Pudding.xyz: The Community Marketplace for Moonbirds (built by Mobo)
- $50,000 USDC
- Trademark requested
Pudding.xyz is the marketplace for everything Moonbirds & PROOF We have two goals: 1) Deliver a curated collector experience for current and potential community members 2) Elevate artists and creative entrepreneurs (e.g., Subparliaments) from the community We are requesting funds to: 1) Build bespoke curation and marketplace features 2) Rollout loyalty rewards for collectors through Pudding
About the project
Pudding.xyz is the marketplace for everything Moonbirds & PROOF
We have two goals:
1) Deliver a curated collector experience for current and potential community members
2) Elevate artists and creative entrepreneurs (e.g., Subparliaments) from the community
We are requesting funds to:
1) Build bespoke curation and marketplace features
2) Rollout loyalty rewards for collectors through Pudding
Mission alignment
- Create experiences or products which directly benefit holders
- Elevate Moonbirds and Mythics within the web3 community
Community backers
omri#0647; grelysian#9280; Axu.eth (ThinkingHotels)#0001; tinbane#7617; burtonair#1377; exitliq#6600; NVR2L8#2988; TreyRatcliff#4447
What is it?
Pudding (built by Mobo) is the community market for the PROOF and Moonbirds ecosystem. We launched in December, with the encouragement of community members and from the PROOF team. We provide a curated selection of collections from PROOF, artists who have partnered with the community (e.g., Grails, Moonbird backgrounds), and community builders (e.g., subparliaments). We have specific features for the community, such as surfacing nesting level, providing direct links to the proof.xyz site for Moonbirds, and improving the discoverability of subparliament collections. We have also supported PROOF Grails, through the Grail Guess competition, where we gave a GraiI to the community member who guessed the highest percentage of artists correctly.
Pudding honors royalties on 100% of orders - even if the underlying listing does not honor royalties we add the royalties to the order. We also are placing an emphasis on showcasing the complete portfolio of artists, regardless of if the tokens they create are a subset of a smart contract.
In the current environment, there are three key problems 1) Discoverability is difficult - finding work from a single artist or community is time consuming, difficult, and prone to scam 2) Major marketplaces do not add value back to the community or creators 3) Collectors do not know if they are paying royalties or often are not incentivized to do so. Mobo is on a mission to solve these problems by providing software-as-a-service directly to artists, creators, and communities.
We have received positive feedback from the community so far and have an increased sense of urgency to improve the product. With the requested capital, we will a) build additional features that are bespoke to the community (e.g, community insights, matching items, loyalty mechanics) b) Provide loyalty rewards to buyers through Pudding, incentivizing collectors and increasing royalty revenue both to the Lunar Society and to the artists and community projects.
How does it benefit the Moonbirds and Mythics holder community?
1) Pudding improves discoverability and awareness of the Moonbirds ecosystem through a curated collecting experience. This eases the onboarding of new members and improves continuing engagement with the ecosystem.
2) Pudding can be a revenue generator for the Lunar Society, artists, and the community creators. Currently, this will be through incremental royalties. Eventually, we plan to add a nominal fee and share revenue with the Lunar Society.
About the team
Hey! I’m Kyle Nelson (https://twitter.com/kylepnelson) and I’m the founder of Mobo (https://mobo.xyz/). I am a holder of three day-one nested Moonbirds and two Oddities (since mint/airdrop) as well as a PROOF Collective pass. My background includes a career building at multiple startups and spending five years leading tech teams at Amazon in consumer machine learning. I have an MBA from Wharton and completed undergrad at Vanderbilt.
Joining me is Brixton, a software engineer previously at StakerDAO, with a background in ecommerce and fintech. He has been involved in crypto for the past 8 years, and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. We also have partnered with Sebastian Brocher (PROOF Artist and Moonbird, creator of CryptoArte) and his development team as well as an amazing designer & artist.
Our advisors include Justin Aversano, the top selling artist behind Twin Flames and participant in PROOF Grails Season II.
Why are we the right team? First, we are passionate about helping creators, collecting great art, and the power of networked communities. Second, we have deep expertise across NFTs, consumer marketplaces, and art. Third, we have deep connections to the PROOF and Moonbirds ecosystem both as collectors and as creators.
Product strategy
Here is the game plan, with the assumption that funding is received by 4/1. Important to reiterate that https://pudding.xyz/ is launched - the game plan below pertains to new product development and loyalty incentives.
4/1 Partnerships, Outreach, and Design - Outreach to community projects, artists, and PROOF team for partnerships with respect to onboarding and loyalty rewards.
4/15 Gather feedback and complete designs for new features - Prototyping, implementation, testing and roll out.
5/1 - Begin first rewards experiment.
6/1 - Complete experiment and measure success - Use data and feedback for the next iteration.
6/15 - Next rewards “season” begins.
8/15 - Measure success.
In addition to this proposal we have the following ongoing work:
1) Externalizing our content and collection management to be self-service for creators.
2) Build awareness of pudding in the broader ecosystem, making it the default place to discover the great community projects and art.
3) Continue to build out the back-end for appropriate image rendering, collection management, and analytics.
4) Adding new collections to Pudding.
What team will you need? – We have a team for building the core features in this proposal. Beyond this team, we are looking for a skilled community builder and operator as well as a founding engineer.
What are the risks?
Risk #1: Collectors do not want to collect or list through Pudding because they are worried they won’t see listings on other marketplaces.
Solution: We include aggregated listings from OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, and many other community marketplaces. Listings on Pudding are also automatically aggregated by OpenSea and aggregators like Gem.
Risk #2: The 0% fees and curated experience is not enough for collectors to want to use Pudding.
Solution: Collectors are already using our platform. We expect an endorsement from the Lunar Society as well as further integration with PROOF (e.g., linking from the site) will further increase adoption.
Risk #3: Loyalty reward capital is insufficient for adoption.
Solution: There is a risk that $15k is insufficient. To mitigate this risk, rewards needs to provide value above the direct monetary value of that capital and marketing distribution. We will form partnerships to improve acquisition and retention - ideally with the PROOF team and also with artists and brands.
Risk #4: Royalties are going to zero, anon. Blur will be the only marketplace.
Solution: We don’t think this is true but understand the recent narrative and data. However, missing from the narrative is that until recently there was not much reason for innovation with respect to royalties - we intend to help change that in a way that is positive for creators and collectors. We see this as an opportunity for the Lunar Society and PROOF to lead the way.
What will the money actually be spent on? Do you expect any other money to come in related to this project, e.g. revenues?
Rewards ($15k) - Rewards to incentivize royalty paying transactions. A basic example would be sponsoring a raffle/discount for those who have engaged or collected through Pudding (as we’ve done in the past), but we have more ambitious ideas - for example taking learnings from recent Open Edition games (like Checks) to build a more generalized rewards system.
Product Development ($35k) - Design, development, and operational efforts. This includes development, design, and implementation of rewards-related as well as ongoing efforts to improve the curation and selection on Pudding.
Revenue - Currently, with marketplace fees at 0% or negative (marketplaces paying for usage), we will not have any fees on Pudding. However, this environment is temporary - we plan to add a small competitive fee in the future. We will plan to share revenue from PROOF Collections (Collective, Moonbirds, Oddities, Grails, subsequent PROOF drops) with the Lunar Society. At current volume (and not accounting for future collections), and a 0.5% fee split, if Pudding achieves just a 3% market share that is $5,000 a month to the DAO.
We do expect additional revenue to be achieved in the future for Pudding through minting and value added services. However, we do not expect that to be the near term focus - the focus will be improving the product, building awareness and retention, and ultimately generating revenue for the Lunar Society and the community creators (artists, sub parliaments).