GM 52.1: gm.studio funding for 2 months

Author:

Willyham & DeFi Beats

Proposal date:

February 2 2023

Summary:

This proposal aims to cover funding for the studio from February - March.

A note on things in flux.

The DAO is currently pursuing legal advice on how to best incorporate the studio as a company. Whilst this is still in flux, we are anticipating a change where all proceeds from studio efforts (e.g. primary/secondary revenue from NFT sales) would go to the studio company. We’d then deduct costs and donate the profits to the DAO to be used for other projects on a regular cadence.

If we do end up with that structure, this proposal will most likely be superseded by those changes, and we’ll clarify and vote on those changes where necessary. When reading this proposal, please interpret the funding requested as:

1. The maximum that the DAO will allocate to the studio if nothing changes
2. and the minimum that the studio is likely to spend if things do change.

Expect that we’ll use this same proposal in 2 months time to continue funding in the same manner.

Funding cadence

The proposal covers 2 months of costs, but we will not request the total funds in one transaction. In order to stay flexible, we will compute our costs and request that money from the DAO on a monthly basis. This allows us to have more flexibility and to only ask for money that we need. For example, in the event of us lowering the amount of work that we will do, the DAO will retain the excess funds.

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.

Another update is that we have relatively little contract work to do, so we are replacing the majority of those hours with design time.

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We will maintain our existing rates for time spent:

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

We’ll maintain the existing core team. As a guideline, these are the hours that we have previously allocated:

• Willyham (senior) : 20 hours/week = 80 hours = 10,000 USDC
• Bhosh (senior): 10 hours/week = 40 hours = 5,000 USDC
• Swillis (senior): 5 hours/week = 20 hours = 2,500 USDC
• cxkoda(senior): = 1 hours/week = 5 hours = 500 USDC

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