Marisa,

I'd like to meet with you to see if you could offer your services to our project, Spartacus.app. We're also Manifund-backed. We're preparing a social media outreach and influencer strategy and could use some additional expertise!

Thanks!

@TheManxLoinerThank you so much for your feedback!

1. Fair point! An aesthetic overhaul is on the agenda soon.
2. I agree. Initial call-to-actions should be MECP - Minimally Effective Coordination Points
3. "But again, maybe I am thinking about this wrong, and the aim of the tool should be to simply find out who is even interested in discussing it, rather than who is ready to commit to doing more." Exactly this. Small Steps
4. This collaboration could be exciting once we've gotten enough traction.

Thank you again!

Fascinated to see where this goes!

@Arepo I greatly appreciate the feedback and donation from you and your partner. Could you be more specific about why the post was offputting / why it sounds less concrete?

@ampdot Not seeing it. Checked spam. jordan@spartacus.app

@ampdot This is helpful background information and provides context I wasn't fully aware of. I understand now why you may have taken the tone you did. We're coming from significantly different vantage points.

There's no doubt that the process of arriving where we are has taken longer than it could or would have for others— partially due to the constraints of our collaboration arrangement, timing and availability issues, the inefficiencies of asynchronous remote collaboration, the typical losses in translation between non-technical and technical partners, and some higher-than-expected learning curves for me. A relatively strict division of labor was also agreed to at the outset, which created additional bottlenecks.

I'm somewhat familiar with ZK architecture and have spoken to some folks associated with https://www.projectcallisto.org/, for example. But because A, to my knowledge, neither of us had the requisite expertise/knowledgebase to build on the framework, and B, to your earlier point, in the beginning, specific security architecture was a variable of unknown importance. Unless we were willing to pre-commit to building for only those use cases where ZK was table stakes, it would be less critical than validating other parts of the value proposition, and it could prematurely force path dependencies before getting sufficient data on what different kinds of users prioritized. I also had a preexisting bias against building on Web3 for various reasons I won't get into here.

You've raised plenty of valid concerns, some of which remain challenges while we successfully mitigate others. Our exchange reinforces the value of open communication, community engagement, and information exchange, which can only benefit the project.

Because of your personal connection to Tetra and familiarity with the space we're playing in, I'm open to taking this conversation offline if you'd like. jordan @ spartacus.app

Appreciate this, @Jason !

@ampdot, that's precisely what I did before applying for the ACX grant - using Airtable, Sendgrid, and simple intake forms to create a prototype, validate the core concept, and sufficient interest from a subset of my professional network to justify investing my time and money on this bet. It provided the framework for Tetra and me to join forces and start working together once we received the grant.

Feedback on that prototype made it clear most users would not trust a process where the administrator could see all participants' contact info and their activity before a campaign's success threshold was met - what would be the point of anonymity if I, an employee or a hacker, could see everything at a glance? We're trying to make something people feel safe using when there are actual risks to having your participation revealed prematurely. As per Tetra's thesis, it also became clear that UX/UI concerns impeded people from trusting the platform, so a minimum level of adherence to consumer expectations was needed.

So, we built the MVP, and since then, I've been putting all my efforts into doing precisely the kind of manual outreach and high-touch support you described to identify and publish case studies and success stories, which we hope will be a springboard for more publicity and growth.

You're correct - the cold start problem is hard. Unfortunately, neither of us has an extensive preexisting network of people begging to become early adopters or relationships with individuals who could make intros to high-profile users or agree to participate in pilots. I don't have an elite pedigree, technical track record, or reputation in online communities, so the user acquisition process is a grind from a baseline of near zero. The credibility signal of being an ACX grantee only goes so far. I can't wave a magic wand and get people to instantly respond to my emails and DMs. We've had to sift through a lot of the "polite but unserious" interest you mentioned. We welcome any help in this area.

I wasn't aware of any feedback you may have given earlier, but you or anyone else can contact us from the website or via our X account or substack.

@ampdot I'm well aware of the conventional wisdom that product market fit in a specific niche must be established before trying to serve a generalized need. I also know the hazards of trying to simultaneously satisfy many different constituencies with non-overlapping feature requirements, which can lead to feature creep, overextension, and a failure to do any one thing well.

How can we know precisely where this product will gain traction in its current design without running experiments on different use cases and getting feedback? We have certain educated assumptions about our most promising use cases, and we're concentrating our outreach in those areas, but we expect we'll need to update many times based on real-world feedback. We intend to follow signals and focus our efforts where we're delivering the most measurable, unambiguous value.

Instead of being critical from the sidelines, why not join the Beta to help us in that discovery process?

Thanks for your response, Lucie! We're building that evidence as we speak through closed cohort beta testing. We're aiming for a small handful of success stories in what we think are our most compelling use case categories and then use those as a springboard for broader marketing efforts. We've received interest from some high-profile people, but we can't publicly discuss those yet.

If we can show how spartacus works in one example case for which there are potentially thousands of other local correlates, there's no better way to persuade people with similar challenges that Spartacus is something they should use.

But there are a few known unknowns concerning how effective this platform can be and whether we can grow and sustain demand in a few niches vs. a broader range of scenarios. Two significant challenges are discovering the actual demand for non-financial collective action organizing.

1. Crowdfunding works very well, works on the same underlying concepts, and has a predictable and sustainable business model (for the biggest players). However, the market for people willing to pledge non-monetary support to campaigns is less legible, and how to monetize that kind of value enablement is not immediately apparent.

2. Even the most successful examples of Spartacus working does not necessarily lead to people using it frequently or repeatedly. Incredibly impactful campaigns might naturally be an ad hoc, situational phenomenon. We don't yet have features that lend to routine use, making a subscription model harder to justify.

The next step is to demonstrate how valuable Spartacus can be in a handful of high-profile scenarios. When we do that, the contours of our addressable market should come into higher relief.

Good questions. If people don't trust their information will be private and secure on our platform, that would defeat the whole purpose of this undertaking. We have to get that right; luckily, it's a solvable problem.

Providing temporary anonymity is vital because we hypothesize that cases where coordination would generate the most benefits tend to correlate with situations where bad equilibria are sticky because of incentive pressures that are not openly acknowledged.

When there's no risk or penalty for trying to organize something new, assurance contracts are a good framework, but anonymity isn't necessary for standard marketing and mobilization best practices on social media. Change.org would be sufficient.

As far as the potential for this to become a platform, that depends on whether you think most people could answer the following five questions affirmatively:

1. What about your workplace, school, community, or social setting do you wish you could change or a problem you want to fix?

2. Can you change it by yourself?

3. Do you think other people feel the same way as you do?

4. If enough people agreed with you and all decided to act together, could the change happen?

5. How many people would need to agree with you until you felt confident it could happen?
   
   

What progress have you made since your last update?

June/July 2024 Update

MVP Soft Launch!

What are your next steps?

Beta Testing in Cohorts, User Acquisition, Additional Fundraising

Is there anything others could help you with?

Introductions to high-profile individuals who want to use novel techniques to solve collective action problems they care about.

What progress have you made since your last update?

https://open.substack.com/pub/spartacusapp/p/aprilmay-2024-status-report?r=131rx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

What are your next steps?

https://lu.ma/0uq17dmo

Is there anything others could help you with?

Always open to intros!

Nicholas and Ben, Thank you so much! If you want to get in touch, please email me at jordan @ spartacus.app