Hereby we share the Agency DAO executive summary and financial transparency report for the period January 2023- March 2023.
Please provide feedback and questions as you see fit, happy to open up about anything that is not clear yet.
I have some concerns regarding ROI/investments in the agency
Ive been checking on the Agency since I’ve noticed we spend a lot of money from the community on this department, Secret foundation not even included.
I am wondering how much money is being spend and how much hours this team works. Also who checks this?
I would like to see a list of the team with the hours being made since im noticing that the numbers/statistics look awfull, especially for a blockchain like this.
When is someone noted as Dev/lead/VC? It looks like this is just “assuming” that this is a dev or particular person. Next to that i think the focus needs to be on “actual” leads working/being active on the network. So not just “collected” and when looking at the closed investments it is “0”
VC Cold outreach: 407 ? I can walk to a random person to let them place their details and consider them a “VC lead”. 80% of them doesn’t even continue to engage. What is the ROI of this and who is handling this.
University partnerships: 72 ?do we have more info on this? Was this on events only? Who did this and what is the outcome ?
Also onboarded secret university users? What does that mean? Also what are we doing with secret university if agency is also doing this.
So returning on the fact that we are spending 55K+ per month(83.333 SCRT currently), on a team with statistics that are vague, I wonder if this is a good ROI.
Communities are practically dead on telegram and discord, I’ve noticed spam that stays there for days, just scrolling on the communities website on scrt.network, only a couple of the telegrams are active while this is being done by the community itself, Who manages this? 21% of the budget to International ??
Next to this, im reading Content creation:
YouTube views: with an average of 200-400 views per video…what are these kind of statistics, we can’t even get to a solid 1-2k views per video. I can pay a crypto/cosmos influencer 1k a month to get 5-10k views, instead we are paying people to create this without any good strategy. We can create a video, but without any reach its a waste of money… and to be fair, the editing/quality isn’t professional as well.
In the previous thread i see that:
Skrillah, Natalie and shahar are leading the VC’s and DAPPS, what do the other team members do??
I find it very vague and I want to see more transparency as well as people want to see in SF.
The agency is not a normal company, it’s a community effort ran by probably community enthusiasts. I want to see the same structure as we saw how the community were structured requesting budget from the pool. A clear line on what people are doing and getting paid.
I assume some people in this team are doing fine, but I cannot believe that all of them do and that you need this amount of people/money for the statistics I see now.
Also, AMA’s, events and other stuff related to lead generation can be seen as a discretionary pay and not as a job so that will save a bunch money as well.
Also I don’t understand the concept of doing universities with the agency and also having a separate entity (Secret University) exactly doing the same or at least a big chunk. Why spending this money twice.
International wise I also see the African channel is highlighted a lot, what is good ofc, but as I see that 22 Twitter spaces are held, I wonder how much people actually join those calls and are this always the same people or new.
As long as we don’t have enough funding I find it weird to spend this amount of money from the network creating this kind of selling pressure, having SCRT university, Secret Foundation and Agency all together and partly overlapping. Also since secret surge can cause a lot of selling pressure as well and had a big impact on the community pool.
And I’m wondering how much work the agency takes from the secret foundation work and do they work for SF as well or is this included in their pay, seeing a lot of things that are I thought meant for the foundation.
Seeing the excel sheet of Q4 I see discretionary budget is more than 10k, isn’t that enough to spend on small amounts of help from the local people to spread the news?
Also Agents? What are agents? Can I be an agent and get money for being that? Also, the agent platform is this dead or? And how much do we spend on that?
for coordinators and leads, what is the differents and who is on that list and why?
How many hours do people work and do they work full time, part time or task based? Getting 3 different groups isn’t going to make it much clearer, since a group can exist out of 30 people or 3… I’m investing heavily in SCRT, but we need a good structure for the project to survive.
Thanks already and hope to get some answers! We need to get the marketing better to include ourselves with the big boys!!
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When is someone noted as Dev/lead/VC? It looks like this is just “assuming” that this is a dev or particular person. Next to that i think the focus needs to be on “actual” leads working/being active on the network. So not just “collected” and when looking at the closed investments it is “0” >
Tooltips for the “Agency by numbers” Section
- Outreach: These are the VCs contacted, most cold, some via warm connections
- Introduction calls: VCs we had a call with to pitch the Secret ecosytem and the dApp opportunities
- Hot Leads: The number of VCs that spoke to 1 or more dApps to discuss investment after introduction by Agency
- Hot hot leads: The number of VCs that spoke to more than 1 dApp to discuss investment after introduction by agency
- Closed investments: The number of closed deals between dApps and VCs introduced by Agency
- dApps connected/in-progress: These are leads met at events or obtained via contact forms etc in different stages. These leads may merely become contacts and will therefore be removed from the number or move on to either grants or proper connections and be counted towards those totals. Some of these leads are development, audit and press companies. These are important relations to maintain but dont necesarilly track towards the final metrics.
- To be closed: dApps/Chain partnerships in stage where we are waiting on either investment/grant confirmation or other resource allocation to confirm it as a closed deal.
- in Development: These are dApps and other application like partners that are in development on Secret and have not yet launched on either test or mainnet. These are not necesarilly leads created by agency but they are maintained by agency aka dApp rel.
- Testnet: These are dApps and other application like partners that are in development on Secret and have launched on testnet. These are not necesarilly leads created by agency but they are maintained by agency aka dApp rel.
- Live: hese are dApps and other application like partners that are in development on Secret and have launched products on mainnet. These are not necesarilly leads created by agency but they are maintained by agency aka dApp rel.
- Docs visitors: # of total page views for docs.scrt.network
- Event signups/participants: # of people signed up and attended agency organised developer events both online and at IRL events
- Videos/Articles/Podcasts - # of videos created and launched on Secret network youtube both developer and user oriented. # of articles created for blog, learn portal and medium posts. # of external podcast appearances by agents.
Closed investments is indeed 0 as no dApp has signed an investment deal yet with a VC they were introduced to by Agency. Our work on this new type of Ecosystem fund started in january and first dApp introductions were made in March. We hope next quarter will have our first secured deals for Secret dApps via this program.
I would like to see a list of the team with the hours being made since im noticing that the numbers/statistics look awfull, especially for a blockchain like this.>
Such hours are now available for the “Leads” only in the above mentioned report.
VC Cold outreach: 407 ? I can walk to a random person to let them place their details and consider them a “VC lead”. 80% of them doesn’t even continue to engage. What is the ROI of this and who is handling this. >
The leads mentioned under Cold are ones that were reached out to, not merely the collected names, of those reached out too we had calls with 55 of which 13 ended up speaking to a dApp for investment. The ROI cant be measured as we discussed with you in TG, Its hard to put a value on $ raised for an ecosystem dApp. But note that a comission will apply to all $ raised by dApps via our contacts and these dApps succeeding will help the Secret ecosystem adoption. The people handling this effort are mainly nataliia and Skrillah, they are both happy to explain more if you want to know more details.
University partnerships: 72 ?do we have more info on this? Was this on events only? Who did this and what is the outcome ? >
these are the # of universities that booked in presentations, calls or general timeslots to talk about Secret network for their CS degrees or blockchain clubs. Melch handles this effort together with Peponks.
Also onboarded secret university users? What does that mean? Also what are we doing with secret university if agency is also doing this.>
The onboarded users is merely the # of developers that end up signing up for secret university after theses university outreach calls, its hard to track to how much developers this scales. All of these contacts are kept in a developer newsletter so to promote upgrades, hackathons and dev events.
Additionally please note that Secret University != university outreach. Secret university is a development learning platform on Secret created by the SU group. University outreach is a program in which the secret agency aims to attract developer attention and young talent by presenting and partnering with worldwide CS and technical universities. The 2 programs however have great synergy as SU helps youngsters who get enthusiastic after the University outreach programs to become active developers on secret network.
Communities are practically dead on telegram and discord, I’ve noticed spam that stays there for days, just scrolling on the communities website on scrt.network, only a couple of the telegrams are active while this is being done by the community itself, Who manages this? 21% of the budget to International ??>
The international category does not equal merely socials/community. some spend most their time there, others in this category focus more on local events or BD. we are creating a new categorization that doesnt put 1 person in 1 group that should better show this. Also please note that although we help SF and Labs execute on their marketing and content strategy we have less impact/autonomy here than on the other 2 verticals we pursue. We refrained from showing network wide metrics for Socials as there is no way to deduct our impact, therefore we stuck to the things we CAN show like Input.
@sean_pop already commented on the content strategy, i hope that atleast cleared up some of the confusion around it.
Lastly, I completely understand your problems with paying 3 entities that seemingly overlap. I truly think the best way longterm is to just have it all under the same publicly funded org. sadly for now that doesnt seem feasible. Agency however supports certain core functions and we hope the community sees that and is willing to bridge the gap until a better structure arises.
And I’m wondering how much work the agency takes from the secret foundation work and do they work for SF as well or is this included in their pay, seeing a lot of things that are I thought meant for the foundation. >
We currently dont get paid by the foundation nor does SF really lead the marketing strategy any longer. Labs is taking the lead with SF and Agency helping execute, agency is doing this on the lower level and content side will SF pursues more traditional marketing strategies like advertisement, blogs etc.
Also Agents? What are agents? Can I be an agent and get money for being that? Also, the agent platform is this dead or? And how much do we spend on that?
for coordinators and leads, what is the differents and who is on that list and why? >
Agents in this context are the people on payroll, but there are a lot more agents not on payroll contributing in their own way by following missions, creating their own path or taking bounties etc.
You could be an agent, but money is not spend as micropayments anymore like it was done a year ago. You can rank up for swag, nfts and cool tools and some minor SCRT but points are no longer transferrable to SCRT as we felt it was an issue with the previous program. for people that keep contributing there are bounties and oppurtunities to work with ecosystem dApps or the agency itself may arise.
Coordinators take more responsibillity, generally of a specific part of a vertical and get a higher reward for that responsibillity. Leads are Sean, Skrillah and me. We are involved in the day to day of operations, are KYCed under the DAO and lead an entire vertical.
How many hours do people work and do they work full time, part time or task based? Getting 3 different groups isn’t going to make it much clearer, since a group can exist out of 30 people or 3… I’m investing heavily in SCRT, but we need a good structure for the project to survive. >
We have added some of this context and are still debating on addding more. We will never go as far as displaying individual salaries though and made that clear to the community in Telegram as well.
I hope this answers your questions for no, we will add this info over the week to the standardized report as well.
Please dont hesitate to ask more if its unclear or you think its required 
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Dear community,
After some TG and Forum discussion we have added additional financial transparancy and Role clarity to the Q1 report including a salary breakdown of the leads.
We will be including more tooltips and a breakdown of the different taskgroups early next week as well.
I have changed the links in the above post to point to the altered reports.
Please feel free to ask for more metrics and other information in this forum post.
Regards,
The agency
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Dear community,
We have just updated our Q1 review and added the following:
- Dao status overview - introduction
- TOC
- Metric tooltips
- Agency member list
- Payroll spend per category + FTE and AVG pay
- Outlook for Q2
- Bio of all Agency leads
Please feel free to request more information and metrics for above report.
If no further questions come we will consider this a solid base for our Q2 report!
Best regards,
The Agency
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