GM 43.1: gm.studio funding for 2 months

Author:

Willyham & DeFi Beats

Proposal date:

November 16 2022

Summary:

This proposal aims to cover funding for the studio from December 1st to January 31st

Incorporation Changes

We will request funding as normal whilst the DAO/studio incorporation progress is on-going. The vote for that issue may superceed this one, in which case the funding here would not be needed if alternative arrangements were made.

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

It is very difficult to estimate how much work we’ll need to do over the coming months. To keep things simple, we will assume that our costs will be similar to previous funding cycles, up until the the incorporation of the studio. This is effectively the minimum that we can spend to ensure that we’re able to maintain the existing studio product.

However, 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

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

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