[DRAFT PROPOSAL] Growth and Marketing Alignment on Starknet

[jane0mac]

Hi there, it’s great to be here! My name is Jane, and I am one of the co-founders of zkLend. Alongside my talented colleagues @xJonathanLEI and @bfu, we have developed a native money-market protocol on Starknet that is currently live on testnet. We are proud to have been active in the ecosystem since late 2021 and have participated in many exciting developments in the space. Today I’d like to discuss the future of Starknet marketing with the community.

Introduction

Over the past year, much attention has been given to growing the Starknet developer ecosystem, optimizing network performance, and establishing governance. While these efforts are essential for building a strong foundation, we need to focus on expanding the Starknet community beyond developers to drive real-world adoption.

Recently the community has seen governance proposals pertaining to wider Starknet user adoption, such as this recent proposal by @david from Nostra on the creation of a “Starknet Governance Fund”. We strongly believe this is a step in the right direction and in the spirit of furthering discussion, we want to propose the creation of a Growth Committee (“GC”) within the Starknet Foundation. As a team building on Starknet, we believe that a more defined onboarding strategy for users would benefit the ecosystem and amplify marketing efforts from individual projects.

The proposed Growth Committee builds on Nostra’s recent proposal for a “Starknet Governance Fund” that focuses on wider Starknet user adoption. We believe that the creation of a Growth Committee is a logical next step to help coordinate and accelerate user onboarding efforts, while providing guidance, governance, and monitoring of the usage of the fund.

Current State of Growth on Starknet

Currently, Starknet growth is loosely divided into three parts: developer onboarding, partnership building, and consumer growth.

• Developer onboarding is a joint effort by the StarkWare team and developer communities, such as OnlyDust and Encode Club, to onboard developers through a mix of in-person and online educational events.
• Partnership building also is an effort led by the StarkWare team to secure key infrastructure and institutional partnerships, such as the Chainlink SCALE program, ConsenSys, Alchemy, and Ledger.
• However, consumer growth is missing. A dedicated Growth Committee is needed to drive user adoption.

Growth Committee

Mandate
The GC’s mandate is to coordinate consumer-focused activities aligned with Starknet and Ethereum’s principles and to accelerate user onboarding onto Starknet’s protocols. The GC will provide guidance, governance, and monitoring of the usage of “Starknet Governance Fund”.

Scope
The scope of the GC and grants the committee approves should encompass one or more of the areas below:

1. General marketing - efforts to create general awareness about Starknet and its protocols. This could include social media campaigns, influencer outreach, targeted advertising, and other strategies to raise the profile of the network and attract more users.
2. User incentives - campaigns for users to participate in Starknet’s protocols. This could include rewards or transaction fee rebates for completing certain actions or achieving specific milestones on the network, such as using a protocol, providing liquidity, or participating in governance decisions.
3. User education - support educational initiatives focused on Starknet and its protocols. This could include workshops, webinars, tutorials, and other resources designed to help users understand how to use the network effectively. By providing education, the committee aims to lower the barrier to entry for new users and increase overall adoption of the network.

It is important to note that while user incentives will be within the Growth Committee’s scope, it shall only be a part and not the whole of what the GC focuses on. We have seen several successful campaigns by other networks that use creative means beyond incentives to drive user adoption.

Some examples include:

• Arbitrum Odyssey - An 8 week program introduced by Arbitrum last summer aimed at increasing user engagement by offering NFT rewards. Users can interact with various protocols each week, complete specific on-chain actions, and earn badges.
• zkSync Account Abstraction Food Truck Experience - a partnership between zkSync and WeLook, and MyEtherWallet that allowed users to test out zkSync Era (previous 2.0) and transact on the network at EthDenver.
• Optimism Quests - Periodic quests or challenges that are designed to incentivize community members to contribute to the Optimism ecosystem. The quests can range from bug bounties to creative challenges, and rewards can include anything from Optimism tokens to exclusive swag.

The committee should, where appropriate, also help with such coordination. The committee’s scope should be broad and not limited to specific industries or projects to ensure the widest possible adoption of Starknet.

Assessment Criteria
Each interested party or protocol should submit a written proposal detailing the goal of the campaign, execution plan, as well as resources required. While we will not go into detail on the application structure here, our friends at Nostra have done a great job in their proposal and we suggest using it as a template once the GC is established.

Individuals or project teams should also disclose upfront the grants they have received from Starknet and/or the Starknet Foundation to prevent double-funding similar types of activities and to ensure that previous grants have been used up prior.

Metrics for Success
To measure the success of the Growth Committee’s grants, the following metrics should be considered: weekly active wallets (new and existing), TVL, new teams building in the ecosystem. Additionally, cohort analysis can be used to track these metrics by grouping users into different onboarding periods and evaluating their engagement with the platform.

1. Wallets (new and existing) - number of new and active wallets on Starknet, as well as the number of existing users who are engaging more with the platform. This metric is important as it indicates the growth of the user base.

2. Average transaction size and frequency - average value transferred in a single transaction, while average transaction frequency tracks how often users are transacting on Starknet. These metrics provide insight into user behavior for optimizing UX and incentives.

3. TVL (Total Value Locked) in DeFi - incremental value of assets locked in Starknet contracts and compare this against cost of acquisition.

4. New projects - a lagging indicator of ecosystem health but arguably one of the most impactful in the long term. This can be tracked through Github + onchain activity.

Decision Making
The GC will be made up of 5-10 members, and should meet regularly to discuss proposals and make decisions on allocation of resources through a majority voting process. It should comprise a mix of StarkWare employees, ecosystem projects across DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, and infrastructure to ensure a diverse representation of the community.

1. Full-time staff - employees of StarkWare or the Foundation appointed by StarkWare
2. Committee lead - responsible for coordinating meetings and approvals, as well as regular updates and communication with the Foundation and other stakeholders. The leader will be voted on by the Committee.
3. Committee members - responsible for assessment and voting on proposals. This group can initially be selected by the Foundation board. In the long run acceptance of committee members should be on an application basis and approved by the existing GC. Teams with protocols on at least testnet would be eligible and the term limit per committee member should not exceed more than [12] months.

Resources
The Starknet Foundation has been granted 50.1% of the initial token supply of $STRK, with 9% allocated for community rebates and 10% to a strategic reserve to fund ecosystem activities. We believe the Foundation should consider allocating a portion of these 19% of tokens (for example, approximately [5]% of tokens as a starting point) to the Growth Committee to fund consumer-focused campaigns.

Conclusion and Next Steps

In conclusion, we propose the creation of a Growth Committee within the Starknet Foundation to review, approve, and help coordinate user-focused campaigns to drive user adoption of Starknet. The GC would exist orthogonal to other committees in order to reduce redundancy in resources and responsibilities, and would solely be focused on consumer-facing activities.

We recommended funds to be seeded from either the strategic reserve or community rebates pot within the Starknet Foundation tokens.

This proposal is intended to further discussion, and dig deeper into the long-term direction and governance model of the proposed “Starknet Growth Fund" (renamed from “Starknet Governance Fund”) by us and @david. While it is not an exhaustive checklist, we believe this proposal is a crucial step towards making Starknet a more inclusive community with users.

We encourage the community to share their thoughts and feedback on this proposal in the comments below. By doing so, we can gauge community interest and support for this initiative and bring it to the attention of the Starknet Foundation.

[odin-free.ffs]

Hi Jane,
The work you’re doing with zkLend and the Growth Committee you’re proposing is awesome. It’s cool that you and your team have been involved in the ecosystem since late 2021 and also stick around during difficult market conditions. True OGs.

I personally really like your idea to set up a committee focused on marketing and education to get more people using Starknet. IMO think your proposal could make a big difference by expanding the community beyond devs.

It’s also great that you’re thinking about how to reduce overlap with other committees. It’s smart idea to measure success through active wallets, TVL, and new truly innovative projects leveraging the USP of Starknet to evaluate the impact.

Overall, I think your proposal is nice and would be a valuable addition to Starknet. I’m looking forward to seeing how this proposal develops and hearing what the community thinks!

Some questions from my side:

How can the GC ensure that the user incentives it proposes to drive user adoption of Starknet provide valuable education and showcase novel use cases, rather than simply engaging in farming techniques, and add real value to the users and creators of the protocols?

How would the GC ensure grants are used effectively and similar activities don’t get double-funded?

As Starknet grows and evolves, how do you see the GC evolving?

Cheers
Oli

[Nurstar]

Thanks @jane0mac for such a well-thought proposal. As a Non-Dev Content Creator in StarkNet Community, I really think that, as a Community, we should concentrate some of our efforts on valorizing the wonderful things that Builders are doing in the Ecosystem and make it digestible and usable by as many people as possible.

[love2bluff]

Great proposal. A few thoughts from an active member of GuildXYZ, Layer3, Gitcoin, Phi Land communities.

What I really like and find fair about programs like Optimism Quests and Arbitrum Oddyssey (was so good it never relaunched lol) is that they work as a kind of IOU (i owe you) paper.

If project is going to make it, they will be incentiviced to reward early users/testers. If not, well, user still has an NFT proving his onchain achievements. No promises broken.

Also completing quests is a fun value itself.

Just like ppl enjoy completing small tasks in mobile games (short dopamine spikes across the day) but here you actually learn new stuff and have above 0 chance to get an airdrop in the future (Isn’t it a sustainable GameFi model?)

I believe its a fun, engaging and non-toxic way to attract users “if cooked right” (no overpromises, manipulative tasks, degen behaviour promoting etc).

Its also a great gamified education. In a last Layer3XYZ update an emphasis was made on hybrid activities - user reads through docs, learns the key innovations of the project, completes a quiz + makes some onchain actions.

I also believe such activities should be launched after network upgrade. Current sentiment in our community is like “Starknet is slow as hell, I won’t wait 2 minutes for my tx to go through”.

Another favorable timing to launch community campaign may be after the public launch of Influence and Realms games. They are clearly the best match to retain users.

Thanks for being able to share my thoughts.

[klaus]

love it, awesome proposal.
I guess it might be a bit early to start campaigns anytime soon, but it seems to be a pretty good time to start working on concepts. Talk to ecosystem projects, discuss requirements, goals and maybe test a few things - analyse and learn from crew3 and other campaigns that already took place.

[jane0mac]

Thanks @odin-free.ffs Oli, these are great questions! While I don’t have all the answers, I do think the above are more execution based. My two cents:

Q1: Ensuring incentives go to real users and not airdroppers

• Divide user incentive grants into seasons and evaluate the value of each campaign incrementally to identify projects that add value to the network by acquiring and retaining real users. Projects that meet these criteria should receive a larger percentage of grants
• Allocate grants to incentivize user activity that makes the network more “complete,” such as LPs for AMMs or secondary listings for NFT trading platforms
• Grants to include newer projects in later seasons, as more established protocols would have already built up a user base. This way the Growth Committee ensures that user incentives helps highlight novel use cases

Q2: No double dipping/fraudulent behavior from grant receipients

• Establish a database of previous grant recipients and track the purpose of each grant to prevent double-funding
• Require grant applicants to provide a clear and detailed outline in each proposal, specifying the scope of the grant
• They should also submit regular progress reports and proof to ensure proper use of funds/tokens

[brazzilinseys]

I think the reward can be divided into two parts
1: Users who have been involved in the Starknet ecology, such as Starkgate, because we all know that most of the current ecology is a testnet, you can’t ask users to interact with too much frequency, and early users are taking risks. join.
2: After waiting for the mainnet to go online, give rewards or hold a series of activities according to the number of tx

However, I think everyone has seen that such an event organized by ARB is not recognized by everyone, and it has a negative impact on the entire community anyway. You have to know that real users will actively stay without such cumbersome activities.

[mama1000sui]

I think what we should think about is why Arbitrum has managed to stay on top of L2 despite not releasing a token. One shouldn’t compare it to Optimism. Regarding the airdrop scenario, my opinion is that the team leads and is as forgiving as possible, rather than trying desperately and singularly to figure out how to filter out hunters.
Who oversees GC? What about the project side getting funding and not acting?

[edemirgiran]

lowering wages would benefit starknet

[dja]

The GC can ensure that the user incentives proposed for driving user adoption of Starknet provide valuable education, demonstrate novel use cases, and create real value for users and protocol creators by implementing certain measures. Firstly, they can design the incentives in such a way that they align with the objectives of the Starknet network. Secondly, they can prioritize education and innovation over mere farming strategies by setting up programs that encourage the development of innovative projects and applications on the network. Thirdly, the GC can collaborate with existing stakeholders to ensure that the incentives benefit both users and protocol creators. Finally, the GC can continuously monitor the incentive programs and adjust them as necessary to ensure that they remain effective and relevant over time.

[s0lness]

I think this is a splendid initiative, thanks for putting it up @jane0mac!

[iddriss]

The establishment of a Growth Committee would be a welcome addition to the Starknet ecosystem, which I completely support. As the co-founder of a project building on Starknet, I appreciate the need to increase the user base beyond simply developers, and I believe that a more defined onboarding plan for users would be of great benefit.

The proposed scope of the Growth Committee appears comprehensive and all-encompassing, and I especially enjoy the emphasis on educational activities and general marketing efforts. In the past few months, we’ve seen a good amount of educational content being pushed out there, but it’s all been focused on development. And while it’s important to get more developers who’ll build innovative solutions, we’ll need non-developer users to use these solution and grow the ecosystems TVL.

I believe this suggestion has the ability to expedite user onboarding and increase the actual adoption of Starknet’s protocols. Thank you for proposing this, @jane0mac and the zkLend Team; I look forward to seeing the community’s response and involvement with this campaign.

[haitang]

As a user, I want to make money first. When a beta project cannot bring benefits to users, the project needs to give some incentives to the future, so as to attract more testers and finally turn them into loyal users.

There are 8.1% unallocated tokens in the foundation, and 2% can be awarded to loyal users every year. This can last for four years. I think four years will be enough for various ecological projects to develop and cultivate a large number of loyal users.

[Fricoben]

Very cool initiative ! I definitely think we need to coordinate as an Ecosystem to bring this user adoption.

The difficult part will be to attract users that will be sticky for the network. As @mama1000sui, I don’t think that Optimism current growth is “real” considering the amount of incentives they are giving.

However when we look at Arbitrum for example, I think their ecosystem will be more sticky overtime.

Here is why :

1. There is a good deFi infrastructure (but it’s also the case for optimism)
2. There are unique applications (especially GMX) that drives real growth.

Users don’t want to use Arbitrum for the sake of using Arbitrum. They want to use Arbitrum because the app that they want to use are on it (Again, mainly GMX).

To me, we should aim to do what Starkex managed to do. Attract real users with unique Apps that people will want to use not for the hope of an airdrop or for any incentive. DeFi is key, but NFTs are even more important to drive that adoption imo (We have examples like Immutable, Sorare on Starknet but one of the main narrative of Polygon is also NFTs right now).

At Starknet ID we’re working with some Starknet Projects to make a small Proof of Concept with a mini-game that could drive adoption and spotlight on the Starknet Ecosystem.

Would love to talk with you about it @jane0mac (Braavos, Briq, Everai, Argent, Carbonable and more projects are already in discussion with us to help in that initiative).

[jengajojo]

I support like to idea of a delegated group making growth decisions on behalf of token holders since it has shown promising results in the past. Based on learnings from such committiees from other ecosystems I suggest:

a. Limiting the duration to 3 months for the first trial phase
b. Choosing a max. allocation for each grant approval and a max. budget for the trial
c. Making the selection process completely public to avoid backroom deals
d. Having a clear rubric for rating proposals similar to OP Growth Sub-committiee
e. Mandatory reporting to the community on the grants process similar to AGD Renewal 4: Recent work Updates - Aave Grants DAO - Aave

Thank you @jane0mac for putting the initial draft together. While I agree with the marketing and education scope, the metrics which you have identified for the same are not synced to measuring the success of service providers who offer marketing/education. I suggest #views #leads #CTR as some of the metrics to judge these activities. User Incentives should be a completely separate category since the expertise required for this domain is different than the other two.

[janosek]

It is very rare that i agree with everything someone said, but you managed to hit the nail right on the head with this one Jane! the Growth committee is a well thought idea and i am a big fan of doing quests as rewards as long as we find a way not to reward sybil farmers. Arbitrum just now announced the airdrop and it didn’t have to do anything to do with the odyssey campaign which got a certain amount of people mad and the odyssey project itself was stopped due to network issues but i believe we can avoid all those problems if we play our cards right.

[ManuAlzuru]

Thank you so much for sharing this amazing post.

As we all know, decentralized networks, are celebrated for their transparency, community-driven decision-making, and censorship resistance. However, some of the main challenges these networks face is definitely growth, marketing and communication. There are still a lot of questions on how an organization should communicate complex and technical concepts in a decentralized manner without being disconnected from the direction that the tech + BD teams might be taking?

This is where a growth committee can be essential. The growth committee should be composed by individuals with community building, growth and communications expertise within the web3 space and should be in constant communication with the tech and bd teams. This group should be tasked with coordinating marketing and communication efforts to increase awareness, adoption, and usage of Starknet. The growth committee should help bridge the gap between the technical complexities of the network and the needs and wants of the end users, developers and other possible participants of the network (delegates, validators and more).

We need to be conscious that Starkware as an organization has other products like StarkEx which could create a lot of confusion to end users and for that reason I believe that education and clear communication is key for the success of the network.

Usually decentralized networks are built by technical experts who may be able to communicate to developers but might not have a deep understanding of marketing and communication to all the different stakeholders of the network and that’s where the GC makes a lot of sense.

Communication and marketing of a network requires a delicate balance between community involvement and technical expertise. A growth committee can definitely help navigate this balance by allowing the community to guide the direction of the communication and growth, without being disconnected from the tech team completely.

Starknet needs a clear and concise messaging across all the different communications channels and mediums. Without clear communications guidelines, there could be a lot of confusion and even distrust among potential end users, possible organizations wanting to deploy in new networks and even developers, validators or just simply investors in the network. By having a growth committee that signs on all the communication, the organization can ensure that its messaging is clear, consistent, and on-brand.

We need to take into consideration that Cairo is a new language and that there has to be a lot of educational materials (guides, videos, tutorials…) and built incentives for new developers to deploy in the network. But this is just the very beginning, then we need to have guides and even gamify the experience for people to bring the assets to the network, use it constantly and hopefully those can help it grow with word of mouth and with the help of the networks effects of the dapps deployed in the network. If there aren’t good apps in the network it will be hard to attract and retain possible users.

The growth committee can help create campaigns with incentives in mind. These campaigns can be both online and IRL. The growth committee should be in charge also of all the activities in different events, PR, podcasts, TV or other potential user acquisition channels.

I’m sure that by providing a unified voice, clear messaging, and community-driven direction we can definitely help increase awareness, adoption, and usage of Starknet.

I’d be super down to contribute to such committee!

[remi.stark]

I strongly support the idea of establishing a Growth Committee and a grants system for business development in Starknet.

As a network with a small user base and volume, it is crucial to provide effective support for projects that can showcase the potential of Starknet to users who may not have a deep understanding of its technical aspects.

I would also like to emphasize the importance of prioritizing collective actions that promote inclusivity and allow every project to contribute to the network’s growth. By using grants for user acquisition on a collective level, we can avoid sponsoring individual initiatives and prevent the potential for vampire projects that generate false volume and wash trading without bringing value to end users. This approach will help ensure that the network continues to attract genuine users and drives sustainable growth.

[maxxng.eth]

Let 's pump this back so we have more discussion on this topic and will come to a finalize proposal soon. Starknet is better and in good shape now to attract more users. The time is now to finish all the foundation work and laid out new initiatives for user growth.