It is true that Moonshot Bots, which raised $3mm for Grants matching pool, was mostly a Kevin/Austin YOLO to start.
I’d just briefly challenge this assertion by pointing out a few counter examples that the collective has built:
Successes at Moonshot that did not deeply involve Austin/Kevin
- Quadratic Trust, was led by @anneconnelly and her team with only recruiting/advisory support from myself and Austin, and was able to build & ship a social quadratic curation experience that successfully was used by hundreds of people during GR11, and proved that Quadratic Funding can be used for curation (something that’s been on the core team backlog for a very long time).
- The Greatest LARP was built by a half dozen people from the collective (though it was my vision), and raised $500k for public goods + the comic was read thousands of times.
- Tip.Party, TokenStream.party, and pay.party, and the inchoate multisiend app have each been used dozens of times to reward Moonshot Devs, and are run almost entirely without my involvement. Though to your point these tools need more work to cross-pollinate to other DAOs.
- There will be a half dozen marketing activations at schelling point driven by Moonshoters with almost no involvement by myself/Austin. An art gallery, actors doing on-theme performances, NFT auctions, a POAPathon, and a few other bespoke activations. I cannot say how successful these are yet, perhaps on Friday we can.
Successes in Rapid Prototyping at Gitcoin
And even before the Moonshot Collective launched in July 2021, there was a track record of successful YOLO innovation happening in/around GitcoinDAO. For example:
- Fundoss - a QF application for web2 that successfully raised $95k for web2 oss. (2021)
- Downtown stimulus - a QF application that successfully raised $45k for Boulder COVId relief. (2020)
- WTFisQF - an easy QF calculator/explainer, used by 100s of ppl per month. (2020)
- QuadraticVote.co - an easy tool for hosting Quadratic Votes, used by 100s of ppl per month (2020)
- Hosting Sustainweb3 - a one day conference about OSS sustainability, with attendance in the 100s and video watches in the 1000s (2020)
- the launch of Gitcoin Labs and the Burner Wallet, with my friend Austin Griffith (2019)
- Various experiments & products launched on Gitcoin.co including small experiments like Gitcoin Quests, Gitcoin Kudos, the Quadratic Lands, an avatar builder, a quadratic funding social network, and other tools that later evolved into being flagships like Gitcoin Hackathons or Gitcoin Grants. (over the years)
- a handful of other tools that recorded here and here (over the years)
Of course, Moonshot Collective does not take credit for the innovation that precedes it, but it is cut from the same cloth of this innovation - so it is worth mentioning it to give full context.
In Conclusion
It is true that the Moonshot Collective does need more work to get to its target state, and the recent additions of two product managers and a project manager (and the systems they set up) are investments in getting more systematic about the progress towards product market fit.
But I think we should start that journey with a consensus that the tools sometimes reach product market fit right now. I also want to dispel the notion that the only successes have come from myself/Austin (they have been the result of the work of ppl in many corners of the collective).