AIP-184: Ape Water powered by ApeCoin - Updated Proposal Formatting

We can definitely create that! :slight_smile:

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How did you calculate costs for the tech stack and development? I don’t see how storing data would cost up to $1m and take 1280 hours to build. Unless we are serving millions of users daily, a database would normally only cost a few hundred dollars per month.

Would like to see more info about what AR needs to be developed and why it would cost up to $700k & 800 hours.

Do we have any metrics for how often people are scanning QR codes on cans?

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These numbers just don’t add up. Not sure if this is worth spending without tangible return! IMO

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Ape Water look´s great… Any ideias for more Ape Drinks? :wink:

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Hey @MarcoMR Ape Beverages has a lot of ideas for different drinks. Next is sparkling… The community will help guide us on future drink ideas (flavors, energy, etc)

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Hi @Wolf, sorry for the lag in responding, but we hope you can appreciate we wanted to provide you with a thoughtful and detailed response, see below. I would like to start off by firstly thanking you for the thoughtful questions as this gives us the chance to share our teams thought process with the hope to show you that Ape Beverages has only positive intentions to create a robust and powerful system to help propagate the ApeCoin Dao brand into the mass market for adoption.

The proposal outlines multiple technology categories that all overlap with each other quite a bit.

They can be split up to a degree, but none of these components exist standalone. The tech stack on the infrastructure side of things will integrate with every other part of the stack. These tech stack allocations are broad and intended to be ample budgets for delivering continuous development and maintenance at high quality without cutting corners. Data Engineers and Cloud Engineers typically have six-figure base salaries to start, as they will be in-house, not using 3rd party engineers. In addition to the traditional tech stack components, we’ll also be incorporating more esoteric hires such as AR/VR and smart contract developers when needed. Here’s some more context on each category:

  1. AR Development: $500k - $700K

a. We will produce a number of AR games that are re-purposable for many different IRL activations. For instance, an AR basketball hoop will rest above the can in a geofenced gameplay experience with a live leaderboard for that game.

b. These gameplay experiences will include detailed data capture for user engagement analytics that aren’t presently possible without integrating geofenced experiences into the brand activation.

c. The cans themselves incorporate a vault that the user can access with specific dialogue for that location, event, user, partnership, etc. This is an actively developed bridge between Web3 and IRL events.

d. These AR games will also be built on leading social media platforms such as Spark AR for Instagram, Lens Studio for Snapchat, and Effect House for Tik Tok.

  1. Web2 game development: $250k - $500K

a. This includes the continuous development of several simple web2 games that are re-purposable just as the AR games are.

b. The games, like the cans, are all IP agnostic. So depending on the partnership, we can co-brand the game with another brand’s IP.

  1. Data capture: $500k - $1M

a. User data capture with an AWS backend and Tableau for business intelligence will provide a new class of touch points facilitated by smart can technology.

b. The data capture will be interwoven with all future tech buildouts we do, so this is in the category of continuous development.

c. We will integrate each data point in each aspect of the tech stack together including, but not limited to: E-Commerce, on-chain events across networks, QR code scans, engagement data in games, geo-data, and any other data concerning technology initiatives going forward. These data points will come from a variety of databases, but will ultimately be analyzed using Tableau to inform the business.

  1. General technology stack: $500K

a. An AWS cloud stack for real-time gaming with many concurrent users, data capture and business intelligence via Tableau, integrations with third-party vendor APIs of leading social media platforms, and seamless bidirectional web3 integrations facilitated by familiar single sign-on logins.

i. Many AWS Products will be used including, but not limited to CodeBuild, CodePipeline, DeviceFarm, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFront, Cognito, Aurora, ECS, SNS, Lambda, EventBridge, CloudFormation, etc.

ii. Each of these products needs to be set up by a sufficiently experienced Cloud Engineer to ensure proper security and fault tolerance measures are in place.

b. A Solidity stack of smart contracts can be used in self-custody or pro-visionary wallets to ensure mass adoption.

c. A library of Unity games to take advantage of best-in-class AR game development technology with a broad market of developers.

We hope these points help qualify our reason for the use of funds and our CTO has addressed your concerns. Please let us know if you have any other concerns or questions.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Hi @apethor

Thank you for the note. We appreciate your point of view. However, I would like to clarify a few points of contention and offer the reason why we applied for the grant in the first place.

  1. Please know we have an established business, Ape Beverages that is selling at retailers in the US and we have raised funds through traditional investment rounds for our day to day business. This grant is specifically funding the production of ApeCoin Dao branded cans and the tech stack to support the education and brand awareness.

  2. It’s important to share the only reason we applied for the grant was after speaking with 100+ ape coin holders IRL or via our twitter spaces + social channels, the community agreed that they see Ape Water as creative and powerful tool to help propagate the ApeCoin Dao brand into the masses.

So we decided to put together a supply chain and financial model that we thought would be effective to hand out 1M x ApeCoin Dao cans - like you see RedBull street teams handing out RedBull’s, we would create mass awareness with our ApeCoin teams at music festivals, cultural events etc, to onboard and educate new coin holders.

So with much respect, I do hope you can understand we have not applied for this grant to fund our every day business, but to create a new vertical that is designed to promote ApeCoin Dao and its benefits.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Hi. Congrats on your success so far! I’m open to this.

Is there a .pdf of your AIP, and/or do you have a pitch deck for investors? Easier than reading so much info in this format.

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  1. AR Development: $500k - $700K

Can you share some AR/VR experiences that you have built out previously? Do you have any experience doing this?

Sam goes for this - 2. Web2 game development: $250k - $500K

It looks like you think the DAO is here to dole out free money for some of your random ideas without any experience or track record.

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Hi @br00no

Thank so for the support, we truly appreciate it.

Yes, we have an investor deck for Ape Beverages and we also have special benefits for BAYC and MAYC holders (we currently have 26 Ape holder investors on our cap table)

Whats your best email and we will send you the information.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Who is this? Is DAO’s money your money? What processes and analysis you have for when to provide funding or when NOT to provide funding?

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In broad strokes as I see it, here’s an already established unique idea/product that could gain traction outside Web3 in innovative ways while consistent with Web3, and already related to BAYC.

Seems that’s a great place to start from, and I hope informed people keep asking good questions.

Meantime maybe @ApeBeverages can further clarify how - very specifically and distinct from the existing Ape Water enterprise - this AIP represents “a new vertical that is designed to promote ApeCoin DAO and its benefits”?

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@br00no we appreciate your thoughtfulness and vision for what we’ve presented.

And to your last point - below we offer further clarity between our core Ape Beverages business and what this AIP represents - a new vertical that is designed to promote ApeCoin.

  1. Ape Beverages, Inc is selling Ape Water at retailers in the US and soon will be allowing members to buy a cases of water through our online subscription “Water Club” using ApeCoin, Fiat and other crypto. Ape Beverages has and will continue to raise funds through traditional investment rounds, angels, SPVs etc for the production of our Ape Water cans and managing our day to day business.

  2. This AIP has been designed specifically to fund the production of ApeCoin Dao branded cans and the tech stack to support the education and brand awareness. It’s important to share the only reason we put this AIP together was after speaking with 100+ ape coin holders IRL or via our twitter spaces + social channels, the community agreed that they see Ape Water as creative and powerful tool to help propagate the ApeCoin Dao brand into the masses.

So we decided to put together a supply chain and financial model that we thought would be effective to hand out 1M x ApeCoin Dao cans - to reflect what you see RedBull street teams handing out RedBull’s at events to build awareness, we would create mass awareness with our ApeCoin teams at music festivals, cultural events etc, to onboard and educate new ApeCoin members.

So with much respect, we hope the community understand we have not applied for this grant to fund our every day retail or subscription business, but to create a new vertical that is designed to promote ApeCoin Dao and its benefits.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Thanks again.

I was further informed by reading the previous, withdrawn, version: Ape Water Powered by ApeCoin - #8 by ApeBeverages

It may also interest anyone that’s reading this thread.

If approval comes down to cost estimates for some people, I suggest considering getting quotes from trusted sources and including those estimates in the AIP.

Respectfully suggest you consider going the extra mile of pitching some ideas of what sort of education or “ApeCoin assets” could be involved in the outreach. I don’t believe the DAO has anything specific, other than apecoin.com which is obvious but probably not super engaging to someone scanning a QR code at an event, so there’s a gap there .

The prior one was withdrawn per no response within 30 days. Bit of a cliff-hanger. Given you’re very proactive with responses, what happened?

I’m keen to try Ape Water when I get the chance, and especially looking forward to the orange special edition can of sparkling Ape Water with a refreshing hint of blueberry and orange flavor!

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Hi @br00no ,

Again thank you for all the considerations. Just to give you context, during October we did our best to respond in a timely manor on our previous AIP. We apologize for the cliff hanger, the AIP was withdrawn as the ApeCoin counsel asked us to resubmit due to formatting issues, so we followed their request.

Thanks for the recommendations, to alleviate any concerns we will certainly work transparently and share quotes from trusted sources when we use 3rd parties and we will share some of the gamification/ education assets we are planning to create with the program as we get closer to the .

As of today, the team is laser focused on getting our website and social strategy ready for our launch, so I will have them list these out asap.

We’re excited for you to enjoy the freshness and hydration of Ape Water as well.

Now that’s a wonderful flavor combination - maybe we can bring you in for mapping out our product innovations in the future. :smile:

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Hi @apethor

Thanks for your questions.

Our lead game developers also an investor and a BAYC holder has over 2 decades of gaming experience - with his current title director of destruction for Call of Duty with his passion for AR/VR, our CTO has a wide network of developers who build Web2 games for agencies and clients, we also have close relationships to studios and animators.

So we feel confident that we have been well instructed on the budget and we will build the team accordingly from our eco-system and beyond to build these activations.

Respectfully, we are not asking for free money, we are offering creative opportunities to build a robust team and platforms, that will ensure the highest level of efficacy and values to match that of the ApeCoin Dao brand.

Please know that if the community requested we reduce the budget, we would work effectively to match the funding with the outcome. But our team decided to put forward this robust plan to create something that doesn’t exist and are malleable if this is this a cause for concern for the community.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Hi @apethor

Below are some AR examples a few of our community members have been creating for us to use in our core Ape Water business. So we feel confident that we have professional and skilled members in our community we can work closely with and with our connections to talented AR/VR agencies we have plenty of resources to utilise to ensure we can create high quality and enjoyable activations.

Example of AR:

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Hi @br00no,

In response to your suggestion of pitching some ideas of what sort of education or ApeCoin assets we would develop.

  • Our creative team to develop fun, engaging assets for each of the activations we design to come off the QR code. Embedding educational assets that will assist to bring new holders into the ecosystem, create fun experiences for current holders to potentially earn more $APE, educate new audiences about the benefits of ApeCoin, and help incentivize behaviours beneficial to the broader ApeCoin Community.

We are yet to flesh out the educational language, as this will be part of the onboarding process with our creative team, as you pointed out there is limited information available today. So like any new project we will spend the time accordingly to talk with the community and develop the educational assets that match the activations we develop.

We’re keeping a lot of our IP opportunities including those in this space fairly open ended.

Although one of the ideas we’re all most excited about is an AR geocaching style game in a similar sense to the Pokémon Go. The reason the physical cans are exciting for this format is because with their QR codes combined with location data of the user, we’re able to conduct nationwide or localized AR activations with IRL venues and events. For instance, we’re uniquely able to have a large number of locations participating nationally in a treasure hunt where customers can go to these locations until someone finds the hidden rewards (physical or digital) along with nuggets of ApeCoin information and potentially earn $APE. This format works great in a wide array of verticals from retail locations, restaurants, to festivals.

We intend to incorporate geofencing mechanics into a lot of our gamification strategies. For instance, we can repurpose a simple AR game, co-brand it with our festival or venue partner for a single time playable experience only available at that specific event - limited time only to increase user engagements.

I hope this helps provide some insight to how Ape Beverages can be the perfect trojan horse to usher ApeCoin to the masses with fun, engaging and interactive experiences.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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Thanks.

Good point, “chicken or egg” type thing:

“We are yet to flesh out the educational language, as this will be part of the onboarding process with our creative team, as you pointed out there is limited information available today. So like any new project we will spend the time accordingly to talk with the community and develop the educational assets that match the activations we develop.”

This could be worked into the AIP as a starting milestone prior to full payment being released, or something agreed to be worked on with WG0 so if people wanted to vote for your AIP they’d feel it’s less carte blanche.

Possibly that step of defining how the DAO would be represented and benefit, again incorporating input from here or WG0, could come first as its own AIP.

I’m obviously not speaking for WG0, or the DAO, or even sure this is within scope here, much less something people would vibe or vote with, but IRL it’d be the logical, common first step.

It’d be capital cost-free or close to it, and benefit both sides with valuable ideas or action items that can be taken away from the process even if the final AIP didn’t go through.

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@br00no,

Thank you again for being so thoughtful and offering us recommendations through this process. As this is our first AIP we were not entirely sure how much input we could gather from the committee. But knowing we could engage with WG0, we’d openly accept a milestone based process to ensure we certify our efforts and help ensure the WG0 see that we are developing a branding opportunity that will benefit the Dao by accessing the mass community through a fun and novel approach.

Best,
Ape Beverages

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