
Proposal Summary
In Proposal 128, we set out to turn The Noun Square into "a daily touchpoint for the community and a powerful onboarding tool for Nouns." This prop was structured to cover art contest prizes, operations and team compensation for 5 months, ending Dec 31/2022.
During that time, our team has met and surpassed ALL of the broad goals and specific metrics that we set out for ourselves in that proposal, and we've even stretched our operations an additional bonus month with careful budgeting and some supplemental internal revenue generation.
In the past 6 months we have:
✅ accumulated over 36K followers across TNS socials ✅ went viral on TikTok and received over 8.6MM video views across socials ✅ received over 5MM unique Twitter impressions ✅ garnered nearly 57,000 Spaces Listens on Twitter ✅ hosted our flagship Noun O’ Clock Twitter show 230+ days in a row ✅ empowered and supported many Nounish communities and projects with communications and distribution ✅ onboarded countless talented artists, builders and creatives to the DAO, as well as welcoming many new Nouners as well ✅ developed a game + daily edition collection that has raised 7 ETH of revenue in 6 weeks. ✅ built a CC0 nounish media company from the ground up
We are asking for the DAO's support as we continue to build TNS out as a Nounish Community Hub, cc0 media company and proliferation power-house over the next 6 months.
We are also committing to raise 50 ETH of revenue over this period with several complementary strategies for decreasing our reliance on DAO funding (See "Sustainability Strategy" Below.)
Table of Contents
- TNS as a Nounish Media Company
- TNS as a Community and Onboarding Hub
- The SoapBox Network
- Supporting other nounish projects with distribution
- Welcoming new Nouners to the DAO
- The FOMO Factor
- Onboarding Artists and Builders through art contests and Prop House rounds
- Our broad and specific goals for the next 6 months
- The TNS Team
- Operations Budget
- Sustainability Strategy
- THE ASK
- Conclusion
- The Messhup x TNS Commemorative Open Edition mint.
- The Transactions & Multisig
1) The Noun Square as a (Sufficiently Decentralized) Media Company:
The TNS Team is very proud to have produced an engaging and well-attended Twitter Spaces Show called Noun O' Clock LIVE every single day since June 13, 2022.
That's 230+ days in a row!
We have hosted many marquee guests during this time such as Mike Demarais, Alana and Jesse from Variant Fund, Farokh and Mando of RugRadio, Punk 4156, VapeApe, and Ryan Carson... plus many brand new Nouners, and countless interesting nounish builders and artists.
Over the past 6 months, we have accumulated nearly 57K total Twitter listens to our spaces, hosting a total of 580 unique spaces, including our flagship daily NOC LIVE and a slate of weekly community spaces through a new program called The SoapBox.
Twitter Spaces Metrics: Up and to the Right
What is The Noun Square SoapBox?
The SoapBox Network was developed by TNS as a way to leverage our platform to provide Nounish communities with a voice, as well as opportunities to cross-pollinate and collaborate with other groups in the ecosystem.
If The Noun Square is meant to depict an old town plaza with a clocktower in the centre, The SoapBox imagery might evoke passionate nounish subcommunities such as Lil Nouns, Food Nouns and Gnars dragging a soapbox into the Square to stand atop and give a rousing speech to their own community of nounsfolk.
Stepping back out of the realm of metaphor, SoapBox is, simply put, a Network that allows any community in the orbit of Nouns to host weekly Twitter Spaces on The Noun Square Twitter account (usually co-hosted from their own account), allowing them to bootstrap an audience that is comprised of a mix of their own fans, TNS's unique community, and spillover audiences from other SoapBoxes as well.
Nouners Gami and Brennen (of Gnars and Nouns Esports respectively) on their experience with SoapBox
At present, we are hosting approximately 38 Twitter interesting and well-attended spaces per week, including our daily Noun O' Clock spaces and the various TNS Soapboxes.
Twitter Engagement
In addition to our healthy Twitter Spaces metrics, TNS also has a robust track record of increasing both unique impressions and 100% organic engagement on Twitter, from a combination of art contests and games, as well as cross-posting quality nounish content from other accounts and communities too.
At the time of our previous Proposal, we had achieved 1.2MM impressions across all our posts, and the baseline trend through to present would have carried us to about 3MM impressions.
In reality, our impression growth has been exponential, with a 5X increase to over 5.4MM in a 5 month period. (See chart above.)
Similarly, our Profile Visits were up 4.6X to 446K, and we completely blew through our previous Proposal goal of 5000 followers, as we are trending towards close to 6000 Twitter followers as of this proposal.
Here is a screenshot from Prop 128 showing our year-end goals for Twitter followers and daily Spaces Listens, both of which we have exceeded (6000 vs. 5000 and 380+ vs. 200 respectively):
Other Media Channels
Although the focus of Prop 128 was growing our Twitter Spaces reach and onboarding artists and creators to Nouns, part of our vision for this time was also to begin experimenting with content for other platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, to complement our Twitter content strategy. We have had some success with both of these platforms during this trial, especially on TikTok (where we went viral in December and continue to get great numbers.)
TikTok
NounFungibleNikki and Hypnos had been working as a team on a Nounish TikTok presence for the NounsNews Project, before that project was discontinued in the fall.
Seeing their impressive efforts and consistency, TNS approached and asked them to join forces and merge our TikTok accounts together under the TNS banner. (Was this the first Nounish Acquisition in history? Maybe not explicitly, but it was nonetheless the beginning of an amazing collaborative relationship that has produced some of our most popular and viral nounish content over the past months.)
Shortly after bringing Nikki and Hypnos into the TNS team, we also saw that JP had been getting some really impressive attention on TikToks he had created for a Brazilian Noggle sticker campaign "Encontre o adesivo." We invited him to join the team, both to run a Portuguese Language TNS TikTok Account, and to advise Nikki and Hypnos on English language TT content strategy as well.
Under the guidance of this new team, the growth of our TikTok presence has been nothing short of incredible; from a baseline of 37,000 views in September, to a steady ~100K in October and November, and then spiking dramatically to over 8 million views in the month of December:
Exponential TikTok Audience growth.
A clever video collaboration between JP on the TNS Brazil account and N/H on the main TNS account managed to go viral twice, one version on each account. After this video (a lighthearted curiosity-hook about nounish tattoos), many of our other videos, including trend videos, interviews and educational shorts, began to accumulate views and organic engagement as well.
For example, check out this TikTok re-packaging of an @Nounish video (with their permission) with nearly 30K views. Or this video of Nikki interviewing a Nouns Vision-wearing Farokh at Art Basel, with almost 80K views. Or this followup to the tattoo video where Nikki explains what Noggles and Nouns are, which has just under 70 thousand views so far as well.
We also ran a very successful Public Good contest on TikTok called #NounsGiveBack, calling on our viewers and community to do something good in their local community and submit a video showing what they'd done. We had participants from all over the world who submitted some really inspiring entries.
The hashtag #NounsGiveBack on TT has received over 300K views across our own posts and all of the entries to date. A 2-minute recap video summarizing many of the amazing submissions has received over 32.5K views as well, you can watch it here. We are planning to launch a second Public Good contest as well in the coming weeks using the same hashtag.
At present, both TNS TikTok accounts have amassed over 30,000 combined unique followers, over 850K "Likes" across our videos, and nearly 8.5MM total views on all videos. For more metrics, our TikTok team has prepared a short deck that provides some additional details and insights here.
This is a huge opportunity to proliferate Nouns, especially to a younger generation of artists and builders, and we are excited to see what the TNS TikTok Dream Team can achieve over the next 6 months with a renewed mandate and continued enthusiasm.
YouTube
We have also begun some experimentation on YouTube in 3 main ways during this proposal period:
- Streaming all notable Twitter Spaces to YT Live for alternate tune-in and listen-back options;
- Creating and hosting evergreen/educational nounish video content; and
- Hosting/re-hosting of co-branded video content from other nounish projects such as House of Nouns and Nouns AI.
Our YT Live streams of daily Twitter Spaces have picked up an extra 20-30 daily listens on average, while also serving as a more permanent living archive of our Twitter content (helpful since Twitter deletes Spaces Recordings after 90 days.)
Some examples of our evergreen content would be the "Nounsplaining Web3 Terms" series with Aubtoshi and SuperTightWoody, and the "Prop House Profiles" interview series with Toady Hawk. In both cases, these series have been produced in a way that they can be viewed either today or in 5 years and still be relevant. As we grow, especially in new mediums like video, having a healthy repertoire of interesting educational content is valuable, as new eyeballs arrive on our accounts and will be immediately greeted by helpful onboarding content.
Finally, our co-branded content strategy: For example, House of Nouns' thoughtful weekly Voter Companion show "Prop Talk" was premiered on our YT channel in addition to their other podcast services, resulting in more views for their content and more useful content for our audience. The same can be said for Recordings of the AI Pod weekly Discord calls.
We know that YouTube continues to be a great opportunity for future growth, and we plan to devote more resources to building out our presence and content on this platform over the coming months.
2) The Noun Square as an Onboarding and Community Hub
Over the past 6 months, TNS has cemented itself as a pillar of the Nouns DAO community, supporting funded projects and sub-DAOs alike, while also welcoming builders, artists and new Nouners to the DAO with open arms.
In our estimation, this role of providing Community-As-A-Service to the DAO is every bit as important as the proliferation and distribution role outlined in the previous section.
After the original Nouns discord was switched to read-only, we worked to embrace the diaspora and create a guidepost to the Nouniverse. We thoughtfully did this in our Discord server and on TNS shows, so as not to simply try and replicate what was just disbanded, but rather create a neutral space where people can learn more at their own pace and find their own way to get more involved in the Nouns ecosystem. As a result, with 966 members, our TNS Discord is now one of the largest (if not the largest) active nounish servers by membership.
More Info About The SoapBox Network
Over the course of this past funding period, our SoapBox Network has grown from nothing into a weekly itinerary of 38+ spaces that have provided a turn-key platform to 15+ nounish projects and communities including Shark DAO, Lil Nouns DAO, Lil Sisters Fund, Nouns esports, Food Nouns, Nouns Builder, UMA DAO, Gnars DAO, Nouns Africa, Nouns DAO Amigos, Nouns Brasil, InternatioNouns, Nouns Agora, House of Nouns, NounBA, Lil Toadz DAO / Cryptoadz and more.
This initiative has empowered these nounish communities to consistently engage their membership on a weekly basis, cross-pollinate and collaborate with each other. It has also helped TNS greatly in our role of onboarding new people to Nouns, allowing our team to often say to newcomers: "Just spend a week listening to TNS Spaces and you will find your nounish people."
SoapBox is a true symbiotic "Win-Win-Win-Win" arrangement:
- Nouns DAO benefits from a passionate and interconnected web of communities, all employing different strategies to proliferate the ⌐◨-◨ meme to different demographics.
- The Noun Square benefits from additional engaging content for our various distribution streams and from having multiple active funnels from which to grow our own community.
- SoapBox partners benefit from a turn-key solution to host spaces with minimal planning or coordination required on their part, and the opportunity to reach new eyeballs from different corners of the ecosystem.
- And finally, the Nouns community at large benefits from a full daily slate of Nounish content and a one-stop-shop to catch up on everything happening in the Nouniverse.
A bilingual testimonial from Nouns DAO Amigos about their experience as a SoapBox partner.
In addition to empowering nounish sub-DAOs, subcultures and communities, the SoapBox Network has also been a powerful tool for TNS to help other funded nounish projects with their DAO communications and user growth. Some examples:
- We have partnered with Nouns Agora to co-host weekly public DAO discussions and townhalls about Nouns DAO Proposals that have produced very interesting dialog and have been very well attended and received. Yitong from Agora had this to say about TNS's efforts:
- We hosted a Technical Townhall about Rage Quit with The Verbs team of Elad and David, which also was very well attended and was the venue for some very important conversations between 4156, VapeApe, 0xHindsight, DigitalOIl and others.
- We have partnered with House of Nouns on two fronts: 1) Hosting co-branded video versions of their weekly voter companion podcast "Prop Talk" on The Noun Square YouTube (amplified on our Twitter), and 2) Hosting a live discussion SoapBox by the same name on Twitter Spaces weekly. Christian from HoN shares his experience here:
- We have hosted on many occasions "PopUp Soapboxes" by request for several Nounish projects, such as:
- A Bud Light NEXT Happy Hour (which was very well attended - we are in the process of potentially turning into a regular event.)
- A Basketball X Nouns event in collaboration with NounBA and Vesselverse.
- A Bilingual Chinese-English space featuring Noun 74 and the Chinese Cryptopunks community, which was also simulcast on Binance Live.
We believe that, again, in the absence of a centralized Nouns Discord, providing a public and neutral space for discussion of Nouns Proposals and DAO governance is an important and powerful part of our mandate that we hope to nurture and grow in the coming months.
On-Boarding New Nouners to the DAO
Another aspect of our daily community-building efforts is our consistent commitment to reaching out and engaging with folks on Twitter, Twitter Spaces, TikTok, etc. to answer their questions about Nouns and explain how they can get involved.
We have also reached out to new Nouners on a weekly basis to invite them on the daily Noun O' Clock show as guests and help them introduce themselves to the community. We have had many new Nouners on the show including Taco Noun, Digital Oil, shan96, darlington, 0xpiney, susuc, pNouns, NickyG, Nounvestment Fund, Variant Fund, Valko, and more. Invariably they have all had positive feedback about their experience!
A couple recent examples:
The FOMO Factor
TNS has also had a tangible effect on Nouner onboarding with our efforts to coordinate FOMO every night on our Noun O' Clock LIVE Twitter Spaces. In several instances, we have been asked by people to try to FOMO mint a specific Noun head, which we have done successfully and then this has often directly resulted in said Noun being purchased. Nouns 404, 433, 453, 472, 487, 506, 532, 542, 552, 562, 569, 577 & 578 (to name a few) are all examples of Nouns we FOMO'd by request and were purchased as a result.
Modrovsky, on his experience asking TNS to FOMO him an Index Card head.
We believe playing FOMO every day has led to minting more aesthetic nouns on average also, and as part of the fun, we aim to mint nouns for cultural events and occasions too. For example, we minted a rabbit for Chinese New Year (while hosting Nouns DAO China), 2 Rose Buds for the Rose Parade, a snowman head on Christmas day, and a basketball, knowing that the nouns acquisition committee were likely to want one for Victor's basketball court restoration proposal.
FOMO comic strip by TNS community member @Kimmydeuk
On-Boarding Artists and Contributors to Nouns
By encouraging artistic expression and rewarding creation through our weekly community art contests, The Noun Square has prompted the creation of 1000's of Nounish illustrations, sculptures, food items, videos, costumes and more.
Using TNS as a launch-pad, artists from around the world have entered into the Nouniverse and have found great success. Artists that started with TNS contests have been commissioned by Nouns communities, minted their own collections, been featured in IRL exhibitions and other collections, and have begun collaborating with each other as well:
Special Holiday Edition mint by @0xaprilia, @ilustradoraeth, @DesenhistaRedn, @amiyoko_eth, @facuserif, @Greta_gremplin, @Messhup, many of whom were exposed to Nouns via TNS
After winning our contests, many artists have had the opportunity to work with us on art inspired by the daily Noun that we give away as POAPs on our Twitter Spaces. Each commissioned artist does 7 or 8 pieces of art for that week. Some examples of the 230+ POAPs we have given out since inception:
And here's a brief reel showing many of the beautiful Nounish art pieces created by our community members over the past months:
A Few TNS Artist Success Stories:
After being introduced to Nouns via one of our earliest art contests, talented South Korean artist Jhee has gone on to mint collections including her popular watercolor-styled "With Noun" collection. Her art is really beautiful:
She has also been featured in IRL galleries, created merchandise and hosted her own exhibitions!
Arash, an Iranian animator living in Turkey, was on-boarded by several members of the TNS team. He premiered his Shrimpy Burger Nouns music video on TNS YouTube, collaborated with Nouns Sounds on "The Bomb" music video, is creating a pretty cool Nouns Video Game, and more.
0xAprilia came to Nouns via TNS art contests and has launched their own collections, created artwork for Nouncil, helped with multiple Nouns Proposals' art, and will be a resident artist at boards.wtf as well. Some of her art:
Duckhead entered into an Unminted Noun Heads contest and created a beautiful Box Noun Resin Figurine, which later was produced and sold out its initial order. They've continued to create more Nouns as figures and create one of a kind Nouns resin art!
In addition to empowering hundreds of artists, TNS has also funded social goods efforts around the world with challenges like our Cleanup Contest, which inspired community cleanup efforts the world over. One of the winners of this competition, Davin, went on to be funded by Nouns Prop House to do a larger cleanup effort, and then eventually founded Nouns DAO Africa as a result of these initiatives!
Two Successful Trial Prop House Rounds:
To complement our efforts to fund Nounish artists through our consistent Twitter art contests, we wanted to allocate a portion of our Prize budget to pilot two Prop House Rounds to extend the same kind of support to other creators and builders in our community.
We coordinated two rounds, one with 5 prizes of 2 ETH each, and one with 10 prizes of 1 ETH. In both cases, we were very impressed with the quantity and quality of submissions. In fact, there were so many quality submissions, we ended up awarding a total of 3 extra Bonus Prizes as well. We received 63 proposals over both rounds, and here are just a few of the projects that were funded and have executed:
- A team that created a substack newsletter to post summaries of every Noun O' Clock LIVE Twitter Spaces for those who missed.
- A Portuguese language Twitter Spaces called Bora Buildar Brasil that is airing weekly on TNS SoapBox.
- A collection of custom made resin trophies made by Duckhead in the image of the TNS mascot "Nouny Clock."
- A series of animated shorts based on memorable clips from our Twitter Spaces shows.
- A tree planting operation in the Philippines.
- & many more!
3) Project Goals For The Next 6 Months
These are the goals and target metrics we will strive to achieve over the next 6 months:
Broad Strategic Goals:
- Continue our unbroken consistent streak of Noun O' Clock Twitter Spaces as an important daily touchpoint for the community, and effective onboarding funnel for people new to Nouns. We will continue to keep our Spaces content engaging and interesting, and pursue bigger guests even more regularly to draw in larger crowds and continue/accelerate our current trend of growth.
- Increase production of educational/evergreen video content for YouTube, and concentrate on continued growth of YouTube following and engagement.
- Continue to build and grow the TNS TikTok accounts followers and engagement in both English and Portuguese.
- Continue to offer distribution and DAO communications support to Nounish projects such as Agora, House of Nouns and Nouns AI + providing support and additional distribution for Aubtoshi's Nouns On The Air Podcast Series.
- Maintain and grow the SoapBox network, including expanding it to some communities on the periphery of Nouns and possibly suitable communities outside the ecosystem.
- Continue to make a concerted effort to reach out to all new Nouners and invite them on NOC LIVE + help them orient themselves in the DAO as best we can.
- Host and moderate thoughtful DAO discourse on Proposals on a weekly basis.
- Continue to ideate and administer creative art contests that produce positive social media engagement and amazing User Generated Content, plus attracts and onboards talented artists from around the world into the ecosystem.
- Continue to experiment with and document decentralized project management and team compensation (all team comp disbursed by recurring retro rounds according to contribution and/or grants for specific projects completed.)
- Experiment with alternate language versions of TNS Twitter, as we have been trialing with a TNS Spanish and TNS Portuguese Account.
- Be a leader in the Nouns space on the front of finding paths toward sustainability (more on this in the "Sustainability Strategy" section below.)
Specific Metric Goals:
- Grow Twitter following to minimum 11K over the next 6 months (which would make our account the largest nounish project account by followers after @nounsdao)
- Grow total Twitter impressions to 20MM+
- Grow total Listens metric to 120K+
- Organically grow YouTube subscribership to 690+ with consistent and quality content (minimum 2 pieces of video content per week.)
- Build TNS TikTok accounts to 50K+ combined followers and 12MM+ combined views. (Target of 200 videos posted with consistent cadence over the next 6 months.)
- Allocate 70+ ETH to builders and artists through art contests/commissions and community project funding.
- Challenge ourselves to raise 50ETH in revenue over the next 6 months to defray our operations budget with a combination of crypto-native and media-native experiments (more on this in the "Sustainability Strategy" section below.)
- Onboard at least one new artist to Nouns per month through contests, POAP commissions or other community initiatives.
- Land strategic partnerships with at least two brands/communities outside the Nouns ecosystem.
4) The Team
The Noun Square continues to operate with a novel decentralized project management system loosely based on the original Nouncil governance documents. Members of both the Core and Support teams can rotate in and out as needed, depending on schedule and commitments, allowing others to step in and step up as needed. All compensation is calculated by periodic retro round allocations, or by specific project-based grants.
This format has allowed interested community members to land in TNS from a contest or a Twitter space, start contributing, and then become part of the Support Team or even the Core Team based on nothing but merit, effort and output.
Running the daily operations of TNS is no small task and encompasses myriad responsibilities, including but not limited to:
Production and planning for daily NOC show, Administration of SoapBox Spaces, schedule and coordination of Hosting and co-hosting of daily show, creation, editing and publication of YouTube and TikTok content, general content ideation and strategy, POAP artist coordination and administration, POAP creation and delivery, contest ideation, administration and execution, tracking and administration of contest prizes and payments, retro round administration and payroll, administration of Prop House rounds, booking guests for all shows, Twitter and other social engagement, maintaining Show schedule and Tweeting Spaces daily, onboarding conversations, business and partnership development, Discord management and moderation etc.
Core Team (And most Common Responsibilities):
- Toady Hawk (Founder, project management & Strategy, Twitter management, Space hosting, Coordination/Administration, Business development)
- Aubtoshi (Space hosting, video content, coordination/administration)
- Benbodhi (High Level Strategy, POAP coordination, Contest Payments, Co-hosting, Discord/YouTube admin)
- Joshua Fisher (Contest ideation and coordination, Hosting, High Level Strategy)
- SuperTightWoody (Discord admin, High Level Strategy, music)
- Xargs (SoapBox scheduling, backend administration of scheduling, international channel moderation and international community outreach)
- RobotFishGirl (Hosting, discord moderation, video content editing)
- Noun 142 (Founder, Advisor, High Level Strategy)
Support Team (And most common tasks):
- Symbiotech (Administration, Discord content, Twitter Spaces technical hosting)
- Al409 (Hosting most SoapBox spaces, general administration as needed)
- Cardno (Guest management, space hosting)
- NounFungible Nikki (TikTok strategy, content creation and development)
- Hypnos (Tiktok content strategy and video editing)
- JP (TikTok content strategy and creation, Portuguese language TT and Twitter account)
- PooPiePie (YouTube streaming)
- Santhosh (Essential Non-North American hours administration and scheduling, SoapBox Hosting)
- Satori (Administration, support, guest booking)
- Akva (Portuguese language support, hosting)
- BK (Reports)
- Prof Werder (Twitter admin and hosting)
- Kyro Wolf (Art, branding and design)
- Jhee (art)
- Volky (NOMO dev / big brain)
We have also kept public records of every single retro round we have completed for team compensation to date (to our knowledge we are the only Nouns-funded project to have provided this level of operational transparency). Nouners are welcome to review the document here.
5) Proposed Budget:
Monthly expenditures August-Present: Team Comp and misc operations: 38 ETH Contest Prizes, art commissions, community project grants: 12 ETH (We continued operations through January as a bonus)
New Budget: Monthly Team Compensation Budget: 42 ETH Monthly contest Prizes, community art commissions, community project grants: 11.17 ETH
Total Ask Per Month = 53.17 X 6 Month term = 319 ETH (Before Sustainability Efforts, See Below.)
6) Sustainability Strategy
There has been some discussion in the DAO recently about the self-sustainablity of Nouns-funded projects. Notably, Nounder 4156 mentions here on Twitter that many beloved Nounish projects could be endangered in the medium-to-long term if they don't think seriously about a path to sustainability.
That is why at TNS, we are implementing a 2-pronged strategy to gradually reduce our dependence on DAO funding, while continuing to bring value to the DAO and the community at large. In addition to reasonable DAO funding for provision of Community-As-A-Service and growing media distribution, we will also try:
- Crypto-Native experiments in self-funding; and
- Traditional Media experiments in self-funding.
To reduce our total ask of the DAO, we are challenging ourselves to produce 50 ETH of revenue through a combination of a) NOMO Nouns daily edition mints, b) a TNS Nouns Fork using Builder DAO that celebrates talented artists in our community, and c) tiered sponsorship opportunities of our media channels.
A) NOMO NOUNS: A TNS-Developed Addition to the FOMO Experience
NOMO NOUNS is a gamified daily edition mint, bootstrapped and developed in-house by TNS (shout out Volky.eth.) It kicks off directly after FOMO Nouns and allows our audience on Noun O' Clock LIVE to pick one Noun that got passed over during FOMO (and is soon to be NO MO'), and save it from eternal blockchain purgatory by clicking like mad.
Once the game is over (about 60 seconds), the winning NOMO Noun is minted as a 24H open edition that is very affordable, but goes up in price every 15 minutes thereafter. So far in the first 6 weeks of beta, the feedback from our community has been overwhelmingly positive. People love the game, and have been minting the NOMOs even though we haven't fully developed either the game or the usefulness of the NFTs yet (it's currently mostly just for fun and provenance.)
We have raised over 7 ETH from NOMO so far, and all proceeds have gone directly to the TNS treasury (which allowed us to operate for a bonus month in January.)
Additionally, our TNS partner dev Volky is currently working on several improvements to the game and interface, and NOMO V2 will be released very soon. Our vision is for NOMO to become an efficient single landing page for listeners of Noun O' Clock LIVE and beyond, and we're excited to roll out new features soon to that end. In the meantime, just keep on clickin'!
B) TNS DAO
In the next 30-45 days, we plan to launch a TNS DAO by forking Nouns using Nouns Builder. We have some exciting plans in motion to partner with and empower some of the incredible artists in our TNS community. We also have novel plans to integrate NOMO Nouns owners into the structure of the DAO, and ultimately envision a future in the medium-term where auction proceeds can net out the cost of much of our contest prizes and community project grants, in a true virtuous cycle of art and proliferation.
C) Sponsorships
We are currently in discussions with several crypto-native organizations about potential secondary sponsorships (after Nouns DAO) of our Twitter Spaces, as well as video content on our YT and TikTok. We are working to balance the traditional media model with a more crypto-native approach to sponsorship, and with any confirmed partner collaborations, we will ensure that both the partner and our audience benefit mutually and safely.
With the three initiatives above, we believe we can meet our goal of raising 50 ETH in revenue over a 6 month period, and we are excited both for the challenge, and to set an example in the DAO as a project seeking paths to semi-self-reliance.
7) The Revised Ask
Projected 6 Month Operations Budget of 319 ETH, minus 50 ETH of targeted TNS revenue = 269 ETH Total Ask
8) Conclusion
To sum it all up, The Noun Square is a growing media hub and onboarding/educational platform for Nouns DAO and the Nouniverse. We aim to bring value to existing and new people through many impactful initiatives, as outlined in this proposal, and we will continue to iterate and improve daily (the beauty of creating nounish media every single day.)
The detailed metrics and information in this prop are important and demonstrate the tangible value that TNS brings to the broader Nouns community. But numbers and details can also be overwhelming in a world of information overload. Numbers and details don’t tell the whole story. We hope that this prop and the discussion around the funding and sustainability of TNS will allow you to see and hear the story of what we’ve been able to build alongside our audience: an onboarding hub for the Nouniverse, and a cc0 media company, kickstarted by Nouns.
What ESPN’s Sportscenter is to most sports fans, that’s the role TNS is playing for many currently in their Nounish journey. And it will continue to hold that place as the next 1000 come into the Nouniverse, and the 1000 after that. This prop can’t properly tell the stories of many artists who went from relative obscurity to sustainable work thanks to their onboarding to Nouns. The prop can’t tell of the 50 builders who were either ushered into Prop House victories for the first time, or brought onto the TNS team as their first chance to work in web 3, or who found people to create and build alongside in a nounish subdao, thanks to TNS.
It can't tell how TNS was a springboard to new ventures in the Nouniverse. How we were a shot of energy into the proliferation stars of NounsDAO Brazil, or Africa. And the prop can’t tell the story of 100+ who have found their footing in web3, found their tribe in the Nouniverse, and will find themselves on a Nounish web3 journey for years to come.
These people are the next stars of the Nouniverse. They are future Nouners, too. And to be honest, they are the real stars of TNS. This prop can’t tell all those stories. For those who are not a part of the TNS orbit, we hope the discussion of this prop during the on-chain period allows you to hear that human story alongside the numbers and the metrics, so that you get a feel for the full picture of the value of TNS to the Nouniverse.
Thank you for your time!
9) A Special Edition TNS X Messhup Mint
Upon successful execution of this proposal, "The Meta-Square," a special TNS-inspired edition by Messhup, will be minted by the TNS Deployer to mark the occasion and at the same time offer a beautiful collectible piece to all our supporters (and detractors?)
This mint will be open for 5 days after execution of the Prop (if passed) at a cost of 0.0420 ETH each (for the culture.) Half the proceeds will go to TNS, half will be returned to the DAO.
10) The Transactions & Multisig
- One transaction of 269 ETH to the TNS Multisig (3/5), consisting of trusted community members who have been serving on said MS since August/2022: Toady Hawk, Noun 142, Benbodhi, SuperTightWoody & Maty.eth.
- One transaction which will mint Messhup's "The Meta-Square" as a Timed Open Edition on Zora upon execution of the Prop.
The Noun Square: A Community Hub and Media Network for the Nouniverse ⌐◨-◨
The Meta-Square: This custom commission by amazing Nounish Artist Laureate Messhup depicts a futuristic Noun Square with representation of all our content & community partners, and it will be minted by the TNS Deployer contract as a Zora Open Edition, activated by the execution of this proposal (thanks to Zora's Nouns Connect.)
TL;DR:
The Noun Square was funded for a 5 month term to continue doing Nounish Twitter Spaces every single day, plus to expand our reach into other mediums and socials, while acting as an onboarding and community hub for Nouns.
We have crushed all of our metric goals, 4X-ing our Twitter impressions and daily listens, going viral on TikTok with 8MM+ views, and becoming one of the go-to Nouns DAO onboarding sources for artists, builders, and new Nouners alike. We even managed to squeeze an extra month of operations out of our budget by creating a game (NOMO Nouns) that has generated 7 ETH for the show during its beta release alone.
Our proposed budget for the next 6 months of continued media growth and Community-As-A-Service to the DAO is 319 ETH (53 per month, including funds ear-marked for art contests and community project grants.) However, we are committing to self-raising 50 ETH of revenue through several crypto-native and media-native strategies.
Therefore, our ask of the DAO today is 269 ETH. Please read on to better understand the work we have been doing, the impact we have been having, and our goals for the next 6 months. 👇
Victor Solomon on TNS's success as a media platform and onboarding avenue.
Proposal Summary
In Proposal 128, we set out to turn The Noun Square into "a daily touchpoint for the community and a powerful onboarding tool for Nouns." This prop was structured to cover art contest prizes, operations and team compensation for 5 months, ending Dec 31/2022.
During that time, our team has met and surpassed ALL of the broad goals and specific metrics that we set out for ourselves in that proposal, and we've even stretched our operations an additional bonus month with careful budgeting and some supplemental internal revenue generation.
In the past 6 months we have:
✅ accumulated over 36K followers across TNS socials ✅ went viral on TikTok and received over 8.6MM video views across socials ✅ received over 5MM unique Twitter impressions ✅ garnered nearly 57,000 Spaces Listens on Twitter ✅ hosted our flagship Noun O’ Clock Twitter show 230+ days in a row ✅ empowered and supported many Nounish communities and projects with communications and distribution ✅ onboarded countless talented artists, builders and creatives to the DAO, as well as welcoming many new Nouners as well ✅ developed a game + daily edition collection that has raised 7 ETH of revenue in 6 weeks. ✅ built a CC0 nounish media company from the ground up
We are asking for the DAO's support as we continue to build TNS out as a Nounish Community Hub, cc0 media company and proliferation power-house over the next 6 months.
We are also committing to raise 50 ETH of revenue over this period with several complementary strategies for decreasing our reliance on DAO funding (See "Sustainability Strategy" Below.)
Table of Contents
- TNS as a Nounish Media Company
- TNS as a Community and Onboarding Hub
- The SoapBox Network
- Supporting other nounish projects with distribution
- Welcoming new Nouners to the DAO
- The FOMO Factor
- Onboarding Artists and Builders through art contests and Prop House rounds
- Our broad and specific goals for the next 6 months
- The TNS Team
- Operations Budget
- Sustainability Strategy
- THE ASK
- Conclusion
- The Messhup x TNS Commemorative Open Edition mint.
- The Transactions & Multisig
1) The Noun Square as a (Sufficiently Decentralized) Media Company:
The TNS Team is very proud to have produced an engaging and well-attended Twitter Spaces Show called Noun O' Clock LIVE every single day since June 13, 2022.
That's 230+ days in a row!
We have hosted many marquee guests during this time such as Mike Demarais, Alana and Jesse from Variant Fund, Farokh and Mando of RugRadio, Punk 4156, VapeApe, and Ryan Carson... plus many brand new Nouners, and countless interesting nounish builders and artists.
Over the past 6 months, we have accumulated nearly 57K total Twitter listens to our spaces, hosting a total of 580 unique spaces, including our flagship daily NOC LIVE and a slate of weekly community spaces through a new program called The SoapBox.
Twitter Spaces Metrics: Up and to the Right
What is The Noun Square SoapBox?
The SoapBox Network was developed by TNS as a way to leverage our platform to provide Nounish communities with a voice, as well as opportunities to cross-pollinate and collaborate with other groups in the ecosystem.
If The Noun Square is meant to depict an old town plaza with a clocktower in the centre, The SoapBox imagery might evoke passionate nounish subcommunities such as Lil Nouns, Food Nouns and Gnars dragging a soapbox into the Square to stand atop and give a rousing speech to their own community of nounsfolk.
Stepping back out of the realm of metaphor, SoapBox is, simply put, a Network that allows any community in the orbit of Nouns to host weekly Twitter Spaces on The Noun Square Twitter account (usually co-hosted from their own account), allowing them to bootstrap an audience that is comprised of a mix of their own fans, TNS's unique community, and spillover audiences from other SoapBoxes as well.
Nouners Gami and Brennen (of Gnars and Nouns Esports respectively) on their experience with SoapBox
At present, we are hosting approximately 38 Twitter interesting and well-attended spaces per week, including our daily Noun O' Clock spaces and the various TNS Soapboxes.
Twitter Engagement
In addition to our healthy Twitter Spaces metrics, TNS also has a robust track record of increasing both unique impressions and 100% organic engagement on Twitter, from a combination of art contests and games, as well as cross-posting quality nounish content from other accounts and communities too.
At the time of our previous Proposal, we had achieved 1.2MM impressions across all our posts, and the baseline trend through to present would have carried us to about 3MM impressions.
In reality, our impression growth has been exponential, with a 5X increase to over 5.4MM in a 5 month period. (See chart above.)
Similarly, our Profile Visits were up 4.6X to 446K, and we completely blew through our previous Proposal goal of 5000 followers, as we are trending towards close to 6000 Twitter followers as of this proposal.
Here is a screenshot from Prop 128 showing our year-end goals for Twitter followers and daily Spaces Listens, both of which we have exceeded (6000 vs. 5000 and 380+ vs. 200 respectively):
Other Media Channels
Although the focus of Prop 128 was growing our Twitter Spaces reach and onboarding artists and creators to Nouns, part of our vision for this time was also to begin experimenting with content for other platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, to complement our Twitter content strategy. We have had some success with both of these platforms during this trial, especially on TikTok (where we went viral in December and continue to get great numbers.)
TikTok
NounFungibleNikki and Hypnos had been working as a team on a Nounish TikTok presence for the NounsNews Project, before that project was discontinued in the fall.
Seeing their impressive efforts and consistency, TNS approached and asked them to join forces and merge our TikTok accounts together under the TNS banner. (Was this the first Nounish Acquisition in history? Maybe not explicitly, but it was nonetheless the beginning of an amazing collaborative relationship that has produced some of our most popular and viral nounish content over the past months.)
Shortly after bringing Nikki and Hypnos into the TNS team, we also saw that JP had been getting some really impressive attention on TikToks he had created for a Brazilian Noggle sticker campaign "Encontre o adesivo." We invited him to join the team, both to run a Portuguese Language TNS TikTok Account, and to advise Nikki and Hypnos on English language TT content strategy as well.
Under the guidance of this new team, the growth of our TikTok presence has been nothing short of incredible; from a baseline of 37,000 views in September, to a steady ~100K in October and November, and then spiking dramatically to over 8 million views in the month of December:
Exponential TikTok Audience growth.
A clever video collaboration between JP on the TNS Brazil account and N/H on the main TNS account managed to go viral twice, one version on each account. After this video (a lighthearted curiosity-hook about nounish tattoos), many of our other videos, including trend videos, interviews and educational shorts, began to accumulate views and organic engagement as well.
For example, check out this TikTok re-packaging of an @Nounish video (with their permission) with nearly 30K views. Or this video of Nikki interviewing a Nouns Vision-wearing Farokh at Art Basel, with almost 80K views. Or this followup to the tattoo video where Nikki explains what Noggles and Nouns are, which has just under 70 thousand views so far as well.
We also ran a very successful Public Good contest on TikTok called #NounsGiveBack, calling on our viewers and community to do something good in their local community and submit a video showing what they'd done. We had participants from all over the world who submitted some really inspiring entries.
The hashtag #NounsGiveBack on TT has received over 300K views across our own posts and all of the entries to date. A 2-minute recap video summarizing many of the amazing submissions has received over 32.5K views as well, you can watch it here. We are planning to launch a second Public Good contest as well in the coming weeks using the same hashtag.
At present, both TNS TikTok accounts have amassed over 30,000 combined unique followers, over 850K "Likes" across our videos, and nearly 8.5MM total views on all videos. For more metrics, our TikTok team has prepared a short deck that provides some additional details and insights here.
This is a huge opportunity to proliferate Nouns, especially to a younger generation of artists and builders, and we are excited to see what the TNS TikTok Dream Team can achieve over the next 6 months with a renewed mandate and continued enthusiasm.
YouTube
We have also begun some experimentation on YouTube in 3 main ways during this proposal period:
- Streaming all notable Twitter Spaces to YT Live for alternate tune-in and listen-back options;
- Creating and hosting evergreen/educational nounish video content; and
- Hosting/re-hosting of co-branded video content from other nounish projects such as House of Nouns and Nouns AI.
Our YT Live streams of daily Twitter Spaces have picked up an extra 20-30 daily listens on average, while also serving as a more permanent living archive of our Twitter content (helpful since Twitter deletes Spaces Recordings after 90 days.)
Some examples of our evergreen content would be the "Nounsplaining Web3 Terms" series with Aubtoshi and SuperTightWoody, and the "Prop House Profiles" interview series with Toady Hawk. In both cases, these series have been produced in a way that they can be viewed either today or in 5 years and still be relevant. As we grow, especially in new mediums like video, having a healthy repertoire of interesting educational content is valuable, as new eyeballs arrive on our accounts and will be immediately greeted by helpful onboarding content.
Finally, our co-branded content strategy: For example, House of Nouns' thoughtful weekly Voter Companion show "Prop Talk" was premiered on our YT channel in addition to their other podcast services, resulting in more views for their content and more useful content for our audience. The same can be said for Recordings of the AI Pod weekly Discord calls.
We know that YouTube continues to be a great opportunity for future growth, and we plan to devote more resources to building out our presence and content on this platform over the coming months.
2) The Noun Square as an Onboarding and Community Hub
Over the past 6 months, TNS has cemented itself as a pillar of the Nouns DAO community, supporting funded projects and sub-DAOs alike, while also welcoming builders, artists and new Nouners to the DAO with open arms.
In our estimation, this role of providing Community-As-A-Service to the DAO is every bit as important as the proliferation and distribution role outlined in the previous section.
After the original Nouns discord was switched to read-only, we worked to embrace the diaspora and create a guidepost to the Nouniverse. We thoughtfully did this in our Discord server and on TNS shows, so as not to simply try and replicate what was just disbanded, but rather create a neutral space where people can learn more at their own pace and find their own way to get more involved in the Nouns ecosystem. As a result, with 966 members, our TNS Discord is now one of the largest (if not the largest) active nounish servers by membership.
More Info About The SoapBox Network
Over the course of this past funding period, our SoapBox Network has grown from nothing into a weekly itinerary of 38+ spaces that have provided a turn-key platform to 15+ nounish projects and communities including Shark DAO, Lil Nouns DAO, Lil Sisters Fund, Nouns esports, Food Nouns, Nouns Builder, UMA DAO, Gnars DAO, Nouns Africa, Nouns DAO Amigos, Nouns Brasil, InternatioNouns, Nouns Agora, House of Nouns, NounBA, Lil Toadz DAO / Cryptoadz and more.
This initiative has empowered these nounish communities to consistently engage their membership on a weekly basis, cross-pollinate and collaborate with each other. It has also helped TNS greatly in our role of onboarding new people to Nouns, allowing our team to often say to newcomers: "Just spend a week listening to TNS Spaces and you will find your nounish people."
SoapBox is a true symbiotic "Win-Win-Win-Win" arrangement:
- Nouns DAO benefits from a passionate and interconnected web of communities, all employing different strategies to proliferate the ⌐◨-◨ meme to different demographics.
- The Noun Square benefits from additional engaging content for our various distribution streams and from having multiple active funnels from which to grow our own community.
- SoapBox partners benefit from a turn-key solution to host spaces with minimal planning or coordination required on their part, and the opportunity to reach new eyeballs from different corners of the ecosystem.
- And finally, the Nouns community at large benefits from a full daily slate of Nounish content and a one-stop-shop to catch up on everything happening in the Nouniverse.
A bilingual testimonial from Nouns DAO Amigos about their experience as a SoapBox partner.
In addition to empowering nounish sub-DAOs, subcultures and communities, the SoapBox Network has also been a powerful tool for TNS to help other funded nounish projects with their DAO communications and user growth. Some examples:
- We have partnered with Nouns Agora to co-host weekly public DAO discussions and townhalls about Nouns DAO Proposals that have produced very interesting dialog and have been very well attended and received. Yitong from Agora had this to say about TNS's efforts:
- We hosted a Technical Townhall about Rage Quit with The Verbs team of Elad and David, which also was very well attended and was the venue for some very important conversations between 4156, VapeApe, 0xHindsight, DigitalOIl and others.
- We have partnered with House of Nouns on two fronts: 1) Hosting co-branded video versions of their weekly voter companion podcast "Prop Talk" on The Noun Square YouTube (amplified on our Twitter), and 2) Hosting a live discussion SoapBox by the same name on Twitter Spaces weekly. Christian from HoN shares his experience here:
- We have hosted on many occasions "PopUp Soapboxes" by request for several Nounish projects, such as:
- A Bud Light NEXT Happy Hour (which was very well attended - we are in the process of potentially turning into a regular event.)
- A Basketball X Nouns event in collaboration with NounBA and Vesselverse.
- A Bilingual Chinese-English space featuring Noun 74 and the Chinese Cryptopunks community, which was also simulcast on Binance Live.
We believe that, again, in the absence of a centralized Nouns Discord, providing a public and neutral space for discussion of Nouns Proposals and DAO governance is an important and powerful part of our mandate that we hope to nurture and grow in the coming months.
On-Boarding New Nouners to the DAO
Another aspect of our daily community-building efforts is our consistent commitment to reaching out and engaging with folks on Twitter, Twitter Spaces, TikTok, etc. to answer their questions about Nouns and explain how they can get involved.
We have also reached out to new Nouners on a weekly basis to invite them on the daily Noun O' Clock show as guests and help them introduce themselves to the community. We have had many new Nouners on the show including Taco Noun, Digital Oil, shan96, darlington, 0xpiney, susuc, pNouns, NickyG, Nounvestment Fund, Variant Fund, Valko, and more. Invariably they have all had positive feedback about their experience!
A couple recent examples:
The FOMO Factor
TNS has also had a tangible effect on Nouner onboarding with our efforts to coordinate FOMO every night on our Noun O' Clock LIVE Twitter Spaces. In several instances, we have been asked by people to try to FOMO mint a specific Noun head, which we have done successfully and then this has often directly resulted in said Noun being purchased. Nouns 404, 433, 453, 472, 487, 506, 532, 542, 552, 562, 569, 577 & 578 (to name a few) are all examples of Nouns we FOMO'd by request and were purchased as a result.
Modrovsky, on his experience asking TNS to FOMO him an Index Card head.
We believe playing FOMO every day has led to minting more aesthetic nouns on average also, and as part of the fun, we aim to mint nouns for cultural events and occasions too. For example, we minted a rabbit for Chinese New Year (while hosting Nouns DAO China), 2 Rose Buds for the Rose Parade, a snowman head on Christmas day, and a basketball, knowing that the nouns acquisition committee were likely to want one for Victor's basketball court restoration proposal.
FOMO comic strip by TNS community member @Kimmydeuk
On-Boarding Artists and Contributors to Nouns
By encouraging artistic expression and rewarding creation through our weekly community art contests, The Noun Square has prompted the creation of 1000's of Nounish illustrations, sculptures, food items, videos, costumes and more.
Using TNS as a launch-pad, artists from around the world have entered into the Nouniverse and have found great success. Artists that started with TNS contests have been commissioned by Nouns communities, minted their own collections, been featured in IRL exhibitions and other collections, and have begun collaborating with each other as well:
Special Holiday Edition mint by @0xaprilia, @ilustradoraeth, @DesenhistaRedn, @amiyoko_eth, @facuserif, @Greta_gremplin, @Messhup, many of whom were exposed to Nouns via TNS
After winning our contests, many artists have had the opportunity to work with us on art inspired by the daily Noun that we give away as POAPs on our Twitter Spaces. Each commissioned artist does 7 or 8 pieces of art for that week. Some examples of the 230+ POAPs we have given out since inception:
And here's a brief reel showing many of the beautiful Nounish art pieces created by our community members over the past months:
A Few TNS Artist Success Stories:
After being introduced to Nouns via one of our earliest art contests, talented South Korean artist Jhee has gone on to mint collections including her popular watercolor-styled "With Noun" collection. Her art is really beautiful:
She has also been featured in IRL galleries, created merchandise and hosted her own exhibitions!
Arash, an Iranian animator living in Turkey, was on-boarded by several members of the TNS team. He premiered his Shrimpy Burger Nouns music video on TNS YouTube, collaborated with Nouns Sounds on "The Bomb" music video, is creating a pretty cool Nouns Video Game, and more.
0xAprilia came to Nouns via TNS art contests and has launched their own collections, created artwork for Nouncil, helped with multiple Nouns Proposals' art, and will be a resident artist at boards.wtf as well. Some of her art:
Duckhead entered into an Unminted Noun Heads contest and created a beautiful Box Noun Resin Figurine, which later was produced and sold out its initial order. They've continued to create more Nouns as figures and create one of a kind Nouns resin art!
In addition to empowering hundreds of artists, TNS has also funded social goods efforts around the world with challenges like our Cleanup Contest, which inspired community cleanup efforts the world over. One of the winners of this competition, Davin, went on to be funded by Nouns Prop House to do a larger cleanup effort, and then eventually founded Nouns DAO Africa as a result of these initiatives!
Two Successful Trial Prop House Rounds:
To complement our efforts to fund Nounish artists through our consistent Twitter art contests, we wanted to allocate a portion of our Prize budget to pilot two Prop House Rounds to extend the same kind of support to other creators and builders in our community.
We coordinated two rounds, one with 5 prizes of 2 ETH each, and one with 10 prizes of 1 ETH. In both cases, we were very impressed with the quantity and quality of submissions. In fact, there were so many quality submissions, we ended up awarding a total of 3 extra Bonus Prizes as well. We received 63 proposals over both rounds, and here are just a few of the projects that were funded and have executed:
- A team that created a substack newsletter to post summaries of every Noun O' Clock LIVE Twitter Spaces for those who missed.
- A Portuguese language Twitter Spaces called Bora Buildar Brasil that is airing weekly on TNS SoapBox.
- A collection of custom made resin trophies made by Duckhead in the image of the TNS mascot "Nouny Clock."
- A series of animated shorts based on memorable clips from our Twitter Spaces shows.
- A tree planting operation in the Philippines.
- & many more!
3) Project Goals For The Next 6 Months
These are the goals and target metrics we will strive to achieve over the next 6 months:
Broad Strategic Goals:
- Continue our unbroken consistent streak of Noun O' Clock Twitter Spaces as an important daily touchpoint for the community, and effective onboarding funnel for people new to Nouns. We will continue to keep our Spaces content engaging and interesting, and pursue bigger guests even more regularly to draw in larger crowds and continue/accelerate our current trend of growth.
- Increase production of educational/evergreen video content for YouTube, and concentrate on continued growth of YouTube following and engagement.
- Continue to build and grow the TNS TikTok accounts followers and engagement in both English and Portuguese.
- Continue to offer distribution and DAO communications support to Nounish projects such as Agora, House of Nouns and Nouns AI + providing support and additional distribution for Aubtoshi's Nouns On The Air Podcast Series.
- Maintain and grow the SoapBox network, including expanding it to some communities on the periphery of Nouns and possibly suitable communities outside the ecosystem.
- Continue to make a concerted effort to reach out to all new Nouners and invite them on NOC LIVE + help them orient themselves in the DAO as best we can.
- Host and moderate thoughtful DAO discourse on Proposals on a weekly basis.
- Continue to ideate and administer creative art contests that produce positive social media engagement and amazing User Generated Content, plus attracts and onboards talented artists from around the world into the ecosystem.
- Continue to experiment with and document decentralized project management and team compensation (all team comp disbursed by recurring retro rounds according to contribution and/or grants for specific projects completed.)
- Experiment with alternate language versions of TNS Twitter, as we have been trialing with a TNS Spanish and TNS Portuguese Account.
- Be a leader in the Nouns space on the front of finding paths toward sustainability (more on this in the "Sustainability Strategy" section below.)
Specific Metric Goals:
- Grow Twitter following to minimum 11K over the next 6 months (which would make our account the largest nounish project account by followers after @nounsdao)
- Grow total Twitter impressions to 20MM+
- Grow total Listens metric to 120K+
- Organically grow YouTube subscribership to 690+ with consistent and quality content (minimum 2 pieces of video content per week.)
- Build TNS TikTok accounts to 50K+ combined followers and 12MM+ combined views. (Target of 200 videos posted with consistent cadence over the next 6 months.)
- Allocate 70+ ETH to builders and artists through art contests/commissions and community project funding.
- Challenge ourselves to raise 50ETH in revenue over the next 6 months to defray our operations budget with a combination of crypto-native and media-native experiments (more on this in the "Sustainability Strategy" section below.)
- Onboard at least one new artist to Nouns per month through contests, POAP commissions or other community initiatives.
- Land strategic partnerships with at least two brands/communities outside the Nouns ecosystem.
4) The Team
The Noun Square continues to operate with a novel decentralized project management system loosely based on the original Nouncil governance documents. Members of both the Core and Support teams can rotate in and out as needed, depending on schedule and commitments, allowing others to step in and step up as needed. All compensation is calculated by periodic retro round allocations, or by specific project-based grants.
This format has allowed interested community members to land in TNS from a contest or a Twitter space, start contributing, and then become part of the Support Team or even the Core Team based on nothing but merit, effort and output.
Running the daily operations of TNS is no small task and encompasses myriad responsibilities, including but not limited to:
Production and planning for daily NOC show, Administration of SoapBox Spaces, schedule and coordination of Hosting and co-hosting of daily show, creation, editing and publication of YouTube and TikTok content, general content ideation and strategy, POAP artist coordination and administration, POAP creation and delivery, contest ideation, administration and execution, tracking and administration of contest prizes and payments, retro round administration and payroll, administration of Prop House rounds, booking guests for all shows, Twitter and other social engagement, maintaining Show schedule and Tweeting Spaces daily, onboarding conversations, business and partnership development, Discord management and moderation etc.
Core Team (And most Common Responsibilities):
- Toady Hawk (Founder, project management & Strategy, Twitter management, Space hosting, Coordination/Administration, Business development)
- Aubtoshi (Space hosting, video content, coordination/administration)
- Benbodhi (High Level Strategy, POAP coordination, Contest Payments, Co-hosting, Discord/YouTube admin)
- Joshua Fisher (Contest ideation and coordination, Hosting, High Level Strategy)
- SuperTightWoody (Discord admin, High Level Strategy, music)
- Xargs (SoapBox scheduling, backend administration of scheduling, international channel moderation and international community outreach)
- RobotFishGirl (Hosting, discord moderation, video content editing)
- Noun 142 (Founder, Advisor, High Level Strategy)
Support Team (And most common tasks):
- Symbiotech (Administration, Discord content, Twitter Spaces technical hosting)
- Al409 (Hosting most SoapBox spaces, general administration as needed)
- Cardno (Guest management, space hosting)
- NounFungible Nikki (TikTok strategy, content creation and development)
- Hypnos (Tiktok content strategy and video editing)
- JP (TikTok content strategy and creation, Portuguese language TT and Twitter account)
- PooPiePie (YouTube streaming)
- Santhosh (Essential Non-North American hours administration and scheduling, SoapBox Hosting)
- Satori (Administration, support, guest booking)
- Akva (Portuguese language support, hosting)
- BK (Reports)
- Prof Werder (Twitter admin and hosting)
- Kyro Wolf (Art, branding and design)
- Jhee (art)
- Volky (NOMO dev / big brain)
We have also kept public records of every single retro round we have completed for team compensation to date (to our knowledge we are the only Nouns-funded project to have provided this level of operational transparency). Nouners are welcome to review the document here.
5) Proposed Budget:
Monthly expenditures August-Present: Team Comp and misc operations: 38 ETH Contest Prizes, art commissions, community project grants: 12 ETH (We continued operations through January as a bonus)
New Budget: Monthly Team Compensation Budget: 42 ETH Monthly contest Prizes, community art commissions, community project grants: 11.17 ETH
Total Ask Per Month = 53.17 X 6 Month term = 319 ETH (Before Sustainability Efforts, See Below.)
6) Sustainability Strategy
There has been some discussion in the DAO recently about the self-sustainablity of Nouns-funded projects. Notably, Nounder 4156 mentions here on Twitter that many beloved Nounish projects could be endangered in the medium-to-long term if they don't think seriously about a path to sustainability.
That is why at TNS, we are implementing a 2-pronged strategy to gradually reduce our dependence on DAO funding, while continuing to bring value to the DAO and the community at large. In addition to reasonable DAO funding for provision of Community-As-A-Service and growing media distribution, we will also try:
- Crypto-Native experiments in self-funding; and
- Traditional Media experiments in self-funding.
To reduce our total ask of the DAO, we are challenging ourselves to produce 50 ETH of revenue through a combination of a) NOMO Nouns daily edition mints, b) a TNS Nouns Fork using Builder DAO that celebrates talented artists in our community, and c) tiered sponsorship opportunities of our media channels.
A) NOMO NOUNS: A TNS-Developed Addition to the FOMO Experience
NOMO NOUNS is a gamified daily edition mint, bootstrapped and developed in-house by TNS (shout out Volky.eth.) It kicks off directly after FOMO Nouns and allows our audience on Noun O' Clock LIVE to pick one Noun that got passed over during FOMO (and is soon to be NO MO'), and save it from eternal blockchain purgatory by clicking like mad.
Once the game is over (about 60 seconds), the winning NOMO Noun is minted as a 24H open edition that is very affordable, but goes up in price every 15 minutes thereafter. So far in the first 6 weeks of beta, the feedback from our community has been overwhelmingly positive. People love the game, and have been minting the NOMOs even though we haven't fully developed either the game or the usefulness of the NFTs yet (it's currently mostly just for fun and provenance.)
We have raised over 7 ETH from NOMO so far, and all proceeds have gone directly to the TNS treasury (which allowed us to operate for a bonus month in January.)
Additionally, our TNS partner dev Volky is currently working on several improvements to the game and interface, and NOMO V2 will be released very soon. Our vision is for NOMO to become an efficient single landing page for listeners of Noun O' Clock LIVE and beyond, and we're excited to roll out new features soon to that end. In the meantime, just keep on clickin'!
B) TNS DAO
In the next 30-45 days, we plan to launch a TNS DAO by forking Nouns using Nouns Builder. We have some exciting plans in motion to partner with and empower some of the incredible artists in our TNS community. We also have novel plans to integrate NOMO Nouns owners into the structure of the DAO, and ultimately envision a future in the medium-term where auction proceeds can net out the cost of much of our contest prizes and community project grants, in a true virtuous cycle of art and proliferation.
C) Sponsorships
We are currently in discussions with several crypto-native organizations about potential secondary sponsorships (after Nouns DAO) of our Twitter Spaces, as well as video content on our YT and TikTok. We are working to balance the traditional media model with a more crypto-native approach to sponsorship, and with any confirmed partner collaborations, we will ensure that both the partner and our audience benefit mutually and safely.
With the three initiatives above, we believe we can meet our goal of raising 50 ETH in revenue over a 6 month period, and we are excited both for the challenge, and to set an example in the DAO as a project seeking paths to semi-self-reliance.
7) The Revised Ask
Projected 6 Month Operations Budget of 319 ETH, minus 50 ETH of targeted TNS revenue = 269 ETH Total Ask
8) Conclusion
To sum it all up, The Noun Square is a growing media hub and onboarding/educational platform for Nouns DAO and the Nouniverse. We aim to bring value to existing and new people through many impactful initiatives, as outlined in this proposal, and we will continue to iterate and improve daily (the beauty of creating nounish media every single day.)
The detailed metrics and information in this prop are important and demonstrate the tangible value that TNS brings to the broader Nouns community. But numbers and details can also be overwhelming in a world of information overload. Numbers and details don’t tell the whole story. We hope that this prop and the discussion around the funding and sustainability of TNS will allow you to see and hear the story of what we’ve been able to build alongside our audience: an onboarding hub for the Nouniverse, and a cc0 media company, kickstarted by Nouns.
What ESPN’s Sportscenter is to most sports fans, that’s the role TNS is playing for many currently in their Nounish journey. And it will continue to hold that place as the next 1000 come into the Nouniverse, and the 1000 after that. This prop can’t properly tell the stories of many artists who went from relative obscurity to sustainable work thanks to their onboarding to Nouns. The prop can’t tell of the 50 builders who were either ushered into Prop House victories for the first time, or brought onto the TNS team as their first chance to work in web 3, or who found people to create and build alongside in a nounish subdao, thanks to TNS.
It can't tell how TNS was a springboard to new ventures in the Nouniverse. How we were a shot of energy into the proliferation stars of NounsDAO Brazil, or Africa. And the prop can’t tell the story of 100+ who have found their footing in web3, found their tribe in the Nouniverse, and will find themselves on a Nounish web3 journey for years to come.
These people are the next stars of the Nouniverse. They are future Nouners, too. And to be honest, they are the real stars of TNS. This prop can’t tell all those stories. For those who are not a part of the TNS orbit, we hope the discussion of this prop during the on-chain period allows you to hear that human story alongside the numbers and the metrics, so that you get a feel for the full picture of the value of TNS to the Nouniverse.
Thank you for your time!
9) A Special Edition TNS X Messhup Mint
Upon successful execution of this proposal, "The Meta-Square," a special TNS-inspired edition by Messhup, will be minted by the TNS Deployer to mark the occasion and at the same time offer a beautiful collectible piece to all our supporters (and detractors?)
This mint will be open for 5 days after execution of the Prop (if passed) at a cost of 0.0420 ETH each (for the culture.) Half the proceeds will go to TNS, half will be returned to the DAO.
10) The Transactions & Multisig
- One transaction of 269 ETH to the TNS Multisig (3/5), consisting of trusted community members who have been serving on said MS since August/2022: Toady Hawk, Noun 142, Benbodhi, SuperTightWoody & Maty.eth.
- One transaction which will mint Messhup's "The Meta-Square" as a Timed Open Edition on Zora upon execution of the Prop.
