The Vision and Mission of the DEF
How might we, as followers of Christ, reshape the systems of the world to be subsumed by and exist within His Kingdom? The command to “love God and love your neighbor” empowers us to spread God's blessing and fulfill the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. The world of web3 and the “cryptocosm” enables His disciples to leverage new tools, rules, and team structures to alleviate the physical, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy which pervades society.
This Disciples’ Engagement Forum (DEF) will provide a space to educate each other, evangelize the broader community, and empower followers of Christ to build for His Kingdom on earth. The core function of the group will be to promote positive public dialog and encourage engagement by rewarding meaningful contribution and developing a network. Tactically, the DEF will take the form of a short (one page maximum) weekly article which explores the confluence of economics, history, institutional or systemic change, and faith. Each of these articles will end with a prompt or “call to action”, which will be posted to Twitter as a free “hook” to engage more people and encourage them to subscribe to the weekly articles.
Operations of the DEF
A primer on the Growth Flywheel
The network growth model of the DEF is based on the Product-led Growth Flywheel from productled.org. This model shown below demonstrates how new users evaluating a product will Activate as Beginners, those Beginners then make the decision to Adopt to become Regulars, the Regulars soon learn to Adore the product to become Champions, and product Champions will Advocate a product to encourage new Evaluators to Activate, and the cycle repeats. In this way a new product can achieve exponential growth in its user and customer base.
The DEF Operations Flywheel
The model for this forum will be to use Twitter as a free resource to engage and activate new users with thoughtful prompts, encourage those new users to subscribe to the publication on Mirror.xyz to access weekly articles and resources, create a sense of ownership by selling articles and artifacts as NFTs, and incentivize healthy and sustainable network growth by sharing subscription revenue with NFT owners.
Twitter will be used to encourage free, open, and limited engagement and maximize exposure. Mirror.xyz provides a platform for users to subscribe to longer-form articles (one page maximum), and the subscription paywall encourages meaningful and positive contributions. Mirror.xyz also provides a model to turn artifacts such as articles into a purchasable NFT which gives owners a stake in the forum’s success, and the interplay between the free Twitter, subscription-based articles, and ownership-based NFTs is meant to create sustainable product growth.
DEF Revenue Sharing Model
There are 4 personas involved in revenue:
- Creative Team Members: write and post articles, edit content, and manage the Mirror.xyz and Twitter feeds
- NFT Owners: purchase artifacts minted as NFTs and maintain a share of subscription profits
- Subscribers: pay subscription fees on mirror.xyz in order to access articles and artifacts
- General Users: Engage with prompts posted to Twitter, but have no access to Mirror.xyz articles until they subscribe on the platform
There are two sources of revenue- subscription fees which are shared by all NFT Owners to incentivize growth of the DEF, and NFT sales which are distributed amongst the Creative Team Members to compensate for maintaining the DEF.
DEF Kickoff Roadmap
The DEF Creative Team Members will have much to learn and many trials and errors as we release this product, and there are aspects which will need to change. A full release roadmap is in development, and as that is being built our team will focus on the following tasks for a launch:
Frequently Asked Questions
Where will these articles and prompts be released? Articles will be posted on the Johannes Talbotus Mirror.xyz site: . Prompts will be posted on the Johannes Talbotus Twitter: https://twitter.com/j_talbotus
How many people will engage initially?
Initial engagement will be understandably low. In order to address that, the access to articles on Mirror.xyz will be free for a limited time to build a network and an active following.
When will the first article and prompt be shared?
The MVP for release will be articles on Mirror.xyz and posted Twitter prompts, which will be launched in May. At that time, the full monetization and revenue sharing model will not be in place. The subscriptions, NFT sales, and revenue sharing will follow in the future.
How often will articles and prompts be released?
The initial plan is for a weekly release of one article on Mirror.xyz, followed immediately by the posting of a prompt to Twitter. Articles and prompts will be released Mondays, with future NFT sales happening later in the week.
Why introduce payments and not keep this free?
Co-founder of Netscape and investment firm Andreessen-Horowitz, Marc Andreessen claims “the original sin of the internet was not including a payment option in the browser”. This means that all revenue is generated by advertising, and therefore incentivizes maximum engagement at all costs. This model has led naturally to incentivizing and promoting negative behavior, as anger and fear have proven to drive engagement. Our hypothesis is that basing revenue on subscription and a “stake in the game” will incentivize positive and meaningful engagement instead of trolling and negative interactions.
How will revenue sharing be structured?
This will be tested and optimized through the early release. The initial model will be for all NFT sales revenue to be split amongst the DEF Creative Team Members, and for all subscription revenue to be split evenly with NFT Owners. This means that for each new NFT release, the previous owners’ stake will be diluted. This will encourage owners to counteract that dilution by either encouraging more subscribers to increase the revenue they share, or by purchasing another NFT artifact to increase their stake in the shared revenue.
What is the long term goal of the DEF?
The DEF will be a place for Christians who want to build in Web3 to connect, learn from others, and engage the broader community. It will remain in place as long as it proves helpful and effective. This project is also an experiment to test an ownership-based model of content creation and engagement.