This topic is to discuss ways to become financial sustainable as part of our goals in the Governance 2022 doc: Clarity — The simplest workspace for decentralized teams
As of now, RAW currently spends money but does not generate income. We have a limited runway for acquisitions and funding operations.
As of May 15 we have 500 ETH in our treasury, not including our $PRINTS tokens
We spend approx. 16-20 ETH every month on acquisitions and operations
This gives us a runway of about 25 months / 2 years
Note that this does not include any ad hoc purchases that come up which could be anywhere from 20-100+ETH in a single month.
There are many ways for us to create revenue streams, here are some that have been discussed in Discord so far:
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We are currently working on implementing a treasury management proposal so that our current holdings can be productive and generate some income for us
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Selling our soon-to-be custom voting UI - for community curation or alternate Cooridnape but this is not a good bet for covering all of our costs. Especially the case for Coordinape, although their UI sucks it is free.
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We have connections with all curated NFT photography platforms and leading artists in this space, we can partner to drop collections with artists. This isn’t a bad idea but it is reliant on the NFT photography market which has ups and downs
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We have discussed on-boarding services as it becomes an extension of RAW being a “lighthouse” for NFT photography to help artists from the traditional art world come aboard.
These are just few, but I hope in this discussion we can come up with other ideas so that we can get closer to achieving our goal of becoming more financially sustainable as a DAO.
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Great initial list on a topic of critical long term importance. It might also be helpful to frame and prioritize the options based on how RAW might create value for different stakeholder groups:
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RAW member artists - photo nft onboarding and artist marketing services; drop support/collabs with other platforms including revenue sharing; other ideas…
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RAW member collectors - marketplace support for personal photo nft listings; subscription membership early access to RAW member artist drops; other ideas…
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RAW partner DAOs - access to proprietary software; DAO consulting services; other ideas…
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Photo NFT Marketplaces - affiliate programs to drive artist listings/collector traffic; other ideas…
As part of this discussion, it would also be helpful to define criteria by which we might prioritize these options for development:
- Mission/Vision/Goal alignment (H/M/L)
- Est. revenue potential (H/M/L)
- New member growth potential impact (H/M/L)
- Member retention potential impact (H/M/L)
- Community/Market growth impact (H/M/L)
- etc…
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Might it be an idea to do a kind of hackathon?
It could look like this:
Members write proposals in a set amount of time, like 5 days or a week. Every member or team of members who writes a proposal gets compensation in ETH for their effort.
Then the DAO members vote on the different proposals through Discord polling. In the end, maybe with some adjustments after community discussion, the winning proposal goes to Snapshot vote.
The writer(s) of the winning proposal gets an extra bounty in the form of an special soul bound token. (Just like the RAW DAO artist pass.)
We should be open to ideas and imput from members, especially regarding future revenue for the DAO. A hackathon might be a fun way to hear and explore ideas of the community and reward them. Also this would structure all these ideas and we can discuss them. It would be like RAW DAO Community Curation but instead of photography NFT collections, it’s ideas.
Anyway it might be better than anyone just dropping ideas in Discord and then they get lost in the conversation or worse. I think this is a common problem for most DAOs working with Discord.
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Been sitting with this for a while
2 thoughts have come up…
#1 Partnering with traditional photography/art institutions to onboard them into the web3 world.
As seen by the data in our member surveys, this is many people’s first DAO. And many comments were made that we should provide more education around NFT photography, around the space as a whole. How can we accomodate our members needs in a way that could also be profitable?
Some organizations host residencies for artists, guiding them through marketing, technical know-how etc. What if this was a service we provided to large scale photography institutions looking to place a foot in the NFT world? We have seen this sort of happen between Magnum and Obscura and now Magnum is launching NFTs on its own. The MOMA was looking for a web3 associate and after hearing about interviews, its clear they really need help from people inside the space after quietly launching a collection on the Bitmark blockchain
This could included education around best practices for NFT launches, assisting with Discord community building, an exchange of NFTs by renowned artists, establishing RAW’s relationship with the trad fine art sector.
What does the community think?
#2 - Sourcing VC Funding
Fingerprints has received funding from a16z, USV, and Wintermute.
When I attended the Obscura panel in NYC last week, co-founder Tony Herrera mentioned attending a VC event in which 2 parties brought up Obscura.
What stops RAW from receiving funding in order to continue to light the path forward for photography? At the very least it’s a good exercise in evaluating our DAO model, our costs, and at best we recieve anywhere fro 0- over 1000 ETH as seen by Fingerprints phase 4 funding round (see photo)
I’ve been thinking about the concept of RAW as “the lighthouse” for NFT Photography. What if we were to explore this a bit further and host contests / an awards ceremony dedicated to NFT Photography? “The NFT Photography Awards” hosted by RAW DAO. Including the IPA awards page here for reference: About | International Photography Awards™
Photographers would pay a set fee (Maybe starting at 0.10 ETH per submission?) to submit their work for different categories. Categories could be topic-specific similar to how IPA does it, such as:
- Architecture
- Portraiture
- Street
- Event
- Nature
etc
We could have a jury consisting of some of our founding artists or inviting other photographers + collectors.
Awards could include 1) RAW collecting the work 2) a monetary prize 3) An exclusive RAW trophy airdropped as an NFT
Depending on how much we want to scale this, we would also be in a good position to seek sponsors for monetary prizes as well as holding an in-person celebration. Or, alternatively, a virtual one in a metaverse like Arium, which has webcam and audio capability for events.
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Thank you great ideas!
Only what I’m a bit wary about is letting artists pay for their submissions for RAW to get revenue. Think for artists submitting should be free.
RAW DAO sponsors and partners in these contests should bring in also RAW DAO revenue.
Actually what RAW DAO is selling is our curation system, that is what RAW is building. So sponsors and partners pay for making use of RAW DAO curating, that is RAW value and field of expertise.
how about selling memberships this way? it can be kind of cool and stimulate the purchase of raw tokens. like it’s a free submission but you must hold x amount of RAW.
Well, that would be like saying, members only! 
You have to be a member to participate.
But yes, it could be also a way to reward existing members in that way.
But still also in this scenario I think partners / sponsors should compensate RAW for making use of RAW DAO unique community collection system RAW developed over the last few months. That is actually the product RAW is selling.
What might be idea is to do a contest / challenge / hackathon about thinking about photography NFT, developing cutting edge NFT native photography collections. What does the future of photography NFT look like?
Are NFT a medium? If so what kind of medium? Is the medium the market? NFT are programmable, interactive, what can you do with that in perspective with photography? What new ways of storytelling are possible? If NFT are game items in search of game what games could we be playing with photography? The non-physicality of NFT JPG are a liberation, what does that mean for exhibitions? What could a photography collab with a gen artist look like, or a PFP project? Or a photography Art Blocks drop?
The winning proposal could be RAW DAOs first curated drop.
It could be a yearly event; like the Aperture photo book award - the RAW DAO photo NFT award - imagine the booth on Paris Photo next year.
RAW DAO ushering in the future of photo NFT, RAW DAO should only be reaching for the stars✨
