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raid-guild / RIPs

Registry of internal raidguild improvment projects
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Business Model workshops to refine Raid Guild’s positioning #135

Closed benedictvscriticus closed 1 year ago

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

Project Update RIP #135 and #139

Lately, it's become apparent that Guilders lack effective resources and frameworks for describing (or shilling) Raid Guild to others, especially potential new clients. Inbound leads have been few & far between, and Guilders have begun to do more outbound business development to secure new clients.

Agreement was reached that Raid Guild must enhance marketing positioning and unify messaging that effectively expresses Raid Guild's unique value proposition(s). This needs to be agile and efficient; marketing initiatives that are research heavy and produce lengthy reports with little actionable items are seen as not helpful.

We propose a the production of two decks: a BD deck meant to be distributed/presented to potential clients, and an EPK more for general outreach. The process to architect both decks is near identical, and below we outline a flow to do just that.

Project Submitted By

@st4rgarden, @benedictvscriticus, @joshsdoug

Summary

Workshop (90mins): Raid Guilds business model

Public Working Session (90mins): Refinement

To be mindful of participant's time while maintaining transparency, we will schedule a public working session to refine the inputs from the Workshop. During this session, we will organize the Workshop finidngs into a formal BMC. We will also begin work on RIP Deliverables.

Anyone interested in participating is welcome to join, however, active conversations are not necessarily required to be maintained by attendees.

Presentation

Deliverables

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Why should we build this?

Guild members need to have the resources and frameworks in how to effectively communicate the work and positioning of RaidGuild. This exercise is light weight and likely produces actionable items for focused marketing initiatives, while producing streamlined marketing messaging for Hunters.

Anything else you'd like to add?

The change log and comments can be found here.

Raid Party Skills Needed

Cost (in USD)

Given an estimate of ten (10) hours to prepare and hold the workshops, to which sixteen (16) hours are added to produce the promised material, as well as three (3) hours for a designer to polish the deliverables, we would like to request one thousand fourhundred fifty (1,450) US Dollars.

1,450 USD

St4rgarden commented 1 year ago

Looks pretty good to me.

I will definitely attend this.

ECWireless commented 1 year ago

@benedictvscriticus damn, this looks like a lot of work ("This exercise is light weight" 😅)! Really excited about this project--I can see this going beyond your expected hours, though, and would pad the cost $100-200 more.

Also, how would you determine the success of a project like this? I think something like tracking the media engagement by views/clicks, or doing a 1-2 month follow-up on the business model canvas' usefulness, are two ways you could go about it

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

@benedictvscriticus damn, this looks like a lot of work ("This exercise is light weight" 😅)! Really excited about this project--I can see this going beyond your expected hours, though, and would pad the cost $100-200 more.

Also, how would you determine the success of a project like this? I think something like tracking the media engagement by views/clicks, or doing a 1-2 month follow-up on the business model canvas' usefulness, are two ways you could go about it

Thank you for this feedback. Luckily, @joshsdoug0 reached out because he is interested to help. We certainly appreciate the padding and your recommended success metrics sound reasonable and actionable. I will be meeting with @joshsdoug0 on Friday, prior to our SG weekly. We then further refine the proposal and have it ready for execution.

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

@ECWireless I think after some refinement by @joshdoug0 and myself, we are good to go. I edited the issue to reflect the latest version and linked the HackMD file for transparency.

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

As requested by @ECWireless, I included an itemised list of sections that are included in a pitch deck:

It specifically is distinct from an electronic press kit (EPK) through its use. An EPK is for cold leads and consists of a nucleus version of a pitch deck, whereas, a pitch deck should be a slide deck master for a living document used by hunters for warm leads. Thus, the EPK is something any raider can forward to a cold lead without any changes and pitch decks should be tailored and amended to the concrete sales context.

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

A Brief Retrospective

Lessons Learned

Conducting a business model canvas workshop was first met with some scepticism, as the ultimate and tangible deliverable of such a workshop was not as clear as desired and the effort got conflated with KPI-driven marketing. After thorough discussions and proper scoping, we finally started modelling. It was great fun.

Highlights

Scepticism during the brigade preparations ameliorated into active participation by over 20 Raiders in the workshop. We generated an immense amount of data that was condensed into an authoritative slide deck named 'BMC'. It was a great opportunity to work with long-standing Raid Guild members (shoutout to @joshsdoug) and opened new perspectives on long completed Raids. The knowledge we surfaced enabled us to deliver a consistent pitch deck for use by many Raid Parties.

Low-Lights

Scheduling and task assignment could be improved next time such initiative is executed. Over the course of completing the work streams we have discovered that there is a severe shortage of Archers within the Guild. Furthermore, dependencies between multiple initiatives have caused bottlenecks and scope changes. It is unfortunate that other Brigade initiatives were unable to consume our output due to holidays, varying professional obligations, and external contingencies. Lastly, we could not verify the delivery of the EPK at the time of writing this retrospective.

Status

One workshop was held that drew Guild-wide participation. The results were reviewed and discussed in a public working session. The BMC was transposed into a slide deck, which forms the basis of a draft for a pitch deck on Google Slides. The Google Slides-based pitch deck was transformed into Figma assets and is now available to all Raiders as consistent work deck.

Next steps

Summary

It was a fun and fulfilling experience that turned out to be more complex than expected. We uncovered interesting sales angles and new Molochs, which made all parties involved bond and share their perspectives. Controversial and widely accepted arguments were heard, but a state of the art analysis delivered. We now can go out to Raid with a shared voice. We will be back to check in whether we were heard.

St4rgarden commented 1 year ago

EPK Draft #1

Here's the first draft of the EPK

This is just designed to give people the very most basic information about Raid Guild; and to get the saliva flowing a little bit, to get their imagination churning about us; and building Web3 products in general.

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

Following Up

Lessons Learned

After three months, the retrospective on the OKRs yields disappointing results. While initial interest was large and even throughout the retrospective period members signalled interest in using it, the pitch deck did not actually lead to a deal closed. This can be attributed to the overall state of the market, but may also point to information asymmetries within the guild.

Highlights

It is important to note, however, that the pitch deck template has proven immensely valuable in the communication with existing clients. Namely, the pitch deck was used to facilitate and document delivery sessions with Lobby3 and was the basis for ROM's earliest marketing engagements.

Low-Lights

While a lot of work has flown into aligning the contents with senior guild members throughout three iterations, the fine-tuned pitch deck was to my best knowledge only used by myself. Furthermore, the pitch deck was presented at a guild wide weekly call and the resource was made available to all guild members for customisation and is free to use through the sharing of a Figma link. Despite all these efforts, adoption remained limited to the individuals actively involved in the construction of it.

Status

Through the follow up new interest from some Raiders was generated, however, the extent to which this turns into real usage remains to be seen. One of the reasons for lacking adoption could be the slow overall market and low inbound. I am determined to continue using it and would celebrate any adoption. The resource remains available and I continue to service requests, if any come up.

Next steps

Summary

From my own, subjective perspective, despite lacking guild-wide adoption, it was valuable work because I continue using it and it integrates with more recent consolidation efforts of the RaidGuild branding. If the ROI changes in the coming months, I will update the status accordingly.

ECWireless commented 1 year ago

@benedictvscriticus thanks for writing up the follow-up! Because of Discord feedback (cc @plor ), are you able to lay out results in the same format as OKRs listed above? For instance:

Deck utilization

...

benedictvscriticus commented 1 year ago

Deck utilization

Objective: Guilders should use these materials, and potential clients/partners should see them

Key Result:

Pitch Deck Goal: 6 uses in 3 months

The pitch deck template was used three times in client meetings, however, the pitch deck was not used for any warm leads or potential clients.

EPK Goal: 6 uses in 3 months

The EPK was not added to the website and the status was not reported by @St4rgarden. Hence, we must labelled it as unused in the first three months.

Pitch Deck Result: underdelivered EPK Result: undelivered

RaidGuild recently has generated clients primarily of personal connections instead of business development. Like the distribution of raidguild.org email addresses, the distribution of communally owned resources is dysfunctional. Active propagation does not suffice when no continuous ownership over processes is established.

Finally, do you think BizDev / Marketing projects are worth pursuing in future Brigades?

I would not categorically dismiss them, as I am not aware that strict KPIs are applied to technical deliverables. Thus, we are not aware whether such initiatives yield worse results than software development brigade contributions. Brigades appear to bring more continuity due to their longer run times than standalone RIPs and I do not feel comfortable to draw final conclusions. Yet, focus on operations should be the main objective of Brigades.