ProposalsProposal 584
ProposalsProposal 584
For the last 8 months we have broadcast nounishness across the internet, to millions. Creativity, curiosity, vulnerability, absurdity, playfulness. These values are central to our brand, and we think they are essential in addressing a larger problem.
In an online landscape where creators must compete desperately for attention they ultimately satisfy algorithms, not audiences. And when stories prioritize being seen over everything else, the audience is left starved of substance. We don't want to contribute to this damaging design.
Nounish represents more than just an appeal to attention. We must activate our audience's curiosity. We need to speak to the part of them that is courageous and inventive and inspired - every Nounish story should be a trojan horse designed to wreak wholesome havoc online.
Nounish needs to do all of this to prove that a massive social media brand can be positive-sum; an ambitious step towards an even greater vision: to re-humanise the internet through creativity.
This long-term vision requires us to:
These are the pillars that underpin this proposal.
We are Nounish. A team of 12 who transformed our commercial production company, Pixel, to focus full-time on Nouns. We are led by Goldy & 142 - two Nouners and early community members.
Nounish has been funded four times by Nouns DAO (pilot, season 1, season 2, season 3). At first, we represented a dedicated marketing studio for the DAO, producing videos about Nouns-funded projects, including the 11 minute explainer on nouns.wtf, along with videos about Gnars, Free Glasses for Kids, Mucho Love, Esports and more.
We then set out to expand our viewership, turning the camera back on ourselves with the goal of building our own audience - a paradigm shift that cannot be overstated.
It was a moment where a highly skilled team - a team that spent 15 years adhering to the restrictive guidelines of advertising - were set free. We weren't given the keys to a kingdom, we were given the chance to build our own.
And we were ready.
We've grown our followership by almost 7x from 80K to 540K, and are growing at about 5K per day. This includes 120K subscribers on YouTube, 260K on Instagram, and 110K on TikTok. All of our growth is organic.
Our ambitious goal from proposal 413 was to 10x our followership, a target we're projected to hit by the end of August.
After finding product-market fit with Three Artists, we have experimented with new ideas that have garnered millions of views and significant engagement. We followed up Three Artists with two back-to-back bangers: Drawn Apart and Drawn Together, both of which are growing even faster than Three Artists.
Whilst Three Artists (a 5-hour art challenge) requires one day to shoot an episode, our newer experiments have allowed for shooting multiple - our most recent shoot saw us capture 14 episodes across two days.
We’ve continued to refine processes in all phases of production, allowing us to double the speed of finishing episodes, and we've experimented with XL edits and longer-form YouTube releases.
We are constantly improving, optimising and learning.
We’ve translated our top performing videos and our new spanish language instagram and tiktok channels are growing fast. We are now warming up our portuguese language accounts, and will then be creating youtube channels for both languages. Global impact is the goal.
Our gifs are getting used more and more, including by our Instagram community. We've even come across people who discover our videos for the first time and recognise the noggles from the gifs. Also, we just crossed 2.5 billion views on Giphy (and 1.1 million shares on Tenor), which we understand sounds like a fictitious stat.
We’ve created new connections to begin exploring potential partnerships, including relationships with Adobe, Wacom and Magma. After watching our Nouns Explainer, Adobe were fascinated by the story behind Nouns & Nounish and discussed Nounish featuring as a speaker at Adobe Max.
Our audience can see the aspirational quality of our work, and feel the aspirational quality of our culture.
From wanting to buy prints of the artworks created on our shows, to admiring the quality of the videos themselves, to appreciating the Nounish values that underscore our storytelling. Though Three Artists may be framed as an art 'competition', nobody wins or loses. It's not the point. It's not Nounish - and our audience get it.
We’re ready to make more impact. We'll continue making hits that stand out in their production value and their cultural value. Over time noggles will make both an aesthetic and emotional imprint.
Although most of our work up until this point has been short-form content, we have always had a strong instinct that long-form is where we were heading.
Getting traction on YouTube, specifically with long-form storytelling, is the most difficult. And there's a reason for that - it's the most rewarding. Longer-form stories are key to both nourishment and monetisation.
We've set ourselves up with 120K YouTube subscribers, and we've run multiple long-form experiments to make sure we can apply all of our learnings moving forward. A longer runway will be the linchpin that allows us achieve our long-form ambitions.
Projected to hit 800K by the end of August, across our platforms, our follower goal will now shift to focus on YouTube, where we aim to get 1 million subscribers over the next 2 years.
We'll continue to uplift and inspire our current audience of artists, whilst working on what it means to reignite creativity and curiosity more generally. That is to say, 'curious creatives' are not limited to a specific mode of self-expression. It's the value of self-expression that they are connected by.
We want to appeal to the creativity and curiosity in everyone, and begin workshopping new ideas that can capture an even greater audience.
The north star of proposal 413 was growth, so we made the strategic decision to pilot ideas in the 60-90 second range (allowing us to hit all major short-form platforms). Having said this, we definitely felt the limitations of these time constraints - as did our audience.
Increasing the length of our stories on YouTube will allow us to nourish our audience, because it's where people go for nourishment. This is in stark contrast to the sensation of the short-form-doomscroll.
Something that will help us move quickly to maximise nourishment is that, over the last few months, we chose to capture all episodes of Three Artists, Drawn Together and Drawn Apart for short-form and long-form releases (vertical and horizontal). This means we'll be able to maintain our short-form platforms, whilst giving us the best chance to build long-form momentum immediately. Our fans will be very happy.
After solidifying our values and establishing a manifesto, it became clear that Nounish needs to stop thinking of our fans as followers, and start treating them as community members. If we want to re-humanise the internet, we must start by humanising our followership.
Building a community will be a unique challenge for us. We will be exploring all avenues from more meaningful communication with our audience (giving people time is one of the first tools we have been using to humanise our viewers), giving them creative challenges, studio livestreams, creative feedback sessions, coordinating philanthropic group projects and organising events that allow us to connect in person.
Fostering a sense of community and connection is something we've already been doing in our immediate orbit. Every artist we work with is lit up by Nounish, so our next step is to do everything we can to beam this same energy out to millions.
All of these factors will be instrumental in achieving sustainability.
We are asking for 18 months of runway to reach sustainability.
We are going to use our same approach of prototyping, experimenting, learning and iterating, to figure out what model(s) of revenue work for us and align with our vision.
Some of the experiments we're considering are:
We ran a profitable business and it lacked meaning. We ran an unprofitable venture and found meaning. Now we need to do both.
We are asking for 1.54M USDC to give us an 18 month runway to reach sustainability. This is a 50% lower run-rate from the last proposal.
Salaries (team of 12) – $1,121,000
Operating Expenses – $160,200
Production Expenses – $144,000
Biz Dev – $100,000
Content Localisation – $18,000
Total – $1,543,200
*rent, utilities & maintenance, insurance, accounting, legal, consumables, software, equipment etc.
Transactions:
We plan to be Nounish forever. But we understand there may be a concern around maintaining long term alignment between sustainable businesses and Nouns.
We don’t see this as a risk for us specifically, given Nouns is integrated deeply in both our content and our branding - Nouns is in our name, the noggles are our brand - but it feels like a healthy discussion we (and all proposers aiming for self-sustainability) should have.
The ambition to make a massive Nounish-shaped mark on the culture of social media, and the internet more broadly, is big. It's actually too big for us to fully comprehend. But we need to take a big swing, and use all of our storytelling skills to make a contribution.
Humans can be so creative, so inspiring and so powerful when they feel connected. If we can build a movement that understands we are all worth being curious about, then Nounish and Nouns will win.
For the last 8 months we have broadcast nounishness across the internet, to millions. Creativity, curiosity, vulnerability, absurdity, playfulness. These values are central to our brand, and we think they are essential in addressing a larger problem.
In an online landscape where creators must compete desperately for attention they ultimately satisfy algorithms, not audiences. And when stories prioritize being seen over everything else, the audience is left starved of substance. We don't want to contribute to this damaging design.
Nounish represents more than just an appeal to attention. We must activate our audience's curiosity. We need to speak to the part of them that is courageous and inventive and inspired - every Nounish story should be a trojan horse designed to wreak wholesome havoc online.
Nounish needs to do all of this to prove that a massive social media brand can be positive-sum; an ambitious step towards an even greater vision: to re-humanise the internet through creativity.
This long-term vision requires us to:
These are the pillars that underpin this proposal.
We are Nounish. A team of 12 who transformed our commercial production company, Pixel, to focus full-time on Nouns. We are led by Goldy & 142 - two Nouners and early community members.
Nounish has been funded four times by Nouns DAO (pilot, season 1, season 2, season 3). At first, we represented a dedicated marketing studio for the DAO, producing videos about Nouns-funded projects, including the 11 minute explainer on nouns.wtf, along with videos about Gnars, Free Glasses for Kids, Mucho Love, Esports and more.
We then set out to expand our viewership, turning the camera back on ourselves with the goal of building our own audience - a paradigm shift that cannot be overstated.
It was a moment where a highly skilled team - a team that spent 15 years adhering to the restrictive guidelines of advertising - were set free. We weren't given the keys to a kingdom, we were given the chance to build our own.
And we were ready.
We've grown our followership by almost 7x from 80K to 540K, and are growing at about 5K per day. This includes 120K subscribers on YouTube, 260K on Instagram, and 110K on TikTok. All of our growth is organic.
Our ambitious goal from proposal 413 was to 10x our followership, a target we're projected to hit by the end of August.
After finding product-market fit with Three Artists, we have experimented with new ideas that have garnered millions of views and significant engagement. We followed up Three Artists with two back-to-back bangers: Drawn Apart and Drawn Together, both of which are growing even faster than Three Artists.
Whilst Three Artists (a 5-hour art challenge) requires one day to shoot an episode, our newer experiments have allowed for shooting multiple - our most recent shoot saw us capture 14 episodes across two days.
We’ve continued to refine processes in all phases of production, allowing us to double the speed of finishing episodes, and we've experimented with XL edits and longer-form YouTube releases.
We are constantly improving, optimising and learning.
We’ve translated our top performing videos and our new spanish language instagram and tiktok channels are growing fast. We are now warming up our portuguese language accounts, and will then be creating youtube channels for both languages. Global impact is the goal.
Our gifs are getting used more and more, including by our Instagram community. We've even come across people who discover our videos for the first time and recognise the noggles from the gifs. Also, we just crossed 2.5 billion views on Giphy (and 1.1 million shares on Tenor), which we understand sounds like a fictitious stat.
We’ve created new connections to begin exploring potential partnerships, including relationships with Adobe, Wacom and Magma. After watching our Nouns Explainer, Adobe were fascinated by the story behind Nouns & Nounish and discussed Nounish featuring as a speaker at Adobe Max.
Our audience can see the aspirational quality of our work, and feel the aspirational quality of our culture.
From wanting to buy prints of the artworks created on our shows, to admiring the quality of the videos themselves, to appreciating the Nounish values that underscore our storytelling. Though Three Artists may be framed as an art 'competition', nobody wins or loses. It's not the point. It's not Nounish - and our audience get it.
We’re ready to make more impact. We'll continue making hits that stand out in their production value and their cultural value. Over time noggles will make both an aesthetic and emotional imprint.
Although most of our work up until this point has been short-form content, we have always had a strong instinct that long-form is where we were heading.
Getting traction on YouTube, specifically with long-form storytelling, is the most difficult. And there's a reason for that - it's the most rewarding. Longer-form stories are key to both nourishment and monetisation.
We've set ourselves up with 120K YouTube subscribers, and we've run multiple long-form experiments to make sure we can apply all of our learnings moving forward. A longer runway will be the linchpin that allows us achieve our long-form ambitions.
Projected to hit 800K by the end of August, across our platforms, our follower goal will now shift to focus on YouTube, where we aim to get 1 million subscribers over the next 2 years.
We'll continue to uplift and inspire our current audience of artists, whilst working on what it means to reignite creativity and curiosity more generally. That is to say, 'curious creatives' are not limited to a specific mode of self-expression. It's the value of self-expression that they are connected by.
We want to appeal to the creativity and curiosity in everyone, and begin workshopping new ideas that can capture an even greater audience.
The north star of proposal 413 was growth, so we made the strategic decision to pilot ideas in the 60-90 second range (allowing us to hit all major short-form platforms). Having said this, we definitely felt the limitations of these time constraints - as did our audience.
Increasing the length of our stories on YouTube will allow us to nourish our audience, because it's where people go for nourishment. This is in stark contrast to the sensation of the short-form-doomscroll.
Something that will help us move quickly to maximise nourishment is that, over the last few months, we chose to capture all episodes of Three Artists, Drawn Together and Drawn Apart for short-form and long-form releases (vertical and horizontal). This means we'll be able to maintain our short-form platforms, whilst giving us the best chance to build long-form momentum immediately. Our fans will be very happy.
After solidifying our values and establishing a manifesto, it became clear that Nounish needs to stop thinking of our fans as followers, and start treating them as community members. If we want to re-humanise the internet, we must start by humanising our followership.
Building a community will be a unique challenge for us. We will be exploring all avenues from more meaningful communication with our audience (giving people time is one of the first tools we have been using to humanise our viewers), giving them creative challenges, studio livestreams, creative feedback sessions, coordinating philanthropic group projects and organising events that allow us to connect in person.
Fostering a sense of community and connection is something we've already been doing in our immediate orbit. Every artist we work with is lit up by Nounish, so our next step is to do everything we can to beam this same energy out to millions.
All of these factors will be instrumental in achieving sustainability.
We are asking for 18 months of runway to reach sustainability.
We are going to use our same approach of prototyping, experimenting, learning and iterating, to figure out what model(s) of revenue work for us and align with our vision.
Some of the experiments we're considering are:
We ran a profitable business and it lacked meaning. We ran an unprofitable venture and found meaning. Now we need to do both.
We are asking for 1.54M USDC to give us an 18 month runway to reach sustainability. This is a 50% lower run-rate from the last proposal.
Salaries (team of 12) – $1,121,000
Operating Expenses – $160,200
Production Expenses – $144,000
Biz Dev – $100,000
Content Localisation – $18,000
Total – $1,543,200
*rent, utilities & maintenance, insurance, accounting, legal, consumables, software, equipment etc.
Transactions:
We plan to be Nounish forever. But we understand there may be a concern around maintaining long term alignment between sustainable businesses and Nouns.
We don’t see this as a risk for us specifically, given Nouns is integrated deeply in both our content and our branding - Nouns is in our name, the noggles are our brand - but it feels like a healthy discussion we (and all proposers aiming for self-sustainability) should have.
The ambition to make a massive Nounish-shaped mark on the culture of social media, and the internet more broadly, is big. It's actually too big for us to fully comprehend. But we need to take a big swing, and use all of our storytelling skills to make a contribution.
Humans can be so creative, so inspiring and so powerful when they feel connected. If we can build a movement that understands we are all worth being curious about, then Nounish and Nouns will win.