Proposal Purpose: It has been brought up and discussed on numerous occasions that GRAPE provides tools to partner projects to gate their servers without receiving any value in return. This proposal will bring to the table a potential way to drive value from partner projects without seeking explicit monetary compensation in return.
Proposal Overview: As a part of GRAPE integration to partner servers, we create a GRAPE category and child channels within partner servers. I propose we add another channel within the GRAPE category where we can publish the content created by the GRAPE community on an almost daily basis. This can be WF, Barndog, ME, GRAPEvine, incubation and mint announcements and anything else that we feel deserves a wider public eye.
While we might not receive USDC or SOL in return, this would at the very least allow us to use our partnerships to reach a wider audience for the content thatās being created. My hypothesis is that this will expose more people to GRAPEās core proposition and help us position us as a project thatās more than just a server gating tool. Over time people will realise that GRAPE has the most alpha of any Solana related server/community out there, and look to become holders to reap the benefits GRAPE memberships offer.
My understanding is that we will need the partner channels to share webhooks to these newly created channels that weāll use on our side to push content. A basic tool will be needed that will aggregate all the webhooks and push content to all the channels from a single interface.
On the governance side, we will have to decide who gets to have access to this tool for content publishing on the GRAPE side. Open to community comments here.
Stakeholders:
Community and content creators (WF, Barndog, ME, Durden++)
Development team
Costs/Resource Requirements
I believe the main resource requirement for this implementation would be the development hours needed to build this tool. The content is already being created and published and a lot of effort is going into it as is.
I am not aware of the bandwidth available to the GRAPE development team but the Goat IT dev team is willing to utilize some of the available bandwidth to develop a basic tool and share the build with the GRAPE team for implementation. This is of course subject to the proposal successfully going through the community vote.
Interesting idea! I think we would need to make clear that Grape has more to offer in its server than only the things posted in those channels. Otherwise, people will think thatās all there is and they have no reason to join Grape. Any thoughts on how to accomplish that?
I think that will go down to how well we can communicate and share successful case studies from the past once we have space to share our content. IMO we will need to take a step by step approach here: create awareness > bring them into server > basic membership > upgrade membership > join DAO and create value.
We may need a person or group of members coordinating the content that will be pushed to these servers. I think it can be a good idea. But it should not be simply a content dump on a channel. From the perspective of a discord member of another project I think this might just end up being confusing and not really insightful.
Also the more I think about it, I am not too sure on the keenness of other projects to allow us to try to āpoachā their users. Maybe I am wrong though. Thinking of how this can be pushed from the partnersā side is pivotal.
Maybe having a channel with a single post on Grape might actually be the simpler and most efficient idea.
I totally agree on this but that said, we are not like any other project trying to poach members for a mint. We are already providing a free of cost solution and a great one at that. We are looking to our partners to help us get a wider reach for our content in return - at least for a start. Also many servers already have separate shilling spaces for āalphaā e.g. Turtles, Monke servers picking Dragons ahead of everyone else.
We are not going to create a content dump if we publish high quality posts couple of days a week. Think WF, ME, Barndog going live with livestream/AMAs etc. 50 partner servers sending 5 members each to our content - assuming no overlap - is 250 incremental eyeballs. Just my 2 grapes.
Pros: Grape gets dedicated space to push messaging into other servers. This theoretically converts into more members
Cons: Itās like adding ads into your product
I really like this idea ā and would want to explore this more AFTER we have successfully articulated and updated our membership benefits in a better way
Definitely an idea that needs to be explored further!
My initial thoughts were, that we should outline some different versions of this with their respective pros and cons, cause there are things that need to be considered and shouldnāt be underestimated. E.g. if we open channels on partner servers, we not only need people to manage what will be posted there, we need to be aware that people will have questions and will also ask for help. This means anything more than an announcement channel needs active moderation and someone who is available.
I did some support over at GenesysGo for the last few days and there are constant questions regarding grape access. So if we have a channel on potentially every partner server, we need to be aware of this, since if we neglect questions there, it will reflect badly on the project itself. We could surely do an arrangement with the server owners but for this basic stuff but the channels need to be monitored imo.
Would asking these partners to hold a minimum amount of GRAPE for our services be a solution ? Maybe not retroactively, but new onboarded projects. It would seem fair to me.
Iāve seen this idea floated in other contexts too, but itās never really made sense to me. All it effectively does is create a temporary price appreciation in GRAPE (as long as they hold it). Thereās an analogy here to protocol owned liquidity (POL). Having them hold GRAPE is like liquidity mining - weāre only renting price appreciation (in the case of liquidity mining, liquidity). The equivalent for POL in this analogy would be receiving a payment - a non-reversible, non-retractable transfer of value. I would prefer this over having partners hold GRAPE.
Rather than make it an ad channel, how about the idea that itās where project teams can praise / highlight other projects?
āThis is a channel where teams can share Alpha, gossip and tips; a grapevine.ā
If itās perceived of as more of an Alpha channel itās likely to be much better received than an ads space. Personally, Iād probably avoid a channel that I thought of as ads.
I know we already have The Solana Grapevine, but the grapevine metaphor, in some form, also seems like a great name for an inter-discord channel.
Pls i think we really need a channel in partner servers where we can send out notifications once the bot is down, and when itās back online. This will decrease panic in partner servers.
Partner communities seek to engage ātheirā communities. Anything that isnāt a mutual benefit, might be seen as opportunistic.
Grape community is trying to engage Grape AND āPartnerā communities.
Grape & Partners share members across their communities.
Goal would be to leverage this concept to help Grape become a bridge and community hub.
Idea:
I would propose we make something closer to an āannouncementā or āeventsā channel that can mirror or provide updates related to whatās happening in the Solana Calendar or Grape Events schedule. To further explore the partner synergy concepts being explored keeping in line with āPartner Serverā rewards theme.
Any additional advertising for our core CCs and information coming from Grape will be advantageous, but require extra work. A fucken great concept and I think for things simple as being able to announce AMAās, Alpha discussing, curated videoās that we ourselves deem worthy of group announcements (some of my content I donāt tweet for example - thatās not me thinking Ive made a shit video, I just try to be careful to not over-do messages and stuff).
Alot of these AMAs have super informative bits of info, that if you miss them you may not get that info in a timely manner, alot also have some pretty amazing prizes, and this is where we key into having membership benefits, atm crowds are still small for most AMAs, so making it Grape member obly prizes isnāt super warranted, but with more exposure we could change that, and offer to our Membership base as prioty.
There was a tonne of great input so far on this thread, love it.
I think there is something here, I partnered with GRAPE for my own discord (thatās how I found out about GRAPE) and was surprised when getting everything set up that there was no cost involved and no further involvement after the original set up.
How ever I have come to realise there are some other products out there for other networks (collab-land) that also offer a free and automated service for discord integration, so charging a fee probably wouldnāt work.
There is also the chance that the server wanted the integration may have a completely different demographic that may not be interested in what we are doing at grape?
What about the idea of more contract based partnerships when setting things up with partner projects, like a bit of a āwe scratch your back, you scratch oursā cross promotion style thing on a semi regular basis.
I dare say if we where posting regular posts into a channel on a partnered discord say for example an NFT server, they would most like mute the grape channels anyway as it would just seem like irrelevant spam to them.
Maybe just some better promotion from the partners on our partnership on there āabout usā section where they can mention GRAPE and give us a bit of a shout out that they have partnered with them to bring them the gated community etc etc and give us a bit of a plug explaining what we do, this could all be pre written and copied and pasted to them as a requirement.
I reckon we just need a solid marketing/socials campaign that really lets people know what we are doing in here
I would agree that charging new communities for the ability to gate would be detrimental to us.
The plan was to provide them tools and the ābells & whistlesā once they have gated their community as a value accrual method for us. Get them in first, then offer them further services.
Once such example is a small change we just added to the application form.
when they apply for gating, we also ask them. do you want an AMA with grape CCās?
which ofcourse charges a small grape fee.
The core team had more plans so im interested to see what they were going to implement.
I made a few thoughts about it introducing non-aggressive requirements for those projects.
Just holding grape or particiapting in a pool in raydium or orca or anything that is not payment but a requqirement to honour the free integration etc.
If anyone is interested to see what i write and what i propose in it then message me.
