Grant Proposal: XFounders

Community Grant Applications
#1

Grant ID: 868635e4f

Summary:

Background:
After holding the XFounders Bootcamp in Turkey, which involved the ICP ecosystem, we formed a closed community of founders and experts. We also have over 200 hours of educational content recorded from the Bootcamp.
As part of our first grant from ICP, our KPIs were to bring in 5 new projects to the ICP ecosystem, and we exceeded the plan by bringing in 8 projects.
Now, we want to continue developing the same with other ecosystems and are ready to bring in The Graph ecosystem 6+ new well prepared projects.
What does XFounders Fundraising School consist of?
A closed community of participants from XFounders Bootcamp Season 1 (21 startups and 30+ mentors) - new participants join the community and go through onboarding.
XF Crash Course - an express video course for 30 hours (recorded at XFounders Bootcamp). The goal is to prepare the Pitch Deck.
XF Feedback Session - a practice pitch for new startups in front of community members and experts. The goal is to identify weaknesses in the project, Pitch Deck, and the pitch itself, and understand what is needed to improve each element.
XF Community events - regular educational lectures, workshops, masterminds, mini hackathons, where mentors from partner ecosystems share their experiences and help founders build products with sustainable business models. The goal is to fill all knowledge gaps and better prepare for the Pitch Hour.
XF The Graph track - a special project where we select startups that can and want to launch in the The Graph ecosystem and help them understand how to do it, conducting regular track sessions. The goal is to prepare startups for launching MVPs on The Graph.
XF Pitch Hour - the final event that every startup goes through. At XF Pitch Hour, startups pitch to investors, funds, and partner ecosystems. The goal is to attract investments.

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Describe what your project does or is aiming to do in 50 characters or less:
XFounders Fundraising School - community driven school for web3 founders.
We do seasonal offline bootcamps and educational platform for web3 startups.
XFounders is eliminating the gap in preparing web3 startups for fundraising and onboarding into the web3 ecosystems. We are increasing the survival rate of web3 startups.

If available, please enter a link to your project below:

How far along are you?:
Far

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?:

What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?:

What’s your vision for how your project will impact The Graph and/or web3?:

How will you measure success?:

What milestones will you achieve in the coming weeks/months, with or without the grant?:

Please select who you think will benefit from your project?:
Other

How much funding are you looking for? (USD):
20000

Provide a breakdown of your requested funding:

Have you applied for (or already received) funding from somewhere else?:
Yes

If yes, please describe where you’ve received funding from and how much you have, or will, receive:
ICP Ecosystem, $15,000, Before XFounders Bootcamp (1 September 2023)

Can you share any information about current/past web3 experience?:

Why are you interested in contributing to The Graph and/or web3?:

Are you applying as a team or individual?:
Individual

What type of grant are you pursuing?:
Long-term (continuous)

Please select the category your project best fits into:
Education




Primary Community Poll

Do you fundamentally support this grant application, knowing that the final scope and grant amount may differ from the requested proposal?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters




Grant Committee Vote

Do you recommend this grant to the DAO?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

#2

Greetings!

After reviewing this proposal in detail, I have come up with a few questions that I would like to discuss more specifically:

Can you elaborate on why The Graph? And what do you plan to teach people? Since from the modules you provided, I don’t really see The Graph there, rather it’s just a course for new people who didn’t really understand what web3 was before. Or are you planning on creating a new course?

What format will this all take place in? Obviously it’s online, but I understand there will be both technical and non-technical sessions, can you tell me more about that?

Next I have a few concerns about the budget. Can you elaborate on what that means? And in general what is included in it.

  • Open content: youtube, linkedin, instagram, tiktok, twitter, medium
  • The Graph track organisation

And how will you measure the success of this proposal?

Thank you! And that’s all for now.

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#3

Hello,

Thank you for submitting your grant application. In addition to @doxe01.eth 's questions, I have the following questions:

  • You mentioned that “The goal is to prepare startups for launching MVPs on The Graph”. Can you explain more what you mean by this? Projects aren’t really built “on” The Graph. The Graph is a tool that dapps use to power their applications on protocols like Ethereum, Arbitrum, Gnosis, etc. My concern is you may not have a strong understanding of The Graph and it’s service, which would make providing a course on it very difficult and likely unsuccesful.
  • On a similar note as the question above, can you define specifically what the curriculum would be for this educational content for The Graph?

Looking forward to your response.

#4

Thank you for your question.

  1. We believe that the subgraph technology can help our startups build products faster and more efficiently. We want to create user interfaces that are simple and user-friendly. That’s why we are ready to help spread knowledge about The Graph technology to our startup pipeline.
  2. It is important to understand that our target audience consists of founders of startups at early and mid-stages. Our main goal is to teach them how to build a sustainable business that generates revenue. The second goal is to prepare founders for fundraising and help attract investments. And finally, the third goal is to help them choose the infrastructure for product development. This is where the answer to the question “what do you plan to teach people?” lies. We plan to teach marketing, economics, fundraising, legal matters, and more - so that startups can attract investments and avoid dying within 3-9 months after launch. We also plan to familiarize founders with The Graph technology - so that they understand how it can be used, its purpose, the benefits it can bring to startups and their users, and most importantly, all of this will help more founders and members of their teams become aware of The Graph.
  3. Indeed, the provided program does not include information about The Graph. We showed the program that was conducted at the Bootcamp in September 2023. We are taking this grant, in part, to prepare a separate module about The Graph ecosystem and integrate it into our program.
  4. All of this will take place in an online format, within our community. Lectures, workshops, masterminds, plenary discussions, 1-on-1 sessions. We are also happy to invite experts from The Graph and members of The Graph community to all our internal events if they have the necessary experience and expertise and are willing to share them.
  5. Open content: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Medium - this is the Averness brand for The Graph ecosystem. We conduct in-depth research on the ecosystem and release a series of videos, articles, podcasts, interviews about the ecosystem and the value it brings to startups and builders. We invite experts for discussions and debates about The Graph.

The organization of The Graph track - as we described in the application, our KPI is 5+ new launched projects that will use The Graph technologies. For this, we need mentors who will help projects with MVP releases, smart contract deployment, and integration of The Graph technologies into projects.

  1. And finally, the success of our work can be divided into 2 main points:
  • 5 new startups will start using The Graph technology
  • 500 new startups will learn about The Graph ecosystem and be able to make a choice whether to join The Graph community or not, whether The Graph ecosystem is suitable for them or not.
#5

Thank you, that’s a good question. One of the problems we are solving is that in Web3, everything is focused on developers and their coding skills. Very little attention is given to the business side, marketing, sales, economics, and so on.

  1. Yes, you are right, currently we do not have deep knowledge of The Graph ecosystem. But here’s why we can help 5 projects start using The Graph technologies:
  • We didn’t have a deep understanding of the ICP ecosystem, but we were able to train projects and launch 5 MVPs in that ecosystem.
  • In order to create useful and reliable educational material about The Graph ecosystem, we need to find 10-20 experts within the community, for example, and conduct interviews with them. With this information, our team of methodologists can create valuable material that is accessible not only to developers but also to non-technical founders.
  1. As I mentioned, creating a program is not difficult, you just need to know where to start. As part of the grant, we will engage with experts and founders who are already using The Graph. Through in-depth research, we will gather all the information and incorporate it into our educational materials.
#6

Greetings!

The presentation of the project will be in the public-voice-chat channel on the Graph AdvocatesDAO Discord server on November 7th at 10:00 UTC. Entrance is open and everyone is welcome to come in and ask their questions during the presentation!

Thanks everyone for your attention!

#7

The majority decision of the Grant Committee concludes to not recommend this proposal for DAO funding. Please recognize that this is not a statement on the proposal itself, but rather an aggregated reflection by committee members taking into account a number of factors, such as alignment to The Graph and web3 ecosystem, budget available to support grants and prioritization relative to other proposed grants.

Below you find brief feedback brought up within the committee to not recommend DAO funding that may help you to submit successful grant applications in the future:

Would like to see a more straightforward proposal aimed at The Graph, as the modules and the information provided is quite general. Also, the grant itself and its aims are quite large and hard to achieve, perhaps it would be worth doing a smaller event to understand people’s moods and how they would interact with the content.

Thank you for submitting this proposal, and you are encouraged to stay engaged in the Graph community. You are also welcome to submit new grant applications in the future with proposals that may generate stronger support from the committee.

Sincerely,
Graph AdvocatesDAO

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