Dot Leap 2: Let's grow!

Problem Statement

For the past three years, Dot Leap has been keeping the community in the loop about all governance, technical, and ecosystem news surrounding the Polkadot ecosystem.

Our last proposal has helped us remain in operation, and we would love to be able to stay free of ads for products and services, and credibly neutral going forward, while renewing focus on growth.

It is no secret (real, human) users have been stagnating across web3 - the community has been scared off, and the echo chambers are saturated.

Metrics-wise, the newsletter had 3310 subscribers at the time of our last proposal, with a 30% open rate and 10% average clickthrough rate, which is almost unheard of in newsletter success metrics. However, fast forward almost a year, and our subscriber base is 3390, with the same open rate, but slightly lower clickthrough rate at 7.5% on average.

This is also why we have chosen not to request the followup milestone and instead take a different approach entirely.

Being fully cognizant of the fact that the bear market which drove these users off into hybernation might extend well into 2025, we decided to uproot the Dot Leap effort and focus on aggressive growth going forward. Our aim is to help Polkadot get the necessary userbase and developer base, and to expand global awareness of Polkadot's innovations which - currently - get sadly overlooked.

Now more than ever, due to new terminology like coretime, Polkadot 2.0, async backing and other new concepts, we need to provide the wider ecosystem with good explanations, clarifications, tutorials, and branding assistance, all of which is only possible through good journalism, technical education, and community growth.

For all this, we need your help.

Proposal Solutions and Objectives

The growth plan consists of three major pillars.

Dot Leap website
AI integration
Newsletter continuation, reformatting, and growth

Dot Leap Website

The Dot Leap website started out as a static website with some basic explainers by Bruno Skvorc. This effort will be revived.

What the fabled Polkadot.com education portal was supposed to be will now find its home on Dotleap.com:

explainers of basic concepts
very basic user guides for essential Polkadot functionality
very basic user guides for individual parachain functionality
illustrated and enhanced versions of certain high-impact Wiki content (will also be PRed upstream where it makes sense)
open source AI-powered search of the Dot Leap archive for natural language searching of previous content (e.g. "I remember there being some tool to track council performance a few months ago, what was it?" or "When was the biggest voting turnout bump registered, between which Dot Leap editions?")

Per community vote, however, most emphasis will be placed on newbie friendly guides for using various parachain core functions and their dapps.

The website will have optional web3 user profiles which will grow in reputation based on feedback given and actions taken, later evolving into a system for internal governance, clarified a little lower in the proposal.

AI Integration

An OpenAI powered app is being built to assist with the creation of link-heavy newsletters.

It can automatically process and summarize information, detect relevance, and proceeds to generate social media materials for sharing the content in easy to consume snippets.

It automatically reads staking rates and treasury balances from chain and generates social-media friendly graphs that will also be embedded into the newsletter editions.

This application is being developed specifically for Dot Leap and NFT Review (which is not part of this proposal).

AI integration will also be added to the Dot Leap website in order to make the archive searchable with natural language (basic OpenAI wrapper with custom data training).

The application will also be able to ingest links from a telegram bot configured specifically for parachain and dapp teams, as well as independent active community members, to submit links to. The bot will reply with information about the link, its assessed quality and relevance, and whether or not it was already submitted by someone else.

The newsletter will be reformatted to be less "😐🥱" (ugh) and more "😳🤯😲" (wow). So far, some of the problems were the following:

Github links were rarely clicked on unless controversial. To really explain those, the writer must understand what they do, and follow them meticulously. Under more technical leadership which can break these technical changes down in an easy to consume way, there is a good chance that these links will be made appealing to click on again.
Governance links lost clickthrough rates despite controversy because the outcomes have become predictable, while no interesting explanation is given for votes and outcomes. The lack of creativity in the proposals seems to also be a contributing factor. These need to be more thoroughly explained, but in a short and soundbitey way so that they do not look like skippable walls of text - people have enough to read and pay attention to already. Conclusions - economical, technical, and social - also need to be laid out, as not everyone is in Polkahaus :)
Focus is on the wrong metrics across all ecosystems. TX count or TVL are often mentioned, either in staking or governance locks, but real user count or actual transaction intents across parachains are rarely discussed (likely because they paint a worrying picture when not gamed). By shedding light on the problems, we believe we can make Dot Leap incredibly engaging to read again, while also helping solve some of those issues.
Announcements, while they do sometimes lead pumpamentals and clicks, are ultimately meaningless. Dot Leap will only publish shipped collaborations, ignoring press releases and "partnerships".

The initial plan was thus to create a subletter for Governance, Technical, and Ecosystem.

Each version would mention key points of the other, but go into detail only about its own content. However, the readership seems divided on this topic, so this is still in the air.

If it happens, we will pilot this in a way that does not dilute the content, and we will ask for feedback on every edition. The goal is to make the readers happy - the newsletter makes no sense otherwise - so if the community decides against it, they are in charge.

Per majority vote, each version will also contain commentary on that week's most pressing or notable issues.

Per majority vote, each edition will also have a short video recap, for those who prefer to consume news in a video or audio format, auto-formatted and sliced in such a way that makes it easy to share the whole thing of parts of the video on social media.

Per community vote, each edition will also have a "dogfood of the day" section, guiding readers through something they should DO in Polkadot's side of web3.

Finally, each newsletter will contain a simple link to a feedback form at the end to gauge people's satisfaction with our work and solicit feedback or requests for changes of direction. This will be non-invasive, a simple 1-5 grade with a text input.

Fee and Payment Terms

Item	Expense	Duration	Note
Website Growth, Expansion, Content	20000	12 months	Web3 profiles, feedback mechanism
Website Maintenance + AI tools	~5000	12 months	Mostly hosted on IPFS, this comes down to pinning and alternative hosting costs
Newsletter Continuation	80000	12 months	Daily research, keeping track of Github PRs and governance proposals across the ecosystem's many chains, commentary, event and community coverage, social media
AI Integration	~38000	12 months	Helper application for edition generation, social media conten
Ad Spend	~12000	12 months	Purchasing placed ads on search engines and social networks.

Beneficiary Address

1QjuTEKebQ3au8bxQC6iwYSPCA2iZn3YHwX8VABCauKtwRk

EMA7 rate by Subscan will be used to calculate the allocation on the day of submission.

The expenses cannot be more accurately predicted or broken down any further, anything else would be misleading the OpenGov community.

There are many things to take into consideration, from salary and level of expertise of involved people, to tax ramifications (as an example, in Croatia the total comes down to something like 60% tax on these gross amounts), so these budgets are proposed in the minimum amounts needed to guarantee a successful outcome.

This is a full time job, and despite the integration of AI (which itself might need a part time employee), at least one person fully embedded in this ecosystem will be monitoring it, parsing it, editing it, developing the helper tools and integrations, generating content for the website, and more. As such, this ask is mainly for salary funds (incl. tax) which will be distributed amongst the people working on this, and used to cover whatever infra expenses are incurred.

Work done so far includes a new template for the newsletter, reader feedback research, and an MVP of a helper application for link-heavy newsletters which auto generates summaries and social media threads along with growth hacking scenarios and data analytics.

We believe our track record and general favor of the community speak for our dedication and quality of work. The bear is the time for building, and we could not be more excited about telling the world about new Polkadot concepts, as well as keeping everyone up to date on all the upcoming changes.

KPIs

15000 total subscribers before November 2024, Substack, X, Youtube, and Telegram Readership channel combined. On X, only Verified accounts will count as subscribers.
20%+ open rate on the emails
5+% average clickthrough rate

We believe this is in the realm of possibility. The open rates and clickthrough rates generally go down with subscriber base growth, and the more comprehensive a newsletter is, the less incentive there is to click through a link, but as we prune inactive emails (those that have not interacted with an email after several editions), these numbers should be attainable.

The Telegram output and social media output, as well as the video recap might all nerf our numbers a little since those cannot count clicks, and there might be some duplicates (an X follower might also be an email subscriber) but this is why we are comfortable raising the subscriber count KPI target to almost 500% of the current number.

How will we grow?

Which methods will be utilised for user acquisition and retention? How exactly do we plan to achieve such growth?

Active Communication

Notes and X: Regular thread-versions of the newsletter's editions will be published on X and Substack Notes immediately after publication, tagging relevant parties and prompting discussion. Both for X and Notes, most of the initial content will be automatically generated by AI, prompting passive growth, while active engagement will be used as a followup. This will include changes in staking %, governance info and numbers, and all the general content from the newsletter's edition, abbreviated and summarized, encouraging clickthrough.
Feedback form: The feedback form at the end of each edition will be useful to optimize future content according to the wishes of current readers. This alone should significantly increase retention and reduce unsubscribes.
Announcement Channel and Link Group: Two Telegram groups will be set up: announcement channel for edition recaps, in case people prefer to consume the newsletter out of inbox, and a submission channel where DMing a bot will automatically insert a given link into the dedicated helper AI application. The application will keep score of submitted links, encouraging users to report fast and often.

Additional Reach and Ad Campaigns

Due to publishing short form video content for every edition, we expect growth on Youtube and X. A tiktok presence will also be established and attempted. May Odin help us all.

$1000 per month will be spent on Ad campaigns, A/B testing platforms, content, and copy text. We intend to leverage social media network ad placement for targeting audiences, as well as search engine ad placement to hijack popular search keywords.

Gamification

While not for everyone, gamification has proven to be noticeably effective in certain demographics and user personas. Our aim is to give each reader who provides feedback a web3 profile on the Dot Leap website, and grow their profile with an evolving NFT, introducing reputation into the mix.

Over time, these users will be the governing layer of Dot Leap, shaping more than just the content of the newsletter. As Dot Leap matures, it might take on additional roles - like validating or a nomination pool - and, inspired by ChaosDAO, these key actors will have an important voice in matters of governance.

Collaboration and User Cross-pollination

The Polkadot community is small and fragmented. A fabled legion of Asian devotees exists, yet they barely register on the western radar. The various outspoken entities already present in the ecosystem (Kusamarian, Polkaworld, Kryptoschain, Bill Laboon, Rob…) have their audiences, but generally these audiences are not shared.

Our aim is to proactively seek out and collaborate with all of these entities and more - should they be willing - to encourage cross-consumption of material and grow the ecosystem's attention span together, rather than fragment it further. Dot Leap 2 is not a vampire attack on other media, but an augmentation.

Looking For Trouble

We intend to actively seek out discussions touching on the Polkadot outside the Polkadot ecosystem. We will look for discussions around concepts similar to what Polkadot has or is working on, and insert our content into the conversation, hopefully also gradually improving Polkadot's brand at the same time.

We will publicly report on these attempts and ask our community for (non trolling, patient, and collaborative) help.

FAQ

I will attempt to frontrun some questions.

Who will be doing this?

At first, Bruno will be doing most of this, with some help from his brother on development matters. Someone more techincal and data-and-AI minded is needed to take the newsletter to its next level in terms of organic growth, and so we need to make staffing changes as much as infrastructural/content changes to get this growth in an honest way.

How can you do this while running RMRK?

I am barely useful at RMRK these days. As ops/admin, I am de-emphasizing my position there in favor of writing code again (any code - both RMRK-adjacent code and other stuff which includes Dot Leap related development) and getting more familiar with the technical side of various ecosystems, which is also a part of what I must do for RMRK's benefit as it expands.

I am plugged into web3 18 hours a day as is, and dedicating time to making Dot Leap into the behemoth I know it can be is a worthy challenge that can benefit all parties. I will, however, aim to replace myself at the first opportunity.

Dot Leap is a separate entity, and hopefully one I can pass on to someone else after setting it up the way I would like to be reading it.

Aren't you a Polkadot hater now?

I have my gripes with the brand and various entities in the ecosystem. None of that means I disregard the tech that comes out of this ecosystem, or that my journalistic integrity is compromised. I have been in tech writing and journalism for well over 12 years now, 9 of those in web3, always delivering objective reports. This will continue.

I am still deeply invested in this eco, in more ways than one, and I like to be kept in the loop on things as much as the next tokenholder. I might as well do a good job of forwarding the information while absorbing it.

What happens to Dot Leap if this proposal fails?

I will attempt to seek out sponsorship and integrate ads. Failing that, I will shut down Dot Leap and NFT Review.

Why not request this in milestones or as a bounty?

The planned changes are truly vast, and their expenses unpredictable. A smaller amount at first might not be enough to get critical mass of development early on, and the uncertainty might dissuade people we might want to hire from applying.

In theory, this could be done in smaller instalments, but these are not constraints under which I would personally be comfortable with leading this.

Will you just marketdump?

The funds will be staked and only sold as necessary for expenses. For the most part I will pay for everything out of pocket and reimburse my costs periodically, in an effort to gain as much as possible from the stake.

Contact

Telegram: t.me/swader

email: [email protected]