Northstar: 20k Revenue monthly by EOM Sept.
Our short term user focused north star: weekly active transactors (WATs) goes up to 300 or more.
Goal 1 Execute on Calculated Portfolio of bets
Aligning work streams around business lines, features, integrations, and experiments to hit revenue breakeven. (~250k monthly)
Our bets, feature break down in Roadmap proposal:
-
Revenue optimized, high leverage, frontend features
- New business lines
- Monetization experiments
- Infrastructure optimization
- Batshit moonshots
- Engaging the Shapeshift DAO ecosystem
Tactics:
Disseminate the high level framework, roadmap coordination, and cross-workstream alignment
- tooling for a portfolio of bets.
- We will primarily spend product efforts on scoping great specs and talking to users. Ideally, at every weekly Monday roadmap check-in we spend the time and rigor towards development and launching of features that people want.
- filtered backlog for all features
- top 5 from here will get moved to the backlog in spec land👆
Success looks like:
- Everything requiring DAO resources follows a spec & there are 3x as many specs & mini specs in backlog at kickoffs [best case: 30-50 at any one time || fine case: 15-30 || strugglebus: 10 or less].
- The coordination sheet and framework improves every week [we make decisions faster and outcome-focused-meetings are scheduled, everyone is using “discovery, definition, hand off” stages to frame spikes and work by end of july ].
As a result, velocity of feature development over time speeds up [goal is 3 week cycles from discovery kick off date to prototype in an ENV
- (tracked within github tickets or notion via handoff date) [ ideally this is visible by September]—depending on other workstreams always though and sensitive to dependencies].
Goal 2 Retention 
Revenue & User growth
Retention is what separates the top 1% of all apps in tech, if we don’t have users continually show up, use core functionality, love it, and return to do it again…. we don’t have a product. Full stop. We can disagree and commit if something requires growth to succeed but we have to know where we’re starting from with a goal to work towards.
We will primarily use revenue modeling for resourcing across work streams in spec documents. that looks like a Growth case, Minimal Case, and failure case in the projections on a spec.
Tactics & Feature list
Increase
- users who have completed one transaction
cumulative, the top row, is at
- 10K
- try for 14504 minimum with a check-in September 1 & office hours
- weekly active transactors from 175 ( as of today) → 300 or more
-
Aim starting retention of weekly cohorts with users who do transactions
- towards 50% and higher by September 1 on web
- 65% on mobile by September 1
Increase wherever subscriptions by % <— this needs to be hashed out here on forum @Hpayne
Increase defi confirms or find out why it went flat from ~15 (original goal from January: 60) retro to be scheduled one month after@gomes
- finishes defi display work
- Some possible retention features
Remove the splash screen
- move demo wallet experience to landing pages.
- , most comprehensive portfolio view for any DeFi user who also holds assets on EVM, UTXO or cosmos-based chains.
- **Osmosis, enabling users to trade cosmos-based assets.**round this out - add keplr and trades across all osmosis assets.
- evaluate bandwith for claim, restake, and bond.
- spec and evaluate squid bridge
- Metamask Snaps
- Arkeo
- [Next foundation initiative goes here -- as a sneak peek check out sommelier finance]
- Splash pages removed whenever we can slot it in. Ideally mid summer.
- MM Snaps handed off to the DAO with full documentation by August 1.
- Weekly active transactooor goes to 800 or more weekly, and cumulative at 15k by sept 1.
- Mixpanel cleaning:
Stickiness is funky, donations don’t track quite right, MAU’s probably more vanity than actually tracking what matters
- (ARR annual recurring revenue— are users passing volume, earn positions, donations, etc. )
- and compile data on those personas
- mixpanel tracking on every UI focused goals
- Every two weeks, cohesive data check in at office hours covering:
Weekly cohorts & retention
- Visits → conversion pipeline
- Canny backlog request forms for user feedback
- Site visits and short term spikes with the actual actions.
Enhancing display & seamless functions on Cross-Chain DeFi positions
spec and evaluate
Shapeshift ecosystem features
Success looks like:
Goal 3 Mandated Metrics & Measurement
We can’t fly blind, so we need data to accomplish the goals. Every feature will have mixpanel tracking or onchain data in mind. Re-evaluate past launches to improve the feature-success-metrics going forward and iterate on each release.
Tactics
can we fix up the use case map
Success looks like:
- Data reports are frictionless and they last 10 mins on the dot during product office hours. Check in per call to see if it’s performant, adjust dashboards, repeat.
- At hand off, All specs have revenue projections & or success metrics included plus event tracking by end of July.
- Use case map compiled and disseminated to team by mid-August.
Goal 4 Experiment more
We have bandwidth for around three big pieces running in parallel per month and we don’t want to fracture our efforts on shiny things that take up bandwidth without results.
Based on runway constraints, we should have started experimenting and killing things a lot earlier, 
. So, over the next six months we will move quickly and determine the best path for marquee DAO initiatives on their merits.
Tactics, initiatives, and feature list
- Validate or invalidate the “frontend as public good” hypothesis by ~August. We should have enough data for extrapolating if the three pillars of this are working or if we need to re-evaluate fundamental incentives (workshop at six weeks post rewards launch on the main pillars)
Note: if one of these pillars isn’t succeeding, I suggest we redesign the flywheel and go back to vision planning. I’m happy to serve as facilitator for this planning exercise.
-
Are opt out donations going up, staying flat, or generating meaningful revenue monthly
-
Are user campaigns(missions) leading to app usage, spiking and falling, or not converting at all?
- visits are good, but do the flows in mixpanel show trading or other usage?
most importantly:
- are those users retained?
- how are retention cohorts performing?
- are we getting feedback along the way?
-
Are rewards leading app usage and converting wallets into the app, and are thy retained? Just like missions, if we do not have retention we will deprioritize energy to these.
- E.g. Optimism mission → optimism use (swap, bridge, onramp)
- FOX rewards pilot→ trading, bridging, depositing, withdrawing beyond just break even
More experiments
-
Try a donation\monetization experiment on part(s) of the app that haven’t been monetized.
- Thorchain savers or thorchain lending are possible candidates but open to other ideas.
- other experiments could even be incentivized by Fox rewards which could be a really interesting risk & game-theory path for users. After FOX rewards launch or towards tail end ~july.
- Evaluate Cosmos again, there are lots of appchain debates picking up and our early moving here might turn out useful.
- stETH optimizations. couple of angles to take here but we have an opportunity to make staking into the dominant yield in the space right now and not lose out on market advantage.
- DAO dogfooding, (gnosis safe support, talking to other DAOs to use SS, using hats protocol, playing with NFT mints for governance rights etc.)
Success looks like
- For public goods pillars: Conversion into app actions, retention, and revenue.
- Missions leading to a healthy and prioritized business pipeline (good) or money upfront (best).
- Rewards doesn't require significant engineering lift and proves that users are incentivized to use the app more than just for free money.
Let things fail faster, we should not be maintaining a feature with no meaningful usage after about 3 months (assuming monthly check ins and a retro or two) .
- If we fail to reach retention metrics we will consider any product or eng requests deprioritized, nice to haves, or later on the roadmap.
- We finish launching the public goods features and evaluate at retro or two plus office hours. The debates on this should be short. We have been discussing this for over a year. Time to stop.
Goal 5 Talk to our users
We love more foxes in the fam. Please bring them into threads, use our canny board, and let’s drive more understanding of who uses the platform and why they love it OR what bugs them and what they want to see. For the API or any other business lines we should do the same.
Tactics
- Leverage FOX for user surveys
- PMF survey in app using blaze
- As we experiment with API or whatever feature we take user feedback and integrate it
- is continually updated weekly
- Create Fox Mission to “sign up for user surveys”
- Enjoy this and start Alphalpha Connect thursdays. where we all connect wallets at 22:00pm UTC and get rekt together.
Success looks like:
- Get canny out on office hours, pinned in channels, twitter, and generally linked everywhere by July 4.
- Product office hours includes at least one active user jumping on stage with feedback once a month by August.
- Tims & product calendar includes hours a week — 3 as base success or 12 as growth case— talking to users by End of July, not just discord threads.
Goal 6 Assist Grants Partnerships
- Support a grants framework that accounts for high user growth platforms and chain additions by:
Working with marketing & growth workstream to acquire grants either continuously with DAO seasons or approach DAOs with solid USD equivalent business funding upfront.
- Leveraging the missions page for grants.
- Include some form of USDC in agreements or streaming or token liquidations as par of deal under the bear market framework.
Success looks like:
- Grants have a mini or full spec with insight from product & ENG around realistic metrics, workload, and unblocking prioritization.
- Grants come in and help the treasury with USDC to shore up runway:
Best case > 15% USDC in treasury ASAP
Success Case 15% USDC streaming to treasury, 1/2 upfront 1/2 on delivery, or some other committment from DAO governance
Failing 0 USDC
References
Mental model “vision pipeline”:
“getting lucky isn’t sustainable” — A wise product team member, not tim.
vision → short term mission → goals (this document) → executed in categories (buckets ) with features/epics inside of those buckets.
Mental model buckets or categories:
- bugs and maintenance
- core functionality
- integrations with leverage for DAO users
research
growth initiatives