GM 66.1 : gm.studio funding for April

Author:

Willyham & DeFi Beats

Proposal date:

May 14 2023

Summary:

This proposal aims to cover funding for the studio for the month of April

A note on things in flux.

The DAO is very close to incorporating the studio as a company. Whilst we wait to finalize the arrangement we need to fund our hard working devs for the month of April.

Core team salaries

We have recently undertaken a significant amount of work with the latest drops to support delegation, new phases (i.e. collector phase), increased anti-bot work, and new design features for the website. We will continue to develop many of these things, as well as work to improve the website drastically going forwards with the help of a professional designer (Swillis). To account for the realities of the time being spent, this proposal doubles the number of paid hours for Willyham.

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💡 We ask that the DAO understands that we may need some flexibility in how we allocate money and spend time. For that reason, we continue to outline rates and expected hours, but reserve the right to allocate those hours internally at Willyham’s discretion. For example, we may need more web based work rather than contract work for a given month, so we’d allocate more hours for the web engineers.

We will maintain our existing rates for time spent:

• Senior Developer = $125/hr
• Non-senior Developer = $65/hr

Other costs

In practice we have found that we sometimes need to bring other people in to help with specific tasks. Whilst we can’t predict these too far in advance, we’d like to reserve the right to pay up to $2500/month for outside help. This is equivalent to 5 hours/week of a senior engineer or ~10 hours/week for a less senior engineer. If there was no need for using this time in a specific month, we would not include it in the payment between the dao and the studio wallets.

Infrastructure costs

Funding for infrastructure is variable and slightly complex. As we use many tools which all have different billing cycles, it’s quite hard to get an exact amount that we’ll need in advance. For this reason I propose that we have a maximum allocation of $2000 and a minimum allocation of $1000. We’ll send $1000 month to our infrastructure credit card to cover existing spending. If our costs change substantially, we are able to request up to $1000 more per month without another proposal.

Promotion, Incentive schemes and other costs

In the past we have used contractors to produce promotional materials such as videos for marketing our releases. We expect this to continue and would like to reserve up to $2000/month to fund this.

We anticipate a month cost for carbon offsetting of around $250.

We will continue our tradition of allocating 0.5 Eth to each core team member who is present for the day of the drop. In practice we have found that a release requires us to be online consistently for the duration of the drop (and afterwards), which can be ~10-12 hours of time. Allocating 0.5 Eth is significantly cheaper than paying for those hours.

Additionally, we wish to allocate some potential funds towards incentive schemes to attract artists to the platform. For example, we may want to pay a referral bonus to anyone who introduces us to an artist that has a collection accepted by our curation panel. There may also be other mechanisms which we choose to use and these would be at the core team’s discretion. We are requesting a maximum of $1000/m for this.

Summary of spend

As the spending is slightly flexible. we will outline the overall minimum and maximum spend. In reality we are likely to always have something in between.

Sponsors:

Defi Beats, Willyham