H2 Proposal [Strategy] - Grants Labs

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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I’m writing this post to capture the goals + strategy behind Grants Labs’ upcoming H2 budget request! These two posts are being created separately for two reasons:
1- they’re long, and hopefully this makes it easier to digest!
2- We are late on the budget finalization due to work from the Ecosystem Collective winddown as well as recently hiring new leaders on the team who are just shaping their goals and needs across marketing, product, and engineering. I expect to have a budget posted by no later than July 30.

What is Grants Lab?

The Grants Lab shares a North Star with the rest of Gitcoin: to increase grants GMV (measured as Allo GMV). This business unit contributes towards that goal with a focus on product development and product adoption. It has a heavy focus on product, development, and developer relations activities, as well as product + growth marketing, grant operations, and sales.

The Grants Lab team is staffed by the former Allo, Grants Stack, GPT, and GSD workstreams which were deprecated in February 2024. Each team is held accountable by the GM of Grants Lab and develops quarterly goals to chart and coordinate our progress.

What have we been up to?

It’s been an eventful first few months (February 2024 - present) for Grants Lab! You can catch up on some of our work below:

Additionally, we’re excited to report progress against the goals that were set for Season 21 (Feb-April) as well as Q2 (March-June). There’s a bit of overlap here as we’ve moved towards a regular quarterly goal cadence vs seasons – it’s much easier to track and remember. :slight_smile:

Season 21 goals (Feb-Apr):

Original goal 50 grants rounds run, modified to 80: Achieved 87 :green_circle:

This goal felt quite ambitious back in October when we had achieved 13 independently run rounds since launching Grants Stack, but we’ve blown it out of the water! This speaks to the traction we have gained in the market and the ease of use of the product. We are now turning our focus towards launching rounds that are more specific to our target customers (on-chain organizations with large ($50M+) tokenized treasuries.

Original goal 10 repeat grants rounds run, modified to 20: Achieved 19 :green_circle:

As mentioned above, we are turning our focus more towards landing and expanding in subsequent rounds with our target customer base.

5 paying customers: Achieved 3 (Avalanche, SEI, Venus). :yellow_circle:

We originally set this goal with product revenue in mind and have yet to turn on a fee switch in Grants Stack or Allo. We do believe that’s an important lever and you can view conversations on that here ([Discussion] Allo Fee Switch Proposal). That said, we did capture services revenue from three customers, and are seeing a higher willingness to pay services fees as well as high demand for services. We will be working on a more robust pricing strategy in H2.

Q2 Goals (Apr - June):

North Star: $8M GMV :red_circle:

  • Achieved $4.3M
  • This is a disappointing finish in a quarter that saw a lot of progress. We started the quarter with $1.6M in GMV and added ~3M, primarily from the GG20 grants round (~$1.5M). As you’ll read in the “Whale Hunting” and “Innovation” goals below, we’ve done a great job filling the pipeline and getting commits turned into initial rounds. We need to activate these partners much more quickly as well as do a much better job with making the distribution process seamless in order to impact GMV.

WHALE HUNTING: :yellow_circle:

  • Land and expand with existing whales: Customer 1 ($1m total forecasted GMV) :white_check_mark:, Customer 2 ($900k total forecasted GMV) :white_check_mark:, Customer 3 ($700k-$1m total forecasted GMV) :red_circle:
  • Activate committed whales into GMV. Customer 1 ($500k-$1m total forecasted GMV) :red_circle:, Customer 2 ($2.5M total forecasted GMV, $250k booked this quarter) :white_check_mark:

INNOVATION PIPELINE: :red_circle:

  • Goal: We know we need to get creative outside our existing product & pipeline to hit our ambitious goals this year. Can we prove $2M GMV through one of these?
  • Result: We have captured $537k in GMV this quarter through Easy RPGF, despite securing a total commitment of $1.9M early in the quarter. Some of this was out of our control with transitions at POKT. The biggest takeaway is a need to focus on a smooth payouts process from both a product and operational perspective as KYC and product bugs have slowed down the delivery of a projected $1M of GMV.
  • That said, we’re excited to expand our focus on RPGF and other mechanisms outside of QF – we have definitively proven that the future of Gitcoin is not just QF!

INVEST IN OUR CULTURE AND TECH: :yellow_circle:

  • Goal: The highest-leverage thing we can do long term is build a high performing team! We are coming out of the Lisbon offsite with lots of momentum and energy to invest in our culture. We want to embrace innovation and pluralistic design across the org, operate with speed and urgency, while keeping focus on delivering excellence for our customers.
  • Result: We have made some good progress this quarter in defining the team we want to be and the tech we want to build. In product speak: we have the requirements, now it’s time to build! We’ll continue to focus on our culture, particularly on product & engineering, and our discipline towards operational excellence.

Moving into H2

We’re moving into the second half of the year with even more conviction that we’re headed in the right direction. We’ve received great feedback to our new direction and focus in the market and it’s directly impacted our ability to bring larger grants programs on board. We’ve made great progress on the Gitcoin Grants program after a smoothly run GG20. Grants Labs and Gitcoin have greater organizational alignment, leadership depth, and clarity on our visual and value proposition than ever before.

That said, like any growing startup, we’re not without our pains! Our pains are largely operational (how we do it) vs existential (what we do). Despite positive feedback on our new focus and direction, the impact radius of that remains small, and the brand narrative of Gitcoin is lagging. We haven’t achieved our goal of being a lean and agile organization yet, and this is our quarter to double down on execution and operational excellence. We’ve also seen the impact of our year of big changes in contributor churn and culture, and we’re critically focused on building the right culture for the next stage of our organization.

Q3 goals

North Star: $10M in Cumulative GMV

1. Double GMV w Whale Hunting

We have confidence that our offering is resonating with our target audience and now is the time to execute with more confidence and urgency. We are empowered to chase bigger deals and commits, as well as build on the strength of our existing partnerships.

  • KPI: Increase the size of average partner grants round of $200k to $400k
  • KPI: Activate $4m in existing delivery pipeline

2. Position our technology stack for our future

We’ve spent this quarter building & validating our product strategy, and now is the time to lay the technical foundation in order to scale it. By the end of the quarter, we’ve articulated and executed on technical and product strategy to accomplish the following:

  • We have defined a technical strategy to accomplish the requirements for our Multi-Mechanism Future
  • We have built or rebuilt 1 mechanism + 1 tool using this strategy
    • Checker is likely the best tool candidate
    • Mechanism: likely direct grants or ERF
  • Every partner can successfully distribute their grants funds, with zero or very minimal issues

3. Roll out refreshed brand narrative + positioning

We’ve learned through our sales motion this quarter that the market’s perception of Gitcoin is outdated – too frequently, we’re perceived as “just QF” or “just public goods” and we’re spending time arguing against this or missing deal flow entirely because of it. This quarter, we will articulate refreshed brand messaging and gain buy-in from internal contributors & community. Additionally, we will formulate an H2 plan to promote brand messaging in the market and start executing. You can expect the H2 plan to contain the following:

  • Finalize brand messaging & positioning
    • Deliverables: Messaging doc, boilerplate, team training, channel-level strategy, marketecture & naming conventions
  • Website redesign (kind of fits into brand but chunky piece so I’m fleshing it out)
    • Deliverables: Finalize agency, all content and design done for early Q4 launch
  • Build-out sales process & collateral (ongoing):
    • Deliverables: pitch deck, product-level content, one-pagers, develop services menu, co-marketing tiering & process.
  • Flesh out lead-gen channels:
    • Deliverables: Refresh lead capture, routing & follow-ups; set up referral program, launch ABM motion
  • New processes around marketing channels:
    • Deliverables: New strategy around socials, content and email (& Youtube if time); select & integrate new social listening tool; establish reporting & share-out process

Conclusion

It’s been a huge year so far for Gitcoin, and we’ve invested much of our efforts in the first half in rebuilding the right team and org for our ambitions. I’m excited to see that pay off in H2, which requires hard work from the entire team. Feedback on all of the above welcomed, stay tuned for budget post!

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