Proposal Name: ApeTalent // Beyond Talent: Building the Future
Proposal Category: Ecosystem Fund Allocation
Previous Proposal: AIP-91 Ape&Talent - Platform to connect talent within the Ape community
Abstracts
As a member of the Ape community, you’re part of one of the strongest communities in Web3. However, despite the wealth of talent and opportunity within the community, it can be difficult for members to connect and collaborate effectively without the right tools. That’s why ApeTalent was born - one of the first software products developed from scratch by and supported by the ApeCoin community. With ApeTalent, we’re taking collaboration and communication within the community to the next level, creating a hub for talent and opportunity that will benefit all members of the ApeCoin ecosystem.
Team / Author Description
The team is the same one that developed the platform in AIP-91, which is composed of:
HolocronApe - Software engineer with more than 15 years of experience. The last 10 years I have been working with several European startup “unicorns” at varying stages. Although my field of most experience is the development of mobile apps, in recent years I have been more focused on the backend side expanding my skill set as an engineer (full stack profile) focused on creating in web3 with technologies like React, Solidity and Rust. Crypto enthusiast since 2017, in love with the BAYC community, avid traveler, and passionate Star Wars fan (hence my nickname).
Frontend Engineer - Fullstack software developer with more than 20 years of experience in startups and big companies. I have helped delivering great successfull projects and very recently I developed an interest for web3 and crypto technologies. I’ve developed solutions in Python, Go, Elixir,… but my main area of knowledge is TypeScript/Node and React for the frontend.
Designer - Front-end engineer and product designer with over 15 years of experience. I’m passionate about startups, technology and sports. I use to work with Figma, Typescript, and React and I have a particular love for CSS animations.
Motivation
The idea of ApeTalent is something that has been in our mind since April 2022 but since AIP-91 was born, the community support has overwhelmed us. Receiving great feedback from the early stages of AIP, ApeTalent has become one of the first 100% community-developed, community-funded software projects from scratch.
Such has been the support that several team members decided to leave their 2.0 jobs to dedicate themselves full-time to build for the Ape community.
Our main goal was to build for the community a high-quality product, always keeping in mind real objectives with budgets adapted to those objectives. As a result, we adopted the “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) approach for the initial version of ApeTalent. This approach is widely used in the startup ecosystem and prioritizes delivering value to users quickly while minimizing product development costs. We only received funding once we delivered value to the community and verified by the foundation to demonstrate our commitment to the community.
While we have ambitious plans for the development of ApeTalent and have garnered interest from external parties looking to support our growth, our commitment to upholding the core principles of our original AIP remains unchanged. Community benefit is prioritized over individual profit. Our long-term vision for ApeTalent is one where 100% profits generated by the platform are returned to the community, either through return contributions to the DAO treasury or by burning tokens to reduce supply. We strongly believe that community-driven projects are the future (and present) of web3 and are committed to continuing our work alongside the community to ensure ApeTalent reaches its full potential.
Rationale
Thanks to the approval of AIP-91 by the community, we were able to turn our vision for ApeTalent into a reality. Although we had already been working on the foundations of the project for 2 months, thanks to the grant, it gave us enough support to finish the first version of the project delivering the basic functionalities of the platform.
When we reached the beta testing phase, we realized that there were some very important functionalities that we did not add in the initial definition of the AIP but were related to key parts such as communication (Messaging), security (integration with tokenproof) and the ApeCoin ecosystem (considering tokens in staking and not just those holding in wallets, since our launch coincided with ApeCoin Staking’s launch). We postponed the delivery several weeks to integrate those features even they were not required by the IAP. This unplanned development was funded from our personal savings, but we were committed to deliver the best product possible.
After opening beta testing to community members, we were pleasantly surprised by the feedback we received, some examples:
https://twitter.com/sergwakesup/status/1613186164147511297
https://twitter.com/halina_eth/status/1612572987596865537
https://twitter.com/mantisunbranded/status/1613266447492435968
https://twitter.com/CopyCheatSteal/status/1612564749786533896
These feedback exceeded our wildest expectations and provided invaluable insights for us to improve the platform. This feedback was collected in various ways thanks to:
- Early users: @Vulkan , @Brazy , @12GAUGE , @Halina.eth … (Thank you guys, your help was invaluable
) - Announcement on Discourse → ApeTalent (AIP-91) is almost here
- First project under the review of the “Beta Testing Group” that was born in Discourse → Beta Testing Group - #46 by Vulkan
- Feedback from Users on Twitter
- Interviews 1:1
We are grateful for this information, as it has provided us with valuable insights into the new functionalities that we can include in the platform to further enhance its value for the community. As a result, we have defined a roadmap, which we’ll present in this AIP, outlining our plans for implementing these features.
Specifications
The team is the same one that developed the platform in AIP-91, which is composed of:
- UI Designer
- Frontend Engineer
- Backend Engineer
And for this AIP we’ll use these technologies:
- NodeJS
- TypeScript
- React
- MongoDB
- Terraform
- Nextjs
- React Native
- Expo
Steps to Implement
To achieve our proposed objectives and ensure that our project remains community-driven, we have divided the work into three blocks. Each block represents an important phase in the development of the platform (4 months of work each approx), and our goal is to complete each block (production ready) before moving on to the next, allowing the foundation to validate it. This way, we can ensure that the community receives the value as each phase of the project is completed. Below are the details of each block, including the specific objectives, work to be done, and corresponding timelines.
Group A (4 months)
- Add cryptopunks / meebits holders: Currently the communities we support are ApeCoin, BAYC, MAYC and BAKC but we all know that the Ape ecosystem is much bigger and that is why we are going to extend the list to the Cryptopunks and Meebits family (1 week).
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Compatibility in the login with delegate.cash & warm wallet: Security should be one of the most important values in any web3 project. We know how important it is for the community not to sign directly with cold wallets, although we did not include it in the original AIP, we added support for tokenproof but this is not the only service widely used in the community so we want to add support for delegate.cash/warm as well (4 weeks).
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Verified NFT Profile Pictures: To access the platform, you need to be a holder of ApeCoin or any NFT of the supported communities but then the user can insert any image wants (NFT or not). This feature gives the possibility to choose the image of your verified PFP on-chain. Yes, it’s the same feature that Twitter has only for the paying users of Twitter blue but here it will be free for 100% of the users (4 weeks).
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“Apes near you”: This is probably one of the features that we have been asked for the most. Adding the possibility to add the information while respecting different degrees of privacy. The user will be able to give from exact coordinates of his city, to region, country or continent. 100% configurable by the user. This information can be used in different filters like to see the users that are close to you, the closest within a range…etc (3 weeks).
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New features to the text editor: Although the text editor, where users can insert information into their profile, is currently stable and operational, some users have asked us that they are missing some options to make it a text editor similar to the one found in Microsoft Word, GDocs… etc (1 week).
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Add onboarding tool: Onboarding process is necessary because it shows users the platform’s benefits, educates them about the functions and gathers profile information to deliver personalized content and notifications. We think the entire process facilitates a positive user experience thus leading towards a higher retention, reducing user’s friction and improving user experience (3 weeks).
Group B (4 months)
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Public sections: The first idea we had of the platform was that it should only be accessible to members of the community, but after seeing the use that our users have made of it, it is important that certain sections of the platform or the profiles themselves can be public, thus making it possible for the profiles to be shared with anyone the user wants. Getting more visibility of the user’s work and exposure of the ApeCoin ecosystem (2 weeks).
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Add Otherside / 10KTF holders: As we already did with Cryptopunks / Meebits, the ApeCoin ecosystem is much bigger and it’s important not to leave anyone behind so we also want to include the Otherside and 10KTF communities (1 week).
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Skills in high demand
section: The great repercussions that was given with the game launched by Yuga Labs “Dookey Dash” and the unexpected demand that was given by very skilled gamers created this idea. We saw that some famous gamers on twitter benefited a lot economically from this launch but there were other members of the community, very skilled too, but they didn’t have the same media impact because they didn’t have a large number of followers.
We believe that diversifying the scope of talent and not focusing on a few, is something that is in the DNA of web3 and benefits everyone. That is why we want to create a new section dedicated to highlight skills in high demand at that time by the community (3 weeks). -
Notifications: The platform contains a notification system but these are onsite, i.e. the user must actively log into the platform to see their latest notifications. We want to include a series of automated tasks to be able to notify users of these new updates in their account completely transparent to the user (1 week).
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Jobs’s board: ApeTalent is perfect to have a need for a skill, enter the platform and start looking for someone who fits your need but what if there is someone who has that talent but has not seen fit to include it in their profile or simply is not currently actively looking for collaborations? There are projects that are currently looking for collaborators such as BeyondTheSWAMP and ForeverApes. Therefore, we want to include the possibility for community members to post “job/collaboration offers” so that the search can be the other way around. This section will be public to see (but only members can apply) (2 weeks).
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Enable staked ApeCoin on BendDAO for login: Since we launched the first version of ApeTalent, many users reported to us that they could not access the platform because they had their staked ApeCoin in the famous liquidity protocol for NFTs and not directly in the official smart contract. Although we’re currently talking to the BendDao core team and it does not seem an easy task (the first project to request it), we can come up with an implementation so that these users are not left behind. This will also help future projects that want to integrate with the ApeCoin pool in BendDao will be able to do so (3 weeks).
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Improvements on filtering lists: The key functionality is being able to see and connect with other members of the community. But what if you’re looking for someone from a specific community? Or want to see the latest members who joined the platform? Or want to see the latest members who had recent activity? These are some of the options that currently may not be available, and that’s why we want to include a filtering system in the platform’s listing (2 weeks).
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Autoload content from URLs: We have detected that some users, as part of their profile, include URLs directly in their portfolio and do not add more information about it. This is not very visual and does not encourage other members to access those URLs so we want to include a component so that users can include those sites and automatically insert into your profile saving time to the owner of the profile and improve the experience of the user who accesses it (2 weeks).
Group C (4 months)
The first two blocks have been devoted to tasks to expand the community and improve the user experience by adding new functionalities to our platform. However, we have found that one of the biggest challenges Web3 users face is protecting their privacy while maintaining effective communication on the platform.
It’s very common users don’t want to associate any personal information (email) to their wallets for privacy reasons, which can cause problems in the way the platform communicates with them about new activities in their accounts, such as messages from other users, reviews and reach of their profile, thus losing engagement on the platform.
Although well-known services such as Etherscan have attempted to provide some solution while maintaining privacy through wallet-2-wallet chats, this has led to a flood of spam, which has prevented the service from being widely used. While our platform is responsive, the tools available for web development are limited to address this issue, such as notifications via browser, etc. That is why we have thought of developing a mobile application for iOS and Android.
With this mobile application, we seek to offer a more effective and secure solution for the community, allowing them to receive push notifications confidentially and without the need to associate their personal information to their wallets. On iOS and Android, push notifications use a unique device identifier that is generated for each app and is completely decoupled from any personal user information. This means that, by using these native tools, we can guarantee our users’ privacy while providing them with effective and personalized communication. In this way, they can maintain their privacy while receiving important updates about their account on our platform.
In addition to offering a solution to privacy and communication issues in Web3, this new application will also include the basic ApeTalent functionalities, such as profile display, talents listing and interaction with other users, allowing for an even more complete and integrated user experience.
Estimated time: 4 months
Extra
If you aren’t a member of some of the supported NFT communities, you can also access by being an ApeCoin holder. Initially we set a minimum amount of 500 $APE, this amount was defined to avoid spam and increase security.
Several users have asked us to lower that amount to be more inclusive and give possibility to more members who do not have so many ApeCoin.
After analysis we see that there is no problem in lowering it without affecting security to 250 $APE.
This change will be made regardless if this AIP is approved or not.
Timeline
The estimated time for the work defined in this AIP is composed of 3 blocks, each estimated at approximately 4 months of work for a total of 1 year.
Overall Cost
We are committed to delivering value to the community as soon as possible. In order to achieve this, we have divided the work into 3 blocks of 4 months each, for a total of 1 year of work. The funding request is $330,000 USD worth of ApeCoin (on the date of this AIP is approved), which will be divided into payments for each block of work completed ($110,000 each).
We will only receive the next payment for block once we have confirmed with the Foundation that the work for the current block is ready in production, as agreed upon in this AIP, starting the first payment once this proposal is accepted. This payment schedule ensures that we are held accountable for delivering the agreed-upon features in a timely manner and that our community can have confidence in our commitment to providing value.
The funds obtained in this AIP will provide us with enough help to finance the development, bug fixing and maintenance costs of these new features in the time window of a year since the feature is ready in production.
