Proposal “Evolution-Marketing“ (Closed)Back
| Title: | *** Re-submitted: with split funding - https://www.dashcentral.org/p/Evolution_Offers_and_Promotions_Platform ***Merchant Digital Growth and Marketing Platform for Evolution (November Superblock Request 12/2 payout) |
| Owner: | srolinson |
| One-time payment: | 2559 DASH (74596 USD) |
| Completed payments: | no payments occurred yet (1 month remaining) |
| Payment start/end: | 2017-11-17 / 2017-12-17 (added on 2017-10-23) |
| Final voting deadline: | in passed |
| Votes: | 199 Yes / 533 No / 72 Abstain |
Proposal description
Hi all,
based on the feedback from our pre-proposal we are submitting our formal proposal for the Evolution Marketing Platform that will that will bring automated digital marketing to the Dash Network and Evolution as well as Dash digital currency to local retailers and etailers through our targeted offers and rewards platform.
**note** This request is for the November superblock and while this request is for a onetime payment, funds will be held in escrow by the Dash Core Team and released throughout the project based on milestone completion.
The PDF version of our proposal is available here: https://goo.gl/tfxncd
Comments from our pre-proposal can be found here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pre-proposal-merchant-digital-growth-platform-for-evolution.17426/
Merchant Digital Growth and Marketing Platform for Evolution
The Acme is a digital marketing and ecommerce technology company specializing in engagement and direct response marketing fueled by consumer data intelligence, machine learning, and digital payments. Our clients are brick & mortar local businesses (retailers) and online small businesses (etailers) that need more repeatable and predictable revenue from repeat customers.
In collaboration with FetchRev, a customer retention marketing software company established in 2012, we have worked with over 3,000 small businesses to reach their customers with offers and coupons across multiple digital channels. Working with brands and companies like Elements Massage, 18|8, SkyZone, Precision Tune and Urban Air, our combined team of 30+ employees consistently sends over 28M emails and 21M social ads to over 19M consumers driving over $2M USD in additional revenue for our customers every single month.
The Pain
The Dash Network benefits and grows when Merchants and Consumers come together to transact using Dash digital currency. But Retailers and Etailers alike lack a strong incentive to accept digital currency as a viable payment option for their business, and Consumers often struggle to find an opportunity to use their Dash wallet in the normal course of their day. Ultimately, the best way to increase usage on the Network will be to provide tangible user benefits like an exclusive offers and rewards platform, for example.
Additionally, those merchants already on the network (as well as any future ones) often struggle to bring their customers back in their physical door or to their online store. The main problem is that the majority of small business owners lack the data, the expertise, and the time to effectively target their customers with relevant offers or content across the right digital channels at the right time in order to drive a return visit or direct purchase.
Many business owners attempt to send special offers or messaging using traditional digital marketing methods (e.g. ConstantContact, Mailchimp) but they consistently achieve low open rates, low click rates and even lower conversion rates through poorly constructed subject lines, non-responsive design and weak calls-to-action.
In order to improve their results, these business owners need to first collect and analyze large amounts of transactional and demographic customer data, develop the expertise to create content that will generate the interest leading to higher open and click rates, and lastly utilize or develop a system that will distribute actionable offers to their customers across multiple digital channels that gives the consumer the ability to make an impulse purchase immediately.
They are simply too busy to find the time.
And while Dash Evolution is simplifying the digital wallet, The Acme will bring one-click offer purchases to the Network, along with exclusive Network-only rewards and repeat transactions for both the merchants and the Network as a whole. We will help Dash become top of wallet for e-commerce transactions. Evolution consumers and users will receive and purchase offers through a friction-free portal while merchants on and off the Network increase their reach to new customers across the Dash Network while also re-engaging with past customers.
The Solution
We believe that a fully automated offers and rewards platform on Evolution will benefit all merchants on the network and will create one of the first real enticing incentives for new merchants to integrate and accept Dash as a viable cryptocurrency. And not only will an offers and rewards platform drive new customers to merchants, it will bring even more value to the average Dash user, giving them an incentive to use the Dash wallet to get access to these exclusive offers. Consumers will even be able to purchase offers using Dash from merchants who are not on the Network since we will take their Dash transaction and immediately convert to USD and deposit in the merchant’s bank account.
We know that the best way to get consumers to take action and make impulse purchases is to send them individualized offers at the right time across the right marketing channel. Therefore, to increase consumer engagement and utilization of Dash on the Network and to increase the revenue that merchants generate from new and past customers, we will release a fully automated, machine learning, direct response offers and rewards marketing platform with Dash firmly in place as the exclusive digital currency.
This software will guarantee persistent engagement with a merchant’s existing and past customers through targeted digital touches and nudges, delivered with individually-optimized offers, at the times and via the digital channels (Evolution) where each customer is most likely to take action--thereby monetizing current and past customer data, continually engaging each consumer and maximizing customer lifetime value.
Continuity - tirelessly engages customers around the clock with BEM*- and data-informed, individually-crafted and personally-timed Converters and Collectors.
Push - strategically sends real-time bulk communications to customers with our custom content builder as well as request time-sensitive or occasion-dependent Converters for distribution en masse.
Pursuit - persistently retargets customers when they take a specific action or trigger predefined reactions as well as those customers that abandon your Continuity or Push landing pages before taking action.
Reach - consistently delivers those touches to customers across essential digital and social channels, including Dash Evolution.
Learn - continuously improves results as it formulates insights and optimizes outputs, creating new neural pathways from its ever-growing database of past touches and nudges.
*Behaviors, Emotions, Moments
Project Summary
We see the potential for the dual powerhouse of automated digital offers and rewards combined with digital currency to revolutionize small business customer retention marketing, making it more relevant, convenient, secure and less time-consuming, thereby increasing overall Dash Network usage.
As merchants seek to increase the lifetime value from each customer and bring each one back in the physical or virtual door while saving time, The Acme seeks to completely displace traditional digital marketing tools and drive consumers to make a digital purchase, using Dash, from Network merchants as a precursor to returning physically or virtually to the business.
Our system will generate increased direct revenue with little-to-no additional effort from the business owner by providing a network-based Offer-to-Consumer matching platform that can take a consumer, augment the base consumer data, and then use machine learning to automatically match consumers to offers from products and offers uploaded by the business.
We have spent the last several months researching Dash, collaborating with Dash engineers, reviewing the BlockCypher-Dash API, the Evolution platform in development, and meeting with partners to bring together all of the necessary components to build a system that will provide significant value to the Dash Network of Consumers and Merchants alike. We will be integrating all of the components identified below together into a simple and cohesive solution.
Consumer
This module provides the capabilities for the upload of Consumers and the management of preferences and registration services. The objective is to make it easy for consumers to sign up for offer notifications and tailor the offers received to their personal preferences based on frequency and product mix. Initially this will be a simple subscribe/unsubscribe with preferences that increase as the merchant network and product portfolio increases.
This will encompass the initial registration services and preferences with an automated onboarding flow to enable businesses to self-serve and benefit from automated campaign services once product information has been captured.
Subscriptions
Subscription management encompasses the creation of different subscription types that can be combined to form a complete monthly subscription charge. This module will also perform monthly billing, invoice production and statement creation and delivery. This would work directly with the Dash Evolution system to perform monthly billing.
The products component captures the data needed by the offer matching and creation engine. Products are entered with details of the discount thresholds, industry, product category, descriptions and purchase options which are then used to create custom offers for consumers based on previous purchase history and demographic information.
In the same way that the offer matching engine can create offers unique to a specific consumer, it will also be able to match consumers to offers created by the business. This module allows the creation of those offers, scheduling runs, throttling the frequency and retiring old offers. This is the most efficient method of targeting customers while purchase history and demographic data is limited.
This is the heart of the system and brings all of the data collection components together and continuously scans its consumer base to identify consumers who are ready for an offer. When a consumer is primed, an offer will either be generated or an existing offer matched to them and sent through email and the Dash network, and complemented through additional channels such as SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.
Offer Delivery Engine
Once offers and delivery channels are decided by the matching engine, details are submitted to the delivery engine. The delivery engine will format the offers correctly for the channel they are being sent to and the associated connectors will deliver the offers. Logic is built into this delivery mechanism to allow the throttling of send info to ensure delivery is successful and not stopped by velocity filters. The delivery call back mechanism allows customers to create their own delivery channels.
In order to get a working product to market in an accelerated timeframe, we will follow Agile/Scrum methodology and divide the capabilities to get a fully functional product to the network and market sooner. Our Phase 1 and Phase 2 plan will allow merchants to automatically distribute timely, relevant, individually-targeted offers across multiple channels, including Evolution, to each of their customers while allowing them the ability to make immediate purchases with a secure Dash digital payment quickly and conveniently and then configure preferences for future offers. The phases, highlighting the requisite capabilities, are detailed below.
Phase 1
The initial phase focuses on the delivery of base capabilities from billing through to campaign creation. By the end of this phase merchants on the Dash Network will have the capability to push offers via the Dash Network and opted-in email to its customer base, driving repeat revenue and return customers.
Duration: 4-5 months
Capabilities:
Phase 2 focuses on bringing significant levels of automation to the process by taking product information, enriched consumer information and automatically generating offers specifically designed to maximize conversion of each individual consumer offer. This is achieved through machine learning algorithms that constantly learn as the dataset grows. To kickstart this process we will bring purchase history from the opted-in database of over 19M consumers from one of our strategic partners in order to train the foundational algorithm set, after which we will continue to refine as the dataset grows.
Duration: 4 months
Capabilities:
The Acme has the relevant digital marketing, data science, and software engineering personnel and expertise at its disposal. We are additionally partnered with both a digital marketing software company and a software development ï¬rm that together combine the innovative DNA of a start-up with the wisdom, scalability, and process rigor of a six-sigma company. They offer both technical implementation and strategic advisory services including DevOps, Cloud, Mobile, UI/UX, Social Ad API, Big Data, Predictive Modeling, Database & System Architecture, Digital Payments, and User Testing.
Viability & Partnerships
For the past several years, through our work with our strategic partners, we've developed significant and unparalleled expertise in direct response and engagement digital marketing and have developed a large consumer-to-purchase data set with which to train our machine learning algorithms needed to automate our individually-targeted product-to-offer-to-consumer matching and distribution engine.
At our core, The Acme is a digital marketing company building an automated customer retention software platform that will generate direct revenue for merchants via consumer-targeted offers transacted on the Dash Network; leading to regular repeat customers for each merchant on the Network. As a business ourself, we will make money through monthly software subscription fees and a results-based revenue share.
Beyond the Dash Network and integration with Evolution, we have several major verticals identiï¬ed and solidiï¬ed reseller partnerships that will roll out our software and its Dash-powered Offer Purchasing Platform to thousands of local businesses:
We are asking the Dash network for 2559 DASH ($691,000 USD) for the development of Phase 1 and Phase 2 with the capabilities as specifically detailed above throughout the timeline detailed below. The Acme also has significant skin in the game. We have already contributed $479,000 USD to the project over the last year and are contributing another $764,000, which is approximately 64% of the total project costs.
We have requested that the Dash Core Team holds the project funds in escrow until requested for product development requirements in order that the payments that will be adjusted according to the Dash/US Dollar exchange rate at the time. This will protect Dash as the value is expected to increase. The funding schedule is proposed as follows:
Project Development Timeline: 8-9 months
The Acme will provide a high level bi-weekly update (via Sprint Review) to the Dash Core Team. Detailed updates will be tracked and communicated with the Dash Core Network Team and assigned Dash Project Manager. The Acme will also generate a report to the community once each month throughout the term of the project.
Phase 1 Development Timeline: 4-5 months
Phase 2 Development Timeline: 4 months
1. Technology Design Sprints, Requirements, Wireframe Design, API Review, Business Logic ($46,000)
2. Technology Development (2 phases @ 4-5 months each) ($467,00)
5. Third-Party Integration and Development Costs ($38,000)
Total Dash Contribution Total for Project ($691,000)
The Acme’s Total Contribution for Project
Total Dash Project Cost paid by The Acme + Dash ($1,952,000)
Our Leadership Team
Brandon Willey, CEO
With more than 10 years of executive leadership experience in sales, marketing, product and business operations, Brandon has established and grown scalable sales, marketing, customer success, product and fulfillment teams at Reputation.com, Recruiting.com, FrontSpin, Hopscratch and FetchRev. He has broad knowledge of the local digital advertising ecosystem with extensive experience in social media, email and search marketing, retargeting, geotargeting and geofencing, segmentation, cryptocurrency, blockchain, automation, and machine learning.
Stuart Rolinson, CTO
A 26-year IT industry expert. 19 years at American Express overseeing technical development, he led the global core platform and product team for the Global Business Travel division, architected the global distributed authorization network and ran the Mobile Infrastructure and Research & Development group. Stuart holds a variety of patents related to payments and Business Travel.
Greg McGuire, COO
15+ years extensive experience managing interactive projects including website buildouts, email marketing campaigns, online technologies, blogging & social networking platforms with the goals of increasing company revenues, improving the standard of customer service, and developing business to business relationships while delivering completed projects on-time and on budget.
Alison Gerbens, CFO
Alison Gerbens brings 10 years of experience in accounting, auditing and reporting for a diverse set of clients and employers. Alison is a licensed CPA in Arizona and earned her Master of Science in Accountancy & Information Systems degree from Arizona State University in Tempe.
Our Advisory Team
In addition to our wealth of expertise, we’ve partnered with several innovative companies and advisors in automation, machine learning, blockchain, and digital currency to create our simple, but powerful direct response marketing platform.
Brad Selby
Advisor & Investor, Weathering Steel
PayPal, Flixster, VerticalResponse, Affirm
Rick Oglesby
Product & Market Research, Payments Industry
Double Diamond Group and AZ Payments Group
Sean Coleman
Adjunct Faculty, Arizona State University
Director of Technology & Development, Drawbackwards
Carlos Noguera
Server, Cloud & Geospatial Architecture
Cliffhanger Solutions, Inc.
Stephen McAleer
AI and ML PhD Student, Arizona State University
Goldman Sachs, STORE Capital
Augustus Ge
Mathematics, Statistics, and Data Science, University of Arizona
Machine Learning, Cliffhanger Solutions, Inc.
based on the feedback from our pre-proposal we are submitting our formal proposal for the Evolution Marketing Platform that will that will bring automated digital marketing to the Dash Network and Evolution as well as Dash digital currency to local retailers and etailers through our targeted offers and rewards platform.
**note** This request is for the November superblock and while this request is for a onetime payment, funds will be held in escrow by the Dash Core Team and released throughout the project based on milestone completion.
The PDF version of our proposal is available here: https://goo.gl/tfxncd
Comments from our pre-proposal can be found here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/pre-proposal-merchant-digital-growth-platform-for-evolution.17426/
Merchant Digital Growth and Marketing Platform for Evolution
The Acme is a digital marketing and ecommerce technology company specializing in engagement and direct response marketing fueled by consumer data intelligence, machine learning, and digital payments. Our clients are brick & mortar local businesses (retailers) and online small businesses (etailers) that need more repeatable and predictable revenue from repeat customers.
In collaboration with FetchRev, a customer retention marketing software company established in 2012, we have worked with over 3,000 small businesses to reach their customers with offers and coupons across multiple digital channels. Working with brands and companies like Elements Massage, 18|8, SkyZone, Precision Tune and Urban Air, our combined team of 30+ employees consistently sends over 28M emails and 21M social ads to over 19M consumers driving over $2M USD in additional revenue for our customers every single month.
The Pain
The Dash Network benefits and grows when Merchants and Consumers come together to transact using Dash digital currency. But Retailers and Etailers alike lack a strong incentive to accept digital currency as a viable payment option for their business, and Consumers often struggle to find an opportunity to use their Dash wallet in the normal course of their day. Ultimately, the best way to increase usage on the Network will be to provide tangible user benefits like an exclusive offers and rewards platform, for example.
Additionally, those merchants already on the network (as well as any future ones) often struggle to bring their customers back in their physical door or to their online store. The main problem is that the majority of small business owners lack the data, the expertise, and the time to effectively target their customers with relevant offers or content across the right digital channels at the right time in order to drive a return visit or direct purchase.
Many business owners attempt to send special offers or messaging using traditional digital marketing methods (e.g. ConstantContact, Mailchimp) but they consistently achieve low open rates, low click rates and even lower conversion rates through poorly constructed subject lines, non-responsive design and weak calls-to-action.
In order to improve their results, these business owners need to first collect and analyze large amounts of transactional and demographic customer data, develop the expertise to create content that will generate the interest leading to higher open and click rates, and lastly utilize or develop a system that will distribute actionable offers to their customers across multiple digital channels that gives the consumer the ability to make an impulse purchase immediately.
They are simply too busy to find the time.
And while Dash Evolution is simplifying the digital wallet, The Acme will bring one-click offer purchases to the Network, along with exclusive Network-only rewards and repeat transactions for both the merchants and the Network as a whole. We will help Dash become top of wallet for e-commerce transactions. Evolution consumers and users will receive and purchase offers through a friction-free portal while merchants on and off the Network increase their reach to new customers across the Dash Network while also re-engaging with past customers.
The Solution
We believe that a fully automated offers and rewards platform on Evolution will benefit all merchants on the network and will create one of the first real enticing incentives for new merchants to integrate and accept Dash as a viable cryptocurrency. And not only will an offers and rewards platform drive new customers to merchants, it will bring even more value to the average Dash user, giving them an incentive to use the Dash wallet to get access to these exclusive offers. Consumers will even be able to purchase offers using Dash from merchants who are not on the Network since we will take their Dash transaction and immediately convert to USD and deposit in the merchant’s bank account.
We know that the best way to get consumers to take action and make impulse purchases is to send them individualized offers at the right time across the right marketing channel. Therefore, to increase consumer engagement and utilization of Dash on the Network and to increase the revenue that merchants generate from new and past customers, we will release a fully automated, machine learning, direct response offers and rewards marketing platform with Dash firmly in place as the exclusive digital currency.
This software will guarantee persistent engagement with a merchant’s existing and past customers through targeted digital touches and nudges, delivered with individually-optimized offers, at the times and via the digital channels (Evolution) where each customer is most likely to take action--thereby monetizing current and past customer data, continually engaging each consumer and maximizing customer lifetime value.
Continuity - tirelessly engages customers around the clock with BEM*- and data-informed, individually-crafted and personally-timed Converters and Collectors.
Push - strategically sends real-time bulk communications to customers with our custom content builder as well as request time-sensitive or occasion-dependent Converters for distribution en masse.
Pursuit - persistently retargets customers when they take a specific action or trigger predefined reactions as well as those customers that abandon your Continuity or Push landing pages before taking action.
Reach - consistently delivers those touches to customers across essential digital and social channels, including Dash Evolution.
Learn - continuously improves results as it formulates insights and optimizes outputs, creating new neural pathways from its ever-growing database of past touches and nudges.
*Behaviors, Emotions, Moments
Project Summary
We see the potential for the dual powerhouse of automated digital offers and rewards combined with digital currency to revolutionize small business customer retention marketing, making it more relevant, convenient, secure and less time-consuming, thereby increasing overall Dash Network usage.
As merchants seek to increase the lifetime value from each customer and bring each one back in the physical or virtual door while saving time, The Acme seeks to completely displace traditional digital marketing tools and drive consumers to make a digital purchase, using Dash, from Network merchants as a precursor to returning physically or virtually to the business.
Our system will generate increased direct revenue with little-to-no additional effort from the business owner by providing a network-based Offer-to-Consumer matching platform that can take a consumer, augment the base consumer data, and then use machine learning to automatically match consumers to offers from products and offers uploaded by the business.
We have spent the last several months researching Dash, collaborating with Dash engineers, reviewing the BlockCypher-Dash API, the Evolution platform in development, and meeting with partners to bring together all of the necessary components to build a system that will provide significant value to the Dash Network of Consumers and Merchants alike. We will be integrating all of the components identified below together into a simple and cohesive solution.
Consumer
This module provides the capabilities for the upload of Consumers and the management of preferences and registration services. The objective is to make it easy for consumers to sign up for offer notifications and tailor the offers received to their personal preferences based on frequency and product mix. Initially this will be a simple subscribe/unsubscribe with preferences that increase as the merchant network and product portfolio increases.
- UI and API based module that allows Dash merchants to upload consumer lists
- UI and API for consumer online registration
- Backend data enrichment services
- UI and API for consumer preference management
- Unsubscribe and resubscribe services to support privacy legislation such as CASL
This will encompass the initial registration services and preferences with an automated onboarding flow to enable businesses to self-serve and benefit from automated campaign services once product information has been captured.
- Business registration
- Business preferences
- Customizable business onboarding
- User management / Access control
Subscriptions
Subscription management encompasses the creation of different subscription types that can be combined to form a complete monthly subscription charge. This module will also perform monthly billing, invoice production and statement creation and delivery. This would work directly with the Dash Evolution system to perform monthly billing.
- Subscription management
- Start new subscription
- Cancel subscription
- Invoice creation & delivery
- Statement printing & delivery
- Payments
The products component captures the data needed by the offer matching and creation engine. Products are entered with details of the discount thresholds, industry, product category, descriptions and purchase options which are then used to create custom offers for consumers based on previous purchase history and demographic information.
- Add products
- Delete products
- Edit products
In the same way that the offer matching engine can create offers unique to a specific consumer, it will also be able to match consumers to offers created by the business. This module allows the creation of those offers, scheduling runs, throttling the frequency and retiring old offers. This is the most efficient method of targeting customers while purchase history and demographic data is limited.
- Add offers
- Edit offers
- Disable offers
- Schedule offers / runs
- Throttle runs
This is the heart of the system and brings all of the data collection components together and continuously scans its consumer base to identify consumers who are ready for an offer. When a consumer is primed, an offer will either be generated or an existing offer matched to them and sent through email and the Dash network, and complemented through additional channels such as SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.
- Consumer monitoring
- Offer matching engine
- Offer creation
- Offer submission to delivery engine
- Offer callback to allow custom delivery by merchant channels
Offer Delivery Engine
Once offers and delivery channels are decided by the matching engine, details are submitted to the delivery engine. The delivery engine will format the offers correctly for the channel they are being sent to and the associated connectors will deliver the offers. Logic is built into this delivery mechanism to allow the throttling of send info to ensure delivery is successful and not stopped by velocity filters. The delivery call back mechanism allows customers to create their own delivery channels.
- Offer formatting engine
- Social media connectors
- Mail connectors
- Dash Evolution connector
- Delivery call back
- Offer process tracking (delivery, opens, click, conversions)
In order to get a working product to market in an accelerated timeframe, we will follow Agile/Scrum methodology and divide the capabilities to get a fully functional product to the network and market sooner. Our Phase 1 and Phase 2 plan will allow merchants to automatically distribute timely, relevant, individually-targeted offers across multiple channels, including Evolution, to each of their customers while allowing them the ability to make immediate purchases with a secure Dash digital payment quickly and conveniently and then configure preferences for future offers. The phases, highlighting the requisite capabilities, are detailed below.
Phase 1
The initial phase focuses on the delivery of base capabilities from billing through to campaign creation. By the end of this phase merchants on the Dash Network will have the capability to push offers via the Dash Network and opted-in email to its customer base, driving repeat revenue and return customers.
Duration: 4-5 months
Capabilities:
- Business Registration
- Consumer Registration
- Consumer Data Uploads
- Consumer Preference Management v1
- Customer Support-Assisted Onboarding
- Consumer, Business, Admin UI
- Subscription Plans (Create/Edit/Retire Basic capabilities)
- Subscription Management (Assign/Start/Stop/Delete)
- Invoice Generation and Delivery
- Dash Billing
- Dash Payment Processing
- Offer Management (Add / Edit / Delete / Schedule / Stop)
- Offer Delivery Engine (Dash Evolution & Email)
Phase 2 focuses on bringing significant levels of automation to the process by taking product information, enriched consumer information and automatically generating offers specifically designed to maximize conversion of each individual consumer offer. This is achieved through machine learning algorithms that constantly learn as the dataset grows. To kickstart this process we will bring purchase history from the opted-in database of over 19M consumers from one of our strategic partners in order to train the foundational algorithm set, after which we will continue to refine as the dataset grows.
Duration: 4 months
Capabilities:
- Customizable Business Self-onboarding
- Business Preference Management
- User/Role Management
- Subscription Management
- Revenue Share Payment Processing
- Revenue Share Subscription Management
- Admin UI Enhancements
- Statement & Reports Generation & Delivery
- Business Product Management (Add / Edit / Delete / Disable)
- ML Consumer-Product-Offer Matching Engine
- Offer Channel Delivery Engine Phase 2 (Social, SMS)
- Consumer Preference Management v2
The Acme has the relevant digital marketing, data science, and software engineering personnel and expertise at its disposal. We are additionally partnered with both a digital marketing software company and a software development ï¬rm that together combine the innovative DNA of a start-up with the wisdom, scalability, and process rigor of a six-sigma company. They offer both technical implementation and strategic advisory services including DevOps, Cloud, Mobile, UI/UX, Social Ad API, Big Data, Predictive Modeling, Database & System Architecture, Digital Payments, and User Testing.
Viability & Partnerships
For the past several years, through our work with our strategic partners, we've developed significant and unparalleled expertise in direct response and engagement digital marketing and have developed a large consumer-to-purchase data set with which to train our machine learning algorithms needed to automate our individually-targeted product-to-offer-to-consumer matching and distribution engine.
At our core, The Acme is a digital marketing company building an automated customer retention software platform that will generate direct revenue for merchants via consumer-targeted offers transacted on the Dash Network; leading to regular repeat customers for each merchant on the Network. As a business ourself, we will make money through monthly software subscription fees and a results-based revenue share.
Beyond the Dash Network and integration with Evolution, we have several major verticals identiï¬ed and solidiï¬ed reseller partnerships that will roll out our software and its Dash-powered Offer Purchasing Platform to thousands of local businesses:
- Independent Software Vendors (ISV) – Point-of-Sale software partners, online marketing automation partner (~1,000 clients), and more
- Additional Brick-and-Mortar Retailers & Ecommerce Etailers
- Value Added Resellers (VAR)
We are asking the Dash network for 2559 DASH ($691,000 USD) for the development of Phase 1 and Phase 2 with the capabilities as specifically detailed above throughout the timeline detailed below. The Acme also has significant skin in the game. We have already contributed $479,000 USD to the project over the last year and are contributing another $764,000, which is approximately 64% of the total project costs.
We have requested that the Dash Core Team holds the project funds in escrow until requested for product development requirements in order that the payments that will be adjusted according to the Dash/US Dollar exchange rate at the time. This will protect Dash as the value is expected to increase. The funding schedule is proposed as follows:
- Dash to fund The Acme 25% upfront to start the project, funded in a single disbursement by a project manager appointed by the Dash Core Team.
- Dash to fund 20% in equal monthly disbursements over four months through the completion of the Technical Development for Phase 1.
- Dash to fund The Acme the another 5% after all testing and the Phase 1 product is ready to launch. Only once Phase 1 is complete and a functional initial product made available to the Dash Network will the Phase 2 receive funding.
- At which time, the Dash Core Team will fund 25% to start Phase 2, followed by 5% monthly disbursements over four months through the completion of Technical Development for Phase 2.
- Dash will fund The Acme the final 5% after all testing and the Phase 2 product is ready to launch.
Project Development Timeline: 8-9 months
The Acme will provide a high level bi-weekly update (via Sprint Review) to the Dash Core Team. Detailed updates will be tracked and communicated with the Dash Core Network Team and assigned Dash Project Manager. The Acme will also generate a report to the community once each month throughout the term of the project.
Phase 1 Development Timeline: 4-5 months
- Initial Funding Payment of 25% for Phase 1
- Business Requirements and Design Sprints - 4 weeks
- Initiate 10% Monthly Funding Disbursements totaling 20%
- Technical Development & QA - 8 two-week sprints
- Final Quality Assurance Testing, Load Testing, Bug Fixes - 2 two-week QA sprints
- User Acceptance Testing/Usability Testing - 1 week
- Time Variance - 2.5 weeks
- Final Phase 1 Funding Payment of 5%
- Phase 1 Push to Production and Go Live 2-3 days
Phase 2 Development Timeline: 4 months
- Initial Funding Payment of 25% for Phase 2
- Business Requirements and Design Sprints - 4 weeks
- Initiate 10% Monthly Funding Disbursements totaling 20%
- Technical Development & QA - 6 two-week sprints
- Final Quality Assurance Testing, Load Testing, Bug Fixes - 2 two-week QA sprints
- User Acceptance Testing/Usability Testing - 1 week
- Time Variance - 2 weeks
- Final Phase 2 Funding Payment of 5%
- Phase 2 Push to Production and Go Live 2-3 days
1. Technology Design Sprints, Requirements, Wireframe Design, API Review, Business Logic ($46,000)
2. Technology Development (2 phases @ 4-5 months each) ($467,00)
- Project Manager - Sprint Master ($45,000)
- Sprint Team 1 - 5 developers - API, Backend Development ($140,000)
- Sprint Team 2 - 4 developers - Frontend & Associated API Development ($112,000)
- Sprint Team 3 - 4 developers - 3rd Party and Dash Integration ($112,000)
- UI Designer - Graphic Design Services ($30,000)
- UI Engineer - Front End UX Development ($28,000)
- 2 QA Engineers ($56,000)
- 1 Dev Ops Engineer - Release Management, Infrastructure Management ($28,000)
5. Third-Party Integration and Development Costs ($38,000)
Total Dash Contribution Total for Project ($691,000)
The Acme’s Total Contribution for Project
- Prior Costs already Invested in the Project ($479,000)
- Additional Technical Development/Dev Ops/QA ($264,000)
- Administrative Costs ($82,000)
- Operational Costs ($54,000)
- Marginal Travel Expenses ($5,000)
- Data Science Team ($113,000)
- PCI and SSL Compliance and Testing ($9,000)
- Additional UI/UX Development Costs ($52,000)
- Project Variance/Hired Guns ($50,000)
- Development Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months ($38,000)
- Production Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months ($112,000)
- Deployment & Code Management Software ($3,000)
Total Dash Project Cost paid by The Acme + Dash ($1,952,000)
Our Leadership Team
Brandon Willey, CEO
With more than 10 years of executive leadership experience in sales, marketing, product and business operations, Brandon has established and grown scalable sales, marketing, customer success, product and fulfillment teams at Reputation.com, Recruiting.com, FrontSpin, Hopscratch and FetchRev. He has broad knowledge of the local digital advertising ecosystem with extensive experience in social media, email and search marketing, retargeting, geotargeting and geofencing, segmentation, cryptocurrency, blockchain, automation, and machine learning.
Stuart Rolinson, CTO
A 26-year IT industry expert. 19 years at American Express overseeing technical development, he led the global core platform and product team for the Global Business Travel division, architected the global distributed authorization network and ran the Mobile Infrastructure and Research & Development group. Stuart holds a variety of patents related to payments and Business Travel.
Greg McGuire, COO
15+ years extensive experience managing interactive projects including website buildouts, email marketing campaigns, online technologies, blogging & social networking platforms with the goals of increasing company revenues, improving the standard of customer service, and developing business to business relationships while delivering completed projects on-time and on budget.
Alison Gerbens, CFO
Alison Gerbens brings 10 years of experience in accounting, auditing and reporting for a diverse set of clients and employers. Alison is a licensed CPA in Arizona and earned her Master of Science in Accountancy & Information Systems degree from Arizona State University in Tempe.
Our Advisory Team
In addition to our wealth of expertise, we’ve partnered with several innovative companies and advisors in automation, machine learning, blockchain, and digital currency to create our simple, but powerful direct response marketing platform.
Brad Selby
Advisor & Investor, Weathering Steel
PayPal, Flixster, VerticalResponse, Affirm
Rick Oglesby
Product & Market Research, Payments Industry
Double Diamond Group and AZ Payments Group
Sean Coleman
Adjunct Faculty, Arizona State University
Director of Technology & Development, Drawbackwards
Carlos Noguera
Server, Cloud & Geospatial Architecture
Cliffhanger Solutions, Inc.
Stephen McAleer
AI and ML PhD Student, Arizona State University
Goldman Sachs, STORE Capital
Augustus Ge
Mathematics, Statistics, and Data Science, University of Arizona
Machine Learning, Cliffhanger Solutions, Inc.
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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?
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Part of the approach here is to bring Dash to an existing merchant and consumer base and at the same time attract new consumers and merchants to Dash.
This solution will allow existing merchants on our network accept dash for offers without actually doing anything. If they sign up with a dash wallet they will be able to keep the funds in Dash, or select to be paid out partially in fiat / Dash.
When may we expect the new proposal?
solarguy
I would like to thank you all for the valuable feedback, based on the general consensus that a project of this size should be split across multiple funding months we are going to withdraw the current proposal and split it as recommended. The new proposal will continue to have a project manager assigned from the core team who will release funds to on completion of milestones. Once again I would like to thank you for the positive and constructive feedback that will help us deliver a project that better meets the needs the community.
"I can confirm that Brandon and Stuart have been working with us directly on their proposed solution, are designing their system to be compatible with our platform approach, and have met with Andy and others on their approach and received their buy-in to continue working together. They have exhibited professionalism and willingness to work collaboratively on the details of their solution and how it will interact with the network. Their existing company FetchRev has been operating in the offers business for several years, so they also have the needed expertise to build this solution. "
The question then remains (for myself) if this budget proposal which contains a thorough Dash merchant and marketing strategy plan is beneficiary for Dash and if Dash can handle such a large one-time payment in the month November.
I decided to wait with voting and monitor the comments before making a decision as the Dash masternode owners mostly seem to trip over the high one-time funding request and not so much about the budget proposal itself.
I like to see how this further develops.
The proposal is for a one-time payment that will go into escrow with the dash core team, it will then be released by them as we reach project milestones. Hopefully this addresses your concern.
Thanks,
Stuart
To give you this much funding this month we would have to defund other projects. You need to break it down into several payments over multiple months so that we can fit you in with the other projects we have going on.
Problem I see, is this a privately owned merchant device that we are supporting? If it is, it can have several pain points that I'm concerned about. Hackers because it is centralized network run on centralized servers rather than the decentralized platform Dash already is. I would like to see this design built on top of our blockchain rather than outside of it. On that point, will merchants hold private keys themselves and only themselves without the ability of the third party service to interact with these funds? Or will it be stored on the private server you will be running?
The glaring issue here that it is just too huge a proposal budget for next month and will likely defund others or itself be defunded (i.e. it needs to be broken down. Is there a reason for not breaking it out into multi-month?)
I'm a fan of big initiatives, but there are also several other issues with this project proposal, which I'd like to highlight below and will suit a multi-month/milestone approach.
1. What insight has been done to support this project? I don't see that there has been any real consumer or business insight performed. It seems a very expensive experiment to go straight to implementation of the tech and an attempt to market it before this is done.
2. Is there a business plan that indicates how exactly this will be launched to onboard businesses and exactly how it will draw in consumers, together with financials to show how it will sustain and grow itself? If so, could we see this please - this stuff isn't easy and we need to see a plausible plan, not just a tech roadmap.
3. This proposal seems very light on marketing costs. What segments you are aiming at for launch that your proposition solves a big issue for? Following that, how will you scale this proposition? I noted that there are some 19M consumers that have been mentioned from your strategic partner(s), but what is the agreement with said strategic partner(s) to access these consumers, there will usually be strict limitations. You state that there are 'solidified reseller partnerships' in place and a potential client list - what commercial/financial commitments have been made in regards to these?
4. For this kind of budget, it would be good if you guys could present the marketing and business plans, host a webinar and allow the community to have questions answered.
A 'no' from me for now, but I'm willing to change mind if the above can be substantially addressed.
1. The model is a fairly tried and tested model with our sister company FetchRev working in this space today. The intent of this initiative is to take that working model and provide significant automation to the process, ensuring merchants can bring in repeat business with little to no effort. There are industries where this works better than others, for example industry verticals where they have repeat services such as health and beauty, restaurant, automotive (service and repair), family entertainment centers, selective retail and online, groceries, night clubs and dispensaries to name a few.
2. Deploying and on-boarding customers is not simple, however what has worked for us in the past has been a combination of self signup with support from our customer experience reps. As far as marketing to consumers, this is a platform that would enable the merchant to gather their customer information through website plugins, electronic waivers, booking and scheduling platforms etc. To supplement this we would look to market the offer platform to consumers through the Dash application, giving them the chance to benefit from Dash exclusive offers, tailored to them based on their interests and profile.
3. From a marketing perspective, we are not expecting dash to fund the business growth, we will fund that. As far as access to the existing subscriber base is concerned, we can use this for 2 purposes. The first is provide demographic behavioral information so we can build the machine learning models to effectively create customized offers for dash subscribers. The second is to add Dash payment capabilities to the existing FetchRev platform giving the opportunity to put Dash in front brick and mortar merchants thats don’t use it today. The intent here was to be ready as Evolution undergoes it’s consumer education and marketing, we will be able to support it with the addition of Dash as a payment type.
4. We would be happy to host a webinar now if deemed necessary and throughout the development. The intent is to ensure there is a fully functioning offer platform available as part of the Evolution offering and while we can pull together some estimates on the growth, much of it will depend on both the adoption of the Evolution consumer base as well as the growth of the merchant network. We aim to help that growth by offering Dash-exclusive offers and Dash as a payment method to our existing subscriber base. We will commit to maintaining and operating the platform both independently and through our partnership with FetchRev.
I dident read this sorry