Vision & Objectives for PrimeRating
TldR:
- Updated vision & objectives
- New key results for Q3 & 4
- This is not final, pls add your inputs into the comments
Introduction
In May 2022, the PrimeRating team met in the Metahub embassy in Lisbon (most for the first time). During this retreat, the team revamped the vision and mission of PrimeRating, discussed goals and priorities, and aligned on how to best coordinate to efficiently tackle the next development cycle.
For instance, in the first session, the team came together to agree on the “Why”. Why are we here and what motivates us to contribute to Prime Rating? The exercise was not targeted to define a goal that can be achieved in the next 6 months, but to find agreement on an inspiring long term ideal that we strive towards.
After an insightful brainstorming session, some inspiring reasons for why we want PrimeRating to thrive came up, the main ones are summarised below:
- to provide orientation through a holistic and comparable overview
- to create insights and facilitate sense making - light beacons in the dark forest
- to help decrease complexity and improve information aggregation for lower barriers to enter the space
- to counteract bad actors and misinformation
- because there is a lack of standards and a narrow perspective of value (get rich fast)
Essentially, what kept coming up was our desire to enable true transparency, to help us and others navigate the space more safely and more consciously. Essentially we agreed that the “why” is best summarised as follows:
To foster transparency and objective decision making in Web3.
Secondly, the team went on to also find a mission statement, to answer the question on how do we achieve the vision, which is:
Enable community-driven research by providing a permissionless framework
In other words, we aim to build a well functioning (sub-)DAO as the vehicle to empower a community of analysts and researchers, by providing the right environment and applying web3 tools best suited for this purpose.
In combination, the two statements encompass the problem we want to solve and our approach to achieve it on a high level. The intention behind this exercise was to align on a shared goal and to come up with an inspiring and easy to communicate message.
However, agreeing on our vision was only the first session and many more followed. Most importantly, the topic of how to achieve financial sustainability strongly influenced most of the discussions. You will also see this topic becoming more prominent in the next sections.
Northstars & Objectives
As done at the beginning of this year in this post northstars and milestones we want to provide orientation by updating these objectives.
In this previous post, the main objectives were summarised as (1) decentralise PrimeRating, (2) Community Growth, (3) Product improvement & additional offerings, and (4) financial self-sustainability.
At the core these objectives don’t change, however, we are going to adapt them slightly to accommodate most recent developments, discussions and future plans. The updated strategic objectives are as follows:
- High Quality Services & Products (prev. Product improvement & additional offerings)
- Financial Sustainability (no changes)
- Community Health & Growth (prev. Community Growth)
- Efficient and empowered DAO (prev. Decentralize PrimeRating)
Next we’re going to break down these high-level targets into more tangible objectives and measurable results. This list is by no means exclusive and can be adjusted as we learn more. However, for now we do believe that putting focus onto these topics in the coming months is the best way forward.
1. High Quality Services & Products
In a space where most information is public and code open source, the value of data lies in its curation, sense making and how you apply it in the right context. Whether it’s writing a report, conducting research for RoD, improving the report template, or managing the rating API, we strive to create the best quality. This requires us to become experts at what we do, which is a key factor to build trust and strong reputation.
1.1 Updated Objectives for Q3 & 4
Obj. 1: Increase our product & service quality to attract users
Obj. 2: Improve BD efforts, service support & infrastructure for RoD & API
Obj. 3: Increase internal expertise about specific fields within Web3
1.2 Key Results
- Build basic infrastructure for RoD & API service (update website, docs & support channel)
- Increase BD efforts for RoD & API:
- establish BD community-group incl. org structure, targets and incentives
- create CRM to plan, track & report on activities
- improve marketing material (create material to simply communicate our offerings)
- establish cohesive go-to-market strategy, incl. pricing
- Explore PMF for at least 3 use cases of RoD (e.g. asset listing DD, pre-launch DD, research for angels) and improve service upon feedback
- Establish a working group focusing on on-chain metrics & automation, have at least 10 questions / metrics automated for better data access and consistency
- Ensure report updates so that the average rating is not older than one quarter
- Establish expert groups/guilds for better informed products (e.g. DEX guild, gaming, lending, etc.)
2. Financial Sustainability
Financial sustainability is the second backbone of a thriving community. As we all know, expertise is costly and in an ecosystem full of opportunities - where joining a new DAO is only one Discord server away - it is especially difficult to retain talent and grow a community of experts. Having the financial strength to keep the best contributors in our ranks is thus a must-have. Strong partnerships can also be a big value-add, hence we also aim to increase our resource through mutually beneficial partnership agreements.
It’s also important to highlight that we aim to achieve financial sustainability and independence, by creating income streams based on our services and the expertise we build together. In other words, we aim to become financially independent from grants or VC’s, by creating value-adding services.
2.1 Updated Objectives for Q3 & 4
Obj. 1: Achieve financial independence from PrimeDAO, grants, or other “one-time investments”
Obj. 2: Establish sustainable income streams
Obj. 3: Establish partnerships with relevant entities to support the success of PrimeRating
2.2 Key Results
- Get at least 10 unique RoD users, 5 of which are recurring users
- Have at least 5 API implementations with relevant partners
- Create at least 10 commissioned pre-launch reports
- Get 3-5 event sponsorships to support our permissionless rating contests
- Further explore demand for RoD and expand market research to similar services
- Define & confirm PMF for at least 2 services by the end of Q3
3 Community Health & Growth
A thriving community of analysts, researchers, detectives, data hunters and of course all the supporting functions are the live blood of PrimeRating. We aim to foster healthy growth by putting emphasis on onboarding and upskilling, to increase our research muscles. Experience and expertise lead to high quality. Hence, we aim to support our analysts in their learning towards becoming experts and consequently we become a leading authority in the areas we cover.
3.1 Updated Objectives for Q3 & 4
Obj. 1: Increase learning opportunities & data access
Obj. 2: Attract new talents & partnerships to elevate our capabilities
Obj. 3: Retain the best analysts in our ecosystem and support their learning & upskilling
3.2 Key Results
- Conduct at least 10 learning sessions for the community (can be in partnership with other reputational entities)
- Enable more access points to information & data for our community (e.g. Nansen, Dune dashboards, internal proprietary DB, etc.)
- increase internal analytics capabilities by attracting contributors with respective skills (e.g. have one Dune wizard join our ranks to support customized dashboards)
- Partner with at least 3 entities for access to additional resources and connectedness within the ecosystem
- Grow the community to at least 50 active analysts, of which at least 25 with 100+ RXP
- Create additional learning material for analysts of all levels (video, articles, webinars)
4 Efficient and empowered DAO
The DAO is the vehicle that empowers the community to grow sustainably and to increase their expertise through co-learning, experience sharing and by providing a safe space to collaboratively improve and become better at what we do. While the DAO needs to be empowering, it also needs to be managed efficiently in terms of resources and focus. Specifically in terms of financial and human resources (both scares). It’s crucial that we put the right consensus and decision making processes in place, to help us remain on track. Further, to increase the speed and agility necessary to steer the DAO, these processes must find the right balance between being as efficient as possible while at the same time as inclusive as needed.
4.1 Updated Objectives for Q3 & 4
Obj. 1: Improve governance processes to be more inclusive where deemed beneficial
Obj. 2: Create & improve frameworks and rules to encourage members to interact and shape Prime Rating
Obj. 3 Improve & automate internal processes for report writing/submission & other related processes
4.2 Key Results
- Increase impact of governance into more areas of the DAO (besides RAP/RUP process). Have an established governance process for at least 2 additional areas, outside of ratings (e.g. BD, finance & reporting, or marketing)
- Increase community autonomy and enable independent working groups/guilds. Set up at least 3 guilds for major areas of priority within the DAO (i.e. BD & growth, community health & growth and product guild)
- Define requirements and create roadmap for spin-off PrimeRating from PrimeDAO
- Broaden contributor involvement by 50%, by improving structures for contributions. To foster community growth outside the analyst guild and support the core team via meaningful contributions supporting our core mission and objectives
- Improve internal coordination - within core team and between contributors/community - by applying best suited methods & tools. Have at least 10 regular processes streamlines, i.e. fully described, efficiently structured and assigned ownership (e.g. monthly rewards, budgeting, objective and key result setting & reporting, bounty setting & rewarding, etc.).
Conclusion
This is the updated outline of our vision and mission for Prime Rating; in fact, one can also display the focus areas highlighted above in circular flywheel, whereby each focus point is a prerequisite of the next.
Given the current market situation and the feedback received from other PrimeDAO stewards, we aim to put specific focus on the financial aspect and thus our products & services in the coming months. We do believe that we need to solve this piece of the puzzle before putting more emphasis on other areas.
We also aim to collect feedback from everyone contributing to PrimeDAO and PrimeRating. If you have any feedback, concerns, or suggestions, please raise them in the comments.
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